Conservatives believe that Nazis are vicious, vile, thuggish losers; leftists (including liberals) believe that Communists and Antifas are just "liberals with the courage of their convictions."

Which is totally screwed up.

Ann Althouse provides another example proving my thesis, involving a reporter whose camera was smashed.

Per the reporter:

//For what it’s worth, I’m a middle-aged white guy. The young man who snatched my camera was also white. I looked at him and shook my head. “Seriously, man!? Is that really necessary?” It was all a bit of a blur, but I think my next words were, “Dude, I’m on your side”—meaning the side that finds white supremacists repugnant....//

Per Althouse:

//Hey, journalist — you call yourself a "journalist" — how about not being on any side? Have you completely forgotten that idea? Sad about your camera, but what about your ethics? Did somebody grab them too and smash them on the pavement? Or is it still possible to scrounge back somewhere in your head and find them?**//

There is no problem with finding white supremacists repugnant, but how about a little repugnance for violent leftist totalitarians?

Conservatives think that Nazis are violent thugs; leftists think that Antifa are "well-meaning but painfully misguided."

Can you imagine what would happen if a conservative described White Supremacists as "well-meaning but painfully misguided"?

Nonetheless, it is good to see what we may hope are some remaining actual liberals distance themselves from the totalitarian wing of their ideology.

This is a pretty good essay on the conundrum that liberals find themselves in because of their "no enemies to the left" tendency.


//When asked to define Alt-Left, I would describe it as a leftist but illiberal authoritarian ideology rooted in postmodernism and neo-Marxism that supports censorship, condones violence in response to speech, is obsessed with identity politics (much like the Alt-Right), and functions like a secular religion that gives its believers a sense of moral self-worth. It masquerades as a form of liberalism, but it has more in common with authoritarianism than its true believers can (or want to?) admit. It claims to speak for the marginalized, but it either ignores or attempts to hatefully shame members of marginalized groups who do not subscribe to the ideology. It is not simply Antifa; it is the ideology that undergirds Antifa, and it has swallowed much of BLM and intersectional third wave feminism. It wishes to swallow the whole of the left, the country, the world. It is rooted in nihilism, resentfulness, and arrogance, though it presents itself as being rooted in equality, justice and morality. It favors collectivism over individualism, statism over liberty, forced equality of outcome over freedom. Now…imagine if I had to say that mouthful every time I wished to talk about the Alt-Left because I bought into the notion that to give it a name it would be insulting to fellow liberals. No, to speak of it by name is to out it for what it is and to reduce some of its power.

I can’t tell you how good it felt when I first discovered the work of Dave Rubin, a reasonable liberal, and realized I wasn’t alone in seeing this pernicious belief system for what it really is. In this video, Rubin offers that it doesn’t matter which term we use, what’s important is that we are allowed to identify the problem. “Whatever name you use for this well-meaning yet painfully misguided set of ideas is largely irrelevant. We needed this phrase to identify this backwards ideology which puts groups before people. And sometimes you need a label to get people to understand an idea.”//