Writes Christopher Manion:

In a classic version of “Down is Up,” candidate Ted Cruz refuses to condemn terrorist Bill Ayers, et al, for shutting down Donald Trump’s Chicago rally.

Some background is in order.

In 1968, fresh out of college, I was working as a”floor officer” of a huge bank in Chicago. My tasks included authorizing countless checks that were brought to the bank by out-of-towners who had come to Chicago to demonstrate at the Democrat National Convention there.

Nobody had credit cards or ATMs in those days, so personal checks were the only option. Twenty-somethings, most of them male, were directed to me to authorize and initial their checks – or not. (most of them were for twenty to fifty dollars – a lot of money in those days).

Most of these guys were reasonably intelligent, antiwar, and polite–at least until they walked out the door and set up camp on the Grant Park lawn. Based on my conversations with them, I OK’d about half the checks brought to me over those two weeks or so (I later learned that I was the only floor officer not to have authorized at least one bad check).

Once the convention started, all Hell broke loose.

That will happen again this summer– Not only in Cleveland but across the country, and all summer long. This year, the possession arrow points to the demonstrators, and they know it. The “Ferguson Effect,” amplified by cases in Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville, Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere, will motivate  “law enforcement” to step back and allow the planned chaos to proceed as advertised.

It might well continue through election day. In Mexico and Latin America, one of the most effective means of voter suppression is to threaten to kill randomly anyone standing in line to vote. Curiously, millions of immigrants from that region can still vote in the countries they still call home, even if they have become American citizens. And they were amply represented in the organized street gang that shut down the Trump rally last night.

The upshot? Trump’s voters were already energized before Chicago. and are only more so now. But the Left, and its potential voter base, is not yet energized. So violence and the threat of violence is called for, in order to mobilize the masses and raise their revolutionary consciousness, by whatever means.

As Lenin explains, ethics, morality, and legality are all negotiable, but the victory of the revolution is not. Of course, this is the foundational principle of the neocons as well, and they are acting along those same lines in their sphere of influence.

In the dialectic, the final arbiter of the good – call it morality, or ethics, or law — is power. And they will use it.