(Author’s note: It turns out that deadlines can be a bitch. I started this thing and expected to be able to write at least one piece a week that was actually about something without much trouble. I’m just barely going to make it this time. If I ever get to the point where I want to start charging people for reading my stuff, if enough people ever decide that my stuff has enough value to warrant a buck a month, then I’ll have to do better.)
Antifa have assaulted another journalist.
This isn’t the first time they’ve at least threatened to do so. Andy Ngo was beaten up by them pretty badly. Even if you think that Ngo is a right-winger or a fascist or is actually aiding and abetting such people, in my opinion that doesn’t justify it.
If you do think that it’s justified against somebody like Ngo, however, perhaps you don’t think that it’s justified against somebody like Michael Tracey, who is a hell of a lot less problematic than Ngo and was nevertheless subjected to robbery and intimidation.
Every goddamn time this comes up, people want to make excuses.
“Everybody they do this to is a fascist who is a direct threat to people’s safety!”
Yeah, that’s bullshit. Especially in the most recent case with Maranae Staab. And there are a number of cases where they’ve assaulted somebody whom they believed was part of the alt-right or something because they were in an area where an alt-right gathering was taking place and they looked like a white supremacist…except they weren’t. The Nazi-detectors of these so-called “anti-fascists” weren’t working and they hurt an innocent person each of those times. I hope they’re proud of themselves.
“Antifa has never killed anybody! How many people have white supremacists killed? False equivalence to say that they’re the bad guys!”
Here’s a question for people who subscribe to that kind of thinking. If neo-Nazis, the KKK, Proud Boys, or whoever it might be went around punching people, breaking their bones, knocking them to the ground, macing them…if they did all of that and more, but they always stopped just short of committing homicide, and went on to say “We never kill anybody, so what’s the big deal?”…would that fly for you? Would you say “Well, as long as you’re not killing anyone…”
No, you wouldn’t. You’d have a problem with them getting violent.
You would also be against their violence because it’s easier than people think to kill somebody by accident if you’re getting violent with them, which came very close to happening in 2018.
And finally, almost a year to the day since this post, antifa’s streak of managing not to kill anyone came to an end. Reinoehl claimed self-defense before he got shot dead as well by cops. Supporters of antifa want to believe his version of events, that he was only defending himself. Just like people who thought that protestors last year were out of control want to believe that Kyle Rittenhouse shot people in self-defense.
Whatever, either way antifa now has a body count. Right now it stands at one, and you can ask “What about the white supremacist body count that’s a lot higher?” Fine, but 1 > 0, and “We’ve only killed one person, so stop picking on us and acting like we’re some kind of threat!” isn’t the sort of statement that casts you in a very good light.
“They’re against fascism and the Proud Boys are for fascism! Obviously, as far as their goals are concerned, they’re the good guys!”
Are they? Are they really?
People argue over what the exact definition of fascism is, but I always considered it to be a dictatorship based on how I heard it described during my 44 years on this planet.
You have a lot less freedom under fascism than you do under any other system of government. There are some things you can’t say without risk to yourself. There are some things you can’t do without risk to yourself. A fascist government demands that all of its citizens behave in the way it wants them to behave, and punishes them mercilessly when they don’t.
Antifa punishes people mercilessly for acting the wrong way or saying the wrong thing. It’s not only limited to people who think Hitler had the right idea and go around committing violent hate crimes whom they punish. It is also: people whom they consider transphobic, people whom they consider racist, journalists who have covered them in a less-than-glowing manner and/or who have the audacity to film them (which, as Taibbi correctly pointed out, is the journalist doing her job and in no way endangering anybody who already takes precautions against being identified on film by covering their face), and “collaborators.” I’ve been told by supporters of antifa that my objections to them attacking people who don’t attack them first make me a “collaborator”.
So among all of their targets who fall short of being actual fascists, I’m on that list for not being a fan. Hopefully that isn’t going to bias me too much here, but if it does, I think I have a pretty good excuse when I’m writing about people who think that I deserve to be beaten up.
These are not people who believe in the First Amendment. Let’s talk about the First Amendment a bit. Usually, other countries do things bettter than America, or pretty much the same as America. For example: other countries don’t have for-profit healthcare systems the way America does. That’s good for the people in those countries. However, there is one thing I believe America did absolutely right while the other countries have done absolutely wrong: freedom of speech.
I don’t believe in hate speech laws. Glenn Greenwald wrote an excellent piece about how hate speech laws suppress left-wing viewpoints when he was still at The Intercept. When the government decides which speech is hateful and must be outlawed, you get things like Glenn describes in that piece, such as people actually being arrested and put on trial for encouraging boycotts of Israel. “That’s anti-Semitic!” says the government. (It isn’t.)
Under American law, you can say almost anything. There are exceptions, yes. The American government has also been known to get creative when it wants to punish somebody for speech it doesn’t like; it won’t charge them with anything, since that would be unconstitutional, but they have ways. Nevertheless, even taking that into account, America is better when it comes to free speech than Canada, or Britain, or France, or Germany, etc.
These days there are people who want more censorship, even those who believe that there should never have been a First Amendment in the first place. It’s a depressingly high number, and among that number are so-called “anti-fascists.” Those among antifa who oppose nearly unrestricted freedom of speech have decided that they have a duty to do what the government won’t: they have a duty to assault people who say the wrong things, to make those people too scared to ever say those things again. (“Make Nazis afraid again” is something they’ve often said in the past.)
As Noam Chomsky once correctly said, Goebbels was only in favor of speech that he liked, and Goebbels didn’t allow speech he didn’t like. That’s Joseph Goebbels, a fascist. Call this melodramatic if you want, but I say that if you likewise demand control over everybody’s speech and would outlaw wrongthink if you had your way, that makes you fascistic.
So no, the different goals of the two sides do not make this a battle between good and evil. They make it a battle between people who both want to control all the other people. It is, as the sub-header says, fascism vs. fascism.
Neither group has any right to control the rest of us.
Neither group has any right to threaten us because we don’t fit their idea of how people ought to be.
For sure neither group has any right to actually harm us physically or to dox us.
Let me close by explaining why I hate antifa so much, why I hated them a lot even before I was called a collaborator who deserved the same treatment as all collaborators. I already told this story on Twitter, but I’ll tell it again here.
If you had good parents, if you had parents that raised you right, then they would’ve told you that hitting people was wrong. That’s what my parents told me when I was little. And that’s what most people used to believe, not just because they happened to have been raised right, but because society was telling them the same thing. Society at large believed that the only time it was acceptable to actually start beating somebody up was in self-defense, or in defense of others.
There was never any bullshit about “It IS self-defense to beat up a fascist, because they threw the first punch just by being a fascist!” No, existing and believing something you don’t like is not the same as initiating violence. Saying things is not initiating violence, unless you are saying something like “I want you to go and injure or kill people.”
I’m 44 years old, as I said. George Carlin once said that he wasn’t an “old fart”, he was an “old fuck.” He said it when he was significantly older than me but I’ve made my peace with being over the hill, so, call me an “old fuck” too.
I’m an old fuck who remembers how things were and doesn’t like how things are going. A lot of old fucks like me remember fondly the good old days that weren’t so good. Segregation was bad, obviously. It’s a good thing that we’ve moved away from that.
Nah, what I’m angry about is how much more often people these days consider it not only acceptable, but vital, to respond to speech with physical attacks. And that there are people on the left who feel that way.
Early on when Trump was running, there were some protestors at his rallies. The Trumpers at those rallies didn’t care for them. And because of that, a number of them got beaten up, with Trump’s blessing.
I didn’t like that when I read about it. But I thought to myself “Those are all right-wingers. They believe the opposite of what I do as a leftist, so of course they think it’s fine to hurt people who aren’t posing any threat to them, who are only expressing an opinion that they hate. The left never does this shit.”
As far as I knew up to that point, nobody on the left HAD done that shit. If it happened, it either went unreported or I missed the coverage of it.
The first time I ever heard of people with leftist beliefs starting a brawl with white supremacists, I was appalled.
What the hell happened to the left I was proud to be part of? What happened to the left that believed in doing the right thing, that believed in staying on the moral high ground even if that meant bad people would get away with saying bad things?
What happened to the left that, during the years after 9/11 when the wounds were still fresh and everybody was itching to make the terrorists pay, opposed the torture of people at Gitmo because their position was “Torture, under ANY circumstances, is wrong. You should never do it, not even if there’s some kind of ticking time bomb scenario with millions of lives at risk”?
This version of the left that I remember so fondly didn’t just object to torturing innocent detainees who were imprisoned wrongly, they also opposed the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was actually guilty of planning the 9/11 attacks.
Let me repeat that for emphasis: we, on the left, were pretty much unanimously opposed to waterboarding a man who was guilty of killing 3000 innocent people, because we believed that waterboarding was never okay. Period.
Today we have people on the left who believe that some people, people who have done nothing anywhere near as bad as what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did, have to be brutalized. It’s not actually that far removed from torture when you think about it: they want to cause everybody on their shitlist pain, over and over, until they start acting differently. Just like a torturer causes a prisoner pain, over and over, until the prisoner does what the torturer wants.
I can’t be proud of being part of a left like that, a left that’s sunk to the level of what I thought only the right was, a left that’s just as quick to resort to violence as those Trumpers at the Trump rallies.
Antifa is ruining the left, MY left that I’ve been emotionally invested in for almost half my life, the left that I would always tell people was better than the right.
Not only are they being violent and putting all kinds of people at risk for no good reason, they’re against free speech as well. The days of people on the left saying “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”? Those days are gone. Now it’s more like “I don’t agree with what you say, and I will make you stop saying it by any means necessary.”
That’s why I hate antifa. That’s why I hate them so much that even though I have argued in the past that American prisons are too hellish for anybody to deserve being in, I actually find myself wishing that these so-called “anti-fascists” (which I keep calling them because they’re not actually anti-fascist at all, as explained above) do get arrested and thrown in prison. It’s a contradiction and I probably shouldn’t want it, but I really do hate them THAT much. And I don’t want to live in a world where somebody can just assault somebody else, beat them to a pulp, and get away with it.