Thursday, April 27, 2017

Still the same

Events have made it difficult to maintain a normal blogging schedule for at least the past week, but I'm hopeful we'll get better about it in the coming days. For today, let's consider the latest nonsense coming out of Berkeley, California:
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter has canceled her speech planned for this week at the University of California's Berkeley campus after a dispute with university officials, who feared violent protests, over whether a safe venue could be found.

"There will be no speech," she wrote in an email to Reuters on Wednesday, saying two conservative groups sponsoring her speech were no longer supporting her. "I looked over my shoulder and my allies had joined the other team," she wrote.
Ann Coulter has been doing her shtick for nearly 30 years now. We've heard it all before and one would ordinarily think the reaction to her appearance in any venue ought to be boredom, but here we have the battle joined.

The Left is not winning the argument these days. From what I can tell, they aren't even trying to win. The prevailing mode of discourse is you should shut up now.

For its part, the ACLU issued a pro forma denunciation of what happened to Coulter:

I doubt they will, though
Hateful speech isn't something directing other people to hate. It's whatever the bien pensant left would rather not contemplate. And in the end, all this nonsense at Berkeley is less about a conflict of visions (to use a phrase from Thomas Sowell) and more about turf. The Left has its redoubts and academe is a key one. It's bad enough the ravening hordes of Trump Nation are on the prowl in small towns and exurban enclaves, but they'd better stay the hell away from Sproul Plaza. Otherwise you get to meet these freedom fighters:

Image result for antifa
Love is in the air
They love you and have a wonderful plan for your life, so long as you get in line.

4 comments:

W.B. Picklesworth said...

What's going to be really interesting is how this ends up playing in actual elections. Trump probably isn't ever going to be popular; we're too divided on partisan lines for that. But this kind of behavior makes the Left look un-electable. However much they might say they hate fascists, they're the ones in the room who look, feel, and smell like goose-steppers.

Gino said...

its an easy problem to solve if your willing to break a few eggs.

Bike Bubba said...

Fighting fascism by dressing up as the Sturmabteilung/Squadristi and beating some people up for disagreeing with you....and as prominent voices on the left don't denounce them. Sad to say, this may actually be a step down from their response to the violence perpetrated against civil rights marches in the 1960s, as at least Northern Democrats came out on the right side of that one.

3john2 said...

If onlyf a few of them could be shown that "Orange is the new black."