Know your enemy #1: The violent "progressives"

It helps when the enemy defines him- or herself, so that we know at whom to aim.

Do you think that being asked to leave a restaurant, or having your meal interrupted, or being called by the public is bad? My fascism-enabling friends, this is only the beginning.

. . .

Rather than detail a laundry list of all the Trump outrages, I ask you simply to consider all of the very real human costs that those outrages have already inflicted on human beings in America and abroad. Some of those outrages, like ripping families apart at the border, show their costs immediately; others, like eschewing the fight against climate change and neutering the EPA and mainstreaming white nationalist ideas, will be manifesting their costs for many decades to come. But the costs are real. We are the ones who are suffering and will suffer them. By and large, the people responsible for these decisions will be wealthy and famous and powerful enough to insulate themselves from those costs. Unless we decide to see to it that they must face them.

. . .

People die because of political decisions every day. Politics is real. This is what is on one side of our current disagreement: death, and human rights, and freedom, and equality. And this is what is on the other side: wanting to eat at a nice restaurant without having anyone remind you that you are ruining people’s lives. The sides of this scale are not even close to balancing yet.

This is all going to get more extreme. And it should. We are living in extreme times. The harm that is being done to all of us by the people in the American government is extreme. To imagine that Mexican immigrants should happily cook for and serve meals to people who enable a man who is determined to demonize and persecute them as subhuman criminals is far more outrageous than the idea that those enablers should not be served in restaurants. I do not believe that Trump administration officials should be able to live their lives in peace and affluence while they inflict serious harms on large portions of the American population. Not being able to go to restaurants and attend parties and be celebrated is just the minimum baseline here. These people, who are pushing America merrily down the road to fascism and white nationalism, are delusional if they do not think that the backlash is going to get much worse. Wait until the recession comes. Wait until Trump starts a war. Wait until the racism this administration is stoking begins to explode into violence more frequently. Read a ******* history book. Read a recent history book. The U.S. had thousands of domestic bombings per year in the early 1970s. This is what happens when citizens decide en masse that their political system is corrupt, racist, and unresponsive. The people out of power have only just begun to flex their dissatisfaction. The day will come, sooner that you all think, when Trump administration officials will look back fondly on the time when all they had to worry about was getting hollered at at a Mexican restaurant. When you aggressively **** with people’s lives, you should not be surprised when they decide to **** with yours.

There's more at the link.

The amount of drivel in that screed is so vast as to be almost impossible to quantify.  It makes up its own alleged "truth" out of whole cloth, ignoring reality.  Consider just a few:

• "the Trump outrages" - that's subjective opinion, not quantified as objective fact.
• "persecute them as subhuman criminals" - I haven't heard anyone refer to illegal aliens as "subhuman", but they are, by definition, criminals.  This has been true for as long as US laws, and the Constitution on which they are based, have been in effect, under both liberals and conservatives, and from both left- and right-wing legal perspectives.  It's objective fact;  and if you deny that it is, you deny the rule of law.
• "These people, who are pushing America merrily down the road to fascism and white nationalism" - really?  The author can say that with a straight face, when the tactics of his side are far more fascist than anything I've seen from Trump supporters?  He claims to understand history, but historically, progressives and far-left individuals and groups are much closer to fascism than their ideological opponents.  That's why so few of them, who so freely fling the label "Nazi", refuse to admit that the proper name of that group was the "National Socialist German Workers' Party".  Yes, Nazis were, by factual, historical definition, left-wing, not right-wing.  Put that in your historical pipe and smoke it.

George Santayana famously observed, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".  Given his self-asserted understanding of history, one wonders why the author of that article fails to remember or understand so much of history.  Rest assured, sooner or later he and his ilk will mess with the wrong people, in the wrong place;  and when they do, they will learn the hard way that the lessons of history - about what happens to those who fail to think things through - are still valid;  because those lessons will be inflicted upon them.

I note that none of the vitriolic in-your-face reprisals upon the author's ideological enemies have been reported from, shall we say, areas more rational and less ideological.  That's because right-thinking people will most likely soon put a stop to them, probably without bothering to call the police except to clean up the resulting mess.  We understand what happens when you allow violence to reign unchecked . . . so we check it, to make sure it doesn't come back.

As for the "Nazi" label, flung around so freely by progressives and far-left individuals and organizations:  both of my parents fought Nazism during World War II, my father in uniform, my mother on the "Home Front".  I fought it in South Africa.  If necessary, I have no problem doing so again - and I know how to identify it, and I know who's exhibiting its characteristics right now.  Hint:  it's not the Trump administration.

Peter