Congresswoman Ilhan Omar calling on Americans to “take back our democracy” by emulating Hong Kong protests is just the latest episode in Democrats’ slide towards “color revolution” tactics to get power they lost at the ballot box.
“Could we take back our democracy if 1.7 million Americans marched for it?” asked Omar (D-Minnesota) on Sunday, retweeting a video allegedly showing that many Hong Kongers on the march.
To Omar, however, the protesting Hong Kongers are just a prop: her actual target is US President Donald Trump. Nor is this the first time a Democrat has called for radical tactics to oust Trump. The self-styled “Resistance” has been at it from the moment he won the 2016 presidential election.
Eight members of Congress literally did that in June 2018, blocking a street in Washington, DC in a protest against “family separations” at the US-Mexico border. Though they tried hard to get arrested, police refused to do so. One of the lawmakers was Rep. Joe Crowley (D-New York), who even passed out from heat exhaustion at one point. That did not help him a month later, when he was primaried by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – who would go on to become a leading Democrat firebrand, part of a self-styled “squad” with Omar and two others.
“Marginalized” communities have “no choice but to riot,” Ocasio-Cortez said on a radio program last month, adding that she meant “all over the world” including “communities of poverty” in the US.
Just about every Democrat protest against every Trump policy has been accompanied with hyperbolic rhetoric and public performances playing entirely to the media, seeking to browbeat – rather than persuade – the president and his party to back down. This is not actual democracy, as envisioned by the Athenians, or even a republic developed in Rome that the US founders sought to replicate. Instead, it looks more like the tactics concocted by the US government for “color revolutions” abroad.
It now seems that this virus, developed as a political weapon for overseas use, is now infecting domestic US politics with the same toxic effect. That the people pushing it are doing so in the name of “saving our democracy” is just one of those great ironies of history.