The Ethic Of The Left

     Shamelessly stolen from 90 Miles From Tyranny:

     In what way is this incorrect? Indeed, the game-show metaphor could be extended: one contestant could cause another to lose points by calling him a fascist, a racist, or (gasp!) a Trump supporter. Hasn’t that happened often enough – and on network television, at that?

     I am put in mind of an incident from some years ago, when the Nicaraguan contras were battling the Marxist / Sandinista regime of Daniel Ortega:

     Contra leader Adolfo Calero had not even arrived for his speech, but the hall was packed. For weeks, a local radical group known as the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) had promised to disrupt the speech sponsored by a conservative student organization on the Northwestern University campus. On the night of April 13, 1985, InCAR members were out in force. Several members mounted the podium to chant slogans and deliver short speeches. Then, minutes before Calero was scheduled to enter the room, Barbara Foley came onto the stage. Witnesses later said she spoke in loud but measured tones:

     “This monster that they’re bringing here tonight isn’t a human being, he’s a monster,” Foley declared. “Adolfo Calero is going to get up here, he’s going to try, and in a few minutes he’s going to talk about freedom and democracy, and liberty….He’s coming up here with the blood of thousands, just about literally, on his hands, He has no respect for the free speech, much less the right to live….

     “He has no right to speak tonight, and we are not going to let him speak.” After a pause, she said: “He should feel lucky to get out of here alive.”

     When, minutes later, Calero took the stage wearing a dark suit and a bulletproof vest, a protestor rushed the stage and splashed him with red liquid (it has been variously described as paint and animal blood) while InCAR members chanted “Death to the Fascist / Fascists Have No Right To Speak!” Unable to give his speech, Calero quickly left the hall.

     Afterward Foley exulted, “I think it’s terrific that people saw the fascists….They should have no freedom of speech.”

     [Charles Sykes, Profscam]

     Incredibly, several of her colleagues defended Barbara Foley’s open incitement to violence against Adolfo Calero as an expression of her “academic freedom.” The university administration disagreed. She was punished for her outrageous act by being denied tenure. That may have been the last case of a university administration standing foursquare for the freedom of speech and the right of students to hear contrasting viewpoints. Today. if you can whip up a sufficiently large gaggle of Leftist thugs – and in my view, “Leftist” and “thug” are synonymous – you can silence anyone.

     The mainstream media is very much in line with this “approach” to political combat. Note how many of its luminaries have advocated everything from censorship to outright deplatforming of those who express conservative sentiments or question the validity of the November 2020 elections. Note how they fulminate against upstarts such as Newsmax and One America News Network. Note how they nearly all advocate action against Fox News for the heinous crime of having a handful of conservative commentators, Tucker Carlson most prominent among them, in its lineup.

     When your opposition has abandoned reason and evidence for force and fraud, you are no longer engaged in political discourse: you are now at war. The Left has pushed that button. They had to; they have no arguments for their position that would hold water for even a second. It remains only for the Right to respond in the appropriate fashion.

     “The fascists cannot argue, so they kill,” wrote Victor Marguerite. That is how one can reliably recognize the true enemy of freedom and justice: when he fails to persuade you – or when he senses that it is you, not he, who is persuading others – he resorts to intimidation, and thereafter to actual violence. He cannot be argued into putting down his weapons, for he’s already been defeated in the contest of ideas, and he knows it. He can only be bested by the very means he has chosen to use against you.

     “When will it start?” is the wrong question. It’s already started. The recognition is merely taking a while to penetrate.