DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND LIBERAL FASCISM. Dartmouth prof defends Antifa: It’s just self-defense against Nazis.
Responding to the appearance of Dartmouth’s Mark Bray, the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook on NBC’s Meet the Press, Allahpundit writes:
The other thing Bray has in common with his enemies is needing the public to believe that the threat from the other side is greater than it is. To hear him tell it, the neo-Nazi menace has reached such proportions in America that a national left-wing gang willing to fight it in the streets is urgently needed. In reality, neo-Nazi groups have existed for decades and have enjoyed moments of high visibility — the march through Skokie, the rise of the American Nazi Party under George Lincoln Rockwell in the 60s, and so on. They faded away without help from Antifa. As Richard Cohen notes, Antifa’s existence is actually manna for alt-right groups insofar as it gives them more of a reason to exist and gives mainstream right-wingers a reason to sympathize with them, however grudgingly. If the left is going to try to intimidate the right with paramilitary rabble, turnabout is fair play. That’s the “spiral” Cohen talks about. Heightening the contradictions is good for radicals on both sides, which is why there’ll be more Charlottesvilles.
Read the whole thing, which dovetails well with this brief Facebook post by Brendan O’Neil of Spiked on Wednesday:
“You are a white man. Check your privilege. Stay in your lane. You will never understand black people’s lives or experiences. You’re all about whiteness, that’s how you’re conditioned.” — SJWs
“I am a white man. What a privilege. I’m going to stay in my lane. I will never understand black people. I’m all about whiteness, it’s how I’m conditioned.” — White Nationalists
Bray actually played the “privilege” card on his debating opponent on Meet the Press, telling Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center*:
BRAY: Well, there’s a big difference between confronting fascism and confronting other forms of violence. We can see that during the ’30s and ’40s there was no public opinion to be leveraged by nonviolent resistance. If you get fascists to be powerful enough in government, they’re simply not going to listen to the kind of public opinion that nonviolence can generate. That’s the argument for resistance to Nazis. The other point that I’ll make is a lot of people don’t have the choice whether they can defend themselves or not. We’ve seen that even before this sort of, what you called it spiral of violence, started there were attacks on mosques, there were attacks on synagogues. A lot of people are under attack and sometimes they need to be able to defend themselves. It’s a privileged position to be able to say that you never have to defend yourself from these kinds of monsters.
COHEN: You know, it’s not an issue of defending yourself. It’s an issue of trying to silence other people. No one is saying that, you know, if you’re slugged in the face that you have to sit there and take it. The question here is when white nationalists want to walk down the street, should people stop them. And that’s a very different issue. It’s a very peculiar notion of self-defense to say you can censor people.
But it’s Google, Firefox, Twitter, and CNN approved.
Twitchy asks a great question about the segment: “Does Bray endorse throwing bottles of urine at cops as self-defense, because that’s what really happened in Boston as no white supremacists even showed up.”
And as veteran blogger AG Conservative notes in a thread on Twitter, “Antifa openly justifies violence against what they consider hate groups and people who help them, even in response to just speech. The problem is that their definition expands constantly and can be used to justify violence against almost anyone who disagrees. Antifa often clashes with police (as in Boston) and a chant they use constantly is ‘Cops and Klan go hand in hand.’ So while the media allows antifa to act like they are just opposing Nazis, suddenly that includes cops & justifies violence against them. Now where does that lead? Well the other night a man named Everett Glenn Miller ambushed a murdered two Kissimmee police officers. What hasn’t been reported much? Miller used the same logic that Antifa does to justify his murders,” according to a reporter with the Orlando CBS affiliate WKMG-TV:
The agency has not disclosed why the former Marine was involuntarily committed to a mental health facility under Florida’s Baker Act, nor is it known whether Miller received any treatment.
Miller unofficially changed his name to Malik Mohammad Ali, acquaintances confirmed, although Miller wrote on his Facebook page that he is not Muslim and does identify with any other religion.
In the days prior to the shooting, Miller posted several articles on Facebook related to the Ku Klux Klan and Neo Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia.
On the morning the police officers were killed, Miller posted a meme of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that included the caption, “When I said march I didn’t mean forever (expletive). Shoot back.”
“You can only poke a tie (sic) up dog so long,” Miller wrote above the photo. “Once that chain breaks it’s over. Wake up America before it’s too late.”
Later that day, just hours before Miller would be accused of murdering two police officers, he posted an article on Facebook suggesting white supremacists had infiltrated police departments.
“F— you, rich bastards,” Miller wrote above photos of police officers allegedly wearing KKK hoods.
* I know, I know. But as Allahpundit writes, “This may be the first time in TV history that someone from the Southern Poverty Law Center was booked to argue with the far left instead of the far — and usually not-so-far — right. Good for them for doing it, though. The counterpoints to this Antifa idiocy are more effective here coming from a liberal than from a conservative. If it’s a conservative versus Antifa, that’s standard left/right noise to the average viewer. If it’s the SPLC versus Antifa, that’s a signal that Antifa should be considered a radical outfit. Which, of course, they are.”