Violence and Harassment Against Conservatives and Trump Supporters

It’s a standard tactic of partisans to accuse people on the other side of being violent crazies. And indeed, liberals can not shut up about the woman who was killed by a white supremacist in Charlottesville. Then there was the case of Gabrielle Giffords who was shot by a lunatic with completely undecipherable political views, but the media blamed Sarah Palin!

But sometimes one side is the violent and unhinged force in American politics.

Just now, it’s the anti-Trump left. Enraged by Trump’s successes — most recently, the Senate confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh — they have been on a rampage, and this has included not merely public temper tantrums, but stalking, harassment, threats of violence and outright attacks.

The List

Breitbart assiduously keeps track of these incidents, and their list now extends to 583 cases (it might be longer when you read this).

Some random entries:

October 8, 2018: Leftist Teacher Tweets: “So Who’s Gonna Take One For the Team and Kill Kavanaugh?”

October 6, 2018: Sen. Collins Flooded with Abusive Tweets Threatening Death, Violence

October 1, 2018: Vandals Hit IL GOP Headquarters With ‘RAPE’ Graffiti

October 1, 2018: Senator Mitch McConnell Badgered At Airport By Anti-Kavanaugh Activists

September 30, 2018: Georgetown prof: White GOP senators in Kavanaugh hearing ‘deserve miserable deaths’

September 25, 2018: CNN Defends harassment of Ted Cruz

September 25, 2018: Ted Cruz and Wife harassed out of DC restaurant

September 10,2018: Broadway Star Carole Cook on Trump: ‘Where’s John Wilkes Booth When you Need Him?

September 6, 2018: Black Trump Fan Booted from Bar for Wearing Trump Hat

. . . and on and on.

It would be unfair to say that the average liberal would do any of these things.  But such things are increasingly condoned by mainstream Democrats. The New York Times, for example, has noted that these kinds of attacks have “opened a rift in the party over whether stoking anti-Trump outrage is helping or undermining its prospects in the midterm elections.”

Younger Democrats, the Times notes:

. . . believe that conventional politics are insufficient to the threat posed by a would-be authoritarian — and that their millennial and nonwhite base must be assured that the party is doing all it can to halt Mr. Trump.

Thus the bigotry and intolerance of the campus left is increasingly infiltrating the Democratic Party. Only a resounding defeat at the ballot box (or perhaps it will take two or three) is likely to cause liberals to back off of tactics that can only be described as fascist.

Update

Yes, and now Hillary supports the nastiness:

During an interview with CNN on Tuesday, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton stated that it’s impossible to be civil with a party “that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.” She continued that if Democrats win back one or both chambers of Congress, “that’s when civility can start again.”

Hillary said, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about. That’s why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and/or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength.”

This is a new level of cluelessness, even for Hillary. The fascist tactics don’t show strength, they show weakness.

Public School Indoctrination

From a Minnesota think tank, a harrowing account of bullying, indoctrination and intimidation in an affluent public school in that state.

Is it really that bad? Anecdotal accounts from the battle over Act 10 in Wisconsin suggest it may be.

It is clear that schools of education explicitly teach students that leftist indoctrination is the proper role of teachers, something we have blogged about here and here and here and here.

While a lot of attention has been paid to the intolerant attitudes of college students, relatively little attention has been paid to the possibility that the come to college already indoctrinated into intolerant political correctness.

Tactics of the Liberal Bullies

Fascist Bullying at Brown University

From National Review online: an article about how, at Brown University, a secret Facebook group is required to allow students to discuss political issues without fear of bullying. Some excerpts:

At Brown University, in Providence, R.I., there is a secret forum in which students may discuss potentially controversial issues freely. Let me say that again: At Brown, there is a secret forum in which students may discuss potentially controversial issues — or anything they want — freely.

Yes, there is an underground group whose purpose is to allow kids to say what they ought to be free to say above ground.

As David Frum remarked on Twitter, when he read the magazine piece, What is this? Warsaw 1983 or America 2015?

The group came about in this way: Last year, Brown was to host a debate on the issue of campus rape. In one corner was Jessica Valenti, a radical feminist, and in the other was Wendy McElroy, a radical libertarian. It was suspected that McElroy would deny there was a “culture of rape.” And this was intolerable to some students, who protested mightily — in advance, mind you.

The debate came off, to Brown’s credit. Not so the speech attempted the year before by Ray Kelly, who was New York’s police commissioner. At Brown, he was to give a lecture called “Proactive Policing in America’s Biggest City.” The kids at Brown, or some of them, were not interested in what he had to say — so they forced him off the stage, denying everyone else the right to hear him.

Needless to say, the protesters and censors accused Kelly of racism. His policing practices were racist, they charged. Of course, those practices — especially “stop and frisk” — saved countless lives. And most of those lives were black or brown. But this sort of thing is trivial to the “social justice warrior.”

Anyway, Kelly was not permitted to speak, but this Valenti-McElroy debate came off. Brown had taken some mollifying steps, however.

The university’s president announced that she opposed McElroy’s view — and scheduled a lecture for the same time as the debate. The lecture, by a Brown psychiatry professor, was called “The Research on Rape Culture.” Evidently, it was not enough that the debate would be just that: a debate, a clash of views. There had to be a separate event, without a debate, without a clash, without a disagreement.

Also, students set up a safe space for those who might attend the debate and be shaken by something they heard. A “safe space”? Yes. This space, in the words of Judith Shulevitz, writing in the New York Times, was a room “equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.”

. . .

In October, the [Brown Daily] Herald published a couple of controversial columns by a student writing under a pseudonym. These had to do with race, ethnicity, and that most radioactive of holidays: Columbus Day. The editors removed one of the columns from the paper’s website. And they apologized abjectly for the publication of both of them. I believe the apology resembles a Mao-era self-criticism. Is that going too far? Here’s a swatch:

We as The Herald are part of a history of Brown that is founded on inequality and that is too often slow to change. Brown itself is built on land that belonged to the Narragansett and Wampanoag nations, and yet the University has no formal relationships with them. … By failing to be more inclusive of marginalized voices, The Herald does not fully live up to its potential or our community’s expectations. We must continue to make active efforts to recruit and retain a diverse staff. Without this, we will continue to fall short and repeat our mistakes. To those who have been most deeply hurt, we ask you to share your voice with us and with the Brown community at large. Understandably, this is an unequal burden, but we cannot progress without help.

(To read the apology, or self-criticism, or editors’ note, in full, go here.)

Read the entire thing, especially the parts about the rationalizations the intolerant leftists use to shut up speech they don’t like. The key concepts are “violence” and “invalidating” and “marginalizing” or “erasing” the “experiences” of people deemed to be victims. All of these things reduce merely to disagreeing with the politically correct orthodoxy.

Update

An article about one of the examples of politically correct bullying at Brown, engagingly titled “White People Are Good With Cows, Brown University People Are Bad With Free Speech.”

Fascism Comes to Wauwatosa

This from a Town Hall Meeting where Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner appeared with State Senator Leah Vukmir. The audience was irate about Scott Walker’s bill requiring larger teacher contributions to health care and pension plans, and limits on union collective bargaining prerogatives.

Weren’t the teachers such wonderful role models for students?

Union Thuggery in Outstate Wisconsin

It’s not just Madison and Milwaukee. From the paper in bucolic Rhinelander, accounts of union thuggery.

In the latest attempt to put pressure on those who don’t agree with them, a pro union protester threatened Friday to put a local restaurant “out of business” because the business owner refused to put a pro-union sign in the business’s window.

Friday members of a group called Americans for Prosperity held a rally Friday at Wolff’s Log Cabin Restaurant in Rhinelander. We learned that someone representing one of the unions was also there to protest against Gov. Walker and the pro-Walker group. We were told, and the owners, Dave and Barb Wolff confirmed this, that when the group went into the building the anti-Walker protesters followed and blocked the parking lot. The owner, Dave, went out and asked them to leave room for customers and that’s when someone came up to he and his wife, Barb, and presented them with a union sign and told them to display it in their window. Dave refused and then they were threatened.

Barb asked if they were being blackmailed and the guy told them, “you can call it what you want, but we’re putting you out of business.”

We had this incident confirmed by four other people who were in attendance at the rally and personally witnessed this incident.

Some of these witnesses also told us that after the anti-Walker protesters left, one of those protesters apologized to Dave and Barb for the comments of the other anti-Walker protester.

We’ve heard and seen the signs that pro-union forces want businesses to display in their window “or else.” The “or else” being as the one protester said Friday “or we’re putting you out of business.” They are attempting this all over the state. Part of that effort is also, what can only be taken as a threat, is for union members to shop only at the businesses that have the pro-union signs and leave those who do not have the signs a little card that says something to the effect that union money was being spent there.

This is just another example, as I have said in an earlier column, where the bullies in this area are used to getting their way and they will use whatever force they can to do so even if it means putting a local couple out of business who were merely using their freedom of speech and who even allowed the anti-Walker protesters to be on the business’s property.

Of course, we want to be clear that there is nothing inherently wrong with using boycotts as a political weapon. Liberals have done it, and conservatives have done it.

But one is allowed to believe that one sort of boycott (say, by the civil rights movement against businesses that discriminated against blacks) was justified, and another (against businesses that have a difference of opinion about Scott Walker’s policies) isn’t.

There are differences of opinion about this, and we are stating ours, in the same way we might say there is a right to free speech, and then condemn some particularly noxious things that some bigot might say.