Dems stay silent when they should speak up
are radical people who want to deny us free speech, who want to close the campus to conversation, who want to stop people from having dialogue, who want to use violence ...”
The easy parallel to antifa and Berkeley is the properly horrified reaction of most decent Americans to the white supremacists and Nazis rallying recently in Charlottesville. The rally was ostensibly about protecting Confederate history, but in effect, with Nazis and the Klan there, it became the theater of white tribalism.
It resulted in the death of a counter protester, Heather Heyer, struck by a car driven by a mad and angry thug of the right. And President Donald Trump’s ridiculous equivocation after Charlottesville — chastising extremists but also saying that among them were some “fine people” — cost him dearly.
Berkeley happened not long before Harvey hit Texas and just as Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz. Arpaio had been convicted of a misdemeanor for violating a court order seeking to stop his office from discriminating against Latinos in a war against illegal immigration that has overwhelmed Arizona.
There is an easy argument that Arpaio represents the weakening of the rule of law. He was a sworn lawman who brazenly ignored the courts. But that’s a political slogan. Slogans are too easy. And they don’t get to the thing itself.
Because long before Arpaio was sheriff, the borders with Mexico had been corrupted. Republican big business wanted cheap and compliant Mexican agricultural labor. Democrats wanted a new dependent class of compliant constituents.
Federal immigration laws were already a joke. And when the rule of law is mocked by the political elites, it breaks down. History tells us that men like Arpaio enter the breach.
With leftist antifa thugs becoming increasingly violent, and mealy-mouthed Democratic politicians hesitant to denounce potentially useful political muscle, who steps into the breach?
I hope it worries you a bit. It worries me, too.