Equating antifa with Neonazis

Said before and will say again: original Antifa? Virtually all of America during WW2 and even before. Mass demonstrations against fascism were happening in the 30s.

Anyone railing on about Antifa who isn’t railing longer and louder against fascism and Neo-Nazis is either a Neo-Nazi or Nazi sympathizer.

I have very little patience for the Whataboutism and equivocation that’s going on with this.

Neo-Nazis and fascists are bad. Unequivocally. End of line.

Antifa, though, is a very specific group. It’s not just anyone who openly opposes fascism or white supremacy.

And, they are sometimes controversial on the left, too. Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything but it’s a conversation worth having.

===

“They have no allegiance to liberal democracy”: an expert on antifa explains the group
Why a loose network of militant activists is confronting fascists.

Aug 25, 2017

https://www.vox.com/2017/8/25/16189064/antifa-charlottesville-activism-mark-bray-interview

Before Charlottesville last week, most people had no idea what he meant. I’m actually not sure he knew what he meant.

“What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the ‘alt-right’? Do they have any assemblage of guilt?” Trump said during a rambling press conference.

If the alt-left exists, it’s probably best represented by “antifa” (short for “anti-fascist”) — a loose network of left-wing activists who physically resist people they consider fascists. These are often the scruffy, bandana-clad people who show up at alt-right rallies or speaking events in order to shut them down before they happen, and they openly embrace violence as a justifiable means to that end.

Antifa is not a monolithic organization, nor does it have anything like a hierarchical leadership structure. It’s an umbrella group that shares a number of causes, the most important of which is resisting white nationalist movements. Adherents are mostly socialists, anarchists, and communists who, according to Mark Bray, a historian at Dartmouth College and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, “reject turning to the police or the state to halt the advance of white supremacy. Instead they advocate popular opposition to fascism as we witnessed in Charlottesville.”

I reached out to Bray to discuss the group and its burgeoning impact on American politics. He’s sympathetic to antifa’s cause and makes no effort to hide that. He describes the book as “an unabashedly partisan call to arms that aims to equip a new generation of anti-fascists with the history and theory necessary to defeat the resurgent far right.”

In this interview, we talk about the ethics of “militant anti-fascism,” why groups like antifa don’t care if they hurt the Democratic Party, and why resisting fascism in a liberal democracy poses a unique challenge to conventional political norms.

Our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, follows.

MARK BRAY
Anti-fascism originated in response to early European fascism, and when Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts were ascendant in Europe, various socialist, communist, and anarchist parties and groups emerged to confront them. When I talk about anti-fascism in the book and when we talk about it today, it’s really a matter of tracing the sort of historical lineage of revolutionary anti-fascist movements that came from below, from the people, and not from the state.

The sort of militant anti-fascism that antifa represents reemerged in postwar Europe in Britain, where fascists had broad rights to organize and demonstrate. You started to see these groups spring up in the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s and ’70s. You saw similar movements in Germany in the ’80s around the time the Berlin Wall falls, when a wave of neo-Nazism rolled across the country targeting immigrants. There, as elsewhere, leftist groups emerged as tools of self-defense. The whole point was to stare down these fascist groups in the street and stop them by force if necessary.

These groups in the ’80s adopted the name antifa, and it eventually spread to the United States in the late ’80s and into the ’90s. Originally, it was known as the Anti-Racist Action Network. That kind of faded in the mid-2000s; the recent wave we’re seeing in the US developed out of it, but has taken on more of the name and the kind of aesthetics of the European movement.

Sean Illing
And this is largely a response to Trump?

MARK BRAY
I think so. The basic principle of antifa is “no platform for fascism.” If you ask them, they’ll tell you that they believe you have to deny any and all platforms to fascism, no matter how big or small the threat. The original fascist groups that later seized power in Europe started out very small. You cannot, they argue, treat these groups lightly. You need to take them with the utmost seriousness, and the way to prevent them from growing is to prevent them from having even the first step toward becoming normalized in society.

Sean Illing
What’s their strategic logic? Why do they think physical violence, as opposed to nonviolent resistance, is both justifiable and effective?

MARK BRAY
That’s a very good question. Much of what they do does not involve physical confrontation. They also focus on using public opinion to expose white supremacists and raise the social and professional costs of their participation in these groups. They want to see these people fired from their jobs, denounced by their families, marginalized by their communities.

But yes, part of what they do is physical confrontation. They view self-defense as necessary in terms of defending communities against white supremacists. They also see this as a preventative action. They look at the history of fascism in Europe and say, “we have to eradicate this problem before it gets any bigger, before it’s too late.” Sometimes that involves physical confrontation or blocking their marches or whatever the case may be.

It’s also important to remember that these are self-described revolutionaries. They’re anarchists and communists who are way outside the traditional conservative-liberal spectrum. They’re not interested in and don’t feel constrained by conventional norms.

Sean Illing
You say one of the principles of antifa is “no platform for fascism.” How do they define fascism? Where’s the threshold?

MARK BRAY
Good question. The other thing that’s worth clarifying is that anti-fascist groups don’t only organize against textbook fascists. There is, first of all, a lot of debate about what constitutes fascism. And it’s a legitimate question to ask — where does one draw the line, and how does one see this kind of organizing?

Of course, there is no central command for a group like antifa. There is no antifa board of directors telling people where that line is, and so of course different groups will assess different threats as they see fit. But I suppose the question you’re raising has to do with the slippery-slope argument, which is that if you start calling everyone a fascist and depriving them of a platform, where does it end?

One of the arguments I make in the book is that while analytically that’s a conversation worth having, I don’t know of any empirical examples of anti-fascists successfully stopping a neo-Nazi group and then moving on to other groups that are not racist but merely to the right. What tends to happen is they disband once they’ve successfully marginalized or eliminated the local right-wing extremist threat, and then return to what they normally do — organizing unions, doing environmental activism, etc.

Sean Illing
You’re a historian. You’ve looked at the data. Is there evidence that the tactics adopted by antifa work? Are there cases of these sorts of groups successfully undercutting fascist movements?

MARK BRAY
Another good question. Whenever we look at the question of causation in history, you can never isolate one variable and make grand or definitive conclusions. So I don’t want to overstate any of the causal claims being made here. But Norway is an interesting example. In the ’90s, they had a pretty violent neo-Nazi skinhead movement, and the street-level anti-fascist groups there seemed to play a significant role in marginalizing the threat. By the end of ’90s it was pretty much defunct, and subsequently there hasn’t been a serious fascist [movement] in Norway.

Another example you can look at is popular responses to the National Front [a far-right political party formed in Britain in 1967] in the late ’70s in Britain. The National Front was pretty huge, and the Anti-Nazi League, through both a combination of militant anti-fascist tactics and also some more popular organizing and electoral strategies, managed to successfully deflate the National Front momentum.

One of the most famous moments of that era was the Battle of Lewisham in 1977 where the members of this largely immigrant community physically blocked a big National Front march and that sort of stopped their aggressive efforts to target that community.

Sean Illing
So antifa’s logic is that fascism is a rejection of liberal democratic norms, and therefore it can’t be defeated with what we’d consider conventional liberal democratic tactics?

MARK BRAY
Well, certainly the latter is correct. They argue a couple of things. First, they argue that in Europe you can see that parliamentary democracy did not always stop the advance of fascism and Nazism — and in the cases of both Germany and Italy, Hitler and Mussolini were appointed and gained their power largely through democratic means. When Hitler took his final control through the [1933] Enabling Act, it was approved by parliament.

They also say that rational discourse is insufficient on its own because a lot of good arguments were made and a lot of debates were had but ultimately that was insufficient during that period, and so the view that good ideas always prevail over bad ideas isn’t very convincing.

They other key point, which probably isn’t made enough, is that these are revolutionary leftists. They’re not concerned about the fact that fascism targets liberalism. These are self-described revolutionaries. They have no allegiance to liberal democracy, which they believe has failed the marginalized communities they’re defending. They’re anarchists and communists who are way outside the traditional conservative-liberal spectrum.

Sean Illing
Scholars of nonviolence will say the worldwide abolition of slavery was achieved almost entirely with nonviolent means (our Civil War being an obvious exception), that great strides in women’s rights were made, that nonviolent revolutions in Eastern Europe, South Africa, Chile, Egypt, the Philippines, and elsewhere were all accomplished without the use of force. What’s different about antifa’s mission? Why do they believe violence is more effective in this context?

MARK BRAY
As I said earlier, no single factor in history can explain an outcome. It’s always more complicated than that. Certainly that’s true in terms of the abolition of slavery. In Latin America, for example, a lot of the abolition of slavery happened through gradual emancipation laws, and a lot of those laws were enacted in explicit response to the Haitian Revolution and out of fear that if they didn’t start to adjust, they’d have an uprising on their hands.

This is also true of the civil rights movement, where the threat of race riots and Black Panthers and so forth made a lot of white America more sympathetic to the kinds of things that Martin Luther King and his allies were saying than they might have otherwise been.

The case of Nazism is obviously one of those intractable historical problems for advocates of pacifism. Even the school of strategic nonviolence that puts aside the ethical questions in favor of the strategic questions still fails, in my view, to show how nonviolence might have worked in that situation.

But look, anti-fascists will concede that most of the time nonviolence is certainly the way to go. Most antifa members believe it’s far easier to use nonviolent methods than it is to show up and use direct action methods. But they argue that history shows that it’s dangerous to take violence and self-defense off the table.

Sean Illing
Here’s my problem. I think the people who showed up in Charlottesville to square off against self-identified neo-Nazis did the world a service, and I applaud them. But when I see antifa showing up at places like UC Berkeley and setting fire to cars and throwing rocks through windows in order to prevent someone like Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking, I think they’ve gone way too far. Milo isn’t a Nazi, and he isn’t an actual threat. He’s a traveling clown looking to offend social justice warriors.

MARK BRAY
I think that reasonable people can disagree about this. I can’t speak for the individuals who committed these political actions, but the general defense is that the rationale for shutting down someone like Milo has to do with the fact that his kind of commentary emboldens actual fascists. The Berkeley administrators issued a statement in advance that they feared he was going to out undocumented students on campus, and previously he had targeted a transgender student at the University of Milwaukee Wisconsin. Antifa regards this as an instigation to violence, and so they feel justified in shutting it down.

Again, though, this is much easier to understand when you remember that antifa isn’t concerned with free speech or other liberal democratic values.

Sean Illing
Antifa defines itself in purely negative terms, in terms of what they’re against. But what do they want? Do they have any concrete political goals?

MARK BRAY
That’s a great question, and one that often gets overlooked. For the most part, these are pan-leftist groups composed of leftists of different stripes. They all seem to have different views of what they think the ideal social order looks like. Some of them are Marxists, some are Leninists, some are social democrats or anarchists. But they cohere around a response to what they perceive as a common threat.

Sean Illing
Do you think people are right to be concerned that this type of illiberalism will only occasion more illiberalism in response to it, and that the result will be a spiral of competing illiberalisms?

MARK BRAY
As I said before, anti-fascists don’t have any allegiance to liberalism, so that’s not the question that they are focused on. The question is also how much of a threat do we think white supremacists or neo-Nazis pose, both in a literal or immediate sense but also in terms of their ability to influence broader discourses or even the Trump administration.

I believe that for people who are feeling the worst repercussions of this, they are already experiencing a kind of illiberalism in terms of their lack of access to the kinds of freedoms that liberalism promotes and tries to aspire to; and so for me, that’s more of a focus, in terms of trying to mitigate those kinds of problems, than the fears of people who, prior to Trump, thought that everything was fine in the US.
Sean Illing
Do you anticipate antifa becoming larger and more active? And if so, what does that mean for American politics moving forward?

MARK BRAY
The first thing to point out is that being part of one of these groups is a huge time commitment, and the vetting process that these groups have for bringing in new people is very strenuous. You have to really commit — it’s basically like a second job. This limits the number of people that are going to be willing to put their time into it. I don’t think the antifa movement is going to explode as much as some do.

But I do think that antifa can influence where leftist politics in America is going. They are aggressive, loud, and fiercely committed. They’re having a wider influence on the radical left in this country, particularly on campuses and with other groups like Black Lives Matter. But I don’t want to overstate antifa’s role in these shifts.
Sean Illing
Well, that dovetails with my final question, which is: Do you think the influence antifa is having on the American left will ultimately hurt the Democratic Party — and by extension help the Republicans?

MARK BRAY
Not to be repetitive here, but they don’t care about the Democratic Party. But it’s still an interesting question to consider. Given the disaster that is the Trump presidency, I just think it would be a colossal failure of the Democratic Party not to win the next presidential election and gain a majority in Congress. If they can’t do that given this craziness, then they need to really rethink what they’re doing.

Will a lot of people see antifa and their methods as a poor reflection of the left? Absolutely. But I also think that these are not people who were going to vote Democrat anyway. If you read the news or pay attention to what’s happening, you know that Nancy Pelosi has nothing to do with antifa. This group loathes the Democratic Party, and they don’t hide that.

So anyone who blames the Democrats for antifa is likely already disposed to vote Republican anyway.

— X — wrote:

One group expresses their right to free speech (not exclusive to neonazis).
The other group terrorizes anyone who expresses their right to free speech.

Have to differ. Both groups do that. Famously. As is very well documented.

— X — wrote:

Let me ask you this, then.
Where’s the footage of Conservatives terrorizing Obama supporters en masse?

I don’t look at right wing sites so I don’t know the equivalent thing you’re talking about. It’s rightie site thing to put up selective vids fueling “outrage” without any real sense of context or situation. I also don;t divide the world into “obama supporters” (with whom I am more likely to disagree on many topics) and “trump supporters” and I would not even know how to follow that. In fact I dont’ care about Trump supporters as a group…that’s too big a category. In terms of this discussion, I only care about neo-nazis and nazis and KKK and white supremacists. I do know that in Charleston those protestors associated with nazis and KKK and so forth came intending to fight, and did so. For example, in one case that got some airplay, throwing urine on counter-protestors. Not on antifa types, who are a completely different deal, but counter-protestors who did not come seeking violence.

KKK and nazi-types are going to attract counter-protestors. It would be weird if they didn’t. I am not even sure we want a country where they didn’t. And they aren’t all antifa types either.

In terms of the antifa types, they’re controversial on the left, too. I posted that in this thread myself.

….

— X — wrote:

Disagree.

One group expresses their right to free speech (not exclusive to neonazis).
The other group terrorizes anyone who expresses their right to free speech.

There’s a reason Trump supporters are being attacked, and it’s not because they’re freaking Nazis. It’s because they dare to show their allegiance to the President in public. The same holds true for speakers like Milo (don’t agree with his provocateur nature), Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, Nicholas Dirks, Action Bronson, John Brennan, Janet Mock, etc. Even if you don’t agree with their talking points, violently attacking their supporters, intimidating them, blocking them from attending speaking engagements, disinviting them from speaking, disrupting their lectures, and coddling/counseling the “victims” of their very existence is flat ridiculous. It’s also bullyism. A prime example is pummeling someone with a “no hate” sign. lol. Idiots.

White Supremacy is no more prevalent today than it was 8 years ago. It did, however, become an epidemic in the mold of The Plague of Justinian as soon as the left spoke it into existence. I, myself, have already been called a racist and a Nazi for absolutely no other reason than being a conservative. Five more minutes in that “discussion”, and it would have come to blows (out of self-defense). I walked away, because I wasn’t going to give them what they wanted.

The left is out of control, plain and simple.

Hey, X, hope all is well.

It looks to me like you’re engaging in the same thing you say the left does: painting with a broad brush, indicting everyone of a particular political view for the actions of a few. In your case, you even cite one personal encounter, as if that can be used as an indictment of the entire left.

“The left is out of control, plain and simple.”

In reality, there is no evidence to support this. There is, however, evidence that a very small number of people — they number in the dozens, and not more than that — are physically confronting right-wingers they see as fascist. And from my experience and observation, “antifa” is actually pretty good at differentiating between nazis and regular old conservatives, and the majority of that very, very small and scattered group only acts in self-defense. A fraction of antifa goes on the offense. This was attested to by clergy in Charlottesville, for instance:

Yes, What About the “Alt-Left”? What the counter-protesters Trump despises were actually doing in Charlottesville last weekend. By Dahlia Lithwick

As for your comment about white supremacy. Not following that at all. Are you saying “the left” made all of that up?

The evidence says right-wing extremist groups are on the rise:

Number of U.S. Hate Groups Is Rising, Report Says By KIM SEVERSONMARCH 7, 2012

The Rise of Violent Right-Wing Extremism, Explained Experts say attacks like the mass shooting in Charleston have been a growing threat. Jaeah Lee, Gabrielle Canon and Brandon E. PattersonJun. 30, 2015 10:00 AM

Hate & Extremism We monitor hate groups and other extremists throughout the United States and expose their activities to the public, the media and law enforcement.

For starters . . .

wv wrote:

Hi X. Always good to see you on the boards. I have missed your posts.

As for politix, we disagree on a lot of stuff, obviously. But i can tell you this — nobody on ‘this’ board thinks all Trump supporters are racists/fascists. We (this little board) know (and have talked about and agreed) that there are different factions that make up the Trump core. Several different factions. The neonazis are just one faction among others.

Plenty of nonfascist Conservatives like you also preferred Trump.
You are respected here, X. But we are leftists (Bernie types, Jill Stein types) (not Democrats), so we disagree with you on a lot of your politix.

Lets hope Goff has the right stuff :>)

w
v

WV,

Agreed. I wish X would post more.

I think you sum up stuff pretty well above.

wv wrote:

Hi X. Always good to see you on the boards. I have missed your posts.

As for politix, we disagree on a lot of stuff, obviously. But i can tell you this — nobody on ‘this’ board thinks all Trump supporters are racists/fascists. We (this little board) know (and have talked about and agreed) that there are different factions that make up the Trump core. Several different factions. The neonazis are just one faction among others.

Plenty of nonfascist Conservatives like you also preferred Trump.
You are respected here, X. But we are leftists (Bernie types, Jill Stein types) (not Democrats), so we disagree with you on a lot of your politix.

Lets hope Goff has the right stuff
w
v

Fair enough. I won’t paint all you leftists the same anymore. Unless you’re out there exhausting your energy battling statues and the idea of islamophobia as opposed to actual islamic extremists and actual threats to the Country.

I’m not a Goff fan, but I do hope he was just the beneficiary of poor mentoring.

OK, I think a free college education at state owned institutions would be a long term benefit for this country. Having my daughter at BU and my son at Northeastern (each over $60k per year), I’m keenly aware of the burden paying for college puts on parents and students.

Education is king for a competitive work force. We need more engineers and scientists, period. These shouldn’t just be rich kids, because most have crappy work ethics.

TSRF wrote:

OK, I think a free college education at state owned institutions would be a long term benefit for this country. Having my daughter at BU and my son at Northeastern (each over $60k per year), I’m keenly aware of the burden paying for college puts on parents and students.

Education is king for a competitive work force. We need more engineers and scientists, period. These shouldn’t just be rich kids, because most have crappy work ethics.

In principle, I don’t disagree. However, what impact would free public college have on the delivery system of higher education? Do you really think that top-down Government regulation of education would be efficient? Would it not be more beneficial to foster more entrepreneurship in higher education while giving all institutions a real stake in their students’ success? Also, should *everyone* be able to waste the resources of higher education? Aren’t there enough people who go to college for no other reason than to go, and don’t finish? Wouldn’t that particular problem be exacerbated with an open door policy?

— X — wrote:

It’s not a matter of looking at selective ‘sites’ to get a perspective of how out-of-whack the number of these Antifa fucks are in comparison to neonazis, or the KKK, or racists, or Supremacists, or whatever else we Conservatives are now. I’m not a fan of White Supremacists either, but let’s not pretend they’re suddenly some huge organization that benefited from Trump being elected President by having their ranks swell exponentially via the awakening of dormant supporters (which is what the media is leading people to believe). Their numbers are miniscule in comparison to the population. Antifa, on the other hand, isn’t some club you can join. It’s a movement consisting of members from all walks of life who don’t possess the intellectual capacity to differentiate between Conservatism and pure, unadulterated hate groups. And for that, I blame the education system. Specifically Universities. The shit young adults are being taught now is negligent.

Talk about the need for border security – you’re a racist.
Talk about the need for a stronger military – you’re an imperialist.
Talk about the decline of morality – you’re a religious zealot (and intolerant)
Dispute the claim that global warming is indisputable – you’re a moron.
Failure to acknowledge income inequality – you’re privileged (horeshit)
You’re white? Holy shit are you evil.
and so on, and so on.

I don’t expect you (or 99% of this board) to acknowledge that the left is destroying Western Civilization. It’s only my opinion based on the way I see things unfolding now (and over the past decade). But I do expect some of you to acknowledge that this whole “White Supremacy” thing is WAYYYYYY overblown, and only became a dangerous threat about 8 months ago. And again, for no other reason than it was suggested and/or conjured. Not because it’s any more prevalent than it was 8 years ago.

I want to ask you a few things because I think I can ask you and get a straight answer, whereas talking online with other conservatives usually goes badly. I mean…these conversations often go off the rails, and become hopeless. I know you well enough that I think if I accidentally offend you, you won’t take it personally.

First of all…an observation. This isn’t meant to be a judgement, just an observation. A few of the attitudes you express here seem to me to be what must be circulating amongst the conservative media outlets because I see the same stuff repeated by others.

Namely:

1. Neo-Nazis are a small, insignificant group and the Left is over-reacting.
2. Antifa is worse, and more violent. (This is always couched in terms of, “I’m not a racist, but…).
3. Universities are basically leftist indoctrination machines, and not to be trusted.
4. The Left says that being a white male is bad in and of itself.
5. The issue with Illegal Immigration has nothing to do with race; it has to do with Legality

On 1 & 2: From my point of view, the logic here doesn’t hold up. The very standard of measurement you and other conservatives hold up here seems to me to lead to the opposite conclusion. First of all, you are dismissing nazis by saying there aren’t many of them. But there are far fewer Antifa. There are hardly any. They popped up in Berkeley, and Portland, I think. But they are not showing up in any significant numbers anywhere. They are a minority amongst the counter-protesters even at the events they do show up at. You complained earlier about the Left’s lack of intellectual ability to distinguish subgroups…well….? And secondly, we KNOW that the folks in Charlottesville showed up ready to rumble, and not just because they came literally armed. There are emails and forum posts that talk about mixing it up before they even went up there. And look who got arrested. So the narrative doesn’t even match what the police did and said. Furthermore, FFS, it was a nazi who drove a car into counter-protesters killing one and injuring 19, as you well know, and they weren’t Antifa, either. As zn pointed out, on the one hand there is a group that stereotypes large numbers of people and actively promotes discrimination (and worse!) against all of those people, and on the other side, a group of people whose ONLY motive is to stop that movement from taking on any legitimacy whatsoever. And, yes, they use violence to do so, and shouldn’t. In my view, the nazis or worse. They discriminate with a very broad brush, whereas Antifa is targeted exclusively on stopping the legitimacy of hatred. So when you come out and say, “Fascists are bad, but they don’t really matter because there aren’t many of them. Anti-fascists are worse” even though there are even fewer of them, the conclusion I draw is this (and tell me how I’m wrong): You don’t like the fascists, but you recognize that you share other common purposes outside the realm of race, so they are a shitty ally, but they are an ally nonetheless in the war against the Left, and that matters more to you than the “numerically insignificant” racist stuff. That’s what I get.

On number 3: I don’t know what to say. I don’t think there is any way to have dialogue on this because people see what they want to see here. I can only say this point of view makes me very sad because I personally have a great deal of faith in mankind’s collective ability to advance knowledge and understanding, and universities are the best institution for those advances for a variety of reasons. I think distrust of universities is literally imperiling civilization.

#4: They don’t say that, and by “they,” I mean thoughtful, calm, educated people on the Left, including Liberals. I completely understand how it feels that way, and I have personally been attacked for being a white male myself. But…to me…that gets back to the Broad Brush issue. Personally, I don’t believe that there is a correlation between political ideology and intelligence. There are plenty of idiots on my side of the fence. My son and I have made a hobby of pointing out the morons we largely agree with.

#5. Well. This isn’t going to go well. My problem here is that if this was really about Law and Order, and Legality, the people complaining about this would also have complained about Joe Arpaio. We have all kinds of legal violations going on in this country, and the Right is selective in its outrage about this fact. This just really looks to me like sophistry, to some extent the same kind of rationalization that is used in 1 & 2 above. “We really care about law and process HERE, but over there it doesn’t really matter.” We can’t let foreign countries get away with violating international laws, but we can violate them because we have a good reason to. Obama’s executive orders are a gross violation of government, but the fact that he issued fewer than Reagan and either of the Bushes isn’t mentioned. You know…illegal immigrants pay more in taxes than many Fortune 500 corporations do.

Finally…last thing…and maybe, actually, the thing I most want to know…

How the hell is Left destroying Western Civilization? What does that mean?

— X — wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Hey, X, hope all is well.

It looks to me like you’re engaging in the same thing you say the left does: painting with a broad brush, indicting everyone of a particular political view for the actions of a few. In your case, you even cite one personal encounter, as if that can be used as an indictment of the entire left.

“The left is out of control, plain and simple.”

Hey Billeh.

Yeah, you’re right. And I’ve corrected that. I would like to gain a better understanding of your world view and some of your beliefs, so I’ll refrain from doing that. The original article just rubbed me raw is all. My apologies.

Billy_T wrote:

As for your comment about white supremacy. Not following that at all. Are you saying “the left” made all of that up?

The evidence says right-wing extremist groups are on the rise:

I didn’t say they made it up. I said they made up the epidemic we’re apparently facing. I’m sure it has its ebbs and flows in terms of violent expression, but it’s not an epidemic as I’m led to believe through the media.

Thanks, X, for the correction. Much appreciated.

As for worldviews: Like everyone else, it’s complicated. But trying to boil it all down . . . To me, the most important thing is that everyone gets their shot in the here and now at maxing out on their life’s potential. And I mean literally everyone. I don’t think we should just accept the fact that we gotta have billions of human beings suffering and never, ever having that shot in order for a certain percentage at the top to get that shot. Our current system, however, is set up to do just that. And I find that profoundly immoral, irrational, tragic and indefensible.

So it’s “the fierce urgency of now” for me, and this colors pretty much everything else. It means I see our economic and political systems as cheating the majority of humanity out of their one and only chance at a real life. And, again, for the worst of reasons: to ensure that an arbitrarily lucky, chosen, ultra-select few can do as they please and have ten, a thousand, tens of thousands times more than they could possibly need to live a full and rich life.

Our system sets up a zero-sum life-sphere, and no matter how many times I hear someone say it’s not that way, the evidence strikes me as overwhelmingly contrary to that view. IMO, it’s just flat out self-evident and beyond debate, it’s so obvious. Math, logic, percentages and common sense all tell us it definitely is zero-sum.

So I passionately believe we need to replace our current systems — economic and political — with something that would facilitate the widest possible shot at full and rich lives for everyone, within the context of preserving our one and only home (earth). And, again, with no one being left out.

Another factor for me: I don’t believe in an afterlife, or reincarnation — though I’ve studied world religions like Buddhism and Hinduism which do. I think this is it. One and done. The future is now, as George Allen once said. So it makes no sense to me, whatsoever, that we should have a political or economic system that acts as if it’s okay to build up to something across generations, a wee bit at a time. And in the case of soft neoliberalism of the Dems, at a glacial pace. Our economy and politics need to be geared to maximize the lives of the living, not future lives that may never be . . . while at the same time doing everything we can to leave future generations with the same shot at the fullest of lives. As in, conserving the earth, our natural resources, ending wars, pollution, etc. etc.

More later. Got some things to add about various ironies regarding “collectivism versus individualism” as I see them.

Good to see you posting again, X.

Zooey wrote:

I want to ask you a few things because I think I can ask you and get a straight answer, whereas talking online with other conservatives usually goes badly. I mean…these conversations often go off the rails, and become hopeless. I know you well enough that I think if I accidentally offend you, you won’t take it personally.

Well, I appreciate that. And I don’t think there’s any way you can offend me (either intentionally or accidentally), because you know how to communicate. I’m going to – at some point – go through all of your points and address them for you, but we’ll just end up comparing ideologies.

Your last point, as offensive as it may seem, is actually a well-thought out opinion I hold based on trends I see, and they tie into my point about higher education. Namely:

Students in college have voted the American flag off their campus. Where did these students learn their unprecedented contempt for America?

European countries continue to welcome in millions of Muslims, adding to the tens of millions of Muslims already in Europe. Many of whom, if not most, have no interest in adopting Europe’s values.

The University of Pennsylvania, in its left-wing English department, has removed its long-standing portrait of William Shakespeare because he was white and male in favor of a more “diverse” writer. Is that not subtracting from Western civilization?

The prime minister of Canada announced that his country has no core identity. You don’t think that counts as an example of a declining civilization?

Last year, Stanford University students voted on a campus resolution that would have their college actually require a course on Western civilization. Students rejected the proposal 1,992 to 347. A columnist at the Stanford Daily explained that teaching Western civilization means “upholding white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from Western civilizations.” Is erasing Western Civilization from Universities entirely not a way of destroying it?

Another small example (very small) is the fact that the west was largely built on standards, but those ‘standards’ are now somehow viewed with contempt. How dare we uphold any standards! The left (not all leftists) now somehow view a piss-Christ or a plain old rock as the equivalent of a Rembrandt. Because, impressionism. Where are the artistic standards anymore? That’s just a personal pet peeve, probably.

Anyway, I’ll expand on this more later. I would, however, ask that we tackle these things individually instead of in one big all-encompassing post. It’s just easier to have a discussion about one thing at a time as opposed to seven things at once.

Billy_T wrote:

Thanks, X, for the correction. Much appreciated.

As for worldviews: Like everyone else, it’s complicated. But trying to boil it all down . . . To me, the most important thing is that everyone gets their shot in the here and now at maxing out on their life’s potential. And I mean literally everyone. I don’t think we should just accept the fact that we gotta have billions of human beings suffering and never, ever having that shot in order for a certain percentage at the top to get that shot. Our current system, however, is set up to do just that. And I find that profoundly immoral, irrational, tragic and indefensible.

So it’s “the fierce urgency of now” for me, and this colors pretty much everything else. It means I see our economic and political systems as cheating the majority of humanity out of their one and only chance at a real life. And, again, for the worst of reasons: to ensure that an arbitrarily lucky, chosen, ultra-select few can do as they please and have ten, a thousand, tens of thousands times more than they could possibly need to live a full and rich life.

Our system sets up a zero-sum life-sphere, and no matter how many times I hear someone say it’s not that way, the evidence strikes me as overwhelmingly contrary to that view. IMO, it’s just flat out self-evident and beyond debate, it’s so obvious. Math, logic, percentages and common sense all tell us it definitely is zero-sum.

So I passionately believe we need to replace our current systems — economic and political — with something that would facilitate the widest possible shot at full and rich lives for everyone, within the context of preserving our one and only home (earth). And, again, with no one being left out.

Another factor for me: I don’t believe in an afterlife, or reincarnation — though I’ve studied world religions like Buddhism and Hinduism which do. I think this is it. One and done. The future is now, as George Allen once said. So it makes no sense to me, whatsoever, that we should have a political or economic system that acts as if it’s okay to build up to something across generations, a wee bit at a time. And in the case of soft neoliberalism of the Dems, at a glacial pace. Our economy and politics need to be geared to maximize the lives of the living, not future lives that may never be . . . while at the same time doing everything we can to leave future generations with the same shot at the fullest of lives. As in, conserving the earth, our natural resources, ending wars, pollution, etc. etc.

More later. Got some things to add about various ironies regarding “collectivism versus individualism” as I see them.

Good to see you posting again, X.

WOW do we have a lot to discuss! I’d love to delve into all of this.
I’m gonna start making new threads now, based on specific topics (many of the above too).

Thanks dude.