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This Is What We Should Not Do
This is an example of what I don’t want.
Protesters disrupted a Shakespeare production in Central Park on Friday night shouting, “The blood of Steve Scalise is on your hands!” and “Stop leftist violence,” according to reports.
A woman identifying herself on social media as Laura Loomer jumped on stage shouting, “Stop the normalization of political violence against the right,” and, “This is violence against Donald Trump.”
Fellow protestor Jack Posobiec, who taped her from the audience, then shouted, “You are all Goebbles,” referring to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Loomer was arrested following the incident when she refused to leave the scene, The New York Times reported. She posted video of her protest on Twitter.
We on the right should not be breaking the law in order to shut down what we consider to be offensive speech. That’s the left’s shtick. We need to be respecting the right of free expression, even when it offends us — and then using that right to push back against the left.
Rather than trying to shut down the juvenile assassination-porn the left enjoys, let’s say some things that we believe, but that we know offend the left.
In my case, that means saying things like “the trans movement is nonsense, an unhealthy pandering to emotionally challenged individuals who need counseling, not surgery.” Or “men and women are different, and feminism has tried to fool women into believing that that isn’t true, depriving them of their uniqueness in its efforts to persuade them to be ersatz males, men-lite.” Or “the Black Lives Matter movement is ugly racism founded on a lie about the nature of anti-black violence in America, directing attention away from the real crisis of violence in the black community by scapegoating police instead of acknowledging the disintegration of the black family.” Or “same-sex marriage is legal, but it isn’t normal and it isn’t ideal. Children benefit from having good role models of, and the support from, both a father and a mother.” Or “the Russia story is a nothingburger, a desperate effort to deprive the people of the choice they made in a fair election because that choice offends the leftist establishment.”
Etc.
Don’t suppress speech. Use it.
Published in General
I partially agree with you, Midge. That isn’t quite my point – but for us to claim that people on the alt-right deserved to be marginalized accepts the premise that some speech doesn’t belong in the public sphere.
If some speech doesn’t belong in the public sphere, than why does the left get a free pass on the speech they push into the public sphere?
Either speech shouldn’t be curtailed at all and both alt-right and ctrl-left get to put all their sordid, disturbing ideas in the public sphere and we back off and grate our teeth in civility, or we marginalize and prevent public access to the very worst of both.
I don’t know what you mean by “prevent public access”. How do you prevent public access in the age of the internet? We should prevent public funding, for sure: Trump is already doing that. As I said before, civility is not really a concern for me: one of the reasons I like Trump is because it doesn’t seem to be much of a concern for him either, but when you endorse going to a riot with a stick to defend yourself, then we aren’t talking about incivility anymore.
How has Ricochet and NRO and many other sites done it in the age of the internet? Censorship. How has Twitter done it? Censorship. How has facebook done it? Censorship.
Marginalizing the immoral is not the same as suppressing free speech. Do you consider it a suppression of free speech to socially marginalize adulterers, for example?
You wouldn’t say society has no free speech unless adulterers remain unmarginalized, I hope. That way lies leftism.
Similar logic applies to other moral transgressions, and the worst of the alt-right is morally transgressive. The neoreactionaries should have no trouble distinguishing themselves from the neo-Nazis, for example. If they refused to, normal people would have good reason to be suspicious. Same goes for elements of the manosphere – some parts are reasonable and wholesome. Others are neither.
Edit: Cross-posted with the comments immediately above. I see that in the delay, some of these points have already been addressed.
Agreed. If we don’t defend free speech then who will?
Don’t let the rageaholics trying to show us all their big swinging…vocal cords…destroy speech – no matter what side of politics they claim to be on.
I don’t disagree with this! Where do you think I do?
Certainly, some views should be marginalized! So why, for the love of all that is holy, are we not marginalizing the left the same way we do the far right?
This whole argument is about not marginalizing speech because we want it free. But if that’s the case, than we shouldn’t marginalize the far right either.
When asked how we expect to do that, we look at how we did it to those groups we have done it to.
I know you are pretty pure on free speech. So question – are you in favor of not marginalizing any speech, including the far right (who I know who detest)?
I think that’s more Free Willie.
Weiner approves.
This is not true on my Twitter feed. It is far from marginalized among the lefties talking about it, and even among the conservatives.
And you say liberals aren’t listening, but that isn’t true, either. They have reacted loud and long to the protests. They have done just the opposite of ignore them.
How could you possibly know that is more effective, much less guarantee it? Conservatives are getting out of their bubbles and interacting with the left, and you’re urging them to get back into their bubbles. That is bizarre.
Marginalizing is different than hooliganism. Free speech doesn’t mean people can’t shun you for your speech. For example I think most of the Alt-right are loony and should be shunned by polite society. I think the entirety of the Left ( as distinguished from Liberals) are antithetical to American values and should be shunned by polite society. I still wouldn’t use thuggery to deny them the right to speak their lunacy.
Making sure the people you elected do what you want them to do is bizarre? When they control both the Presidency and both houses of Congress? Bizarre? Really?
Right, and it’s not like this is about something important, like a sports game. Hooliganism is justified there.
You have many times proclaimed yourself a proud believing Christian and so I guess you’re aware of the famous saying from Jesus: If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them and kick them in the balls.
I started off listing all the problems in the country that have gotten worse and worse through the years because the left’s assumptions have been adopted wholesale by all “right-thinking” people, but it was going to be much too long, and get my blood pressure too high, so I deleted it.
Here’s what has me down right now. It occurs to me that it’s more cultural than political.
The Democrats, many “deep state” bureaucrats, and apparently some Republicans, are trying their best to overturn the election of Donald Trump. I was never a supporter of the man like you are, but I think I have a feel for the frustrations felt by a lot of his supporters, especially among the lower-middle class and rural population, which is where I came from.
The people I’m thinking of are largely Scots-Irish, ethnically and/or temperamentally. I’ll call them the FP for short (the “Forgotten People”, in one of Trump’s speeches). They tend to be generous, hardworking, proud, short-tempered, stubborn, and well armed. They receive more than their share of scorn from the respectable crowd, both Right and Left. They’ve seen the Left demand more and more special treatment for their protected groups, while denigrating the FP at every opportunity. The GOP leadership has alternatively lied to them, ignored them, and been embarrassed by them. Remember “proud”? These folks can detect condescension from a mile away.
I believe the cultural resentment and alienation among the FP is grossly underestimated by the Left and much of the urban Right. Every time they see the Left get another special dispensation for one of its favored groups while the FP is told to go eat white or male privilege, this resentment grows. To be told that someone on their side shouldn’t use the Left’s own tactics to defend their adopted champion, Trump, increases the alienation.
I fear a tipping point may be coming. Pressure is building. Trump’s victory was the first cultural / political “win” for the FP in at least a generation. Every antifa thug, every coastal elitist’s sneer, every attempt to take down Trump, builds more pressure. We shouldn’t tell them they’re denied using the tactics that have been used so effectively against them. Setting aside whether it’s tactically wise, it builds more pressure.
As Admiral Painter put it, “This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”
Look when Liverpool beats ManU that freaking matters. The rest is just noise.
Ah, for the days when they used to kick around a Dane’s skull instead of an inflated gasbag. Of course, Jeremy Corbyn…
I have always thought one of the main reasons our elected representatives don’t do what we want is because they have seen with their own eyes that if they behave with the least bit of indecorum or come up with a minor gaffe (which can easily be manufactured by the hate media) the same type of people who are now saying we should not support the theater protesters will be throwing them under the bus, saying they are not the type of Republicans we need. But if a new breed of constituent is willing to stick out its neck and behave indecorously (as the theater protesters did) they may realize that times have changed — there are now people who will have the backs of our representatives when the going gets rough.
So, you’re saying if we riot more, Congress will do what we elected them to do?
I’m not saying that. Right now our level of riots is zero. If we do four times the amount of rioting we’re doing now, we still have zero rioting. I don’t think that will result in change.
Okay, so you’re suggesting addition rather than multiplication as the operator. Do we need to send a seven-day notice with RSVP to the local gendarmes for when we riot? I mean, these ad hoc riots that the left pull are just very gauche.
This is funny. To most my Democrat friends you and Ricochet is part of the alt-right and needs to be silenced. It is interesting to see you make common cause with them.
Oooh! Soccer club chants! Get twenty or thirty infiltrators in there and cut loose.
No one likes us, No one likes us
No one likes us, We don’t care
We are Millwall
Super Millwall
We are Millwall from The Den!
Sync it up with cell phones.
Actually, I’m not suggesting rioting at all, and I’m not sure why you brought that into the conversation. I would favor non-violent protest as a more effective mechanism. The theater protesters engaged in non-violent protest, btw, and did it without threatening free speech.
Hot dog!
Well, it’s a slippery slope from behaving indecorously to provoking riots in the leftist mental asylums to actually starting riots on purpose. Why not take the shortcut? If we’re going to use the tactics of the Progressives against them, why should we limit ourselves? Maybe we should even do what they accuse us of and round them up into camps and shoot them and such?
I mean, what’s the limiting principle here?
I hear that the Ball Park Franks plump when you cook them.
Dachshund murderer! ;-P
By the way, Alexei Navalny gave the authorities a couple of months notice before the big anti-corruption demonstrations last Monday. The authorities abused the process, but he did it. These were peaceful demonstrations; the only rioting was done by the police, just like here in the United States where the only violence is committed by the left. In the days before the demonstrations, there were plenty of people going on TV and on other media to say about Navalny’s actions, “This Is What We Should Not Do.”