Leftists WANT Violence. Don’t Play Into Their Hands.

Two events prompt this post.  One is the report of a plot against Antifa and a major news organization and perhaps against a prominent Democrat politician as well.  The other is the Climate Strike people blocking traffic and creating gridlock in Washington D. C.

(By the way, Greg Gutfeld went yard on them yesterday at the opening of The Five.  And isn’t creating gridlock pollution an odd way of combating pollution?)

Yes, these two events seem very unrelated.  But what they have in common is the Hard Left’s desire for violence, namely a violent reaction to their provocations.  Provoking and/or making up violent reactions is one of the oldest Leftist tricks in the book. I saw it myself during my college days. We saw it in Charlottesville where Antifa perpetrated and provoked violence.  But, thanks to a compliant fake news media and the cowardly fool who drove his car into a crowd, all we hear about in hindsight is the violence from the right at Charlottesville.

Considering the provocations from the Left, I find it remarkable that there have been so fewinstances of violence from the Right.  The contrast with Antifa and Black Lives Matter is stark.  But when there is one, such as the apparent plot mentioned above, it plays into the Left’s narrative.  Such violence and attempts at violence are not only wrong; they are foolish.

Now I am not a pacifist.  There are times when violence in defense of oneself and one’s rights is justified.  See the American Revolution.  But now is not such a time. 

So what does blocking traffic have to do with this?  At first glance, about all blocking traffic accomplishes is getting attention.  But what awful attention!  My guess is that this is why Black Lives Matter stopped blocking traffic.  That tactic turned the majority of this country against them and strongly and rightly so.

But surely Leftists know how much traffic roadblocks antagonize people.  And that is intended. The hard Left hopes someone will have had enough and violently react with their pick-up, preferably with a Trump sticker.  The hard Left wants a violent reaction; they want to become “victims” for propaganda purposes.  Yes, most of those blocking traffic do not want to be run over.  Such are foolish fodder for the Left’s purposes.

Again, the Left wants violence and often tries to provoke a violent reaction to their outrages.  So again I strongly advise – do not play into their hands.  The Left and their predations must be opposed, but they must be opposed non-violently.  Otherwise, the Left wins.

Those right-of-center have a remarkable record of non-violence in the U. S.  But it is probably good for all of us to be reminded to stick to non-violent opposition.

Charlottesville Revisited II: Dilbert Debunks a Hoax

This week, I did my humble part to debunk the hoax of Trump loving those fine Nazis just revived by Lying Joe Biden. But now Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has done better with a doggedly logical and detailed takedown of the Charlottesville Hoax.  At the same time he notes that hoaxes can be hard to kill due to the commitment of useful idiots (not his term – he is more polite than I) to believe them.

I doubt any further summary on my part can do his work justice, so get thee hence and read it for yourself.

Charlottesville Revisited

Joe Biden in beginning his campaign for President saw fit to smear President Donald Trump’s statement in the aftermath of Charlottesville. He is not the first to deceive about Charlottesville and Trump’s statement for political purposes, and he won’t be the last.  So it’s time to revisit Charlottesville.

First, Trump did not call white nationalists and the like “fine people.”  He did not, as Biden said, assign “a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.”  Here is what Trump said, in context:

You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. ... I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name. ... So you know what, it's fine. You're changing history. You're changing culture. And you had people — and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the White nationalists, because they should be condemned totally — but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and White nationalists. Okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people. But you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group.

And Trump’s statement was and is accurate.  You had people who, like me frankly, are concerned about taking down history for current political motivations.  And on the other side you had peaceful people who, also like me, oppose extremist racist ideologies. (Please see my note below for more.)

At the same time, there were also violent extremists on both sides.  But all we hear about are the Neo-Nazis and the like and the man who ran down protesters and killed a woman. And we should be reminded of them.  But we rarely are reminded of the role violent Leftist groups, particularly Antifa, played that day.  But a great deal of violence came from Antifa and therefore some of the violence from the other side was in self-defense. (Obviously, the car attack was not and should be condemned without equivocation.)

Don’t take my word for it.  Here are testimonies of eyewitnesses from various sides of Charlottesville, such as this:

University of Virginia student Isabella Ciambotti: "I was on Market Street around 11:30 a.m. when a counter-protester ripped a newspaper stand off the sidewalk and threw it at alt-right protesters. I saw another man from the white supremacist crowd being chased and beaten. People were hitting him with their signs. A much older man, also with the alt-right group, got pushed to the ground in the commotion. Someone raised a stick over his head and beat the man with it, and that's when I screamed and ran over with several other strangers to help him to his feet."

Such is par for the course for Antifa, along with using excrement as a weapon.  But we don’t hear much about that (By the way, although I remember numerous reports of Antifa violence in Charlottesville, search engines are not much help digging up those reports.  Funny that . . . in an Orwellian way.) – a double standard which enables more hate and violence as noted shortly after Charlottesville.  Distorting history has consequences.

Yet distorting history, double standards and outright lies is how Biden and other Democrats roll.  I fear for the truth and for us if they succeed.

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NOTE: Now one may ask how the heck can “fine people” find themselves on the same side as Neo-Nazis (and Antifa for that matter).  I will tell you how from personal experience.

Back during my college days, I joined a rally against the Greensboro shooting verdict in 1980 (or 1981, my memory of the time is fuzzy.). I saw the not guilty verdict as unjust.  But during the rally, I saw that it was really more a platform to smear Reagan and shout loony Leftist ideas than to protest the verdict. Eventually I had enough and walked away.

Also in my college days, I participated in Marches for Life. I noticed some, well, interesting people there.  I was intrigued by the leaflets in the Ticked Mary genre I was handed. But the scattered odd balls were more amusing then obnoxious, so I marched on.

One can certainly question the judgement of those who were not White Nationalists or the like but were there in Charlottesville to protest taking down historic statues.  But sometimes when you get involved in honorable causes, you find yourself alongside dishonorable people.

Post-Charlottesville, The Double Standard Continues

After the awful events in Charlottesville, there has been an odd, but familiar phenomenon.  There are the rightful denunciations of the Nazis, KKK, etc.  But if someone even asks the denouncers if they have ever also denounced Antifa and Black Lives Matters, two groups who also have demonstrated racism and political violence, then even that question gets denounced.  Those who denounce both the Nazi types and Antifa and BLM, and who denounce double standards also get very similar treatment.  I’ve seen this sorry exercise even on the Facebook group page of the Anglican Church of North America, which is shameful.

This is an in-your-face example of a big double standard that has poisoned politics and the study of history since World War 2.  While the atrocities of the “Right”* are emphasized, the atrocities of the Left are downplayed or ignored, even if those atrocities are of a much greater scale.  The History Channel once was dubbed the Hitler Channel because of the frequency of its emphasis on Nazism and its atrocities. And certainly we should “never forget.”  But how often does one see documentaries of the atrocities under Lenin and Stalin, who killed millions more than Hitler?

Of course, there is much more to the study of history than the History Channel – thank God – but the phenomenon can be found across academia as well.  And when someone tries to provide some balance and focus on Communist evil, they often get grief for it.  The controversy that surrounded the publication of the Black Book of Communism is one example.

I detest this double standard, which only enables the Leftist New Totalitarians, who are a much greater danger than the KKK, neo-Nazis, and other loons.  If someone has been silent for over a year as Antifa has violently attacked peaceful demonstrators, Trump supporters, free speech, even those who simply wanted to hear a speaker, then his/her display of indignation over white supremacist violence is worth very little to me.

And, yes I will say it, President Trump was right to denounce violence from both sides.  And he was courageous to do so in the face of those who hate truth-telling about the Left.

By the way, these kind of double standards just feed hate.  Denouncing rightist hate while being silent about or even praising Leftist hate throws gasoline on hate.  The double standards must stop.  The political violence from both sides must be denounced and stopped.

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* I use “right” very loosely here.  Placing, say, Nazis on the right is highly questionable as they are a form of totalitarianism not very different from Communism.