On the Inaugural Protests

I had a snappy little exchange with a liberal friend of mine last night on Twitter. At some point in the evening when the protests began to turn violent, I tweeted something along the lines of not remembering there being violent conservative protests when Obama was inaugurated. My liberal friend then tweeted (without reference to me--so I cannot be sure that I was his target) these words "Fun watching GOPsters who were bitterly denouncing Trump several months ago, now with the vapors about the possibility of protests."

Apparently this fellow believed that because some of us strenuously objected to the possibilty of a Trump Presidency, we must therefore believe that violent protest was warranted (or should at the very least, be accepted) now that he had been elected. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The country conducted an election, there was a clear winner by the clearly stated rules of the game, it is time to get on with things.

That there are people protesting in the streets does not bother me. Only when they turn violent do I take issue. And seeing that the man had not even yet been inaugurated, that he had not yet made a single decision as President--there simply isn't a rational excuse for violent protest.

There seems to be an expectation among those on the left that those of us who were vocally anti-Trump during the election would then turn into take-to-the-barricades radicals when he was elected. That's just not the way it works, at least not with someone possessed of a classically conservative mind.