By David Futrelle
Seems like only yesterday that everyone to the left of Donald Trump was mad at the Nazis. Now for some reasons a lot of these same people are yelling about AntiFa. Nancy Pelosi has officially denounced AntiFa, and a piece in the generally liberalish Washington Post today declared that AntiFa are the “moral equivalent” of the literal Nazis they oppose.
Now I’m not exactly the most militant dude in the world but WHAT IN HOLY CRAP IS GOING ON. We are up against LITERAL NAZIS. One of them LITERALLY MURDERED A WOMAN with a car, and then the rest of them LAUGHED ABOUT IT and SAID IT WAS JUSTIFIED. They go to every so-called “free speech” rally they organize with the intent of doing bodily harm to as many people as possible. and unless we stop them it’s only a matter of time before they kill more people. So fuck this shit. Hug an AntiFa today.
On to the tweets. First, the dumb shit.
Pelosi puts out statement condemning Antifa violence in Berkeley. pic.twitter.com/0RlU6RlWmX
— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) August 30, 2017
Opinion: Yes, antifa is the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis https://t.co/dt9vInRh1q
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 30, 2017
Now, some rebuttals. First, a good short thread on how the discussion has shifted from ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS to endless hand-wringing about antifas.
I am perpetually amazed at the ability of lockstep, bad-faith arguments on the right to steer and transform national conversations.
— . (@swordsjew) August 30, 2017
And here’s a response to the Washington Post thing by a Mother Jones journalist who was there at Berkeley.
https://twitter.com/shane_bauer/status/902969494808625152
Some historical perspective:
https://twitter.com/thalestral/status/902614776269955074
Every time I see news coverage of a protest I remember this image pic.twitter.com/ZAL0TwI61R
— Tom Hatfield (@WordMercenary) August 30, 2017
More AntiFa stuff:
https://twitter.com/pixelatedboat/status/902790386619318272
https://twitter.com/daniecal/status/902542063543009280
Antifa dropped a piano on my head and when I popped out of the top moments later I had a lump on my head and had its keys instead of teeth
— Jules (@Julian_Epp) August 29, 2017
I defended the honor of George Orwell against an Alex Jones employee.
Orwell went to Spain to fight the fascists. With guns. He wrote a book about it. https://t.co/vdulXAE58e
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) August 30, 2017
Snopes also has a thing to say about the attempts to portray the fascists and AntiFa as somehow equivalent:
Lmao Snopes dot com is to the left of Nancy Pelosi https://t.co/Pf9aYyNBHR
— Ann 'tifa' Coulter Classic™ (@AntifaCoulter) August 30, 2017
AntiFa may have dealt with a lot of undeserved shit today, but happily our dear leader Donald Trump was also dealing with some richly deserved shit.
https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/903027267940491264
Turns out Trump is not making America great again. Fox News poll finds an 11-point jump in dissatisfaction with the way things are going. pic.twitter.com/YwPvEVxSoB
— Geoff Garin (@geoffgarin) August 30, 2017
Not sure that 58% believing Trump will finish his term when he's just seven months in is quite the accomplishment someone might think it is. https://t.co/QZM073IuaA
— The Darkest Timeline Numbersmuncher (@NumbersMuncher) August 30, 2017
Trump's approval rating among people aged 18-29 has reached a new low of 20% in Gallup's tracking poll. https://t.co/5VWTe33ZFN
— Axios (@axios) August 29, 2017
Huckabee Sanders: Trump was correct to say he'd seen Harvey devastation first hand because he'd been briefed on it pic.twitter.com/y4MmUp0aoZ
— Rhys Blakely (@rhysblakely) August 30, 2017
W. screwed up royally during Katrina but at least he didn't make a speech about how rich people need lower taxes WHILE IT WAS STILL RAINING.
— L O L G O P (@LOLGOP) August 30, 2017
Meanwhile, the creator of Pepe is taking the Pepe Nazis to court and winning:
https://twitter.com/MaxTemkin/status/902700195577823232
And here are some animals!
https://twitter.com/awwcuteness/status/902839313276252160
https://twitter.com/CuteEmergency/status/902748977531162625
https://twitter.com/MeetAnimals/status/903024790675611648
https://twitter.com/lordflaconegro/status/902687000544911362
How anyone can take Trump’s duplictious words seriously and defend him is beyond me.
The Democratic party will just never learn, will it? They’re not going to increase voter turnout among young people and convince dissatisfied Americans that they’re the alternative that’ll turn shit around if they’re out there denouncing the resistance toTrump.
I just…
http://awesomelytechie.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Head-desk.gif
Just when it finally seemed like the Dems were starting to get it and were actually standing up to Trump, one of the party’s leaders just had to revert to wimpy milquetoast form.
A relevant (and, I think, very reasonable) Twitter thread I just came across:
“If you reflexively oppose antifa today, you probably would have opposed the lunch counter sit-ins in 1960.”
The problem with the whole Antifa thing is that it’s hard fighting Nazis and battling oppression. It’s easy to say both sides do it and be fine.
Say what you will about fighting hate with love, but at least Sailor Moon and her friends actually put their lives on the line to stop evil
Dammit, Nancy! How do you fuck up ‘nazis like the other guy’? Why is this hard? Fuckin white people…
If love could blow people the hell up like it does in Mahou Shoujo, it’d probably be a lot more effective.
In conflicts involving Nazis, the other side would have to be ISIS before you could say both sides are equally bad.
March in favour of genocide, racism and oppression, waving flags of an ideology that would happily have butchered half the country and enslaved the other half; march armed; commit an act of terrorism that leaves one dead and 19 injured… but the people to condemn are those standing there and saying “You shouldn’t be doing that”.
Ohhhkay.
Er… are antifa advocating genocide? I haven’t heard that.
Without that element it’s pretty hard to make any “they’re just as bad” accusation stick.
@D,
That is indeed a good thread – thanks for posting. This one is also excellent.
Slightly OT whinge: in some otherwise great defences of antifa, I’ve seen ppl arguing “America has a fine tradition of Nazi-punching” followed by either a Cap America meme or “we saved the world from Hitler” type assertion.
Obv not as important as the main issue here, but it annoys me. The US didn’t enter WWII because of a burning desire to fight Nazism and injustice. And Cap was not the original Nazi puncher.
Ahem. All done now.
The “March Armed” bit is what gets me the most about CVille. Even if the “armed militia” wasn’t officially part of the “march”, it should have stayed home.
To me, “right to peaceful assembly” should never include “carry assault weapon-style firearms”.
@Mish
The meme that says, “you can’t be a patriotic American and a Nazi; we literally had a war about this” bothers me so much. I just want to scream at those people about how we never got involved until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Do they seriously not know even a little history?
Never forget
@Michael Brew
Wouldn’t that be a grand thing?
Washington Post, democrats in power in general, just why? Why do you see the literal nazis, and think “maybe we should take the middle road. We remember the old days of bipartisanship, maybe if we condemn both side we’ll get all the peoples and finally go back to a bipartisan political culture”? Homo sapiens y do dis?
@Dan Kasteray
At least Sailor Moon at least tried basic compassion and was smart enough to know that defending people from harm was more important than maintain some parody of “moral purity”
@weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee
When we have literal nazis on the loose and a president who endorses them, the dems still fail on getting people to their side. Do they like losing?
Echoing (kind of) @Dan Kasteray and @Michael Brew, the idea of fighting hate with “love” just burns my biscuits. I’ve said before that “fighting hate with love” makes about as much sense as fighting fire with salad dressing. So, until the day fire hydrants are stocked with buttermilk ranch, let’s fight hate with legislation.
Somebody needs to educate Nancy Pelosi. WHAT T’HELL, GIRL?!
As for Matt Furie: That’s how you take Pepe back! Now he needs to sue anyone who uses his frog to spread hate rather than love!
I’d love to see Pepe reclaimed and turned into an icon of the LEFT! He’s a peacenik stoner frog! He’s pure “Hippie” material! IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES! He’s a funky psychedelic LOVE FROGGIE!
FUCK, YEAH; HE SHOULD BE RECLAIMED!
The Antifa is just as bad as Nazi’s thing reminds me of what abusers and their enablers do to remove accountability from themselves and to invalidate their victim’s experiences. The whole ‘it takes two to tango’ crap. It also stinks of projection. Is anyone else getting that impression?
@ MissEB47
From some of them, certainly.
From others it seems like a knee-jerk “yikes, they might make me look baaaad! Fox News criticised us!” panic reaction.
Having said that, it’s taken Pelosi how many days to panic?
So are we all meant to just politely watch the Nazis as they commit murder and advocate genocide? Maybe write a few sternly worded letters? Or what?
I do agree, in principle, that violence is not the answer. At all. Ever. But what do you do, when you are dealing with people who literally want to kill you and won’t get round a table about it because they aren’t interested in logic?
I’m not going to punch a Nazi first, but if one punches me I am damn well hitting back.
Gah.
There was the G20 summit in Hamburg in July this year.
Things got out of hand. To put it very mildly.
People immediately started blaming the left. And AntiFa. Of course.
The thing is this. The black bloc is where those on the left with a liking for violence and rioting go. I liken them to football hooligans. Which are a bit of a problem where I live. (They’re usually called ultras)
I tend to watch out for them and stay the hell away from them when on a protest march.
But they are a very small part of the left. And mostly stick to property damage. The last I checked they still didn’t call for genocide.
And AntiFa does occasionally overlap with the black bloc.
The vast majority of the far-left is non-violent.
The far-right is all violent.
The far-left is fighting for equality and against genocide.
Propagating inequality and genocide is the whole raison d’etre of the far-right.
Even if the whole left would take up the methods of the black bloc, they still wouldn’t be ‘just as bad’ as the fucking NAZIS!
Nancy Pelosi, go fuck yourself!
The old Time Man/Woman of the Year went to the most influential newsmaker, not the one Time approved of. Hitler was it once; Stalin twice. It was not till they put the Ayatollah Khomenei on the front in 1979 and saw a serious decrease in newsstand sales that they decided to not put on anyone, no matter how newsworthy, that the American public didn’t have warm fuzzy feelings for. That was why they chose Giuliani over Osama bin Laden after 9/11, and Bush the Elder over Saddam Hussein after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait (but before Bush took it back the next year).
Bluecat-“From others it seems like a knee-jerk “yikes, they might make me look baaaad! Fox News criticised us!” panic reaction.”
That’s true, as well. Bigots can not take any criticism and don’t like being called out on their bigotry, hence this reaction. Which is why calling a racist ‘racist’ is the most hurtful thing ever!! It’s ridiculous! Why don’t they just not be bigots if they don’t like being called out on their behaviour? If they weren’t bigots, there wouldn’t be bigotry to call them out on.
The Crying Nazi is having another whinge.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/crying-nazi-christopher-cantwell-says-hes-just-a-goddamn-human-being
Warning: Any Trans peeps or Jewish folk who read this are going to want to punch him (Jewish trans people will probably need to punch him twice).
@Alan
I don’t actually want to punch him any more than I already did.
Same here. Plus, I think physic laws prevent me from punching him enough time to sate my desire.