Posted on 03/15/2016 4:56:14 AM PDT by SJackson
Ferguson. Baltimore. Chicago. Everywhere Leftist protesters occupy the streets, those whose opinions are deemed insufficiently progressive are abused, mocked, ridiculed, brutalized and physically menaced. This lawlessness is rapidly becoming the norm; the Obama administration, as well as leading media and cultural figures, need to decry that normalization and act strongly against these thugs now before the American public square is transformed beyond recognition, and ceases to be an arena for free discourse.
Although this violence and brutalization of political opponents is a new phenomenon in American politics, it has a historical antecedent: the Nazi Brownshirts. In The Coming of the Third Reich, historian Richard J. Evans explains how, in the early days of National Socialist Germany, Stormtroopers (Brownshirts) organized campaigns against unwanted professors in the local newspapers [and] staged mass disruptions of their lectures.
To express dissent from Nazi positions became a matter of taking ones life into ones hands. The idea of people of opposing viewpoints airing their disagreements in a civil and mutually respectful manner was gone. One was a Nazi, or one was silent (and fearful.)
That is just the kind of public arena that the Left has been trying to bring to the United States for years. For decades, they have told us that their political and ideological opponents are not just wrong, but malevolent. In college in the early 1980s, I was taken aback by the obscene, relentless, vicious hatred that the Left directed toward Ronald Reagan I was at that time entirely sympathetic with their disdain for him, but the frenzy with which they expressed it, their wild furious contempt, shocked me.
And that was nothing compared to what they had in store for George W. Bush. Years ago, the Democratic Party as a whole, along with the entire Leftist establishment, adopted the Alinskyite tactic of ridiculing, mocking and smearing their foes instead of engaging them on the level of ideas. Leftists today routinely portray their opponents as simultaneously stupid and evil, idiotic but crafty; its practically a reflex.
The shutdown of Trumps rally in Chicago, however, takes this one step farther. Trump supporters leaving the arena in Chicago after the Left-fascists had forced cancellation of the Trump rally last Friday experienced that firsthand. AP reported that the protesters closed in on the building, obstructing most of the exits just as Trump supporters began filing out. The Trump supporters had little choice but to push through the anti-Trump crowds that parted only slightly, yelling, Racists go home! Trump supporter Bill Vail said he walked through a gauntlet of protesters who cursed at him as he pushed through holding his 9-year-old daughters hand. She cried, he said.
Commented Vail: They scream about tolerance, but are being intolerant themselves. That doesnt make sense. Yes, it does. Clearly the authoritarian, America-hating Left has decided that the Brownshirts had a good idea: those whose dare to oppose their political views will henceforth be greeted with truncheon and fist. Soon the dissenters will learn their lesson, and accept the Lefts agenda with docility.
Cruz, Rubio and Kasich are already learning to do this, as they demonstrated when they had the audacity, or craven opportunism, to claim that Trumps rhetoric was at least partially responsible for the shutdown of the Chicago rally. Do they think they will be spared? Do they realize that by charging that Trump bears partial responsibility for the thugs actions, they have tacitly validated those actions, implying that under some circumstances, the forcible shutdown of ones political opponents was acceptable if, say, that political opponent was prone to saying outrageous things?
They dont realize that once that premise has been accepted, it can be turned on them. And it will be. Now that theyve apparently agreed that violent thugs can be justified in forcibly silencing those they hate, what will they possibly say when the thugs decide that they, too, have strayed beyond the bounds of what one is allowed to say?
Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich to say nothing of Clinton, Sanders, and Obama should have forcefully and unequivocally condemned the Chicago thugs, called for their arrest, and declared their unshakeable support for civility in the public discourse and respect for ones ideological opponents. Instead, they all contributed to the erosion of that civility and respect, and took the U.S. just a bit closer to becoming a tyranny in which the goons who shut down politically unacceptable rallies work for the state.
Hitler and Himmler and Goebbels, if theyre able to look on from their fiery graves, may be feeling a sense of having, at long last, triumphed.
In this country, the basic law of physics will prevail. Those dolts who don’t, or refuse, to understand it will come to regret the day of its natural implementation.
Good Morning. Had seen that you posted this ahead of me by a few minutes. The duplicate I had posted I had asked the AM to remove.
The anti-Trump, anti-America mob are not "brownshirts" (i.e., SA/stormtroopers). They are the Red Front that provoked or caused the organization of an anti-Red Front paramilitary in the first place.
Whether or not we have brownshirts in our future remains to be seen.
Your point is well taken. There were a number of armed political groups in Germany, their intent eventual armed takeover, their early tactics shutting down political speech. In common usage, I think alluding to the SA fits, the protestors intent in disruption of the political process, and no one is going to know most of the others. Brown Shirts people, some at least, recognize. And the comparison relative to shutting down political discourse is correct. Heck, if you called the Sturmabteilung or the SA, most people would be clueless. If, as some suggest, pro Trump groups of thugs organize, I’d use the same description. Their political orientation isn’t the issue, though in the US this is a longstanding tactic of the left, from the KKK to various anarchist movements, to Code Pink, Moveon, and BlackLivesMatter. Though thus far only the last has resorted to arms, in retaliation against the police.
I heard a protestor yelling Free Speech, not Hate Speech. This is not the American way. The entire concept of hate speech is antithetical to the First Amendment. That supposedly constitutionalist candidates from our side have entertained the concept is beyond depressing.
I agree.
We see now the results of 30-40 years of liberal education starting in elementary school through college.
Students aren’t taught to be patriotic, to value their country, to recognize the many ways they are free, or to be tolerant of differing viewpoints, unless they’re sexual.
Thirty years ago nobody believed schools were indoctrinating their little kids. Now we know better, and we see the consequences.
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