Progressives have a long history of applauding violence when it’s aimed at their ideological opponents.
Progressives have a long history of applauding violence when it’s aimed at their ideological opponents.
Y ou’ll be happy to know that the New York Times did get around to covering Wednesday’s attempted murder of a United States Supreme Court justice. All you need to do is pick up the paper.
Well, no, no, it’s not front-page material — except for a teeny, tiny blurb under the vacuous heading “Arrest Near Home of Justice,” right under such feature page-one stories as “Vanishing Word in the Abortion Debate: Women” and “Back to the Office” Does ‘Never’ Work for You?”
Can’t really blame them though, right? I mean, today’s huge story — the only story really — is “INSIDE AN ATTACK ON DEMOCRACY.” Remember Thursday is Insurrection™ Day! Or, I should say, Insurrection™ Night — as in this evening’s prime-time Dem-dominated January 6 committee TV extravaganza, produced, at the behest of Nancy Pelosi’s House, by a bigwig former ABC executive.
Maybe the assassination story got a mention on page 2? Nope, sorry about that, not page 2 . . . or 3 . . . or 10 . . . or even 15. No, you’ll need to dig all the way down to page A-20 to find the Gray Lady’s grudging coverage of how “Man With Pistol, Crowbar And Zip Ties Is Arrested Near Kavanaugh’s Home.”
Do you think the Left might just have a political-violence problem?
Well, imagine what the coverage would be if, say, we switched out the word Kavanaugh and substituted Sotomayor. Think we’re still talking page A20? Of course not. It would be the only story — a story permitted to eclipse even Insurrection™.
Even if the threat to a progressive justice had merely been verbal — say a gasbag senator screaming, “I want to tell you, Sotomayor. I want to tell you Kagan. You have unleashed a whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions” — it would still be a blockbuster report. Not something trivial like, say, if a radical-leftist Bernie Sanders supporter were to, I don’t know, spray bullets at Republican lawmakers on a baseball field and damn near kill one of them. Unlike the armed attempted murder of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, even an unarmed threat to a progressive jurist would be treated as (all together now!) an attack on democracy itself.
You think this is a double standard? No. It’s the standard. If you don’t see that, it’s because you’re thinking about this the wrong way.
For woke-progressives who dominate the Left today, the dividing line is not violence, such that once you cross it, you are to be condemned no matter what political agenda drove you to act. The dividing line is good and evil, as progressives see them. If you support what Barack Obama vaporously called “transformational change,” and what his friend, the Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, more transparently calls “small-c communism,” you are good. If you are a conservative, if you value the Constitution (i.e., the white man’s charter of negative liberties), if you believe Amerikkka is a force for good in the world, then you are evil.
If you’re in the progressives’ good category, and someone tried to assassinate you, you’d be a media obsession. If you’re in the evil category, you’re page A-20 . . . and that’s only because the Democrats’ media partners don’t want to be harangued about how they never covered it. And by the way, that’s only at the beginning, right after an event like the attempted murder of Kavanaugh happens. Once the dust settles, say by Sunday or Monday, it’ll be safe to start running the “Why Kavanaugh Had It Coming” stories.
When Republicans protest, the Biden administration sees incitement or even domestic terrorism. When radical leftists violate clear federal law by protesting at the home of conservative Supreme Court justices, the Biden administration sees “passion.” How else is good supposed to respond to evil?
Once you understand that the redline is good/evil, not violence, everything else makes sense. The Left knows you think the line should be violence, so they try to finesse the point, often hilariously. Hence the deadpan media commentary in CNN or MSNBC segments about “mostly peaceful protests” — even those where you see streets literally on fire. But the dirty little not-so-secret is that the Left admires its terrorists and assassins. They don’t see these sociopaths as violent. Or better, they see virtue in the violence, a sign that their side has the courage to put it all on the line for The Cause.
Just a few days ago, the Biden administration threw another lifeline to leftist lawyers who firebombed a police car. The Justice Department had already gutted this terrorism case down to one serious felony, for which privileged radical attorneys Colinford Mattis (a graduate of NYU Law School) and Urooj Rahman (a graduate of Fordham Law School) were looking at ten years’ imprisonment — whereas a January 6 rioter, if you could find one who deployed a Molotov cocktail (and none have been found), would be looking at life imprisonment. But even that outrageous leniency was insufficient as far as DOJ’s woke-progressives were concerned. So they just reimagined the crime into something it wasn’t and, presto, the terrorists will now be sentenced, on the Biden prosecutors’ recommendation, to 18 to 24 months in prison.
To repeat, that’s for firebombing a police car.
No surprise. The Biden Justice Department has scorched the earth to find the most minor, nonviolent Trump supporters merely for being on the scene during the Capitol riot and dragged them across the country to face criminal prosecution on misdemeanors that are virtually never charged. Yet progressive prosecutors have dropped hundreds of cases against radical leftists who rioted and looted in the “mostly peaceful” nationwide, monthslong George Floyd protests, and they’ve reduced charges to a stunning degree even for acts of arson that caused death.
The Left doesn’t want to prosecute its terrorists. It lionizes its terrorists.
The aforementioned Bill Ayers and his wife and terrorist sidekick Bernardine Dohrn? They’re now respected academics. Their foster son, Chesa Boudin, is progressive royalty, which is what got him elected DA until, even in San Francisco, they could no longer abide a prosecutor who won’t prosecute (because enforcing the laws is, you know, racist). Ayers and Dohrn had to raise young Chesa because his parents, their Weatherman terrorist pals Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, never came home one night in October 1981 . . . because they were arrested for conspiring with Black Liberation Army terrorists to carry out the Brinks robbery, murdering two police officers and a security guard, and seriously wounding another cop.
Naturally, after Kathy Boudin was released from her 20-year prison sentence, Columbia University rolled out the red carpet, enabling her to found the university’s “Center for Justice” (what else?). It was by then a well-worn path. Ayers recently retired after decades as the Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior Scholar at the University of Illinois. Though Dohrn’s terrorist activities and contempt conviction complicated her ability to become a member of the bar, Northwestern stepped up to make her a clinical associate professor of law at its Children and Family [all together now!] Justice Center.
What about Weatherman David Gilbert? Well, in his last official act before resigning in disgrace, Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Democratic governor, granted Gilbert clemency so he could be sprung from his murder sentence. That’s why he was available, along with Ayers and Communist Party darling Angela Davis, to campaign for Boudin a few days ago. (Hard to believe he lost, no?)
Eric Holder rode his student radicalism at Columbia to Democratic Party stardom. As Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general, he helped the president concoct a corrupt pardon process that Clinton used not only to grant clemency to fugitive Marc Rich but also to spring Weatherman terrorists Linda Evans (a Brinks-robbery conspirator who also bombed the Senate in 1983) and Susan Rosenberg (a Brinks-robbery conspirator finally captured three years after the robbery in possession of 700 pounds of explosives). Protests by evil parents and alumni prevented the noble Rosenberg from taking plum teaching posts at John Jay College and Hamilton College, but she’s progressive royalty, so she landed on her feet: a top board position at Thousand Currents, at the vortex of progressive funding streams that buy mansions for underwrite the social-justice activism of Black Lives Matter.
Meanwhile Holder, who was also at the DOJ for Clinton’s clemency grant to FALN terrorists, was of course promoted to attorney general in the Obama administration. At the end of his term, President Obama granted clemency to progressive darling Chelsea Manning (the transgender former Army intelligence analyst convicted of leaking classified information about evil Bush’s war of aggression in Iraq) and FALN terrorist leader Oscar López Rivera, whom even Clinton wouldn’t pardon because he was too brazen about refusing to express remorse.
We should stop acting as if we’re surprised that the media-Democrat complex has trouble condemning terrorists, violent assailants, and sundry radicals who hate America and target conservatives. They prefer to reward and honor these radicals. In their heart of hearts, leftists don’t see violence as evil. They see conservatives as evil.