Nazis: To Punch or Not to Punch?

So here are some questions for you to ponder, to pass time while in social isolation:

Tired of sharing the planet with Nazis? Thinking about punching one? I hope you will ultimately come to understand how completely disgusting "punch a Nazi" is. Here are some questions for you to consider: 

1) What happens when you "punch a Nazi" and his views and behavior somehow remain unchanged. Do you hit him again? If that doesn't work, do you use a baseball bat? 

2) Suppose you are recorded "punching a Nazi". Can he use that footage as a recruitment tool, to energize his followers and elicit sympathy from outsiders? 

3) Do you have a special, extra sneaky, tactic you use when punching a Nazi carrying a concealed firearm? If "punching a Nazi" becomes even a little bit common, you can be sure "Nazis" won't leave the house without a gun. 

4) If this tactic works, however it is that you define "works", why stop with Nazis? Why on Earth wouldn't you punch pedophiles and rapists? Murderers? Those Westboro Baptist Church folks? 

Thoughts?

If he can do it ...

Suppose you have some idiot going about in a Nazi uniform, displaying the swastika, heiling Hitler etc, and said idiot ends up getting clocked in the face by someone, perhaps of Jewish descent or some other European ethnicity that really took a beating in WW2? Well, I'm not going to be terribly sympathetic towards said idiot. Play stupid games ...

My grandparent's generation didn't punch Nazis. They shot, bombed and shelled them. This didn't cause bloody noses, this killed or maimed them. Hell, among my fondest childhood memories was me as a young whipper-snapper asking my grandfather how he'd injured an obviously mangled and deformed finger of his. While it turned out he'd done it in the rollers of one of those old fashioned washing machines when he himself was just a kid, he so loved to tell myself and my young cousins how he'd been injured taking on Hitler's chief aid while storming the bunker at the tail end of the war. Either myself or one of my cousins would be listening to this wide eyed while our aunts, uncles and parents were in the background laughing their asses off. Yes, my grandfather did serve and good for him, but not with quite that much distinction, sadly.

It didn't occur to anyone at the time to question the ethics of punching Nazis.

We usually don't when Veteran's Day or its equivalent among the other allied nations rolls around. While I think WW2 in the west can be overly valorized and romanticized at times, the poor bloody Nazis aren't a big concern of mine. They lost, they lost hard and for that I'm glad.

Of course, that was a state of war. Things were different then.

Right?

A better question is how we define "Nazi" and how and when is political violence justified?

I recall when Antifa and allies rioted on Berkeley campus in protest against Milo Yiannopolous giving a talk there. A man, keep in mind, who was flamboyantly homosexual and allegedly married to a black man. Things that would have gotten you a one way ticket to Dachau in the Third Reich. And also a man with whom I'd disagree on many things, has done some things on social media I think were, to put it mildly, uncalled for, and who I would not regard as a political ally in any sense, except perhaps in our shared belief in free expression.

Yet that antifa riot was a public relations disaster for the cause of anti-fascism and for the left in America more generally. For all that Milo's political opponents rightly call him a troll, they couldn't have exemplified better how not to fall for a troll's bait. I think he even called himself a provocateur. How could antifa and the left at Berkeley have been so stupid?

That's just one example. There are others - punching Richard Spencer, assaults on Andy Ngo and so on. Doubtless Spencer and Ngo's assailants felt quite pleased with themselves. Almost makes you wonder who they really did it for?

Look, I don't doubt there's a time when fighting fascists with violence is called for. Hell, history makes a pretty damn convincing case after all. But doing so is a question of timing, strategy and context. Organizing an Antifa type group to fight back against skinheads who are attacking minorities and leftists is one thing. Perfectly reasonable. We called the groups S.H.A.R.Ps - Skinheads against racial prejudice - in my time. Was involved with a few tense standoffs with racist skinheads myself back then, though I lacked the close cropped haircut that gave the Sharps their names.

But suppressing public discussion of crucial issues like immigration by means of violence or at least intimidation under the aegis of being anti-racist or anti-fascist is quite another thing all together. This we must condemn in no uncertain terms.

And there's no excuse for slandering as Nazis men and women who simply are not Nazis. Period. Disagree with Sargon of Akkad or Jordan Peterson all you want, my fellow leftists. That doesn't make them Nazis. There's plenty to disagree with conservatives and libertarians on too. But those disagreements are better settled through the presentation of better ideas rather than fisticuffs. We have no business promoting the use of force as a first measure in the settling of political disputes. Keep in mind that the mainstream left of that time was also wrapped up in concerns over "toxic masculinity." That kind of punch first, ask questions later mentality completely undermines the anti-macho posturing of the social media era mainstream left.

People are right to take exception to antifa taking it upon themselves to deplatform not merely actual fascists and racists, but even more mainstream conservatives. Those who say that this makes antifa the "real fascists" are mistaken - fascism is much more complicated than that. But fascism also isn't the only form of ideological authoritarianism either, and antifa all too often comes across as being the other kind of totalitarian barbarism that soaked the 20th century in blood. They don't exactly try to hide it either. Hammer and sickle symbols abound in their protests.

Fascism and Nazism must, of course be resisted, and occasionally this must be done with force. Were I younger, in better shape and knew how to fight, I'd join an antifa action if it was being carried out against people actually brandishing swastikas, S.S insignia and so on. On the other hand, I just might line up against them if they were trying to shut down someone whose worst offense was daring to criticize feminist dogmatism or open door immigration or the like. But the use of force mustn't be something to glamorize. It must be but one part of a much larger overall strategy.

The most important means of doing so is to recognize what helped give rise to fascism. Widespread discontent and disillusionment with both the mainstream powers that be as well as with the leftist opposition was crucial to the success of Hitler, Mussolini, et al. Thus both the mainstream and the left of our day should consider how they might be failing the working classes if they so fear the possibility of a fascist uprising.

It's crucial to study what real existing fascism was. The right is very fond of reminding the center and the left of the failures of socialism and communism. We should do the same with fascism. It simply failed. Fascists placed great value on the manly art of war, but when bang came to crunch it wasn't the western allies and the Soviets signing surrender papers in May of 1945. Thirteen years of German Nazism and 21 years of Italian Fascism (23 years if you count the rump Italian Social Republic of '43 to '45) resulted in devastated nations and populations. Motivated by ideology, they began wars that they ultimately could not win, and Nazi/fascist ideology drove some of the worst military blunders made by the European Axis powers during the war. Ask your young tough guy who might be giving some thought to fascism just how cool he thinks that is?

As Jello Biafra, former lead singer of the leftist punk rock band the Dead Kennedys and one of my earliest political role models once sang: "You still think swastikas look cool, the real Nazis run your schools. They're coaches, businessmen and cops. In a real fourth reich you'd be the first to go!"

Indeed. The stormtrooper thugs - the Sturmabteilung, or S.A brown shirts were purged early on in the Third Reich, and replaced by the much more militarily professional blackshirted Schutzstaffel, or the S.S. Regrettably, unlike other storm trooper regiments you might be familiar with, the S.S very much did shoot straight. If you're a Nazi skinhead or something of that sort today, you've more in common with the S.A, sorry to say. But even if you were S.S, your fate wasn't admirable. Many were killed, mostly on the eastern front. Others were brought up on war crimes charges. Today they're a disgrace to history and the world, synonymous with the worst crimes against humanity ever perpetrated. That is what you're really aspiring to if you think /pol/ silliness is somehow edgy and subversive. Not so cool, isn't it?

Life as a neo-Nazi is hard. You lose friends and family and become a pariah in your community. And rightly so. Jail is a very real and common destination. Good luck getting a job with your swastika and S.S tattoos. Now you're just like the layabouts and parasites that you want to purge society of. How ironic. Does anyone really want that, provided they haven't already been pushed to that point in the first place?

And therein lies the rub. Perhaps we should be careful not to alienate too many of our already precarious young men. Perhaps they need a place in our society, positive role models and hopes they can aspire to, rather than scorn from both right and left. From the right for being poor layabouts abandoning good old fashioned morals and values,  and from the left for daring to be ... white and male! Oh no! Call the police! Call the army! Call the National Guard! In taking so casual an attitude towards the fate of our young men, we've forgotten one of the most important lessons the fascist era has to teach us, and so undermine our own credibility when we preach about the evils of fascism.

In suggesting that mainstream society are the real Nazis, perhaps Mr. Biafra was righter than he thought, though not in a strict, political science sort of way.  Listen to the Dead Kennedy's "Nazi Punks F**k Off" here. Some nice easy listening for ya! A favorite of mine all the way back to the late 1980s.

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Does University "Indigenization" Threaten Open Inquiry?

The Laurier Society for Open Inquiry was founded by one Lindsay Shepherd, after the fiasco at Wilfred Laurier University in January 2018, wherein she was brought before the diversity inquisition (which, unlike its Spanish counterpart, we all very much expect these days) for showing a video of U of T prof Jordan Peterson expressing his controversial views on gender pronoun usage. The LSOI has since grown to include 180 academics, students and community supporters, most from Wilfred Laurier University (WLU) and the University of Waterloo, where the LSOI is based and most active.

The LSOI has fought an uphill battle with both of these educational institutions, who have shown considerable covert sympathy to antifa and other regressive left groups in their ongoing drive to censor controversial speakers and remake our intellectual culture along Soviet and Maoist lines. Besides giving Shepherd herself the third degree - and not the kind these institutions should be known for, other events were cancelled due to the age old tactic of fire alarmpulling, tacitly supported by Canadian university administrations despite the misuse of fire alarms being highly illegal, as well as by suspiciously elevated “security and police costs” which may be passed on to the speakers themselves or the groups hosting their events on college campuses, according to a recent policy revision at Waterloo University.

The LSOI has invited one Dr. Frances Widdowson, Associate Professor in the Department of Economics, Justice, and Policy Studies at Mount Royal University – my old alma mater - to present a public lecture at WLU entitled "Does University Indigenization Threaten Open Inquiry?" on May 9. The LSOI has launched a go fund me campaign to raise funds assessed to the group for additional security needs for this event.

And not without reason. Two antifa like groups: Kitchener-Waterloo Against Fascism and the Grand River IWW Defense Committee have announced their intent to protest the group in an event called "Racists Aren't Welcome Here" on the grounds that Lindsay Shepherd and Widdowson are racists, right wingers and white supremacist sympathizers. An odd action, given that Widdowson has described her politics as “Marxist-Socialist.” The event advises participants to wear masks. We can safely guess what that means.

Ah, Antifa. If it weren’t for you, we’d still not know for sure that the far left can be every bit as hysterical and stupid as the “Obama was a communist” tricorn hat and pointed hood crowd. They and the neo-Nazis really do deserve each other. 

And no, antifa aren’t the alternative left. They’re the mainstream regressive left, just a more extreme version of it. They're the militant wing of the intersectional feminist movement and don't really care about worker's rights or economic inequality all that much, despite the Marxist and syndicalist IWW facades. They're all about identity politics, which is actually closer to fascism than anything. That these groups are tacitly (and openly) supported by media, academia and other power structures in our society suggests that they're far cozier with the elites and real systems of power in our society than their pantomimes of resistance and protest would have us believe. 

This is the alternative left. These days, leftists who support free speech, leftists like us, are the alternative, not the main stream.

In case you’re wondering, “indigenization” is yet another fad/buzzword to emerge from the wacky world of academic intersectional social justice ideology. It’s not altogether different from “decolonization” which has led to such wonderful results – as indicated by rampaging mobs, vandalized buildings and intimidated students and faculty - in places ranging from South Africa to numerous US colleges such as Evergreen or UC Berkeley. Or the feminist “transformation of the academy” of the 1980s and 1990s, which ushered in so much of this propensity towards ideology masquerading as scholarship in the first place.

The academic veneer of such programs as “indigenization” includes, in the words of the abstract to Widdowson’s talk: 

… a number of components, including proposals to increase the number of courses on indigenous subjects, the symbolic recognition of indigenous cultures, and incentives for promoting and incorporating indigenous “knowledge systems.”

This should all sound familiar to anyone who was on hand to watch Occupy Wall Street completely implode. Widdowson worries, again according to the abstract: 

While some of these developments promise to enhance the university environment, others are a threat to the open and honest exchange of ideas. This is because some forms of symbolic recognition attempt to compel faculty and students to embrace a particular political and philosophical perspective, and dictates that “Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing” be “respected and valued” discourage critical thinking.

You might be wondering: How specifically does examining things from an indigenous perspective discourage critical thinking? If anything, shouldn't it add to avenues by which one can approach an issue, thereby opening up different opportunities for students in considering said issue and encouraging them to think critically; as opposed to just following common "colonial" wisdom exclusively?

Of course, there's nothing wrong with examining "indigenous perspectives" as such, although, the question of who speaks for indigenous people as a whole stands out in my mind. One wonders if antifa groups or postmodernist academic leftists are the most authentic answers to this question. But there’s no inherent harm in the study of such ideas any more than there’s inherent harm in the study of feminist theory or critical race theory. Multiple perspective are preferable to a single perspective, after all. Were we to thoroughly demonize and try to silence these points of view, we would become the very thing we're trying to fight.

However, Widdowson’s abstract explains further: 

It is expected, in fact, that “Indigenous knowledge”, “research traditions”, and “new epistemologies” be welcomed uncritically, and indigenization advocates try to intimidate intellectual challengers with accusations of “racism” and “colonialism.” There are even arguments that the refutation of any indigenous idea constitutes “epistemological racism” or, more astonishingly, “epistemicide”. This pressure has a negative impact on open inquiry; it creates an emotional “no-go zone” that is hostile to examining indigenous-non-indigenous relations rationally. While this will increase the power of indigenization advocates and the resources made available to them, it will not improve indigenous education. Educational achievement can only be improved if people are better able to understand the world around them, and this is not facilitated by many indigenization initiatives.

This is a familiar pattern now. The problem, as we've seen time and again, is the high barrier of intellectual protectionism constructed around standpoint and conflict theory based ideologies. Rooted, of course, in the rationalization that those deemed historically marginalized require their own safe spaces - the true origin of this now so rightly ill reputed concept, to develop their own consciousness free of meddling from the dominant social groups. Capitulating to this line of thought was the original sin of academia that has led to the proliferation of the dogmatic regressive leftism of our time.

We know by now that this is intellectually catastrophic – the results of protecting any school of thought from scrutiny or criticism always end up being dogmatic, ideological echo chambers. Without external checks, belief systems have a well documented tendency to become extremist, excessive and intellectually lazy. This is why the SJWs resort to name calling and censorship, as opposed to debate, when faced with ideological opposition.

There's nothing indigenous in my mind about the construction of a manichean view that romanticizes so called indigenous knowledge while viewing “white” or “western” ways of knowing; logic, reason, enlightenment etc. as being innately oppressive and discriminatory. This is rooted in German critical theory and French poststructuralism. Germany and France were not indigenous first nations in North America, last time I checked.

Plus, while I can't attest to how effective "Indigenous knowledge”, “research traditions”, and “new epistemologies” would actually be since such concepts tend to be vaguely defined, I've always felt that this view that science, logic and empiricism were somehow inherently "white" was actually the most insidious form of white supremacy going. It implies that in order to remain culturally authentic, non European cultures should stick to premodern ways of thinking and leave this science stuff to us white guys, who are the only group expected to disdain its own premodern traditions in favor of enlightenment rationality. If I wanted to actually ensure the continuation of Eurocentric colonialism, that's precisely how I'd do it in this day and age. A problem, however, is that the predictably unequal outcomes you'd get from "indigenous" vs "white" methods of research and scholarship would be laid entirely at the feet of "institutional racism", thus fueling another round of dogmatic intersectional activism.

None of this precludes looking honestly at how the European conquest and settlement of the Americas proceeded, or at how evils that were visited upon the natives were rationalized. Nor should indigenous traditions be shunted aside entirely. They should be studied and understood honestly. An honest look at historical evils is not the same the demonization of the present day descendants of the perpetrators of those evils, and refusing to study such matters for fear of causing offense, usually to more conservative types, is capitulation to a political correctness of another sort, and not of a better sort than that which equates any criticism of social justice ideologies with oppression and racism themselves.

Our academic institutions must censor no one, and they must shelter no one's views from reasoned critical examination. Peaceful protest must be allowed. The heckler's veto must not be. The stakes are high. If free speech and free inquiry perish in our institutions of learning and research, than they are doomed in the broader society and in our civilization as a whole.

Read The Regressive Left: Theory, History and Methodology Pt 3: Academic Anarchy

Read The Regressive Left: Theory, History and Methodology Pt 4: Postmodern Pandemonium

Read The Regressive Left: Theory, History and Methodology Pt 5: Radical Ruckus

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No need to Falsely Tar Antifa. They're Their Own Worst Enemies.

A lot of false nonsense has come out of 4chan and similar circles regarding Antifa, such as a Snopes recent expose of faked Antifa flyers calling for the murder of white children.  Other hoaxes have involved a flyer from Emerald City Antifa warning people against dating white people, a man being stabbed for allegedly having a “fascist haircut” and a phony “Antifa manual” that appeared in, among other places, a site that equates Antifa with the alt left. 

Don’t believe any of it. 

While I worry about Antifa's propensity to mob rule and vigilante violence, let's keep in mind what they profess to be up against here.  While actual neo-Nazi activity in America is very low and quite marginal, the history of the appeasement of the Nazis both inside the Weimar Republic and, later from Britain and France during the 1930s should teach a clear lesson. Had Hitler been stopped much earlier in his career, and there were countless opportunities to do this right up until the 1938 German annexation of Czechoslovakia, the inevitable war against him would have been far less bloody.  Those who would take the fight to a resurgent Nazism before it's allowed to take real roots have a strong historical case to back them up.

But so too do Antifa's critics.

The good cause that is fighting fascism does not excuse Antifa from the very real dumb things they do.  Plus a lot of the false flags being carried out against Antifa, while not justifiable in and of themselves, are carried out because the nature of hard line ideological movements make them especially vulnerable to those kinds of tactics, as well as rule out the more moderate forms of dialogue and debate.  The actions of 4chan and other right wing sources, despite their own glaring disconnects from reality, shouldn't surprise us.  We should rather be surprised that it is 4chan and not the FBI that are carrying these kinds of actions.  This is how radical politics have played out in the west and in America in particular for a long time now. Many parallels with the new left of the 1960s and 70s burning itself out on ideological excesses abound here.

It might well behoove Antifa to adopt some semblance of a formal national structure and issue a statement of principles, a manifesto or something of the like outlining precisely what they believe and how they hope to go about achieving their goals. This could include a statement to the effect that persons who are not fascists have nothing to fear from them. They'd do well to resolve their differences with Trump supporters through debate or the ballot box, and make clear that they'll fight only in self defense at this time.

The decentralized and utopian nature of the far left in America mitigates against this kind of thing happening, however.  Especially so given the Manichean worldview that's so typical of extremist thinking in general.  There can be no negotiation with pure evil, and that being anything other than themselves.  The western left, from Antifa to its antecedents in Occupy Wall Street to their antecedents in anti-WTO protests and going all the way back to 19^th century communal utopians, have a long history of utopian naivety and reliance on ideological purism for movement cohesion. There’ve been exceptions, of course, but they had their own problems, such as the Communist Party USA parroting the Soviet era Kremlin’s line on damn near everything. 

But, by and large, English speaking radicals have tended to eschew the procedure and organization of parliamentary institutions in favor of an admittedly well intended but ultimately ineffective commitment to purity of consensus.  Doubly so now given how committed to a lot of critical theory/postmodernist concepts (the "authority of experience" for example) the western left has become, lending themselves to eschew classical definitions of fascism (if not the very concept of classical definitions) in favor defining fascism along the lines of being anyone unwilling to give "marginalized peoples" a complete moral blank check vis-a-vis the rest of the population to decide on everyone's behalf what is and isn't oppressive and offensive.

In a similar vein, they've opened themselves up to these old Leninist arguments of "revolutionary violence" that Herbert Marcuse also explored in the 1960s, which basically said that violence was justified if carried out on behalf of "marginalized" "oppressed" or "revolutionary vanguard" groups against their "oppressors", be these the police, the state, peaceful conservatives or anyone so hateful enough as to be born with white skin. 

The left have largely sold their souls to these kinds of concepts, and the result is the creation of echo chambers that are short on reality testing and dissent and long on boundary policing.  This not only alienates potential support and doubtlessly drives away those supporters who end up on the wrong end of some internal power struggle or another, but makes groups like Antifa vulnerable to infiltration and subversion via false flag operations, both from their political opponents (think 4chan) and from state enforcement agencies wanting to avoid dirtying their image via open police state tactics.

Expect COINTELPRO types of activities to be carried out against Antifa - if they haven't been already, because that's what the historical precedent would suggest. I don't support such tactics, of course, but through its embrace of that eternal albatross around the neck of the western left, revolutionary romanticism, Antifa is doing little to help themselves here and I find them hard therefore to sympathize with.

Simply saying "you've all been duped by the conservative media" isn't going to help any, especially given how much media (CNN, Huff Post, the Guardian, Salon, Mic and a host of other news blogs) are decidedly not conservative.  Plus, as any politically minded YouTuber these days would be more than happy to tell you, anti fascism has now become a full fledged moral panic on the left and even in the center, so blaming Antifa's poor reputation entirely on the media dodges the core issue.

The real way to fight fascism is to shore up the center - to create and defend robust democratic institutions that are transparent, inclusive and accountable to the people they're intended to serve.  Most western nations have a long way to go in that regard.  This is especially true in the US, where unrestrained money in politics has all but completely compromised the integrity of political institutions, and the resulting lack of public confidence should therefore not surprise us.  That's what got Trump into office, and that's when extremist ideological movements start becoming attractive to people.

Likewise, that's when people stop believing in the power or even the desirability of the state maintaining order in the face of rising extremism, and take matters into their own hands via groups like Antifa.  This should trouble us, for this is precisely the kind of scenario that makes the rise of authoritarianism more palatable to the mainstream, who would otherwise eschew it.  While groups like Antifa overstate the threat posed by Trump himself - the man is no Hitler, he's not a step in the right direction either.  The great danger is that by contributing to a climate of chaos and political violence, Antifa may well lend legitimacy to calls for a strong man to come along and restore order the old fashioned way, and thus end up with a kind of tragic self fulfilling prophecy.  

I don't believe that Antifa are the moral equivalent of Nazi skinheads and I grow weary of those who suggest that they are.  If Antifa were a Marxist Leninist movement, a case for that could be made.  If they extolled Stalin or Mao, you can say that they’re as bad, or at least in the same league, as Hitler and the Nazis.  There may be some of these inside Antifa, and Antifa may themselves be clear that they regard the fascists as a much more clear and present threat than the bolshevik types and choose therefore to prioritize fascists as a target and even ally with hard line communists against them. Much like our governments did in WWII.  But they primarily identify themselves as anarchists, not cold war era Kremlin mouthpieces with red flags.

But that does not place Antifa above criticism, however much one may agree with the stated goal of fighting Nazis, and does not mean that Antifa are not dangerous in their own ways.  If Antifa are dangerous, at least to their targets at "free speech" rallies, can their targets really be blamed for taking action against them, becoming a kind of AntiAntifa, if you will? 

Antifa are burying themselves in their own ideological excesses, and they have no one to blame for that but themselves.

Antifa, Nazis and the Alt-Left

This whole "alt-left = antifa" kerfuffle has, I think, made clear that the real alt-left fights a two front war, and that there is a definite moral asymmetry between our two groups of opponents.
The regressive left certainly comes in for criticism. No question about that, and I make no apologies for the criticisms I've made of them over time. But they're simply not in the same league as the reactionary right in terms of being completely disconnected from reality.
The regressive left will either deny that the alt-left exists at all, for which they can be forgiven because the alt-left is still very miniscule, measured by the number of people who identify as alt-left. Or the regressive left will throw their typical bromides of "racist", "misogynist" and "privilege" at us. Again, this is not entirely unwarranted, though it is most certainly not entirely true either, since alt-left groups on social media do draw a good number of "left wing of the alt right" types. The regressive left is wrong, of course, in their typical lack of understanding of nuances of any kind of political thought that isn't drenched in white male guilt. So pooh pooh to the regressive left.
But the reactionary right? They're something else all together. The amount of absolute and utter nonsense that I've read from paleocons about this whole matter will make your head hurt. The alt-left = the democrats = Marxists. We're all marionnettes of Hillary Clinton and Obama, who are full-on Stalinists hell bent on destroying America. As with everything that comes from the InfoWars, "don't tread on me" section of the internet, EVERYTHING they have to say about us is a reflection of their completely epistemically closed and delusionally paranoid view of the world. Between them and the regressive left, there's just no comparison. They both lie and they're both obsessed with and completely preoccupied with their own ideological pet fetishes to be sure, but not on nearly the same scale. The difference is one of orders of magnitude.
In the same vein, there's likewise no real comparison of antifa with actual neo-nazis. Antifa are, of course, light years from being blameless. Attacking peaceful Trump supporters, as they have yet again in recent days, is stupid and repugnant, and cheapens and undermines the very cause that Antifa professes to be about. Their behavior is inexcusable and sickening.
But don't even try to compare it with actual Nazis and fascism. Just don't. Antifa's antics are bad, to be sure. But they've got a ways to go to catch up with Auschwitz. To put it very mildly. Or even the Jim Crow era of the US south.
If I could address antifa - and given the recent equation of the alt-left with antifa, it's quite possible that I might be able to with at least a few of them, I'd implore them to understand actual politics a little better than they apparently do and refrain from equating Trump supporters with actual fascists.
Don't like Trump? I don't like him either, but he ain't Hitler. His supporters are not the SS Einsatzgruppen, and you cheapen the horrors of Nazi Europe when you even hint at making that suggestion.

That's what really gets under my skin about a lot of this. Eastern Europe in the 1940s was horror beyond reckoning. Whole populations were systematically abused in the worst ways you can think of, right up to wholesale slaughter. It's a slap in the face to the survivors and the families of the survivors of the barbarism that real totalitarianism unleashed in 1930s and 40s Europe when that horror becomes a mere rhetorical gimmick for incendiary pundits trying to score points in 21st century American partisan party politics. I remember saying this to the Tea Party dumbasses who tried saying Obama was literally Hitler, and I'll say the same thing to the antifa idiots regarding Trump. Shut up already. He's not Hitler. And you're a disrespectful asshole for even suggesting that he is.
But I have WAY less than no use for any piece of shit who profess to admire Hitler, display a swastika, SS runes, death head insignia or any other trappings of Nazism unironically, or start spouting anti-Semitic conspiracy theory nonsense. Espouse that crap and you're signalling support for the worst atrocities humans ever visited on each other. As bad as you've been taught Hitler was, he was worse.

My grandfathers went overseas to fight that monstrosity, and not with mere pepper spray and bike locks either. The "antifa" they belonged to used Sherman tanks and Lancaster bombers, or at least Enfield rifles. They didn't go there to engage in robust debate. "Deplatforming" in those days usually involved a lot of explosives dropped from high heights. And a lot of people died. That was tragic and unfortunate, but way better that than a Nazi hegemony in Europe.
And we call them heroes today, and so we should. I have no problems, none whatsoever, casting my lot in with antifa provided they confine their direct action tactics to actual real Nazis, skinheads, Klan and real bonafide fascists. Not mere conservatives or libertarians who, however much we may disagree, are not in the same universe of ugliness as Hitler and his goons, and with whom our differences can still be settled at the ballot box.
For antifa to commit violent assaults against peaceful conservatives and Trump supporters is repugnant, criminal and inexcusable, and I would implore them to stop if I could, or else implore the powers that be to step up police action to put a stop to it. But what I will not do is equate antifa's violence with the ugliness of the Nazis themselves. The memory of what happened at Auschwitz does not deserve that kind of dishonor.

The Judean People's Front-ification of the Regressive Left

Black Lives Matter protesters disrupt Montreal Pride during a moment of silence for AIDS and hate crime victims.

"Employees of Pride Montreal then broke the circle of protesters and took away Rose’s megaphone. People in the crowd shouted at them to “shut up during the moment of silence” but the BLM protesters refused."

"To make our voices heard we chose to do this during the moment of silence,” said Brian*, a protester and member of Black Lives Matter Montreal. “It wasn’t disrespectful because the moment was meant to commemorate the people who died [of AIDS or homophobic and transphobic laws], and most of them are trans women of color so we reclaimed that moment.”

Black Lives Matter punching down and keeping to easy targets that they know won't fight back, yet again.

The spirit of the NAACP or the SCLC is definitely NOT present with BLM. 20th century civil rights movements risked their lives standing up to state power and violent lynch mobs to win basic rights for downtrodden minorities.

BLM is itself a violent lynch mob that "disrupts" the activities of other marginalized people, and does so with only the remotest likelihood of legal repercussions despite their flagrant disregard for the civil rights of others (which they hold dear for themselves) and near total immunity from criticism from government, media and academia. If this is your idea of civil disobedience and speaking truth to power, I laugh in your face. Looks pretty damn performative to me.

BLM was founded by a trio of western educated anti-sex "queer" feminists, their ideology is a thin veneer of black consciousness overtop French postmodernism, German critical theory, heavily bastardized pseudo Marxism and puritanical feminism rooted in anglo American Victorian era social purity, and topped off with just the kind of Ford Foundation and George Soros money that so effectively co-opts so called "radical" movements. Perhaps the group should rename itself Guilty White Consciences Matter. Sounds like Romanticism, but OK.

One leftist group I doubt that BLM will be trying to shut down in this manner any time soon is Antifa.  Because our favorite faux alt-leftists actually punch back, as they did in a recent protest where both groups originally showed up, apparently on the same side.  At least at first. "One Antifa member wound up punching a Black Lives Matter activist after the Black Lives Matter member chastised the Antifa radicals for hiding behind their masks."

Were Antifa to confine their hard line tactics to real bona fide fascists, I'd be all for them. Let's keep in mind here that Hitler was not defeated by rational persuasion and claims to the moral high ground. Fascism as an ideology was always explicitly clear in both theory and practice as to the central role played by redemptive violence in both its rise to power and exercise of power once claimed. Sadly, an entrenched fascist movement only understands one language, and when our grandfathers went to Europe in the 1940s, it wasn't to convince the Nazis of the error of their ways through superior logic. And we today look at our grandfathers as heroes, and rightly so in my opinion.

The issue I have with Antifa is the issue I have with vigilantism more generally. Antifa are not elected by the people and they are accountable to no one, save their own collective group conscience, which we've all seen to be driven by moral panic and group hysteria. So we should not be surprised by Antifa’s propensity to lapse into senseless destructiveness and failure to distinguish between conservatives and libertarians - whose differences can and should be resolved by debate and at the ballot box - and actual fascists.  

Or in this case, Black Lives Matter protesters.  

"The BLM activist stood in front of the Antifa crowd, bellowing, “Take the mask off! Take the mask off.” His compatriots started chanting, “Mask off! Mask off! Mask off! 

That prompted the Antifa crowd to start yelling at the black man, “He’s a cop! He’s a cop! He’s a cop!” 

One masked male white member of Antifa got right in the black man’s face, then punched him directly in the face, prompting another BLM activist to start yelling, “You f**king hit ’em! You f**king hit 'em! Take the mask off! 

A young female Antifa member then started screaming, “He f**king pushed me! He f**king pushed me!” She and the BLM activist started screaming curses at each other. 

Later, a BLM member addressed the Antifa crowd, saying, “We ain't gonna let some outsiders make us look bad."

You're doing a good enough job of that yourself, BLM.

The whole charade reminds me of that brilliant scene, one of so many, in the prophetic satire of prophecy, Monty Python's Life of Brian:

"Brothers! We should be struggling together! We mustn't fight each other! Surely we should be united against the common enemy!"

"THE JUDEAN PEOPLE'S FRONT!"

"No! No! The Romans!"

Keep it Regressive - Upping the Ante Post Inauguration

Sargon of Akkad hates having to defend the administration of Donald Trump.

Jonathan Pie hates having to defend the administration of Donald Trump.

Something tells me that Snopes.com isn't happy about having to defend the administration of Donald Trump.

And I'm not happy about it either.  Not that it's "defending" Donald Trump per-se, It's about trying to keep political discourse open and reasonable.  Scrutiny and criticism of Trump will be more effective in the long run if it's not so marked by sensationalism and hysteria.  People are going to start rolling their eyes whenever the Huffington Post, CNN or any of them pound their "Trump is evil Hitler" drum, and the ironic result of that is that eventually Trump will gain greater leeway to act.  I suggest to the chattering classes that they go back and read that old Aesop story about the boy who cried wolf.    

As recently as a few months ago, I was rather proud of the fact that hysterical paranoia surrounding the sitting President was a right wing specialty.  Sure, "Bush derangement syndrome" did have its excesses, but nothing that could compare to Tea Party or Info Wars type nonsense asserting that Obama was a Muslim, a communist, a non-citizen or even the Antichrist.  And for those of us with a few more years under our belts, Bill Clinton was an evil commie coming to take everybody's gun's away.  

And it goes back much further than that.  Further than Reagan and the paranoid Moral Majority of the 1980s accusing my favorite heavy metal records and role playing games of the time of being Satanic.  Richard Hofstadter was writing about the Paranoid Style in American Politics as far back as 1964.   To say nothing of McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, the American Mercury Magazine (which returned in 2010, by the way, with the only thing missing being Pepe the Frog) - the craziness of which drove William F. Buckley to leave it and go start the National Review in the early 1950s.  It's even older than that.  The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, the sundry anti-immigration leagues of the late 19th century and anti-Illuminati conspiracism going back further than that.

The progressives, with all of their flaws, are simply smarter than that.  Sure there had been dumb leftists too: the degeneration of the Communist Party USA into a mere mouthpiece for the Kremlin, the carrying around of pictures of Chairman Mao and fetishizing of 3rd world dictators among the New Left, Herbert Marcuse's doctrine of "repressive tolerance" and the related concept of "power plus prejudice" to emerge out of the radical serge of the late 60s, the personal becoming political among the anti-heterosex feminists of the 1970s and 80s, the emergence of political correctness in the 1990s, the apologetics for and palling up with regressive Islamism in the Bush years (and carrying on to the present day) and the emergence of the social justice warriors in the last decade or so.  All of it stupid and counterproductive.  But widespread mass hysteria and moral panic akin to the red scare or the Satanic panic was simply not within the purview of left wing politics. 

Oh no.  Not us.

Then 2017 happened.  

Antifa riots in DC following Trump's inauguration destroy, among other things, a limousine belonging to a Muslim immigrant, whose livelihood may be lost as a result.  231 people all told were arrested.  

And then, of course, there was UC Berkeley meltdown in response to Milo Yiannopoulos's speaking tour, causing an early estimate of $100,000 damage and sporadic reports of injuries.

Though the worst of what we've seen thusfar, these are not isolated incidents either. 

Suddenly, the special snowflakes on tumblr don't seem like such a big deal now, don't they?

I've had personal experience with these antifa characters.  I moderate several alt-left Facebook groups, and quite suddenly - almost as if on cue - they're spamming every leftist social media space with bland calling outs of "liberals" who refuse to endorse black block tactics, with some even going as far as to call liberals "fascist sympathizers."  I don't brook a whole lot of this - they get banned right quick if they descend to such foolishness as to believe that smashing store windows, lighting garbage cans on fire or pepper spraying unarmed civilian protesters is some kind of valiant resistance to fascism, on par with the British R.A.F in the summer of 1940 or the Red Army in Stalingrad circa December 1942.  Seizing the means of production, they are not.

Don't major in political science.  That would be my counsel to these antifa apologists.  If antifa and actual Nazis ever end up in a real clash, can I guess it will be over who hates "liberals" more?

Do I need to actually say why it is these black block tactics are stupid?  Do I have to explain why no platforming is stupid?  Do I have to explain why attacking peaceful civilians - not actual nazi skinhead gangs that are really causing trouble, like antifa was established to do, but nothing beyond normies wearing "Make America Great Again" caps - is stupid?  Do I have to explain why smashing store windows and burning your own campus and urban core to the ground is stupid?  Do I have to explain why behaving this way in front of the whole world due to the reach of social media is stupid?

Let the recent spike in Milo's international profile and book sales answer that question.  

There's now a petition circulating to have antifa declared a terrorist organization.  And I don't blame the circulators of this petition one bit.  

What's suspicious about this is that, like every other regressive left-wing fad, from privilege theory to "Islamophobia" to just about any manufactured social justice grievance you can think of - cultural appropriation, safe spaces, trigger warnings, men complimenting women as harassment, attacks on due process for men accused of sex crimes, on and on and on, its emergence seems strangely choreographed. 

Amidst all the hubub, I keep reading - mainly in right wing sources, about paid protesters and conspiracy theories surrounding the Clinton Foundation, George Soros and the like.  I used to just scoff at such tinfoil hat talk.  Now I'm not so sure.  Regressive left stupidity emerges in all kinds of places almost spontaneously, and spreads like wildfire before reasonable people have even begun to respond - by which time media coverage has long since moved on.  

The silver lining, if there is any, is that liberals are now getting bashed from the left for a change.  This might just be the wake up call they need.  But then again, the emergence of political correctness was supposed to be a wake up call.  The excesses of online social justice warriors was supposed to be a wake up call.  Trump's victory was supposed to be a wake up call.  As I've recently said elsewhere, the center left has been hitting snooze on the alarm for a very long time now.  

Instead, the regressive left just keeps doubling down on the regressive.  Which isn't what we need, because enough bad crap is going to come down the pike from the Trump administration and GOP dominance at both the congressional, state and soon enough the Supreme Court level that we need to be on our game. We're heading in exactly the opposite direction.  We're getting conspiracy theories from people who should know better, that these riots were provoked by Breitbart, Yiannopolous and the Trump administration to bring about increased federal control over higher education.  Because it's easier to blame a conspiracy than it is to admit your side screwed up and really has no good ideas.

Perhaps I should consider becoming a professional protester.  George Soros and the Clinton Foundation on the one side; Trump, Bannon, Yiannopoulos and Breitbart on the other can bid against each other for my loyalty.  Kind of like Clint Eastwood's nameless protagonist in those old spaghetti westerns, playing one side against the other, a guy could make a fistful of dollars doing that.

I have no love of censorship and certainly balk at the prospect of government control over curriculum in higher education, but look at what a disaster the colleges have become in the last quarter century.  The censorship going on inside the Ivory Tower is beyond ridiculous.  Something needs to be done.  It's been left to fester for far, far too long now.

More seriously, trying to talk to left leaning people about the idiocies present on their own end of the spectrum reminds one of the words of Charles McKay in his 1841 opus Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds.  It will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

Is it too much to ask my fellows on the left that we think and scrutinize a little more, and goose step along with the party line and follow baseless and stupid fads a little less?