Presidents Day protests were a break with reality

What we saw was a mass of people who will not get on board with decidedly common and voter-approved motions from the president. Rapid-fire adjustments and reallocations are no shocking play, especially along the arc of a particularly hard pendulum swing.

As to appearances, participants in the recent protests emerged from among two typical types. One dominant demographic was the boomer generation — the old people of the Left who are attached either to social welfare or political stagnation or both. The rest consisted of left-wing, mask-wearing activists. These members focused on the more dire issues of Nazism, transgenderism, and a certainty that democracy, once again, is actively toppling. All waved such props as Mexican flags, Palestinian flags, sexual orientation flags, and signs claiming a most violent resistance.

Protesters chose, also, from among two discontents: fear for pet issues of the Left — transgender and immigrant groups are “being targeted and dehumanized by multiple people in this government” — and fear of Elon Musk’s supposed authoritarianism. The second of which, when broken down, still concerns itself with “dehumanization,” just on the broader level of supposed fascism.

Noisy but entirely expectation-meeting. And it is a shame: There are at least imagined complaints that administration-opposed voters could argue are in line with actual happenings. 

They might say that Trump has gone overboard with the number of executive orders he is making, but instead, they advance the idea that executive orders are a conceptual departure from democratic proceedings. Likewise, they might protest to show that Trump’s advisement from Musk needs real caution — but their dominant claim is that any role of Musk’s is blanketly illegal.

Thus are we left with one large, unidentifiable claim of “dehumanization.” It turns on overreaction to reasonable steps the Trump administration has taken, mainly the order to stop child sex transition procedures and the president’s goals for mass deportation. What disconnects it from reality, however, is not just visceral disagreement with the ideology but the insistence that it denies human dignity.

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There is no way to make the argument that sex transition is an objective affirmation of humanity — if anything, it does the opposite by defining core human characteristics as insufficient and mutable. It is an outlandish refusal to acknowledge even the building blocks of man’s reality. So, too, with immigration: Not only does pushback deny the reality that there is an illegal immigration problem and that there is an order to things, but it states as fact the lie that legal immigrants also are in danger.

None of the protest should be taken seriously, then. Rather, it is the protesters themselves who make-believe that this is a statement on their human worth, with claims that are dramatic and unreal. Trump has support: The buzz these days feels little different from inauguration weekend, but it is no less victorious.