"Peace Activists"

Mark Stein writes,

Most of the news bulletins I'm exposed to are on the radio, as I'm tootling around hither and yon. So it took me a while to discover that what the media call "peace activists", "anti-racists" and "anti-Nazis" are, in fact, men and women garbed in black from head to toe, including face masks. Thus, as I pointed out on the radio last month, the violence on American streets derives from today's paramilitary wing of the Democrat Party - antifa - working itself up over yesterday's paramilitary wing of the Democrat Party - the Ku Klux Klan. Both have stupid pseudo-exotic self-romanticizing names and, as many commentators have observed, both have strict dress codes intended to conceal their identities. From white sheets to black bandanas is a mere fashion evolution: the purpose is the same - to do ugly things one could not confidently do with one's face known to all.

...In America today, Democrat state senators urge the assassination of the President and pay no price. To be fair, Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal was at pains to point out that she had no plans to kill Trump herself, merely that she wouldn't be averse to some John Wilkes Booth type volunteering his services - like that Bernie Sanders supporter who pumped those bullets into House Majority Whip Steve Scalise the other week and left him with injuries that will afflict him for the rest of his days.

...Meanwhile, the police stand around and watch. Administrators of publicly funded colleges dislike having to pay lip service to free speech and are happy to have antifa's shock troops on hand to send the message loud and clear. Municipal governments cannot, yet, be as openly hostile to dissent as college campuses are, but in Charlottesville, the authorities were plainly resentful at a judge's order commanding them to re-instate the neo-Nazis' rally permit, and they determined to circumvent it. So they surrendered the streets to the "anti-fascists", and then drove the "fascists" into their path: The good cops in effect decided to leave it to some informally deputized bad cops. The selective rule of law is one of the most unsettling features of contemporary America, and there will be a lot more of it in the years ahead.

...The media agree. And the Democrats mostly agree with the media - because the party's moderates are a bust, and such energy as remains among the Dems belongs all but entirely to the hardcore left. And their donors in Hollywood agree with the Dems and the media. So George Clooney gives bazillions to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which salts it away in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and other outposts of colonialism it supposedly reviles, and in return issues lists of "hate groups", by which they mean people who disagree with the SPLC by, say, keeping their money in American banks. If you make your living denouncing hatey-hatey haters all week long, it seems reasonable to conclude that you are, in fact, the hater. But instead "progressive" groups write to Google, Facebook, PayPal et al pointing out that, say, Jihad Watch has been "identified" by the SPLC as a hate group, and the panicked de facto Internet monopolies clutch their pearls and dump the haters. And pretty soon there's no news out there except from moderate, responsible, impartial sources like Wolf Blitzer arguing that Trump and his tiki torches are to blame for European jihadism.

Read more here.