Nothing to worry about, move along.
A Personal Blog
by Michael Froomkin
Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Miami School of Law
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C’mon Michael. Don’t keep buying into this crap. How about the ACTUAL acts of violence? (Pretty much entirely from the left.) How about all those supposed hate crimes in the wake of the election by Trump supporters? (All or pretty much all turned out to be hoaxes, or hoaxes pretending to be “attempts to raise a dialog.”) Even these non-bomb bombs are quite possibly a false flag operation (ironic that they were literally covered with a false flag) meant not to hurt anyone, but to make Trump supporters look like bad people worked up by Trump’s rhetoric. (Does any serious person think you can send packages to these people and they will happily open it themselves like the woman on the Wish.com commercial?)
This is the endless narrative every day, all day, Trump is evil, Trump is Hitler, Trump supporters are the stupidest Americans to ever be allowed to vote. Trump supporters want to beat you up. This is just childish and deaf to history.
Remember before the election, I mean HOURS before the result came in how all the Yale, Harvard, and Columbia graduates of the world were positive that Trump had no chance? Remember all the very smart people on TV explaining confidently with their electoral charts how it was a mathematical IMPOSSIBILITY for him to win? Remember how Hillary even stopped campaigning because she was such a shoe in? Does ANY of this ring a bell?
The reason it turned out like it did is simply because smart people from Yale, Harvard, and Columbia don’t actually have a lock on knowing what people who didn’t go to Yale, Harvard, and Columbia think and want and what might offend them. You posting this just proves that point again. While I’m sure it will get you pats on the back from the right-thinkers who surround you, “you showed those Drumpf idiots!”, this constant hateful narrative, the reason you got Trump to start with, will be the reason you get Trump again. And you will be just as dumbfounded a second time as you were after the election in ’16.
What was it Santayana said…?
I don’t know where you get your news, but you are being badly served (or if you pay for it, robbed) if you think political violence in the last year or two is not a primarily right-wing phenomenon.
I’m not sure what metric one would use for “ACTUAL acts of [political] violence”, but surely the white supremacist violence, from killing a woman in Charlottesville, to the Proud Boys, to the today’s pipe bomber all go in the mix. I suspect you’d want to put the various black-garbed anarchists at WTO meetings and the like on the other side.
But the way in which the two sets of things are not comparable shows why the weighing game is the wrong one: right-wing violence is being tacitly and overtly praised at the highest levels of the right (“good people”, “my kind of guy”) and there are overt calls to violence. There is nothing — nothing — remotely comparable coming from the leaders of the left. Show me where Sanders, or Warren, or any elected or party official of national stature has endorsed violence? And if you find one (it’s a big country), was it condemned by others or met with silence?
The history we learn from is 1933 Germany, and contemporary Hungary and Poland.
One day before the pipe bomber made the news, the NY Times published more murder porn about Trump. And if you are paying any attention at all, you know it happens all the time these days.
Thankfully, the pipe-bomber seems to be more of a crank that should have been locked up years ago (once again) and who thankfully could not make a bomb anyway. Not excusing him at all. He did what he did. With whatever intent he had. But he was never going to actually harm anyone with those bombs, and he probably knew it.
Flash forward to today and we get a leftwing anti-Semite killing multiple people and at least some members of the Press saying it was inevitable since Trump supported the moving of the embassy.
How many would the memory-holed shooter have killed at the GOP softball field if someone there didn’t have a gun to help stop it? What was the ACTUAL cause of Rand Paul getting beaten badly by his neighbor?
Look, both sides have their crackpots, but I have never in my long lifetime seem such fomenting of violence and justifications for it on social media. Not a day goes buy, NOT ONE DAY, when my friends of social media don’t point out how all Trump supporters are complete idiots who should be jailed or even killed for being so stupid for supporting our President “Cheato” who also should be jailed or killed for the good of everyone. I do not see my conservative friends doing the same, because most of them have simply given up against the flood. I have friends that I can’t even comfortably interact with anymore because I know the hatred they feel for any conservative from their social media posts. maybe you honestly don’t see this, since you probably don’t interact much with a range of people as I must. Go on Twitter and talk about committing an act of violence against a republican and nothing happens, do the same against a democrat and you will be suspended. It happens over and over and over again. This is a new cultural norm. Consider yourself lucky if you don’t see it.
As to hate groups on the R side, they tend to be small and fringe. They do not tweet and have a million retweets because they are in Hollywood, or are journalists. Honestly, I never even HEARD of the Proud Boys before all my liberal friends got work up over them and posted everything evil they could think of accusing them of. I never heard of Richard Spencer until I was told by my oldest friend, who has now unfriended me for not knowing about and denouncing him immediately. Over 40 years of friendship thrown away because I didn’t even know about some fringe person who the left hates. And he’s not the only one, I’ve lost most of my oldest friends since Trump’s election because I will neither post anti-Trump stuff, nor explain to them why I don’t. Seriously – over and over again I’ve been called on to do so, and unfriended when I refuse.
So don’t tell me about how kind and accepting the left is in comparison to the hateful right. And certainly don’t compare the right to Nazi Germany.