The Patriot Post® · On Cancel Culture and Mob Rule
By Derek Lane
The mob is pulling down statues. The Left has been verbally pulling down the founders of our country for 50 years. Today it is using ropes on bronze and stone.
The mob, fanned by a media so attuned to hints of racism that it can create a national scandal from one garage-door pull rope tied in the shape of a noose over nine months ago, is effectively putting a noose on the heroes of our history. That’s what lynch mobs do.
Our Constitution, on the other hand, is decidedly anti-mob. The Fourth Amendment reads, “The right … to be secure … against unreasonable searches and seizures … shall not be violated.” The Fifth says, “No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
It took “due process” for past generations to erect statues of their heroes in public places. City councils, elected by people, voted to permit them to be erected. Citizens either raised money privately or elected officials allocated the people’s money, by due-process votes, to fund the statues’ creation and placement. And citizens, or their elected representatives, could just as easily vote to remove them.
The difference could not be clearer. Are some of the “heroes” memorialized in bronze and stone guilty of racism? Without a doubt. Should some of the statues be pulled down? Perhaps. But who elected the mob to bring them down? What “due process” culminated in a vote to recognize the sensibilities of our darker-skinned citizens by removing these reminders of past brutality from public view?
The mob hates due process because the mob thrives on thrill-of-the-moment emotion, not thoughtful deliberation. The mob lynches. The Left winks or encourages mob action, as long as it is lynching those it dislikes, or as long as the mob is sympathetic to the Left’s larger goals. Prominent leftists even fund the mob.
Wiser people take the long view: Mob rule is the opposite of civilization. Mobs feed raw emotion, anger, and vengeance. If mobs are not suppressed, the rule of law dies. If mobs rule, they will soon turn on those who initially sided with them and funded them.
Due process is frustratingly slow, but it is careful, and it protects the minorities, the weak, the poor, and those without political connections. The mob protects nothing, but mows down all who disagree.
Civilization moves forward deliberately, united, giving all a chance to contribute their thoughts on our actions through direct voting or through elected representatives. Civilization brings us together.
When has a mob ever built something lasting and good? Does anyone think this round of mob rule will bring us together?