Triggered

  The police would later arrest Eric Clanton for the crimes. By day, Clanton was an “ethics” professor at Diablo Valley College. By night, he was a leftist thug in the war against Trump. (Irony is lost on the left.) The ethics professor would receive just three years’ probation. If the sentence seems a little soft to you, you’re not crazy. Three years’ probation for what amounted to attempted murder? Perhaps the scales of justice were tipped in his favor? Well, the court was in California’s Alameda County, a place that had gone nearly 80 percent for Clinton. So you tell me.

  At the end of June 2019, an Antifa mob attacked Andy Ngo, an editor for Quillette, on the streets of Portland, Oregon. Over the past few years, Andy had been doing some excellent reporting about a vast series of fake hate crimes that had been staged by various “oppressed people” in Oregon and elsewhere. His reporting, some of which had run in the New York Post, had exposed several people who had “Smolletted themselves,” as I like to say, painting racial slurs and obscene images on their own houses and then blaming Trump supporters for it. In one case, a woman who had fallen while drunk blamed her injuries on a white supremacist. Andy’s reporting had made him an enemy of Portland’s liberal gestapo, whose entire narrative hinged on those horrible attacks being true.

  When they found out about Andy’s reporting, the leftist communities of Portland reacted violently, as they often do when you point out their blatant hypocrisy. On June 29, Andy tried to film a protest going on in downtown Portland, and the Antifa crowd turned on him. They allegedly dumped milkshakes on his head, punched him in the face, and beat him all over his body with whatever weapons they’d left the house with that day. Later, in the hospital’s emergency room, doctors told Andy that he had suffered brain injuries from the attack. The attack is being challenged, of course, but only by left-wing rags that likely only want to hurt Ngo because he doesn’t fit their desired mold.

  If those had been isolated incidents, it’d be one thing. But they’re not. All over the country, leftists are organizing marches, shutting down speakers, and committing horrible acts of violence when they don’t get their way. And instead of calling out these atrocious acts for what they are, the media either ignore them or cheer them on. The New York Times referred to the widespread protests after my father’s election—many of which had turned violent—as “peaceful.” When Trump supporters gather anywhere, organizing in the same numbers for similar reasons, we’re called “white supremacists” and “hateful fearmongers.” This isn’t because we’re evil or even because we’ve upset the established political order. It’s because we say things that the left doesn’t like to hear—and in the era of Trump, there is no greater crime than to trigger someone.

  In recent years, the left has come together and decided that words are violence, which, in the minds of its members, makes it perfectly acceptable to use violence against people with whom they disagree.

  They have decided that there are some things you just shouldn’t say anymore, and when you say one of those things, you become the enemy.

  But words aren’t violence. They’re just words.

  3.

  CRACKS IN THE FOUNDATION

  I WAS ONLY FOUR or five years out of college when I undertook my first major project as a VP at The Trump Organization. I had already learned a great deal about the business on a few smaller projects in New York City, but this was much different. Ninety-eight stories high, the Trump International Hotel & Tower now stands on the banks of the Chicago River. Luckily, I was alongside some of the most talented men and women in the business. We worked day and night on the project for close to five years. Because of the team’s commitment to the company, we brought the whole thing in on time and under budget.

  By the time we had our soft opening in 2008, I was almost thirty years old and fifty times more experienced than I’d been at the start. The lessons I learned on that job stay with me to this day. Maybe the most fundamental lesson was this:

  You need a strong foundation.

  Hidden from view, foundations transfer the weight of the entire building to the earth. As any good architect knows, a few centimeters of misalignment in the concrete subfloor can cause the structure to tilt or sink. If you don’t believe me, look at the Millennium Tower in San Francisco. Finished in 2009, the fifty-eight-story tower has sunk seventeen inches and tilted a foot. Today, they call it the “leaning tower of San Francisco,” and estimates are that it’ll take more than $100 million to fix—not the best news for people who bought condos in the building, which have depreciated in value $400,000 on average. Like most things in life, tall buildings need a solid foundation. Without one, as they say in the trade, you’re screwed.

  I’m reminded of faulty foundations when I look at the modern Democrat Party. It built a political party on a foundation of Jim Crow–style racism, support of the KKK and slavery, and stark opposition to Abraham Lincoln. Every few decades it added a floor to that foundation. Those floors included a widespread welfare state, hindrance of businesses both big and small, and finally political correctness, Soviet-style socialism, and Antifa. They are the party of dependence. Without that, they have nothing.

  It’s a miracle that the party is still standing.

  It’s not as if it hasn’t had several opportunities over the years to tear down and rebuild. After my father crushed Hillary in 2016, exposing an obvious flaw in the Democrats’ way of looking at the world, they could have regrouped and figured out a way to become less radical.

  But they didn’t.

  Instead of becoming more sensible after the 2016 presidential election, they shifted even further to the left, bringing the craziest fringe figures to the forefront of the party. In recent years, the Democrats have almost completely abandoned the principles of capitalism and democracy. Instead, they’ve begun embracing some of the worst ideas in the history of mankind: socialism, collectivism, class warfare, and the politics of fear and resentment. Some of their most recent proposals sound as though they came right out of The Communist Manifesto. They saw the 2016 election results, and they did exactly the opposite of what most reasonable people would have done.

  Did you ever think you would live in a country where the president of the United States would have to stand up during his State of the Union address and declare that we “would never become a socialist country”? But here we are.

  For my maternal grandmother, who lives with us for a few months every year, that line came as an incredible relief. For her, it was personal. She and my grandfather grew up in Czechoslovakia during the very worst of communism. Unlike most of these new-age Starbucks-chugging socialists in Brooklyn, they knew the horrors that can come from a state-run economy, and the scars of socialism are seared in her memory. I vividly remember speaking with her during the lead-up to the 2016 election, when she was watching neo-socialists such as Bernie Sanders on CNN almost every day. (We’re working on getting her off the CNN train, by the way. But back in the Czech Republic, you pick up CNN early, like a drug addiction. Soon she’ll be watching Fox with the rest of the sane people in the world.)

  “Don, don’t these people understand?” she asked, her voice quavering, tears coming to her eyes. This is a woman who hid from Nazis in the basement of her farmhouse as a child and lived under Communist occupation for decades. At ninety-three, she’s still stronger and tougher than most. But she feared that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren might go through some of the same things she went through, and the thought of that had scared the hell out of her.

  “They don’t know how bad it can be. Please do something. Don’t they know this is all lies?”

  The truth is that most people probably don’t know. They don’t know that socialism—especially this new, hip version of it that’s being pushed by the Democrats—is all just a bunch of nice-sounding lies. They’re happy to buy the rosy picture that the current Democrat Party is pushing. When Democrats tell them that what they’re proposing isn’t “real socialism,” they’re happy to go along wit
h that, too. But socialism has been lurking on the left of the US political system for decades, spreading like a crack in the foundation a few inches every election cycle.

  In the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s presidency and assassination, something called the New Left emerged in American politics. Much like Bernie’s following, the new left found its strength on college campuses across the United States. Organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) populated the movement.

  Meanwhile, in Washington, Lyndon Baines Johnson, perhaps to provide cover for his failing war in Vietnam, tried to appease the New Left by ushering through a socialist agenda. Among the programs he supported were food stamps in 1964, Medicaid in 1965, and the Gun Control Act of 1968. By the early 1970s, the hippies of the New Left had traded their peace signs for raised fists and terrorist organizations. Among them was the Weather Underground, which was responsible for more than two thousand domestic bombings. The Weather Underground’s manifesto, called Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-imperialism, is dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s assassin. Then there was the Black Liberation Army, which murdered seventeen American police officers in the 1970s, including six in New York City alone. There was the Symbionese Liberation Army, of Patty Hearst kidnapping fame. On the other side of the spectrum was the United States Christian Posse Association, a precursor of Aryan Nations, which preached violent white supremacy. It was domestic terror groups such as these that led the assault on the United States. In one poll taken at the time, more than 3 million Americans favored a revolution.

  The election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 and the strength of capitalism brought an end to the socialist insanity that marked the prior decades. Even Bill Clinton tried to ride the prevailing winds. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act he signed in 1996 sought to combat the cycle of poverty by putting limits on welfare. Still, under the surface, the cracks in the Democrats’ foundation spread and deepened.

  Out of those cracks, hidden socialists crawled.

  I’m not sure anyone was paying attention in 1988, for example, when Bernie Sanders took a little jaunt over to the Soviet Union to meet with some of the party leaders he admired so much. Anyway, why would they have noticed? In those days, Comrade Bernie was still just the hippie mayor of Burlington, Vermont. No one took him seriously.

  Less than four days into his trip, he found himself in a sweaty Russian sauna singing “This Land Is Your Land” with a bunch of bare-chested Communists. I know that sounds like a nightmare, but I can assure you that it is all too real.

  It used to be the case that most people—even other crazy liberal Democrats—would just look the other way when Bernie started talking. I don’t know if there was two-camera programming on C-SPAN back in the early 2000s. But if there had been, today you would be able to find clips of Crazy Bernie ranting to an empty Senate chamber, going on about socialized medicine while the janitors came through and scraped gum off the bottoms of the desks.

  Next to not having him in the Senate at all, leaving him alone was probably the best way to deal with the guy. Maybe we should have taken him more seriously.

  Many people saw Sanders’s run for the presidency in 2016 as a joke. But his crazy socialist ideas of free college, free health care for all, higher minimum wage, income redistribution, and tearing the heart out of capitalism almost gave him the Democrat Party’s nomination. It’s hard to run against “free everything.” Even if that is a pipe dream, it’s appealing to those who don’t get or choose not to realize that nothing is free. He won twenty-three primaries, 13.2 million votes, and 1,865 delegates. Though he ultimately lost to Hillary, in what was really a stolen and rigged primary, his success gave birth to a new generation of socialists who now threaten to take over the Democrat Party—and the country, if they ever find their way to power.

  A few years before Bernie took his little Soviet vacation, I was on my first-ever plane ride to Prague. I was five years old, going with my grandfather to visit his home in Communist Czechoslovakia. I had already been once when I was two years old, but this was my first trip without my parents.

  Looking back, I guess the trip to where my mother had grown up served two purposes. First, it gave my parents a little peace and quiet for a couple of months, and second, it allowed me to see what life looked like outside a Fifth Avenue penthouse. My parents didn’t believe that a childhood of privilege would do anything good for my development as a human being. My father actually had the conversation with my grandfather, and they both agreed that I needed to see the other side.

  My maternal grandfather put in as much work raising me as anyone else in my family. Dedo, Czech for “grandfather,” was tall and handsome with a long, lean body that he’d built by swimming laps in the public pool as a competitor. According to my grandmother, he had been a Czech national team swimming contender as a teenager, but I never got the full story about that. He had dark hair and rough workingman’s hands that were about as big as my whole face. In Czechoslovakia, he was a blue-collar electrician. He was very much his own man in everything he did.

  Throughout my entire childhood, Dedo would tell me how lucky I was to live in the United States, a place where a man could get whatever he wanted through hard work and perseverance. I had the kind of freedom he had yearned for his most of his life. But he also warned me about growing up rich and how easy it would be for me to become complacent.

  Given that the left will tell you that I was potty trained on a solid-gold toilet, I guess I got his point.

  Zlín was a three-hour drive from Prague. The building my grandparents lived in was gray and drab, twelve stories of cheap concrete-and-metal construction. It was designed in the old Soviet fashion, not to make money or push architecture forward but to keep the status quo. The apartment was a one-bedroom, as were all the apartments in the building. They were barely big enough for a couple, let alone a family. I don’t remember the structure having an elevator. I made a friend on the tenth floor, and we would run up and down the stairs to see each other.

  Visiting my grandparents was like going back in time sixty years. Most of the people who lived there kept chickens in the backyard. I would help my friends pluck and butcher them—I butchered hundreds of chickens in my childhood. Milk was sold in glass bottles with foil seals. Although the apartment was in the city, it was on the outskirts. Three hundred yards or so from where they lived was a tree line to a small forest we called “the woods.” After breakfast and the wood chopping, Dedo would point to the woods and say, “There’s the woods. Go. I’ll see you at dark.” I’d spend all day in the woods trying to master the things my grandfather had shown me how to do: shoot a bow and an air gun, make a fire, swing an ax, and throw a knife—all that guy stuff. There were aqueduct tunnels that my friends and I would explore, holding up homemade torches made with pine sap. It was during those early experiences that I first began to love the outdoors, a love that’s a fixture of my life to this day.

  Though I treasured the great outdoors, I wasn’t crazy about speaking Czech at first. My mother and grandparents had started speaking it to me so early that by the time I was three, I was completely fluent. Sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference between Czech and English. I only knew that my friends back in New York would laugh at me when I slipped into speaking Czech by accident. To this day, I have a clear memory of sitting in my grandmother’s kitchen one night and screaming “Nechci mluvit česky!” at the top of my lungs. It means “I don’t want to speak Czech!” in Czech. I totally didn’t realize I was doing it.

  (Just as an aside, I’m sure if anyone heard me speaking Czech, they’d take it as some kind of proof that I had colluded with Russia. I’ve actually heard pundits on television using my second language as proof that I must love “Mother Russia.” Not only is the Czech language different from Russian, the Czechs have no love of Russia. If those crazies had bothered to learn the history between the two countries, they would have known that the
Soviet Union occupied Czechoslovakia from just after World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Russians destroyed many things in the country.So, there’s certainly no love lost there, to say the least. But these days, the narrative rules the facts.)

  Still, there was something about life in Zlín that I found comforting. Around a campfire, I developed amazing friendships that I’ve kept to this day. In Czechoslovakia, I learned the value of friends over tangible objects. Despite the difficulties they endured, the people there had great relationships, great families whom they cared about. They just had to do it somewhat hidden from the Communist Party, I guess. Eastern Europeans are some of the hardest-working people in America—once they get here. The thing that they were missing in Czechoslovakia was motivation.

  My grandparents lived practically their whole lives around people who relied on the government for everything. When Czech citizens wanted a new house, they talked to the government. When they wanted a new job or a promotion, they spoke to the government. Health care and elder care and retirement funds, all low quality compared to their counterparts in the United States, came from the state. In Czechoslovakia, the government gave the people everything they needed to exist (barely) and then asked for a small amount of labor in return. People worked in careers that would maintain the status quo and provide for the state, and everyone made roughly the same amount of money. No one could make a higher wage just because he or she worked harder. There were no incentives, so there was no economic growth. The only people with any money were the people who had connections to the top ranks of the Communist Party, and most of that money was either dirty or stolen.