I & I Editorial BoardWe were bemused at the Orwellian doublespeak of the weekend protests, which were waged under the banner of “hands off.”
Hands off? What the protesters really want is for the government to keep its hands on – on our throats choking out our freedoms and in our pockets stealing our money.
Naturally, the protesters describe themselves as “defending democracy” and the current situation a “crisis.” What else is new?
But this particular effort – reported by most of the press to be “massive,” encompassing, said CNN, “scores of people” (20s of people?) – was more mindless than usual.
The “Hands Off” website claims that “Trump and Musk are attempting an illegal power grab,” but that they are also “gutting services” – not aware that this is a flat-out contradiction.
How is Donald Trump amassing power by cutting the size of government, squeezing out waste, and deregulating the economy? Or by ending the weaponization of law enforcement? Waste, fraud, heavy-handed regulations, politicized law enforcement are all the hands-on weapons of autocrats and dictators.
The Hands Off folks claim Trump is “racing towards slashing Medicaid, Social Security, and more.” Really? Trump has made it clear that Social Security is off the table. And Medicaid wastes billions of dollars every year on fraudulent claims, ineligible beneficiaries, and general waste.
The Government Accountability Office reported a year ago that Medicaid made more than $50 billion in “improper payments” in 2023. That’s just what was caught. In one year. Recently in this space, we pointed out that states use a Medicaid “provider tax” scam to improperly grab hundreds of billions of federal money – something even Joe Biden wanted to end (see “Dems Fight To Protect A $600 Billion Medicaid Tax Scam That Joe Biden Tried To Kill”).
Medicaid has been on the GAO’s “high risk” list for “mismanagement and fraud, waste, and abuse” for more than 20 years. And what’s been done to fix it? Nothing.
Is allowing this fraud to continue what the protesters mean by “hands off”?
Besides, the government is running annual deficits of more than $1 trillion a year, on top of $36 trillion in federal debt. If protesters really were about “hands off,” they’d demand that government release this debt grip on future generations.
The “hands off” protesters also “demand an end to the attacks on immigrants.” But Trump isn’t attacking immigrants. He’s trying to stop illegal immigration and deporting those who are here illegally. Since Trump took office, the State Department has issued on the order of 100,000 legal immigrant visas.
And, of course, what would a leftist protest be these days without calling out supposed attacks on “transgender” people?
But hang on a second. The vast majority of the public opposes allowing boys who claim to be girls to compete in girls’ sports. And most Americans support laws banning the mutilation of children by adults in the name of “gender-affirming care” – just as they support laws banning minors from getting tattoos in the name of “self expression.”
We’re not sure what they’re referring to when they complain about “invasion of privacy.” But you’d think the left would be more concerned about government-sponsored censorship. Except that was something the Biden administration was doing that Trump ended.
Then again, as Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds helpfully documents, many of the protestors had no idea what they were protesting.
These protests are just another sign that the left has nothing to offer. Nothing but fear itself.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Paul F. Petrick
We who read I&I already agree with I&I’s points-but the videos are hilarious, especially the ones by Insurrection Barbie.
It is such a relief to know that at least one young pretty woman can passionately support Trump policies.
And make sense doing it! Do yourself a favor a watch the videos (under the instapundent link that is in the article).
You guys are giving the leftists way too much credit. My perspective is that the Democrats held a lot of rallies where they provided transportation and paid people to show up along with a few that showed up for free to rant against the democracy that selected Donald Trump. Trump was very clear about his agenda and the majority of American voters wanted that. Democrats did a terrible job over the last 4 years have a platform limited to hating Trump. They hate losing and are ready to dump democracy in a heartbeat if it means they can get rid of Trump and overrule the majority of Americans.
I attended one of the rallies and nobody was given transportation or paid to attend. It was the largest rally in the history of the town where I live.
Before the election, Trump claimed he never heard of Project 2025. Now he’s implementing it to the letter. And Trump won with slightly under 50% of the electorate. So no, it’s not true that “Trump was very clear on his agenda and a majority of American voters wanted that.”
In 2000, Gore, after losing all the court cases on an election that was decided by a few hundred votes in a single state, personally presided as Vice President when the Senate counted the votes and made his opponent the President. In 2020, Trump, after losing all the court cases on an election that was decided by tens of thousands of votes in several states, incited an angry mob to try to stop the Senate from counting the votes. Based on this, which people can we conclude “hate losing and are ready to dump democracy in a heartbeat”?
Every set maps on a distribution curve, including the set of people who are willing and/or able to apply logical consistency to their thought processes.
The set of people who attend public demonstrations can also be mapped on a distribution curve correlated with the distribution of coherent thinkers.
There often appears to be very little overlap between the correlated datasets;. so little overlap, at times, that it appears to be a spurious correlation.
The small sample size of the overlap, is the reason I&I is well-advised to publish editorials such as the one above.
Are you a Trump supporter and if so, could you make your logical and coherent case for him? I’d be glad to detail one against him for you, assuming you’ve somehow never been exposed to any news or information about him.
Please do not include those of us on the left with these silly people; the singular clue you needed to know that these people have nothing to do with the left is the inclusion of “NATO” as one of their complaints, when the left has been critical of NATO since 1991 (and actually before, but for different reasons).
The reason these protests were so small is that the left refused to show up.
In fact, the NATO expansion of the 1990s-2000s had bipartisan support. Opposition to it also came from both the left and the right. The anti-Trump movement is a coalition and it’s a fallacy to assume each and every participant agreed on each and every reason for protesting.
The protests were so small? What numbers would you expect for a large one then? In my town at least, it was much larger than any I’ve ever seen, and was reported as such in our local news.
This editorial doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny.
“Power grab”: If we have laws for the government to provide certain services, but a President curtails them because he doesn’t like them, what else do you call that? Then what is Congress for? “Weaponization of law enforcement”: Did Trump not have a lot of legal troubles throughout his career, long before he entered politics? Did other top right-wing politicians such as W. Bush or Romney ever have such troubles? Then what on earth are you talking about? “Trump is only stopping illegal immigrants”: Wrong. He’s actually cancelling a lot of visas of people who were here legally, including people with green cards. I could go on.
If your standard is “do the hard work of reporting and researching stories before you offer your uncompromising viewpoints” as it says in the blurb, I feel you failed on this occasion.