A harrowing follow-up to John’s post last night about the near-invasion of Carlson’s home by deranged “anti-fascists.”
Because if there’s anything that signals deep moral objection to fascism, it’s kicking in a political enemy’s door to terrorize his family.
Fingers crossed, but even CNN might be willing to use the M-word to describe this. Assuming they cover it.
“I called my wife,” Carlson told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “She had been in the kitchen alone getting ready to go to dinner and she heard pounding on the front door and screaming. … Someone started throwing himself against the front door and actually cracked the front door.”
His wife, thinking it was a home invasion, locked herself in the pantry and called 911, Carlson said. The couple have four children, but none were home at the time…
“It wasn’t a protest. It was a threat,” said Carlson, who is often denounced by critics, particularly liberal ones, for his rhetoric about immigrants and minorities on his Fox News show. “They weren’t protesting anything specific that I had said. They weren’t asking me to change anything. They weren’t protesting a policy or advocating for legislation. … They were threatening me and my family and telling me to leave my own neighborhood in the city that I grew up in.”
“I think I should fight back,” he said later, “and I plan to.” Presumably that’ll begin at 8 p.m. on Fox, with a “name ’em and shame ’em” taste of their own medicine for the “Smash Racism D.C.” degenerates that nearly broke into his home. They posted his address and the home addresses of his brother and Daily Caller co-founder Neil Patel on their Twitter account last night, per WaPo. (The account has since been suspended.) What’s striking about this incident is that normally Antifa intimidation tactics are presented, however superficially, as “demonstrations.” This same outfit ran Ted Cruz and his wife out of a Washington restaurant during the Kavanaugh wars but plenty of people, including CNN anchors, objected to calling that “mob behavior.” Supposedly they were just petitioning their representatives for redress of their grievances, however … impolitely. Even Antifa droogs’ sporadic public brawls with white-nationalist goons are often framed as mere “protests” that spilled over into violence because the alt-righters, not the lefties, wanted to get it on. It’s self-defense, man.
Not this time. They made it clear that they were there to terrorize Carlson’s family. One of the “protesters” allegedly threatened to bring a pipe bomb to the home; another said the Carlsons should “leave town.” According to WaPo, a Facebook item posted by Smash Racism D.C. read “Fascists are vulnerable. Confront them at their homes!” No one to whom I pay attention on Twitter has defended the mob this morning — on the contrary — but evidently the apologists are out there. The line between self-defense and “preemptive self-defense,” I guess we’ll call it, gets blurrier every day. Gotta get those fascists before they get you. Even if it means putting a mother of four in fear for her life.