TheRiov wrote:
False equivalence.
Wanting to silence someone for espousing policies of genocide, ethnic cleansing or enslaving minorities is not the same as advocating these same policies.
Actually, yes it is. First of all, it's fundamental in this country that repugnant views can be publicly expressed. Second, the people claiming to oppose policies of "genocide, ethnic cleansing or enslaving minorities" are, themselves, a bunch of violent thugs. We've had various forms of rioting, violence, some of it fatal, by the left for several years now and especially since the election. Every time this happens, it's minimized or excused. The left has been
begging for something like an incident on Saturday so they can excuse their own violent thuggery.
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Put another way: Shooting someone for trying to shoot you, (self defense) is not the same as trying to shoot them without provocation (murder)
Except that we're not talking about actual harm here - we're talking about expressions of views.
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Furthermore persecuting people for their ethnicity is utterly dissimilar to persecuting people for their actions or the policies they espouse. You can jail people for their threatening to hang someone. You cannot do so because of the color of their skin.
You can throw someone in jail for making a specific threat against a specific person - you cannot jail them for a generalized expression that they think that certain types of people "ought to be hanged".
Furthermore, neither the left nor minorities have any self-referential authority to declare that what their opponents are saying is "threatening", whether that opponent is the KKK or someone of the flavor of John Kasich. If we are going to jail someone for threats, there is a police force to arrest that person, and a court system to determine guilt. When you instead take it upon yourself to show up with a club and attack them, then claim it was all their fault for saying what they said in the first place, you are equivalent to them - you're a thug. There is no false equivalence here, there's a real equivalence.
These sorts of white power nincompoops would not be getting the sort of attention and attendance they're getting if the left and the media weren't pushing such an obvious double standard, and "defense" of minorities that has devolved into outright racism by the standards they claim to adhere to.
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So stop trying to equate the two sides. They are not, nor ever will be, on the same moral ground.
Except that they are on the same moral ground.
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That said, I agree they should be allowed to march, as long as the are subject to the same scrutiny that other marchers are. An armed force of marchers is not a peaceful protest. It's a threat.
Aside from the fact that just having weapons isn't a threat (despite all the hand wringing over assault rifles at Tea Party rallies, no one was ever shot) so is an armed force of counter protestors.
If there's an armed group of protestors, there's police to deal with that. If you show up armed to counter protest, and violence breaks out, you're just as at fault.
I don't for a moment believe the left is actually disgusted by this. The left absolutely loves this. This sort of thing is just the distraction needed to get the media to activate it's double standard and completely forget about the violent leftist rioting we've had over and over for the last couple years and get politicians eagerly distancing themselves from neo-nazis and KKK members in a way that liberal politicians never seem to need to do from violent, bigoted thuggery like BLM.
A bunch of Republican politicians get shot, and the media shamelessly publishes reason-defying op-eds about how it was really their own fault. You will find no similar article in
The National Review. In fact, what you find is
a conservative author both excoriating and ridiculing the idiots that think it's a good idea to march around giving Nazi salutes. But this will get neither attention nor credit - and the next time the left commits some excess, you will find a dearth of similar self-policing.
Conservatives don't want these people around and wish they'd go away for much the same reason people don't like MRAs. MRAs and the alt right have some points about feminists and the left respectively, and bring up some legitimate issues about the problems men face and the anti-white hysteria of "civil rights" people respectively, but we do not need a bunch of reverse feminists, nor do we need an incoherent white nationalist movement that, as Williamson correctly points out, barely knows what it wants.* Rights and advocacy groups on the left have a long history of manufacturing new problems to solve and agitating people into opposing them so they can continue crusading; the right does not need MRAs or an alt right engaging in the same sort of crap.
The left loves this, because now it has fresh "racism" and "bigotry" to combat. Any future leftist violence will be excused now with "b..b..but Charlottesville!" Blame is not a zero-sum game. The appalling behavior of the right at Charlottesville in no way diminishes the blame of the left, and the left has no moral high ground to cry "false equivalence" from. Stop trying to take up the cause of rights for <insert group here>. It's not necessary and hasn't been for decades. All you're doing is manufacturing opposition to the hypocrisy so you can claim there's a need for it. It's political rent-seeking, and nothing else.
*Williamson's characterization of these people as wealthy and middle class is probably not accurate, but while Williamson is pretty good at calling out the nonsense, he isn't the best author at TNR if you're looking for any real depth of analysis.
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