Rantz: This is a must-read on antifa violence
Sep 19, 2017, 5:18 AM | Updated: Sep 22, 2017, 9:42 am
(Paul Kitagaki Jr./The Sacramento Bee via AP)
My guest this morning was Megan McArdle, a columnist with Bloomberg, and she takes on the dangers of normalizing the Left’s violence coming from, in part, antifa and their sympathizers. It’s absolutely worth the read.
Progressive activists pretend that President Donald Trump’s rhetoric has been normalized. Yeah? Where? Tune in to any variety of cable and network news, blogs, magazines, and newspapers and he’s being derided. One ridiculous hot take on MSNBC even said his golf-ball meme retweet promoted violence against women. There’s been no normalizing of Trump.
On antifa? Progressives will say there is violence because the morally-just antifa is fighting against a dangerous group of thinkers who can hurt this country. Indeed, their very existence offers the threat of violence.
But as McArdle points out:
Much of the debate over antifa has focused on whether the white supremacists on the other side are worse. It seems to be impossible, in fact, to write a column on antifa without noting, at length, that they are not nearly as bad as the neo-Nazis who converged on Charlottesville. And indeed, they are not.
But how does that justify antifa’s tactics? It’s not as if the police are unable, or unwilling, to deal with white supremacists who commit violent acts. We may wish that they had gotten to those people soon enough to prevent tragedies like the killing in Charlottesville, but it’s not as if antifa is a crack team of investigators who can stop crimes before they happen. The only things they can stop, and the police cannot, are things that aren’t crimes: notably, people exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceably assemble and speak their minds.
I highly recommend you give the blog your full attention. It’s a relatively quick read but it should put in perspective the dangers when you justify the violence of the Left.