"Racist!" -- The No Muss, No Fuss, No-Need-To-Debate Way To Shut People Up
John McWhorter writes on CNN that "educated liberals" overuse the term "racist" -- to the point of meaninglessness.
"White supremacist" is another one that gets splashed around every old place.
Absurdly, I've seen that one stuck on various practicing Orthodox Jews on Twitter.
As McWhorter puts it, it's now "hauled out at anything but the most timid of questions about the hard-left line on race." McWhorter continues:
It has become clear over the past few years that the shouting students and their civilian accomplices (the latter of whom have sometimes outnumbered the former, as at Middlebury when Charles Murray was accosted) are a charismatic minority who do not represent general opinion, even among enlightened people on the left. The verdict is in: even those of us deeply committed to battling discrimination and inequality find this shutting down of speakers barbaric: unintellectual, uncivil, crude, counterproductive....Clearly the catharsis of fighting for what they believe is The Good is too powerful for these protestors to heed advice so mild as to ask them to reflect before they perform.
That's just it: these protestors are unmoved by comparisons to fascists or Nazis or even today's neo-Nazis, because they suppose that their commitment to antiracism is "right" in a way that Mussolini, Hitler and Richard Spencer are not. They think they're different.
That presents those of us who disagree with their tactics with a special challenge: to shut them down may give the appearance of condoning racism. That's a tough one, because antiracism is educated America's religion, in almost every sense of the term. It's a sign of the extent to which, contrary to claims such as Ta-Nehisi Coates', the Civil Rights movement transformed the moral and intellectual fabric of this country.
As such, the protesters are testing us in an unprecedented way. Can level-headed university administrators muster the moral courage -- and that's what it would be -- to start having the most vocal and disruptive of these modern-day hooligans physically removed from all such events?
They should.
Shouting down another person's speech is not exercise of free speech but free thuggery.
As I said on Twitter a few days ago, each person is free to protest a speaker they disagree with -- just not by interrupting or shouting down their speech or otherwise stopping them from speaking.
via @YeyoZa
That's the problem with these sick leftists groups like Antifa. Some of their supporters, while somewhat begrudgingly condemning Antifa's violent tactics, seem to be grateful that Antifa is on "their" side. But are they?
Antifa will attack anyone who has a different opinion, condemning their opposition as "fascists," whether they actually are or not. Who's a racist/fascist/Nazi/white supremacist? Whomever Antifa decides.
And once they have decided for you that you're a fascist, they give themselves the green light to use violence against you.
Patrick at October 22, 2017 11:08 PM
Racist was already overused years ago, Nazi is the new shut down word and it's already overused.
Part of the problem is the media is their echo chamber. Repeat the slogans often enough and suppress the other voices and many will think you have won, that dissenting views are in the extreme minority. The reality is anything but that.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/general_lifestyle/july_2013/more_americans_view_blacks_as_racist_than_whites_hispanics
Actual polls on what people (not the media) think. "Among black Americans, 31% think most blacks are racist, while 24% consider most whites racist and 15% view most Hispanics that way. "
One
Joe J at October 22, 2017 11:37 PM
Naturally, on Twitter, McWhorter was labeled a white supremacist for that article.
https://twitter.com/MiriamShulamit/status/921888208526413824
> Shutting down protesters who are protesting White Supremacy tells me where you stand.
jerry at October 23, 2017 12:35 AM
"Fascist" now means anyone with whom they disagree and whom they don't like. Soon, it will be anyone with whom they disagree. Then, it will be anyone.
Leftist student protestors at UC Santa Cruz invaded a College Republicans meeting because Republicans are "fascists, white supremacists, and racists." The College Republicans offered to debate the protestors, but were rebuffed; the protestors wanted the meeting shut down. "A black [campus security] officer showed up and the protesters responded by explaining racism and white supremacy to him," one liberal witness told a reporter.
See, they get to define the nature of the crimes of their enemies. Now that they've determined that Republicans are "racist" and "fascist" by their own definitions of those words, they can begin the process of banning opposing parties and establishing the one-party state.
Welcome to the Revolution.
Conan the Grammarian at October 23, 2017 5:19 AM
"And once they have decided for you that you're a fascist, they give themselves the green light to use violence against you."
Yep. And like all mob movements, when they run out of enemies, it is necessary to invent some new ones. That's when people who consider themselves revolutionaries in good standing suddenly find themselves Trotskyized. And they go to their political graves still failing to see how the machine that they helped create really works.
Cousin Dave at October 23, 2017 6:45 AM
Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.
- Lavrentiy Beria
Antifa is simply following in the steps of the NKVD that Beria headed.
I R A Darth Aggie at October 23, 2017 6:47 AM
Just a few examples:
The list of revolutionaries who suddenly became extraneous to their own revolutions is long, but ultimately undistinguished.
The Revolution always eats its own.
Conan the Grammarian at October 23, 2017 8:08 AM
I think that liberals, progressives, socialists, fascists, communists, antifa and other leftists don't disapprove of what Hitler and the Nazis did, but only with why they did it.
Ken R at October 23, 2017 10:14 AM
In Portland, a neighborhood parade was canceled last year because Antifa threatened violence if republicans were allowed in the parade. I sure don't want these people "on my side". They will not tolerate a two-party political system. They don't even understand that reasonable people can disagree about values and goals, like how much taxes we should pay and whether we should get involved in some particular war. They boil it all down to identity politics, ignoring all the other issues in life, and then label people as the enemy accordingly.
cc at October 23, 2017 12:41 PM
Conan, your reference to the meeting that got disrupted was a little sparse in details, so I googled it. I found this article, complete with videos of the student protesters, who were ultimately arrested.
Patrick at October 23, 2017 4:13 PM
If university administrators will NOT remove these barbarians from the events they disrupt, the law should at least require that they stay out of the way so that the speaker's own security (if he brought any) can do the job.
If Antifa or BLM want to be heard, they can rent a meeting hall of their own, just like their opponents.
jdgalt at October 23, 2017 4:33 PM
"...and other leftists don't disapprove of what Hitler and the Nazis did, but only with why they did it."
I've long had the impression that the hard Left neither disapproves of Hitler's goals nor of his methods... they only sneer at him because he lost. I don't recall the Left having any particular issues with Franco's decades-long Facist government in Spain, nor of the Peronists in Argentina, until after the fact.
Cousin Dave at October 24, 2017 6:06 AM
The Nazis were Leftists.
Fascism and Communism are both collectivist ideologies.
The National Socialist German Workers Party platform included higher minimum wages, old age pensions, universal healthcare, and more. The reasons the Nazis got pegged as right-wingers was their opposition to the Communists (they were competing for the same voters) and the nationalism that is at the root of fascism.
Communism was an internationalist movement, believing political borders to be elements of class oppression. Fascism, on the other hand, emphasized national solidarity. The scale of the collectivism was the main difference between them.
The Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei added elements of militant xenophobia and scientific racism to its fascist foundation.
Conan the Grammarian at October 24, 2017 8:48 AM
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