ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Another day, another mob du jour.

The latest mob is the biggest of them all: Thousands of Central Americans, armed with child pawns and spurious asylum claims, marching inexorably toward our southern border.

President Trump, who won largely on a vow to halt the illegal immigrant invasion, build the border wall and enforce existing laws, has said he’s prepared to deploy the military to seal the border. (This raises a profound and as yet unanswered question: When does a mob of foreigners used to storm our border become an invading army that would justify military action to repel it?)

Mr. Trump knows that it’s a pre-election set-up funded by shadowy (and possibly international) groups. And he appears ready to call their bluff, knowing that the only way to deal with a mob is to deny its demands.

Chaos-stoking mobs have long been the tool of choice for impatient revolutionaries. When the proper avenues — elections, petitions, legislation, courts — fail them, they leverage mobs as a cudgel of extortion.

Since Donald Trump announced his candidacy, mobs mobilized to thwart him. In 2015, top officials in the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation formed a cabal and weaponized uncorroborated, unverified political dirt, paid for by Mr. Trump’s political opponents, in order to secure government surveillance of him and his team. And if the anonymous writer of a recent New York Times op-ed is to be believed, internal mobs within his administration continue to work to undermine him and his agenda.

Other leftist mobs are less clandestine. Before and after the election, roving left-wing mobs became routine and normalized as they attacked and harassed Trump supporters.

During the Senate confirmation vote of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, a mob shrieked from the gallery. Another mob clawed at the bronze doors of the Court in a scene right out of “The Walking Dead.”

Progressive gangs have hounded elected and other officials where they live, work and dine and vandalized their offices. Mothers have dragged their small children to stalk lawmakers in congressional hallways. Antifa mobs roam city streets, provoking violence and destroying property. Conservative speakers are under constant assault on college campuses. And there are countless, continual left-wing social media flash mobs that descend on a target like Biblical locust plagues.

The media is perhaps the most powerful virtual mob, particularly when dominant entities like Facebook, Google and Twitter gang up with the mainstream press to intimidate and silence conservative or other views they deem “unacceptable.” And like all leftist mobs, the media hide behind a caring, peaceful facade that covers their venomous political agenda.

None of this should come as a surprise. Just 10 years ago, candidate Barack Obama implored his supporters to aggressively confront those who opposed their agenda: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” he said, and “get in their faces.”

Now his first attorney general (and likely future presidential candidate), Eric Holder, calls for “kick(ing)” opponents, and Democrats such as Rep. Maxine Waters and Sen. Cory Booker openly encourage public harassment of Trump officials and other Republicans.

Tea Party activists were extraordinarily law-abiding, but in classic leftist projection were smeared as vicious deplorables. Occasionally there’s a lone nut who acts out or a right-wing cluster that causes disruption, such as the one that recently shouted at Nancy Pelosi, but they’re rarely organized or funded and usually roundly condemned. Not so with the well-coordinated, bankrolled and celebrated mobs of the left, which are tasked with executing its long-standing chaos battle plan.

In the mid-1960s, radical-left professors Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven argued for accelerating the transition to socialism by overwhelming the social welfare system. Their contemporary, Saul Alinsky, then argued for destroying the democratic, capitalist order by weaponizing humiliation, mockery, questioning of motives, smears and outright aggression if necessary. Both Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton were student devotees of Mr. Alinsky.

Recall that as the Great Recession got underway, hundreds of union and other thugs descended on bankers’ homes to protest “greed.” Shortly thereafter, deep-pocketed and well-organized leftists sent bigger and more unruly crowds into the streets to protest “capitalism.” The Occupy Wall Street mobs committed violent crimes, defecated on police cars, trafficked illegal drugs and screamed anti-Semitic slurs. It was manufactured mayhem designed to advance the progressive agenda.

Perhaps they’re all using the original modern mob as a model. In 1968, tens of thousands of agitators poured into Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, sparking bloody riots. However, the spectacle of a Democratic mayor, Richard Daley, having to use police force against violent leftists convinced the rest of the country that savage pandemonium was unacceptable. Richard Nixon, the law-and-order candidate, won the presidency.

So it is with Mr. Trump, another zero-tolerance president for whom leftist mayhem is a political gift. The “vote #JobsNotMobs” message resonates in a center-right country that has little patience for incitement. Let’s hope that the great silent majority is preparing to put its foot down and save America once again from the wrathful clutches of the left’s ferocious mobs.

• Monica Crowley is a columnist for The Washington Times.

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