This infuriates me. Here, on the LA Times site, is footage of Donald Trump supporters being beaten up in San Jose outside the rally. In America. Peaceful supporters of a presidential candidate cannot go to hear him speak without mobs attacking them.

Here are a few tweets from a CNN reporter on the scene to give you a sense of what’s happening there:

Protesters cornering Trump supporters as they leave. This woman taunted them. They cornered her & threw eggs at her pic.twitter.com/MiDGDBkKIo

— Sara Murray (@SaraMurray) June 3, 2016

Protesters also cornered a couple who were NOT antagonizing them. They closed in on the couple, threw water at them and spit in their faces.

— Sara Murray (@SaraMurray) June 3, 2016

Protesters are spilling into the street and blocking traffic. One is burning an American flag. Others chanting “whose streets?!”

— Sara Murray (@SaraMurray) June 3, 2016

Trump supporter gets sucker punched. He later identified the man he believes punched him & police arrested the man https://t.co/NiL7GiwJ9R

— Sara Murray (@SaraMurray) June 3, 2016

Look at this, from Buzzfeed’s correspondent on the scene:

Cops standing by as a trump supporter is chased by protesters pic.twitter.com/dAcImJBwok

— john r stanton (@dcbigjohn) June 3, 2016

Mob burns American flag:

Protests have moved out onto San Carlos st pic.twitter.com/0JmUTmZP9c

— john r stanton (@dcbigjohn) June 3, 2016

Cops not protecting an American citizen being chased by a mob for attending a rally for a presidential candidate:

More police standing by as a trump supporter is chased pic.twitter.com/d7nQca1kWH

— john r stanton (@dcbigjohn) June 3, 2016

Protesters are throwing rocks at the cops, even as their numbers dwindle

— john r stanton (@dcbigjohn) June 3, 2016

Yeah, that’s just what we need: to let people who throw rocks at cops to rule the streets.

Whose country is this, anyway?

That deranged Latino mob in San Jose just convinced a hell of a lot of people to buy tickets to the Trump train.

UPDATE: Lead story in today’s New York Times: “Trump Could Threaten US Rule Of Law, Scholars Say” This, after yet another mob runs wild outside a Trump rally, beating up his peaceful supporters.

UPDATE.2: A good comment from Conor Friedersdorf, reminding readers how thuggish Trump is, but also criticizing the rioters and the hateful, intolerant Bay Area culture that produced them. Excerpt:

Thursday’s violence erupted in a left-leaning part of the country that likes to think of itself as unusually tolerant. And yet, would its residents feel safe wearing a Trump 2016 t-shirt around San Francisco or Oakland or San Jose? People in the Bay Area regularly—and often rightly—urge other parts of the country that are intolerant toward different people in different ways to engage in introspection and improve their community.

How many will do anything to respond to the fact that yesterday, at a political rally in their community, some of their neighbors got beat up merely for attending?

Within his post, Conor quotes the libertarian journalist Jesse Walker about these anti-Trump rioters:

You know who isn’t a fascist? Most of the people who go hear him speak.

I’ve covered several of these rallies. Saw some ugliness. But the offline crowds aren’t the same as the online Trump troll mob. Which is to say: I encountered some genuine Nazis, but mostly I met the sort of people who dug Perot 24 years ago… and have now convinced themselves Trump is a worthy vessel for their grievances. Could any of them become brownshirts?

Sure.

People like them have before.

Right now they haven’t. Aiming at them is just acting out. You’re making the closest, weakest scapegoats your target. (And feeding their fears.) And with what endgame? You want, what, people to be too physically scared to go to a Trump rally? OK, they’ll just go to the polls then.

People who think that most voters will see these riots and reason that while the riots are terrible, we have to remember that Trump is worse — they’re deluded. Even if it is true, most people, left and right, don’t vote on the basis of reason. They vote on emotion. They vote on what’s in their gut. These Social Justice Warriors are making lots of people feel in their gut that Donald Trump is the only thing that stands between them and those mobs, and that if Hillary Clinton wins, mobs like that will have their champion in the White House.

Don’t come back to me and say, “It’s ridiculous that anybody would think such a thing.” Maybe it is. But it’s going to happen. A lot of people legitimately criticized the Republican Party and its presidential candidates for not taking Trump seriously enough early on, when they could have stopped him. Now the Democrats are not taking the effect of these anti-Trump rioters seriously enough. If they think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, then the most important thing for them to do is to do whatever they can to stop street mobs from vindicating Trump’s critique.

UPDATE.3: More videos of yesterday’s violence at Hot Air, along with this quote from the Washington Post‘s account:

Many liberals, meanwhile, including the Democratic mayor of San Jose, suggested that Trump angry and divisive rhetoric made him at least partly responsible for the violence at his events.

“At some point Donald Trump needs to take responsibility for the irresponsible behavior of his campaign,” Mayor Sam Liccardo told the Associated Press, praising the city’s  police while adding that “we’re all still holding our breath to see the outcome of this dangerous and explosive situation.”

A mob runs wild in his streets, beating up some of his own constituents who were peacefully assembling to hear a presidential candidate, and the police under his authority let it happen — but hey, it’s all Donald Trump’s fault.

I’ll say it again: Trump is a bad man. And the Left is doing its part to put him in the White House by vindicating his critique. The media may think it can control this by downplaying those videos of street violence, but there were many people there recording what actually happened and distributing those scenes on social media. Outside the leftist bubble, those videos are hand grenades.