Labelers & Enablers

A rose, by another other name, would smell as sweet, at least according to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. One assumes if you called a skunk Rosie, it would smell just as bad. There is, among humans, an unnatural tendency to place a label on something, then identify similar characteristics in others in order to apply that label to them. It’s an odious tendency, and it should never be tolerated.  Similarly there is a tendency among people who see two sides in conflict to identify with and enable one side over the other.  Neither of these traits is good for Democracy.

This past weekend a group of hateful idiots marched in Charlottesville. They were mostly undereducated, nonconforming, spewers of hate.  They’ve been told lies by their parents, friends, and relatives for years.  It isn’t your lack of education or your hateful views that make you unsuccessful, it’s ___________.  And they fill in the blank with blacks and Jews.  Most don’t really believe there is a “pure” race somewhere, but they think it makes them sound smart.  Most do believe that if you worship God differently than they do, or you have a skin tone a bit darker than theirs, then you’re not any good, because as we all know, Jesus preached…oh yeah, love thy neighbor.  Hmm…. They adopt the symbols of Nazis, and they label themselves the Alt-right.   They adopt the trappings of an ideology that killed more than six million sounds between 1939 and 1945, and they express its hateful beliefs proudly and in public.  This disgusts me.

And they are privileged to do it. They have every right to spout this ridiculous hate. The Supreme Court has consistently said that suppression of speech on the basis of viewpoint is contrary to the Constitution. The court has said that to preserve free speech for all, we must preserve it even for people we find awful (like the Westboro Baptists).   The bottom line is these people were citizens, engaged in a lawful assembly, doing what the Constitution says they can do. We can hate the ideology, but we cannot suppress its speech. Instead, we defeat hateful ideology with better ideology. That has always been the American way.

There was another group of hateful useless idiots present in Charlottesville. The ANTIFA group, long recognized as a Soros-funded anarchist organization, was there in force.  It is a group that exists solely to incite violence in the supposed name of preventing fascism. Yet, anyone who understands fascism understands that fascism is exactly what they advocate. Images of flyers distributed at the march indicate that they believe strongly in suppressing ideas they disagree with. That is most certainly not the American way.

But let’s make the point that ANTIFA and its clowns enjoyed the same freedom of expression, and were entitled to the same level of protection from violence as the Nazi clowns. You would have a protest, and a counter-protest, and it could all come off quite nonviolently if those who were supposed to preserve order kept them apart.

The city had made plans. They had the National Guard on call. They had a strong police presence. They had enough officers to keep the groups separated. They had a duty to preserve order and protect the protesters from each other.

And they did not.

That is shameful, and it was a political, not a police decision. Because the mayor decided that it was politically expedient to be on the side of the left-wing fanatics more than it was to be on the side of the people of Charlottesville, and so, he refused to stop the melee that resulted, and lives were lost as a result.  He should be criminally charged.

Now, a fight requires, at a minimum, two people. You can’t beat yourself up physically (assuming you are 100% crazy). You have to have someone else to have a fight.

The Alt-Right Nazis planned and organized the protest, but the left wing fanatics planned and organized the violence. Any time you wear body armor as well as bring clubs and ball bats to a protest, you’re not there to protest, you’re there to hurt people. This was ANTIFA.

This is not to say that the Nazi element shrank from the combat, or didn’t have a means to engage in violence too. They did. But their protest was declared unlawful and according to accounts of protesters, they were forced to run the gauntlet out of the park through swarms of ANTIFA protesters.  In other words, the cops lured them into the park with a promise of protection, then withdrew it and let the violence happen.

It takes two to tango.  But when someone attacks you, it is not wrong to defend yourself.  Please understand, this is not meant to be a defense of the Nazi group or its ideology, but rather, an indictment of the way in which the event was handled and has been reported by the media.  There were two sides there.  Both sides fought.  Both sides are to blame.

But the idea that it takes two to tango seems to be lost on the media.

In any school in America today if little Joey and little Johnny get into a fight, and they both throw punches, then both go to detention, or get suspended. No one bothers to try to decide who was right and who was wrong. Instead, we say “it takes two to fight” and we punish both. To the guy who threw the first punch, it seems fair. To the guy who took the first punch, not so much. But that’s the way it works because you can’t condone some violence without encouraging more of it. Much like you can’t suppress some speech without encouraging more suppression of speech. There’s a yin-yang kind of thing that applies.

So our president, when asked, adopts the schoolyard approach and condemns the violence on both sides of the melee.  This is because there was hate on both sides. He refused to blame only one side for the violence. And that was the right thing to do. But the media firestorm over the event simply couldn’t leave it alone. They wanted him to denounce the Nazi element, because it’s “alt-right” and Mr. Bannon has been referred to by many as “alt-right.”   So his refusal to denounce the Nazi element specifically amounts to… what? Ah, yes, in today’s mainstream media, it amounts to an endorsement of Nazis.

Then we have the people who believe it’s necessary to call the car-attack by one man an incident of “domestic terrorism.” Would the young ANTIFA woman who was killed be any more dead if it was labeled that way? Would she be any less dead if they called it second-degree murder? Why does the label matter, except for the need to link it to a political agenda.

The rules are off. The media never blamed Bernie Sanders for Steve Scalise’s shooting, but they now blame Trump for the car attack in Virginia because this guy may have supported Trump (note: there is no evidence of this that has been presented).

The media coup attempt against the President continues. If the media continues this war unrelenting, the violence will only grow. They will continue to stoke the fires of hate and radicalism, and the burning down of our country will be the end result.

Someone needs to stop and take a step back. What’s going on here is wrong, and every thinking person knows it.