Political Violence is Not Okay

[EasyAce]

Not even when it’s aimed at bigots and cretins.
By Ben Shapiro
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450722/stop-normalizing-political-violence-use-fighting-words-instead

America can survive crappy ideas.

America can survive nasty statues.

America can’t survive normalization of political violence.

That should be the takeaway over the last two weeks. The latest round of racial and political recriminations
began with a horrifying alt-right white-supremacist torchlight rally around the base of a statue of Robert E.
Lee in Virginia, developed into a street brawl between white supremacists and antifa thugs, and culminated
in one of the white supremacists ramming his car into a crowd of innocent counter-protesters. President
Trump exacerbated tensions by failing to clearly condemn the white supremacists, then condemned them,
then seemed to un-condemn some of them by stating that there were some “very fine people” marching
with them.

And then it escalated. Over the past two weeks, we’ve seen antifa attacking police officers in Boston and
Dallas, vandals breaking a Christopher Columbus statue and tearing down Confederate monuments, and
one man attempting to bomb a Confederate statue in Houston.

Meanwhile, members of the mainstream Left have excused violence in the name of “anti-fascism.” Chris
Cuomo of CNN, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, Hillary Clinton spokesperson Brian Fallon — all of them
compared antifa thugs in Charlottesville to World War II Allied soldiers invading beaches at Normandy. In
the pages of the Washington Post, historian Mark Bray of Dartmouth University gushed over Antifa’s
“willingness to physically defend themselves and others from white supremacist violence” Professor N. D.
B. Connolly of Johns Hopkins University called for Americans to “start throwing rocks” at white supremacists.

So, what’s scarier: a thousand pasty and pathetic would-be tough guys marching around in the middle
of the night shouting, “Jews will not replace us,” then weeping openly when arrest warrants are issued
for violence, or the mainstream Left embracing violence in the streets? Some college-age dweeb goose-
stepping around with a flag created 50 years before his birth, or somebody punching that guy, to the
cheers of the media? . . .

. . . if the Left winks at violence, how long until the Right responds in kind?

In 1964, Malcolm X stated that it was incumbent on black victims of racism to use the ballot. The choice,
he stated, was “either a ballot or a bullet.” We’re now 50 years beyond the Civil Rights Act of that year.
Ballots have proved effective means of change in a constitutional republic; never have the number of
Nazis and white supremacists in America been so small. They will continue to shrink quietly into the
hellish ether whence they came. But not if they’re brought back from the brink of death into vicious life
by violent opposition that destroys the social compact in search of monsters to slay.