Whitlock: Ignoring the concerns of Trump supporters will destroy America

 Wednesday afternoon, angry, unarmed, mostly peaceful protesters stormed the Capitol. They caused hundreds of dollars in damages to "The People's House," the taxpayer-funded building where elected lawmakers work.

They took pictures seated at Nancy Pelosi's desk. They shoved furniture out of place. They pushed their way past unprepared and overwhelmed law enforcement. They shattered a window or two.

If not for police shooting and killing an unarmed, female 14-year Air Force veteran, the protest staged by Trump supporters would have more in common with a 1950s fraternity panty raid than political riot.

Here, I guess, I should apologize for not joining the rest of the media in feigning outrage and calling for the trespassers to be tried for treason. But I'm neither outraged nor feeling vengeful because of their act of civil disobedience.

I understand it. It was an inevitable repercussion from 2020 and what we've all witnessed the last decade. It was Sir Isaac Newton's third law come to life.

"For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

For four years now, the billionaire and millionaire elites who control academia, the mainstream media, politics, popular culture, and the sports world have framed Trump supporters as racist deplorables worthy of elimination from society.

These same elites spent the past decade elevating Michael Brown, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, Rayshard Brooks, Eric Garner, and other resisting criminal suspects to icon status while simultaneously raising bail money for protesters willing to riot, loot, burn, and vandalize in the name of racial justice.

This blatant hypocrisy will not go unchallenged. You cannot ignore the desires, concerns and feelings of 74 million citizens. You cannot write them off as Nazis and answer all their complaints with allegations of racism or sexism. That's fascism.

At this point, the Deplorables should be commended for their restraint. Antifa and Black Lives Matter search, burn, and destroy well into the wee hours. The Deplorables returned to their hotel rooms by nightfall and watched our lawmakers return to work inside the Capitol by 8 p.m.

The critics say President Trump provoked Wednesday's political "violence." His refusal to concede a corrupt election baited his followers to overrun the Capitol with flags, put Ashli Babbitt in harm's way, and do enough property damage to delay the Electoral College confirmation three or four hours.

Fine. Guilty as charged.

But our president for the next two weeks was not Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone provocateur. He had plenty of collaborators. They work on all the major and cable news and sports networks. They play in the NFL and NBA. They represent both political parties, hold high positions in Hollywood, at Netflix, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The people wagging their fingers the hardest at Trump and the Deplorables sanctioned, financed, and promoted political violence throughout all of 2020 and for much of the past decade.

Ashli Babbitt's blood is on the hands of Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg as much as, if not more than, on President Trump's. That's why Dorsey and Zuckerberg rushed to silence Trump on their respective platforms, Twitter and Facebook.

Political tension and violence are fomented, planned, and monetized on Silicon Valley's social media platforms. Wednesday's "violence" hit the wrong target. The Capitol is where global elites exchange cash for influence and privilege. It's where $150,000-a-year politicians become multimillionaires building cozy relationships with Big Tech lobbyists and American corporations looking to curry favor with China.

The Capitol is sacred ground for elites. The way you might revere a church edifice is the way millionaires and billionaires revere the Capitol.

The NBA multimillionaires said they played with "heavy hearts" Wednesday night after seeing the Capitol desecrated. They made twisted, illogical analogies between nonviolent civil disobedience and the rioting, looting, and violence that occurred in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Kenosha, and across this country all summer.

"It reminds me of what Dr. Martin Luther King has said, that there's two split different Americas," Boston Celtics star Jaylen Brown told reporters. "In one America, you get killed by sleeping in your car, selling cigarettes or playing in your backyard. And then in another America, you get to storm the Capitol and no tear gas, no massive arrests, none of that."

Brown is right. There are two different American realities. There's the false reality world created by and for elites and their groupies. In this world, progressive elites feign concern for poor black people by championing the cause of a tiny handful of black resisting criminal suspects harmed by white police officers tasked with subduing them. The elites have no interest in the thousands of black men and boys killed annually due to random gang, street, and drug violence. Those black lives do not matter. Progressive elites live inside a social media matrix where they call the Crips and the Bloods to protect them from the police.

The rest of America lives in an alternate universe driven, at least partially, by reality, facts, and common sense. We don't see the norms of Western Civilization as the root of all evil. We have no interest in disrupting the nuclear family. We don't think the storming of the Capitol is analogous to the months of looting, arson, shooting, rioting, and anarchy we watched throughout 2020.

Philadelphia 76ers coach Doc Rivers, a man I greatly respect, lives in a different reality than I do. His interpretation of Wednesday's chaos baffles me.

"No police dogs turned on people, no billy clubs hitting people. People peacefully being escorted out of the Capitol," Rivers told reporters Wednesday. "So it shows you can peacefully disperse a crowd. It basically proves a point about a privileged life in a lot of ways. I will say it, because I don't think a lot of people want to: Can you imagine [Wednesday], if those were all black people storming the Capitol, and what would have happened? That, to me, is a picture worth a thousand words for all of us to see, and probably something for us to reckon with again."

What is he talking about? We've watched buildings burned to the ground this summer. We've seen "protesters" prowling the streets of Atlanta with semi-automatic weapons. We've seen protesters berate and spit on police officers. David Dorn, a 77-year-old, black retired cop, was assassinated. Parts of Portland have been under attack from Antifa and Black Lives Matter for months.

There have been no dogs, no billy clubs.

We don't have to imagine how law enforcement would react to black, lawless protesters. It has aired on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News all summer. The police have been remarkably restrained.

The media, athletes, and celebrities have treated black protesters as heroes. Politicians have taken knees and worn kente cloth to show allegiance with black protesters. Every national sportscaster and head coach has gone along with the facade that police pose a greater threat to black men than black men. We're inundated with television commercials promoting Black Lives Matter. The NFL has celebrated criminals involved in drive-by shootings. A laundry list of media personalities have taken turns rationalizing every violent, lawless action taken by Antifa or Black Lives Matter. No one cares that George Floyd stuck a gun in a pregnant black woman's belly or that Jacob Blake sexually assaulted a black woman. The New York Times commissioned a group of black female reporters to rewrite American history to fit the narrative of the critical race theory taught at our academic institutions.

The concerns propagandized by the ministers of black victimhood are a high priority in American society. Sinners are excommunicated from their employment. There is so much money, fame, and adulation from joining the Church of Black Victimization that white people such as Shaun King and Rachel Dolezal have disavowed their natural heritage to identify as black.

A Trump supporter? He or she is an American pariah. A racist. A coon. An idiot. A sellout. Someone to be silenced or ignored.

Trump supporters will not go away quietly or peacefully. It's their country, too. Their concerns are legitimate. The lawmakers they chased to the basement of the Capitol sold out the American working-class man and woman.

They sold out my mom and dad and the way of life that allowed me to rise from poverty to a life of comfort and privilege. My dad was a small businessman in Indianapolis who owned a tavern that catered to hourly, union factory workers. My mother was a factory worker in Indianapolis and Kansas City.

The black people I grew up with, the ones who frequented the Masterpiece Lounge and went on bowling trips with my mom, were not global citizens. They were hardworking high school graduates who wanted their kids to move up the economic and social ladder.

They had a lot in common with Trump supporters. We can't see that common ground now because the mainstream media and social media have us so irrationally polarized that we think skin color explains everything.

Skin color does not explain the Trump phenomenon, the passion of his followers. Trumpism is rooted in a rejection of the elitism, idolatry, and secularism pervasive in modern American culture.

In September 1620 — four hundred years ago — 102 passengers boarded the Mayflower, fleeing southern England and the elitist society constructed there. They were the original Trumpers, the dregs of European society in search of freedom of religion and expression.

Trumpism is the cry of American citizens uninterested in adopting the cultures and customs of France, China, Italy, Cuba, Venezuela, Canada, or any of the other places global elites romanticize. Trumpism is the cry of the working class who believe the Big Tech billionaires are building an America that cuts them out of the American Dream. Trumpism is the cry of Americans who value authenticity over the fraudulence of political correctness.

The price of ignoring their cries will be war, a civil war.