John touched on this yesterday as part of a longer round-up of “the Resistance” acting like dirtbags but it deserves an extra thread. Imagine the thought process involved in (a) setting out to accost people (b) at an event devoted to the military and their families, specifically, and (c) zeroing in on two women, knowing that chances were fair that they’ve lost loved ones to war. Which, in the case of Ryan Manion and Amy Looney, happened to be true.

Where was security?

We were an hour late to the event. First because we could not get around an angry mob in the street that was burning trash cans and smashing windows. When we finally got to the venue, a group of about 75 people separated us from the entrance. Amy and I stood there unsure of what to do. I finally said, let’s just walk. As we made our way through the crowd we were spit at and called some of the worst and most vile things I have ever heard come out of a person’s mouth. These people had such hatred in their eyes when they screamed at us. After leaving the event we walked outside and was first pushed by a man in a mask hiding his face, then told by 2 women that we ruined this country. They screamed this in our faces along as in the face of a little boy that could have been no older then 6. As the one woman screamed the other pushed up against me and colored all over my mom’s shawl I was wearing with permanent marker.

This was on Inauguration Day, when assorted degenerates were smashing windows and burning limos in parts of D.C., not during Saturday’s Women’s March. Mary Katharine Ham, who knows both women and has worked with the Travis Manion Foundation, went on CNN yesterday to ask the fateful question: How would this have played in the media if the ideological affiliations had been different?

“I don’t think this characterizes the march and the movement that we saw out here today,” she said. “I want to be careful about that because I think that that’s something people have unfairly done to conservative movements in the past and to Tea Partiers, where you pick one thing and you go: ‘Look at those awful people out there, their concerns should be dismissed.’”

“But this is part of the story, as is Madonna saying she thinks about blowing up the White House,” she said. “Those are not great things. If it were a conservative movement, we would hear a lot about it. If you don’t think that the left has some prejudices of its own that can lead it very astray like it did last night in that instance, then you’re wrong. And if you think that that’s not part of the reason many turned to Trump, then you’re also wrong.”

We missed out on some memorably stern lectures about the “climate of hate” on cable news this weekend just because this came from the left rather than the right. If the White House is looking to mess with the press, they should start making a list of incidents of leftists behaving badly and circulating it to the media, with Spicer or even Trump himself occasionally referencing it. Nothing would annoy the media more by disrupting their conventional wisdom that the right is essentially feral while the left is thoughtful and enlightened than having “climate of hate” updates thrown in their faces. It’d be good politics for Trump too, building the sense that the average American is besieged by people who are forever congratulating themselves on their superiority while behaving terribly in various ways. It wouldn’t be fair — MKH is right that it’s a smear to equate a movement with its worst actors — but Trumpism is all about making the other side play by its own rules (which was also one of Saul Alinsky’s famous “Rules for Radicals,” in fact). This is one obvious way.