Ace:
This is the post I delayed because I didn’t know how to write it.
I won’t write it. I’ll just link the stories.
I will just repeat my urgent warning and threat: The rules you make for us are the rules you also make for yourselves. If you’re comfortable with that, then I suggest you begin making serious preparations for the hell you are determined to unleash on this once-peaceful country.
Leftist “Anti-Fascist” Criminals Threaten to Attack and Drag Off Any Republicans in Portland’s Annual Rose Parade; City Cancels Event. I don’t know if they’ll also be mounting a serious investigation into who made these threats and then prosecuting them to the worst the law will allow. I suspect they’ll do neither.
Here’s Althouse on it.
The New York Times previously blamed Milo and the rightwing for making the leftwing riot and physically attack people in Berkeley. They now do so again in the case of threats against the safety of author Ann Coulter.
Ms. Coulter, the acid-penned conservative writer, canceled a planned appearance on Thursday after the political organizations that invited her rescinded their support over fears of violence. “It’s a sad day for free speech,” she said.
Howard Dean and Sarah Silverman are “acid-tongued.” (Not penned; they don’t write.) If rightwing criminals threatend to assault them over speech, would the New York Times be searching for what they have recently called “false equivalency” between the two competing sides– one side that says they have the right to speak without fear of assault, and another side that says if they speak they’ll be physically attacked?
Jim Ruttenberg specifically called for an end of this practice of seeking “balance” were there was none — in the New York Times itself. Of course, he meant that in the sense of not giving “balance” to conservative claims when leftist claims were so obviously the truth and All Conservatives Are Liars.
Notice they’ve gone back to seeking “balance” when the obvious malefactors are their fellow violent, fascist progressives.
But across the country, conservatives like her are eagerly throwing themselves into volatile situations like the one in Berkeley, emboldened by a backlash over what many Americans see as excessive political correctness, a president who has gleefully taken up their fight, and liberals they accuse of trying to censor any idea they disagree with.
The situation adds up to a striking reversal in the culture wars, with the left now often demanding that offensive content be excised from public discourse and those who promote it boycotted and shunned.
A striking reversal? “Now”?
The left has been doing this with increasing militancy since the 1980s.
How fucking old and out of touch do you have to be to call this “striking reversal” as happening “now”?
It has happened and happened and grown worse every year precisely because the alleged “responsible voices” of the left, who could be expected to chastise their misbehaving correligionists and tell them to stop, have in fact covered up for them every step of the way, thereby tacitly approving of them and encouraging them to go further.
Remember the “Climate of Hate,” where it was posited that somehow Sarah Palin had inspired a deranged man obsessed with the mind-control patterns of regular English grammar to shoot a Representative who didn’t take his theories about grammar seriously?
If you believe in a “Climate of Hate” encouraging violence from more excitable members of a political cult, then you must also believe that the left’s endless justification and excuse-making for violence — when not openly calling for it– creates a Climate of Hate on the left for visiting violence on the right.
You can’t deny that. It’s non-deniable.
What the Times and the left are doing, therefore, is simply supporting the Climate of Hate, and hoping to cause violence. So long as it’s directed against the right people.
The rest of the article (so far as I could read) is less egregious than that opening — claiming the victim provoked the attacker — but that rhetorical excuse for political violence is quite enough.
I’m pretty sure that if Rush Limbaugh defended, justified, and make excuses for right wing gang violence the Times would not say the left “provoked” them by “throwing themselves” into “volatile situations” (like state-funded college campuses).
The mayor of Berkeley — who liked a By Any Means Necessary Facebook posts (BAMN being one of the violent groups, as their name would imply), and who has ordered police to stand down and let BAMN and antifa attack citizens at random — says that both antifa and the right which baits people into assaulting them are mutually to blame, and Mother Jones, naturally enough, agrees.
Keep your eye open for when Mother Jones speaks in the passive voice — no human actor specified — and when it gets suddenly specific about a human actor involved in an outcome.