Watch Out, Trump Supporters: Your Business May Be Boycotted

Someone recently told me that a boycott will be organized, in the area where I live, against individuals and businesses who voted for Donald Trump.

In a way, such an idea is funny. When you live in a hard core leftist area, like San Francisco, New York or Washington DC, then you’re used to people who don’t like your politics, using all kinds of intimidation tactics. The kind of people interested in such a boycott will be the same kind of people who were already boycotting you. It’s not anything new. The poor saps think they’re on to something brilliant, innovative and new, kind of like the tried-and-untrue Communism-like ideology that got rejected at the ballot box a few months back.

I wonder about the logistics of such a boycott. Will anti-Trumpers demand election records so the pro-Trump voters will be exposed and correspondingly shamed, threatened or otherwise driven out of business? If Trump, on the whole, garnered about half of the vote nationally, what will society and economic life look like with half of the population eradicated from circulation, as anti-Trumpers seem to want? What if the people who do a great job tuning anti-Trumpers’ cars, fixing their computers or taking care of their pets while on vacation happened to vote for Trump?

Don’t get me wrong. In a free society, which includes an unhampered free market economy, people are allowed to boycott or abstain from trade with any business (or customer) they choose. This is the very thing — a free market based on absolute property rights — that NeverTrumpers and Democrats oppose with more ferocity than anyone. So how do they justify their own right to boycott when they would never, ever permit the same for any other reason, including a boycott of people who voted for a president they like?

Boycotts of Trump supporters are not for everyone. Others settle for things like unfriending or otherwise attempting to “shame” those who disagree with them through petty backbiting in their towns, jobs or communities. But again, what’s the loss? If you learn that a friend considers your whole friendship to be based on political choices at the ballot box, then you’ve learned something that was true all along. You might not have known it before, but it must have been true all along for this to happen. And now you know it. On the premise that it’s better to know than not to know, you now have new information about whom your friends really are, and really are not. Be sad or disappointed, but move on. You don’t need such people in your life, and you never did.

It’s illuminating to consider that yesterday’s opponents of the Obama administration were just as unhappy with that administration as today’s anti-Trumpers are with the present one. Eight years ago, did you hear stories of proposed boycotts in favor of those who voted for Obama, or were people unfriended on Facebook or elsewhere merely for supporting him? I imagine it happened in places, although I don’t believe I heard of one single incident. The anti-Trump hostility is a daily occurrence, however, even for those who normally pay little attention to politics. It seems that the apostles of tolerance and diversity (with a few pleasant exceptions, to be fair) are among the least tolerant and diverse-minded our society has ever known.

A recent writer for The New York Times, of all places, worries about the virulently intolerant tactics that opponents of the new Trump administration are taking:

Liberals may feel energized by a surge in political activism, and a unified stance against a president they see as irresponsible and even dangerous. But that momentum is provoking an equal and opposite reaction on the right. In recent interviews, conservative voters said they felt assaulted by what they said was a kind of moral Bolshevism — the belief that the liberal vision for the country was the only right one. Disagreeing meant being publicly shamed.

You have to ask the question: What are those who threaten, bully and intimidate people with differing views counting on? Let’s say they win the next two elections, in 2018 and 2020. Congress goes back to the Democrats and the White House is taken over by Hillary Clinton or some other Democrat. What then? If they win, it will be just as close as this time around. Will they take their attitudes of hostility and censorship to the government? Will the next Democratic administration unleash what we’re seeing on the streets, on college campuses and in the media on a daily basis against Trump supporters or anyone who disagrees with leftism? If so, what form will that take? What will it look like, and what will the previous supporters of Trump – now silenced by the new powers-that-be – do next? Do progressives, leftists and Democrats think all will be calm and quiet and their politically resuscitated President Hillary will take the reins of a now unified country? It won’t be anything like that.

Protests and righteous indignation on social media and in Hollywood may seem to liberals to be about policy and persuasion. But moderate conservatives say they are having the opposite effect, chipping away at their middle ground and pushing them closer to Mr. Trump.

It’s not about persuasion. And they know it. It’s about intimidation. Whether it’s on the simple/local level of unfriending people on Facebook and threatening untenable boycotts, or whether it’s more serious than that, the writer of this passage summed it up well: “But that momentum is provoking an equal and opposite reaction on the right.”

How do you think we ended up with a President Trump in the first place? Millions and millions got fed up with being pushed around by one-sided bullies in Washington and the media who never have, and never will, consider a dissenting voice on issues like environmentalism, private property, taxes, gun rights or the Constitution interpreted seriously. President Trump is the price that previous supporters of Obama paid for President Obama. It’s a gigantic credit card balance that had to come due. They could literally murder Donald Trump tomorrow, as some talk openly of doing, and the anger that gave rise to his presidency would take a form unlike anything America has seen since the time of the Civil War. Leftists have backed themselves into a corner, and it’s not going to stop here.

“The name calling from the left is crazy,” said Bryce Youngquist, 34, who works in sales for a tech start-up in Mountain View, Calif., a liberal enclave where admitting you voted for Mr. Trump is a little like saying in the 1950s that you were gay. “They are complaining that Trump calls people names, but they turned into some mean people.”

The other possibility? That they were mean people all along. Donald Trump’s victory, combined with a refusal to back away from his campaign promises, gives them the excuse they always needed to unleash their hatred and hostility now. And what an ugly, sad sight it is.

Unhappy people are sometimes mean people. They don’t care about your rights, nor even their own, deep down. They’re simply full of angry, petulant hatred. They have nothing credible to offer, politically or intellectually. Their threats, screams and pouts are the best acknowledgement of that fact you could ever find. They feel impotent, because they are. Why? Power is all they have, because Communism and systems of that nature (the systems the left endorses) are all about force, and nothing at all about liberty. Liberty and freedom require you to take responsibility for your own life, first and foremost. Collectivism and Communism foster dependence, timidity and ultimately hostility toward the very people you depend upon for your livelihood.

We’ve got to find a credible way to sustain the republic our wise and mostly right-on founders gave us, all those years ago. It’s a tragic shame we ever handed America over to the people who now rage and throw temper tantrums on social media, in the media and on the streets.