We Didn't Normalize Trump. We Normalized the Left's Violence.

Once upon a time, conservatives spoke at universities without $600,000 in police protection.
By Megan McArdle

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-18/we-didn-t-normalize-trump-we-normalized-the-left-s-violence

...But the process of not normalizing Trump has instead normalized a lot of other things, bad ones. Like public disorder. Like persistent, pervasive anxiety that often looks like mass hysteria. Like people on both sides who try to minimize the illiberal tactics of the radicals on their own side by pointing mostly to the offenses of the other. (Yes, President Trump, I’m looking at you. And also at the folks who held light-hearted debates about whether it was okay to sucker-punch Richard Spencer.)

Much of the debate over antifa has focused on whether the white supremacists on the other side are worse. It seems to be impossible, in fact, to write a column on antifa without noting, at length, that they are not nearly as bad as the neo-Nazis who converged on Charlottesville. And indeed, they are not.

But how does that justify antifa’s tactics? It’s not as if the police are unable, or unwilling, to deal with white supremacists who commit violent acts. We may wish that they had gotten to those people soon enough to prevent tragedies like the killing in Charlottesville, but it’s not as if antifa is a crack team of investigators who can stop crimes before they happen. The only things they can stop, and the police cannot, are things that aren’t crimes: notably, people exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceably assemble and speak their minds.

Those rights are not restricted to good people with morally just opinions and majority support. We hold them because we are in the U.S., a nation unified by the freedoms we all share...

The article suggests the police presence was way over the top. And we have a nominee for worst sentence of the year: "And collective relief was sighed."

ETA: 60 million Republicans voted for Trump. If that's not normalization, I don't know what is.

just not worth a response.... when a thread title is so far from the truth.

In our country today, the alt-right white supremacists get police protection.  Meanwhile, protestors on the left like Occupy or BLM get beaten, tear-gassed and pepper sprayed by the police.

so yeah, tell yourself the protestors on the left have been "normalized."

@burner must be starved for attention if he is driven to make this sh*t up.

What an idiotic comment, Tom_Reingold, since all I did was post agreement with a published article by adding "Yep, exactly"

.

I'm going to go all Godwin's Law on this and note that you could dismiss posting parts of "Mein Kampf" and adding "Yep, exactly." 

But it's easy enough to read about how the Antifa protected religious counter-protesters from the neo-Nazis, while the Charlottesville police stood by and did nothing. 

Tom_Reingold said:

@burner must be starved for attention if he is driven to make this sh*t up.

tom.. yup, exactly.

tom said:

I'm going to go all Godwin's Law on this and note that you could dismiss posting parts of "Mein Kampf" and adding "Yep, exactly." 

But it's easy enough to read about how the Antifa protected religious counter-protesters from the neo-Nazis, while the Charlottesville police stood by and did nothing. 

shouldn't there be an online law that says a discussion is over when a person quotes a right wing nitwit like Megan McArdle, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, David Brooks, etc.?

Yes; though Brooks will sometimes surprise you by being reasonable. The rest of them, their output could be written by machines. 

First the alleged Trump supported bakery in South Orange, now this. 

??? Gracious!!!  Which local establishment is THAT?  

kibbegirl said:

First the alleged Trump supported bakery in South Orange, now this. 

We normalized white supremacy:

"...Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker."

white women +9

white men +31

white/college +3

white/no college +37

white 18-29 +4

white 30-44 +17

white 45-64 +28

white 65+ +19

white midwestern Illinois +11

White mid-Atlantic NJ +12

White NM +5

In no state...did Trump's white support dip below 40%

If you tallied the popular vote of only white Americans: Electoral College = Trump 389, Clinton 81, 68 toss-up.

Atlantic/ "The First White President"

We knew who this guy was and we voted for him.

it is absolutely clear and very disgusting what this president (and many of his supporters) value.  

The idea that it was the angry white working class that elected this guy alone doesn't pan out. 

And to folks who want Hillary/'16 to go away, we've been investigating '16 since November. She's an interested party.

IMO- If Burner aka Zoinks aka Bramzzoinks, wasn't so prone to hyperbole, be it on anti Semitism or just anti liberal agenda, or anything in general, one would be interested in engaging in a discussion that would actually bear fruit. But I'm  conditioned based on prior experience  to just click and move on. I cannot take him seriously, even if he did one day articulate an argument worthy of discussion by both reasonable liberals and conservatives. That is all. Carry on. 

Historical perspective:

http://www.jofreeman.com/sixtiesprotest/speakerban.htm

In 1947 former Vice President Henry Wallace was deemed too controversial to speak at UCLA because he opposed Cold War policies. But in early 1949 UCLA students heard a debate between two professors, one of whom had just been fired from the University of Washington after he admitted membership in the Communist Party. Sponsored by the Graduate Student Association, the Provost limited attendance to faculty and graduate students.  Shortly thereafter UCLA withdrew an invitation to socialist Harold Laski, a professor at the University of London and Labour Member of Parliament, after President Sproul said his appearance "would not be pleasing to the Board of Regents."  In 1951 Max Schachtman, a prominent socialist who was not a Communist, was not allowed to speak at Berkeley. At UCLA nine out of ten prospective speakers for an Anthropology Department forum for "Negro History Week" were denied clearance because they were members of organizations on the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations. In the Spring of 1962, two Soviet nationals, Cosmonaut Gerhman Titov and Professor Troukhanovskii, spoke on the Berkeley campus. But a year later Chancellor Strong personally forbid the participation of Herbert Aptheker, editor of the Communist Party (USA) journal Political Affairs, in a graduate student colloquium run by the Berkeley History Department, citing Regulation 5. Aptheker held a Ph.D. in History from Columbia and had published extensively on Afro-American history. The History department moved the meeting to the YMCA and passed the hat to pay Aptheker's expenses.

Communist affiliation was not always the criterion. In May of 1961, Malcolm X was not approved to speak at Berkeley on the grounds that he was a religious leader. He too spoke at the "Y". That same year evangelist Billy Graham and Episcopal Bishop Pike both spoke on campus.

Another "liberal" University. Is turnabout fair play?

http://digital-archives.ccny.cuny.edu/archival-collections/observation_post/1961/Vol%2030_No%205_October_11_1961.pdf

ElizMcCord said:

IMO- If Burner aka Zoinks aka Bramzzoinks, wasn't so prone to hyperbole, be it on anti Semitism or just anti liberal agenda, or anything in general, one would be interested in engaging in a discussion that would actually bear fruit. But I'm  conditioned based on prior experience  to just click and move on. I cannot take him seriously, even if he did one day articulate an argument worthy of discussion by both reasonable liberals and conservatives. That is all. Carry on. 

He seems to be here just to tweak libs. 

GL2 said:

ElizMcCord said:

IMO- If Burner aka Zoinks aka Bramzzoinks, wasn't so prone to hyperbole, be it on anti Semitism or just anti liberal agenda, or anything in general, one would be interested in engaging in a discussion that would actually bear fruit. But I'm  conditioned based on prior experience  to just click and move on. I cannot take him seriously, even if he did one day articulate an argument worthy of discussion by both reasonable liberals and conservatives. That is all. Carry on. 

He seems to be here just to tweak libs. 

Zoinks, or Trump?