The Patriot Post® · The Mob Terrorizes a Senator's Family

In her 2011 book Demonic, Ann Coulter explores the mob mentality of the Left throughout history. She also drives home a point that hardly needs to be driven home: Political violence comes overwhelmingly from the Left.

While progressives and their Big Media enablers constantly warn us of the looming threat of widespread violence on the Right, it never seems to materialize. And while they strain mightily to make agnostic Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh a Christian conservative (which he never was), we in the reality-based world can point to “a century of violence from the Ku Klux Klan, the labor unions, the communists, the anarchists, the anti-war protesters, the Weathermen, the SDS, the Black Panthers, Jim Jones’s People’s Temple,” and more, as Coulter points out.

Not content to rest on their laurels, however, today’s Left brings us Black Lives Matter, antifa, and an assortment of lesser-known thuggish groups, one of which terrorized the wife and baby daughter of Republican Senator Josh Hawley on Monday night.

“Tonight while I was in Missouri,” Hawley tweeted, “Antifa scumbags came to our place in DC and threatened my wife and newborn daughter, who can’t travel. They screamed threats, vandalized, and tried to pound open our door. Let me be clear: My family & I will not be intimidated by leftwing violence.”

There are at least two sides to every story, of course, and The Washington Post’s Mike DeBonis dutifully rose to tell the mob’s side of things, defending its disturbance of a quiet suburban neighborhood after dark. “‘Antifa scumbags’ = ShutDown_DC,” he tweeted, in an apparent effort to make the people terrorizing Hawley’s wife and baby girl seem somewhat less menacing. “They described their protest as an ‘hour long vigil.’”

DeBonis then tweeted out the far-left group’s statement, which began, “This evening around a dozen activists with ShutDownDC held an hour long vigil at the Virginia home of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) to demand that he drop his baseless contestation of the 2020 presidential election results. Hawley was the first of 12 Republican senators who pledged to join more than 100 Republican House members in their plan to derail Congress’ acceptance of Joe Biden’s election win on January 6.”

The Post’s Teo Armus offered a similarly sympathetic take: “The activists said they had staged a peaceful vigil Monday night to protest a GOP plan to object to Congress’s certification of the presidential electoral vote this week. On the sidewalk in a Northern Virginia suburb, a group of 15 people chanted while holding candles and signs reading, ‘Protect democracy.’”

Somehow, though, both DeBonis and Armus missed the bullhorns.

DeBonis did, however, smugly share a 51-minute video of the entire event, which began innocently enough with an almost comical non-threatening group organizing in a local parking lot. “Seems they taped the whole thing!” tweets DeBonis triumphantly. And for the first 30 minutes of the video, we get the impression that maybe he’s right, and maybe Senator Hawley and his wife simply overreacted. But then “the vigil” takes a loud and ugly turn, as further footage makes clear.

As Hawley put it, “Now ‘vigil’ means screaming threats through bullhorns, vandalizing property, pounding on the doors of homes and terrorizing innocent people and children.”

The senator is right. There’s a line of decency that today’s Left seems utterly uninhibited from crossing — a line that’s been pushed far beyond the bounds of simple free speech and peaceful political protest. As Coulter puts it, “The Democratic Party activates mobs, depends on mobs, coddles mobs, publicizes and celebrates mobs — it is the mob.”