If you’re politically aware, you likely know about protests in Portland from a week ago. Billed by the press as a clash between Antifa and the Proud Boys, the scene descended in to violent and dangerous chaos.
This is but an intellectual child of Saul Alinsky and knowingly or not, Antifa and far leftists are simply parroting Alinsky and his rules. None of this is original nor surprising, but it is dangerous. Read on.
Most known from the protest was the assault of Andy Ngo. Ngo was at the protest as a journalist and editor for the online publication Quillette. Quillette describes themselves as “political moderates of a liberal centrist persuasion”. Prior to his being attacked while at the protest, Andy Ngo took no action prompting the beating he received. That is, other than simply just being there.
Andy Ngo, gay and Asian, has a history with Antifa. The so-called anti-fascists have an axe to grind with Andy. Prior to the riotous protest, Rose City Antifa singled out the journalist as a target during the clash. Ngo has been covering Antifa for some time and has been getting under their collective skin..and face masks.
The great crime of Andy Ngo was his reporting Antifa actions. For his trouble, Mr. Ngo was kicked, punched, milkshaked (laced with cement) and was diagnosed with a brain hemorrhage. At a minimum, this is aggravated assault if not attempted premeditated murder.
The violence of the Antifa perpetrators was disguised by their masked faces belying cowardice of a mob of caucasian men beating on a singular asian, gay man.
Pointedly, I’m no fan of the Proud Boys. Antifa showed up to counter a rally by the Proud Boys. Andy Ngo is not a Proud Boy. Still he was brutalized.
One of the ‘tenets’ of Antifa is that if you’re not ‘with us’, you are the enemy. This means that if you’re simply a bystander and do not act with them, you are the enemy.
Though the Proud Boys were the focus of reported clashes, another group assembled to support #HimToo founder Haley Adams. Adams created what he’s referred to as the Him Too ‘movement’ as a counter to attention given to #MeToo (which was a reaction to recent attention given to sexual assaults on women). Adams’ idea asserts that men can be victims of false accusations of sexual assault.
Not to digress; but the idea that men need some movement to protect them is, to say the least, misguided. The plausibility of false assault accusations exists because men overwhelmingly perpetrate proven sexual assaults. It’s better served to protect women from actual assaults than to do as Adams does; make a political cause for something that, while awful, is a rarity as is a false accusation.
Like the Proud Boys, I find Adams so-called cause to be wrongheaded. Also, it seems that Adams and the Proud Boys exist simply to be agitators and serve no benefit to conservatives. Pot stirring as a counter measure to the Antifa pot stirrers does nothing for anyone.
Haley Adams had scheduled a rally for ‘Him Too’ on the same day and same general location as the Proud Boys rally. Attending the Him Too rally were John Blum and Adam Kelly.
As events spiraled out of control, Antifa set their sites on a couple dozen #HimToo attendees. Caught in the melee, the Antifa gangs took upon a nearby unidentified gay man wearing a sun dress. Both chasing and assaulting this man.
John Blum and Adam Kelly saw this attack and interceded to protect the man in the sundress. The left has made much hay of the fact that one of the gay man’s protectors had a small police baton available. It’s not clear that it was used other than to help the attacked man.
For their troubles in helping this gay man, Blum and Kelly, per the Washington Times, “…the video of the attack shows the red-bearded Kelly being hit in the head, kicked and sprayed with gas as he moved toward the older Mr. Blum, who was grabbed and beaten with a pipe or crowbar by a crowd of black-clad assailants.” Continuing, “While John was being pummeled by the mob in the center, Adam was struck in the head with nunchucks, water bottles, some sort of metal rod, and fists.”
It was further reported that one Antifa assailant wielded a sock filled with a lock during the attack.
In the current climate, political violence is owned by the left. Make this claim and many liberal and leftists alike will holler “Charlottesville”. Insisting those riots were an example of rightwing violence.
The awful event precipitating the Charlottesville riot was called the ‘Unite the Right’ rally. It did nothing of the sort. It had nothing to do with actual conservatism.
Recall during the 2017 Charlottesville riot that Ohioan, James Fields, plowed a car through the crowded melee, hurting many and killing one woman, Heather Heyer. It was a singularly evil and cowardly act. This week Fields was sentenced to life in prison.
This will never replace the loss of Ms. Heyer to her family and whatever there could have been in her young and promising life.
Conservatives from never-Trumper David French of National Review to conservative stalwart Ben Shapiro condemned these so-called Unite the Right organizers. People like French, Shapiro and innumerable conservatives did condemn this act clearly and categorically. Simply because racist organizers of the rally invoked a claim of being ‘on the right’ does not make it true. The complete absence of anyone seen as legitimately conservative at the rally/protest, along with forceful condemnation of the following events, makes clear that this had nothing to do with conservatives.
If the right was united about any of this, it was in a clear condemnation of the racist organizers.
According the prominent leftists commenting on the recent Portland Antifa attacks, Ngo’s treatment was no biggie. Nathan Bernard who bills himself on Twitter as a ‘free speech activist’, reckons Ngo was asking for it:
Funny that he calls Tim Pool a ‘far-right simpleton’ since Pool is a center left liberal. Pool’s great crime is that he doesn’t buy in to leftisms censorious tendencies. He donates to Democrat Tulsi Gabbard and advocates for liberal leaning policy. Since Tim hasn’t gone down the rabbit hole of AOC-styled leftism, he’s called ‘far-right’.
Whatever Nathan Bernard believes in, it’s obviously not free speech if he’s trying to justify the Ngo beating.
Then there’s Charlotte Clymer.
Identifying herself as both a Human Rights Campaign staffer and a Hillary Clinton staffer, Clymer showed us all the charm of her former boss by tweeting her hot take on Ngo’s attack:
Twitter really is a cesspool of the intellectually weak.
What’s clear in these tweets along with media talking heads like Chris Cuomo, who has tried to justify the existence of Antifa; the only thing that matters is your ideology. Logical consistency be damned. As AOC tells us, you only need be morally correct.
Journalists and leftists scream loudly of the virtues of a free and protected press when trolled by Trump. If you’re on the political right and a journalist, then to hell with you!
Trying to soft-sell the idea that Ngo’s account of the attack was subject to interpretation, so-called fact checker Snopes questioned Ngo’s account by trying to question his editorial credentials and further stating that Quillette was a “conservative” publication. Quillette editor-in-chief was having none of it:
Like the Charlottesville murdering coward James Fields, the modern left does not stand up in the face of overwhelming odds. This is now a bygone era and true courage like that of the Civil Rights Movement is over.
Modern leftists swarm those they’ve outnumbered a la Antifa. Absent a mob, you might be a proud leftist dude willing to kick a woman, and kicking her in the head. Jordan Hunt did this to pro-life activist Marie-Claire Bissonnette. This after kicker Hunt also ripped a pro-life ribbon from the jacket of Ms. Bissonnette while smugly mocking her.
Sure, upon kicking Bissonnette in the head, Hunt was heard to say that he was only trying to kick the phone out of her hands. That he did not mean to kick her in the head.
Because kicking her hands is no less an assault? Dude, you kicked a woman!! In the head!!! Would you have been all ‘Captain Mixed Martial Arts’ were it an Army Ranger?
I thought so…
The main stream media reaction to the Bissonnette assault was swift and decisive. If you consider not reporting anything decisive. A woman was kicked in the head for political reasons and was deemed as not newsworthy. She was pro-life and conservative and Jordan Hunt was a lefty.
If you’re a conservative kid wearing a MAGA hat perpetrating the great crime of smirking? Bring that bastard down! Now that’s a story!
The left is able to justify action in the face of otherwise morally reprehensible circumstances. Somewhere along the line, the left was convinced that the end justifies the means. Today’s leftists are, verse and chapter, a representation of Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’. Literally..to the word.
It’s a bit chilling.
Alinsky tells us, “The second rule of the ethics of means and ends is that the judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment.”
Alinsky uses this to set up an ‘at any cost’ response to the evil of your opponent. To which he proposes, “If you actively opposed the Nazi occupation and joined the underground Resistance, then you adopted the means of assassination, terror, property destruction, the bombing of tunnels and trains, kidnapping, and the willingness to sacrifice innocent hostages to the end of defeating the Nazis.”
Alinsky justifies radical actions as a necessary artifact of war as a response to the evil of the suppressor, “However, in such conflict, neither protagonist is concerned with any value except victory. It is life or death.”
Alinsky on Resistance:
“…neither protagonist is concerned
with any value except victory.
It is life or death.”
This type of language is used by the modern left and is a direct, near verbatim, recitation of Alinsky principles. That opponents, such as the political right, are Nazi’s and in order to restore rightful order, violence is needed. Violence now being the calling card of Antifa and many on the left.
Donald Trump’s election was simply the left’s great call to arms.
The modern left has wrapped itself tightly in this ideology. It has so thoroughly ingested the pills of radical college leftism that the left now convinces itself that there is nobility in violence.
Sometimes behind a coward’s mask.
In absence of any large scale violence from the political right, leftists now embrace the concept of ideas and words being ‘violence’. The left considers any economic policy that is not the left’s policy to be racist. There’s no statistical argument. There’s an emotional and extreme claim of racism that would justify violent responses.
To the left, ‘words are violence’ when the words come from the right. If someone is being violent to you, even if only with ‘violent words’, it is righteous they suggest, to return the violence. Physical violence is an acceptable response to disagreeable words.
How utterly stupid. Damned mob of cowards.
Whether the Proud Boys or Antifa or all of them instigating this mess, consider this; who’s best known as masked attackers? Who attacked innocent bystanders or a lone and otherwise defenseless journalist?
The left.
Then ask yourself who stood up, with no mask, and defended a man in a sundress?
Not the left. The leftists were attackers.
Still, the cowards of the press and liberal pretenders, unwilling to lose Twitter followers, fail to condemn the Antifa violence. Instead, they co-opt a sort of sexual assault lingo by suggesting that Andy Ngo ‘was asking for it’.
For your average conservative, the only effective tool is to vote the leftist intellectual bottom dredging bums like Ocasio-Cortez out of office. Retaliatory violence should not be, and is not, acceptable. Battle at the ballot box. Battle in the courts when silenced. Battle in the media when possible.
Otherwise the cowardly weak like Antifa will continue to rampage unabated.
Unacceptable.
