Kerby Anderson

Some members of the current Resistance Movement are becoming more violent. We see the violence on university campuses and in rallies in major cities. But it is worth remembering that much of this started even before the election of Donald Trump.

For example, the Occupy Wall Street movement began to protest what progressives believed must change in the financial industry. John Nolte writing in Breitbart.com kept a running tally of the rap sheet on these protesters. At last count he listed a total of 417 arrests or other offenses.

Pollster Douglas Schoen found that 52 percent of the Occupy protesters had “participated in a political movement before.” He also found that nearly a third (31%) said they would “support violence to advance their agenda.”

We have also seen this in environmental protests. Take the North Dakota pipeline protests. Law enforcement officials collected 41 pages of social media posts written against the police officers that had to confront the demonstrators. These had the names, addresses, and pictures of the officers with threats to “make their family pay.”

Earlier this month police in Tennessee charged a woman with felony reckless endangerment after she came after a Republican member of Congress and attacked his car. An Obamacare supporter in North Dakota physically accosted a Republican member of Congress.

One writer in the Huffington Post argued that elected officials (especially Republicans) should “be hounded by protestors everywhere, especially in public—in restaurants, in shopping centers, in their districts, and yes, on the public property outside their homes and apartments, in Washington and back in their home states.”

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was accosted in an Apple store. Omarosa Manigault was accosted while shopping at a northern Virginia mall. We need leaders on both sides of the aisle to call for an end to the violence and call for everyone to practice civility.