Antifa Thugs are the New Brownshirts

Antifa Just Showed Its True Colors. Again.

There is no apologetic for Marxist violence.

By David French
National Review Online

If 2016 is the year when our political parties failed, inflicting on America arguably its worst presidential choice in our nation’s history, then 2017 is when our broader institutions began to lose their collective minds. This is the year when reasonable men surrendered to unreason — when political tribalism trumped human decency.

The primary tragedy of Charlottesville was the loss of a young woman’s life. The secondary tragedy was the distortion of our political culture. The president of the United States actually declared some portion of a collection of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and alt-right white nationalists to be “very fine people.” He just couldn’t bring himself to completely disavow men and women who’d supported him since the day he descended down the escalator at Trump Tower.

Yet rather than doing the easiest and most sensible thing in the world — condemning white supremacy while also condemning political violence on the far left — some portion of the left-wing intelligentsia actually decided to embrace their own thugs. They supported Antifa. They decided to lionize some of the worst people in American life. And in so doing, they actually compared them to the American heroes who stormed Omaha Beach. The tweets below, as the saying goes, did not age well.

Antifa and the Alt-Right

Growing in Opposition to One Another

There is a cancer in the body politic. We must cut it out, or be destroyed.

By Ben Shapiro
National Review Online


America has cancer.  On Saturday, a crowd of alt-right white supremacists, neo-confederates, and Nazi sympathizers marched in Charlottesville, Va.; they were confronted by a large group of protesters including members of the Marxist Antifa — a group that has time and again plunged volatile situations into violence, from Sacramento to Berkeley. There’s still no certain knowledge of who began the violence, but before long, the sides had broken into the sort of brutal scrum that used to characterize Weimer-era Germany. The two sides then carried the red banner and the swastika; so did the combatants on Saturday.

Then a Nazi-sympathizing alt-right 20-year-old Ohioan plowed his car into a crowd of protesters, killing one and injuring 19. The president of the United States promptly failed egregiously to condemn alt-right racism; instead, he opted for a milquetoast statement condemning “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.”

The Left leapt into action, declaring Trump’s statement utterly insufficient — which, of course, it was. But they then went further, declaring that Antifa was entirely innocent, despite Antifa’s launching into violence against pro-Trump marchers in Seattle over the weekend, as they have in Sacramento and Berkeley; berating New York Times journalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg for having the temerity to report that “the hard left seemed as hate-filled as the alt-right”; and suggesting that all conservatives were, at root, sympathizers with the Nazi-friendly alt-right.

And so here we stand.

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

It's Not OK to Punch Fascists

Even if they deserve the term

Liam Hehir
Stuff

Not long ago, disreputable Right-winger Richard Spencer was attacked on live television. Spencer is often accused of being a Nazi though he disputes that label.

A man attacks Richard Spencer during the ABC's live interview.

He is undoubtedly a purveyor of white identity politics, however, and is notable for coining the term "alt-right". At the time he was attacked he was being interviewed on the street during the Trump presidential inauguration. A man came up, smashed him in the side of the face and ran off.

A punch directly to the head is serious business. A blow to the cranium – even a relatively restrained one – can cause lasting damage. Spencer could have been seriously hurt or even killed.

Nevertheless, for many "liberals" in the United States and elsewhere, the sight of such a villainous personage being clocked caused much glee. The offender was compared to Indiana Jones, Captain America, the Blues Brothers and other pop-culture icons who were famous for their (fictional) assaults on Nazis.  Videos of the incident set to music went viral, with a former Obama administration speechwriter tweeting that, "I don't care how many different songs you set Richard Spencer being punched to, I'll laugh at every one."

Since then, it has become clear that the idea of using violence against alleged fascists has gained some respectability.

Letter From America (About Japan)

Japan Reverts to Fascism

Tsunami in Japanese politics.

By Josh Gelernter
National Review Online

This week, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party ("LDP") and its coalition partners won a two-thirds majority in the legislature’s upper house, to go along with their two-thirds majority in the lower house. A two-thirds majority is required in each house to begin the process of amending Japan’s constitution. And amending the constitution is one of the central planks in the LDP’s platform.

The constitution was imposed on Japan by the United States after the Second World War; it has never been amended. Why should it be amended now? As Bloomberg reports, the LDP has pointed out that “several of the current constitutional provisions are based on the Western European theory of natural human rights; such provisions therefore [need] to be changed.”

What has the LDP got against the “Western European theory of natural human rights”? you might ask. Well, dozens of LDP legislators and ministers — including Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe — are members of a radical nationalist organization called Nippon Kaigi, which believes (according to one of its members, Hakubun Shimomura, who until recently was Japan’s education minister) that Japan should abandon a “masochistic view of history” wherein it accepts that it committed crimes during the Second World War. In fact, in Nippon Kaigi’s view, Japan was the wronged party in the war.

Letter From America (About How Fascism May Emerge)

This is How Fascism Comes to America

Robert Kagan
The Washington Post

Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing columnist for The Post.

The Republican Party’s attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be laughable were it not so perilous to the republic. If only he would mouth the party’s “conservative” principles, all would be well.

But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy. Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. Because it did not immediately and fully embrace Trump, because a dwindling number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist him, the party is regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance is to him and him alone.

And the source of allegiance? We’re supposed to believe that Trump’s support stems from economic stagnation or dislocation. Maybe some of it does. But what Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies — his proposals change daily. What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence.

 His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common:

Making Sport For Neighbours

Left Wing, Right Wing, and Industrialised Inhumanity

Mr Bennett once sarcastically remarked that the raison d'etre of the Bennett household was to make sport for its neighbours, so the Bennetts, in turn, could laugh at them.  It was a wickedly clever line parodying respectable society in Georgian England.    Similar observations could be made in our day about our "masters" the political classes, and their fawning, downstairs attendants--the media.

Let's face it.  The media long ago ceased to be the bastion of liberty and the ever vigilant constructive critic of politicians and government.  However much the modern clutch of media personnel may deny it, however they may mock and laugh at the antics of those upstairs, in reality they need those pollies for their jobs.  They depend upon them.  The political classes and the media are our modern version of the Bennetts and their neighbours. 

Every so often little tizzies break out in the neighbourhood.  It makes sport for the rest of us.

Orwellian Dystopia Emerging in Post-Fascist Italy

The Rise of Homo-fascism

Posted on December 20, 2013 

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D.

Turtle Bay and Beyond

 

If you thought Phil Robertson from Duck Dynasty is being treated unfairly by A&E, then you have to get a load of what is happening in Italy with regards to media treatment of dissenting views on homosexuality.

The government has just issued a new set of guidelines for journalists on how to treat “LGBT” people. The guidelines, funded by the Council of Europe, dictate what terms and images must be used by the media and which cannot be used when treating LGBT subjects. Journalists who do not comply are threatened with legal and professional penalties.    Journalists are instructed not use negative sexual images from gay pride events and to refrain from employing terms like “natural family”, “traditional family” and “gay marriage”. The guidelines explain that those terms are discriminatory and that marriage and family alone will do.

Letter from Turtle Bay (About France)

The ugly face of Gay-fascism

Posted on | June 20, 2013 by J.C. von Krempach, J.D.

Turtle Bay and Beyond

It is as foreseeable as it is unavoidable: a government that abuses its power to impose absurd and counter-natural laws such as on same-sex “marriages” will soon face massive protest. And given that such laws cannot be defended with rational arguments, those in power take recourse to violence and blatant human rights abuse.

Police using tear gas against peaceful defenders of marriage and family

Sadly, France is now in such a downward spiral. All those among us who believe in human rights and civil liberties should closely watch what is going on in this country, which once proudly thought of itself as the place where human rights originated, but which is now turning into something like a dictatorship in which gender-theory and homosexualist ideology hold sway, while human rights defenders are persecuted and the freedom of opinion is trampled upon.

There is now a first victim to deplore.

Fodder for Fascism

Afraid of Little People

A public brouhaha is under way in New Zealand over the merits and demerits of charter schools.  A list of horrible things that charter schools will allegedly do is being trumpeted by the teacher unions.  They are absolutely certain that charter schools would be evil and wicked and do immeasurable harm.

A similar propaganda campaign is being waged in Britain--except there charter schools have been in operation for some time.  As a result the rhetoric has ratcheted up a few degrees.  Brendan O'Neill, writing in The Telegraph looks at some of the latest allegations.  Apparently free (that is, charter) schools are going to spread fascism.  If charter schools go ahead we predict that it is only a matter of time before we see similar allegations surfacing in New Zealand.