We may someday look back at Sarah Sanders’ expulsion from the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, as the moment that started it all—the Franz Ferdinand of the Second American Civil War, if you will. Sure, Kirstjen Nielsen and Stephen Miller were recently harassed at their favorite Mexican joints by some protestors, but Sanders’ case was unique in that it was the business owner who asked her to leave rather than an angry mob. Perhaps she preferred the Obama method of giving immigrant children to sex traffickers.
Maxine Waters decided to capitalize on this event, encouraging liberals to “create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” Of course, she says this representing a relatively poor district of California while she chills in a mansion that is worth anywhere from $3-5 million dollars, according to her own tax forms.
Of course, this is so idiotic that even Nancy Fuckin’ Pelosi reprimanded her in public for saying it. But it’s even more poorly thought out than most things that Mad Max has said, and that’s saying something. Here’s why.
Trump’s policies are specifically designed to help a few groups of people, and one of those groups is small business owners. Everybody from Forbes to CNBC agrees that Trump’s tax plan will help small business owners keep more of their money, reinvest in their business, and even keep more of their money when they sell their business. They voted for Trump en masse, not only to relieve their tax burden but to relieve them of the millstone known as ObamaCare. Depending on which exit poll you read, anywhere from sixty to eighty percent of small business owners voted for Trump in 2016. Even black business owners were more than twice as likely to have voted Trump than your average black citizen was.
In other words, if you want to start drawing lines in the sand—if you want to have businesses and restaurants where Republicans aren’t welcome, then you better be prepared for the opposite to happen too, and there are far, far more small businesses where Republicans are in charge than ones where Democrats sign the checks. If Democrats want businesses to be segregated, they’re going to end up being stuck outside more often than not.
Of course, this assumes a world where Republicans and Democrats act the same, and nothing could be further from the truth—for now. Republican business owners are more likely to take a dollar from anybody, regardless of creed or belief. And Democrats are historically far better at organizing and executing these sorts of protests. Despite my disagreement with pretty much every press release Disney has had in the last decade, and the fact that their CEO is a likely opponent for Trump in 2020, I still took my kids to see The Incredibles 2 (and its overtly feminist message) this weekend, because I like The Incredibles. In fact, I can’t remember ever not going to a movie or downloading a song just because the actors or musicians were anti-Trump.
But if you keep provoking them, Republicans will organize. If you want further proof, simply look at what happened to the Red Hen’s Yelp and Facebook pages. Yeah, it’s easy slacktivism at this juncture, but I have a feeling it’s a jumping off point and a warning to businesses who discriminate against Trumpers in the future.
Don’t count on Republicans continuing to practice non-violence in the face of being threatened, either. It’s only the desire to neither be in the national headlines nor have 2nd Amendment rights become revoked that has kept CCW holders from blasting an Antifa member in the grill thus far. But it will happen. I guarantee it.
And that might just be the catalyst for a fight that Democrats can’t win. Candidly, Republicans own most of the businesses and all of the guns, and if Maxine gets her way, they’ll begin to feel justified using both to their advantage.
I hope I’m wrong. I don’t want to see donkey and elephant signs on restaurant windows. I hope that we can see that there’s more that unites us as Americans than divides us.
I wouldn’t bet on it, though.