Look Over Here!
By Y'all I think Megan McArdle just low-key admitted to slaughtering puppies https://t.co/0IaHD5tGsw
— superkarate🐒 (@LedZepBoxedSet) September 18, 2017
For normal people Charlottesville was a scary wakeup call. Literal nazis, unambiguously emboldened by a white supremacist Trump administration committed an act of domestic terrorism, and killed someone. Did you know Charlottesville is a city? It is. But in the minds of people who don’t want to grapple with the terribleness of what happened there, it doesn’t exist. There is only Berkeley, California and THE THINGS THAT HAPPEN THERE.
There there are no white-shirted nazis, only polite, pedigreed white supremacist speakers who’ve got just enough plausible deniability to muddy the waters of any conversation one might want to have about politics and/or race. And they’re besieged– besieged by a force that somehow manages to be comprised of both wimpy, delicate snowflakes and black-masked thugs who are danger to everything America holds dear.
I don’t claim to be an expert on antifa but I know enough to know that it’s a label that’s being used to describe an unwieldy group of people who are–broadly–anti-fascist. And because it’s an imprecise term that’s being used imprecisely it’s fun and convenient to say that the 9% of antifa who are acting like buttholes are somehow representative of the 91% who aren’t. And so then everyone who doesn’t want to think about what Charlottesville means can stick their fingers in their ears and scream “LA LA LA BERKELEY!!! LA LA LA! I CAN’T HEEEEAR YOU!”
Well, I’m sorry, but I’m gonna let you do that, Megan. Even if antifa has a 50/50 ratio of asshole to mother’s good boy, there is no equivalence to groups of people who openly advocate for the oppression of women, LGTB, and minorities.