I testified in the Senate about the erosion of free speech and rise of violence on our campuses and in our streets. Antifa and related groups have succeeded in advancing anti-free-speech agendas as students and faculty justify attacks on those with opposing views. An example of the growing intolerance can be found in an editorial at the Daily California by staff writer Khaled Alqahtani. The August 12th column calls for violent resistance and denounced notions of civility in the public debate over racial and economic justice.
In his column entitled “This War Can’t Be Civil,” Alqahtani mocks those who seek non-violent change and while “quoting Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. about peaceful protest and resistance.” He declared “‘Radical love’ my ass. It disgusts me that the oppressors’ emotions and well-being (in all contexts, from institutions to individuals) are the first to be considered and accommodated whenever people question the validity of armed or violent resistance.”Alqahtani is willing to accept a role for peaceful protests but insists that people need to give violence a chance: “I’m not dismissing the power or impact of peaceful resistance. You may want to lead a silent march instead of setting a police station on fire. Sometimes, that may work best. What I’m criticizing is the constant rejection of violent resistance on grounds of respectability.”As will hardly come as a surprise to many on this blog, I believe that Alqahtani should have a protected right to espouse such obnoxious views. Of course, I strongly disagree with him and violent groups like Antifa who seek to intimidate or silence those with opposing views. I have previously stated, including in my recent testimony, that I believe students or faculty who engage in violence should be expelled or fired. Yet, free speech often means defending those who least deserve it but most need it. Alqahtani is one of those people.It is important to note however that conservative students have been punished for language viewed as threatening by others. We recently discussed a Stockton student who was charged after simply using a Trump background for a Zoom class and a comment left by a third party on his Facebook site. In this case, a student columnist directly called for violence but it was treated as protected speech. Likewise, Syracuse editors removed a columnist becauseshe questioned claims of “institutional racism” in another publication.
I agree with the decision here but the greater concern is sense of a double standard applied to conservative, libertarian or contrarian students. Universities have shown strikingly different levels of tolerance for controversial statements or images from the left as opposed to the right.
Alqahtani embodies the rising intolerance for opposing views and embracing of violence as a form a political expression. Tellingly, the Antifa Handbook starts with the following quote from Buenaventura Durruti: “fascism is not to be debated, it is to be destroyed.” These extremists simply define fascism in encompassing an ever-expanding range of views from capitalism to patriarchy to police.
We defeat hateful and violent views like Alqahtani by maintaining the principles that define us — and distinguish us from those who would embrace mob rule.
Your racist comment isn’t welcome, and it only reflects on you.
Book, at least they did not beat Michelle Obama to a pulp like the Antifa/BLM peaceful protestors in Portland did to that driver.
Thankfully no body has covered that driver being pulverized at the Washington Post or NYTimes which means it never happened
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/17/truck-crash-protest-assault/
REGARDING ABOVE:
This isnt Seth Warner but our creepy, loser troll again. He is having a major hissy fit.
Seth – sorry that someone is still targeting you. I tried keeping track of which avatar is yours, but I thought it looked like a TV with antenna. It seems like even when the real Seth posts, the avatar changes.
Karen, he’s after every liberal now and super active today. For reasons that aren’t clear, the Professor and Mr Smith can’t seem to get a handle on this. There could be some technical reason why they can’t. This could be an authentic Russian troll who has the technology to by-pass any block. And if indeed that is the case, Professor Turley might be understandably reluctant to address it openly.
I can tell you guys that a basic VPN service can bypass IP blocks. Works in China and it will work here too. Or Tor, I suppose. It’s almost impossible with an open format like this keep out abusive posters. If you like a format like this, you just gotta be thick skinned. Seth-Peter, dont worry, that person is just mocking you, there is no real danger of confusion.
I invite you Seth Peter, valued partner in dialogue, to keep up your contributions, even though we rarely seem to agree.
Thanks for your support, Kurtz. I realized long ago this troll is seriously disturbed. But my concern is primarily for the blog. None of us regulars want some loser mucking up the threads. And it’s not just ‘me’ he’s after. Today this troll’s been using the names of every liberal regular to create total confusion.
Commit – there is nothing racist about Clide’s comment. Michelle is not above rebuke.
And your point is?
Constitutional citation please…or is that an edict against freely holding an opinion from the Feminazi White Shirt headquarters?
Sieg Heil Mein Frau Obergruppenfuhrer Needs To Be Committed!!!
OUR LOSER TROLL IS TRICKING AGAIN
Between 3 and 4pm EDT, our creepy loser troll posted his usual gay-centric dirty tricks.
This is the same troll who posts numerous comments per day under a range of stupid-sounding names. He once had ambitions of dominating the discussions on this blog. However he lacks the intelligence to be taken seriously as a real debater. Therefore he frequently employs dirty tricks by stealing the names of liberal commenters and creating phony posts where liberals appear to be making gay-centric comments.
Strangely many of the Trump supporters on this blog see this troll as a necessary attack dog to keep liberals at bay. And that in itself tells us everything we need to know about Trump supporters. They actually rely on creepy losers to harass liberals while claiming conservatives are oppressed by ‘mean liberals’.
I rely on creepy losers like myself. When someone says something and I’m hard, then love is in the air. Go Creepy Joe.
More leftist tolerance, peace and love for which they are so well known.
Here is my message to all of the Brave Masked Wonderful Warriors of Antifa (TM), BLM members and their other white allies:
I dare you to leave your urban enclaves where you are supported/tolerated by local governments and come to the “flyover country” that you love to despise with your message of “liberation”?
BRING IT ON! Have a feeling it won’t end well for any of the above groups. Just my guess.
antonio
What do they think they are resisting? People yearn for greatness. Sometimes, they feel like they were born in the wrong time. Perhaps it is a chronistic form of dysphoria. They identify with freedom fighters from the Underground Railroad.
The law protects everyone equally. We do not live in a racist country. There are a great many countries which are homogenous, in which immigrants will never, ever, be considered native. By contrast, we have white, black, Asian, and Latino Americans. These activists feel born out of time, and useless, so they engage in the delusion that they are freedom fighters.
This BLM movement is not about making black lives better. This is made plain when the steps that are statistically most likely to yield a middle class life are dismissed as white supremacy:
Stay in school, study hard, and get a good education.
Go to college or a trade school, or get a job out of high school.
Work hard.
Wait to have kids until you are married.
Do these things, and you are most likely to enjoy a middle class life.
But what’s encouraged? Speaking improperly, dropping out of school, doing drugs, and then demanding the goods of those who followed these easy steps. It would be like the grasshopper razing an ant hill and demanding their food stores, gathered while he fiddled the summer away. Looting and rioting are euphemistically called “protesting” and excused. BLM racists drag white people from their vehicles, beat them, and demand white people give them their houses. That makes blacks look like violent, total failures who require white people to care for them from cradle to grave. That’s is a racist, self defeating message of lethargy. BLM is anticapitalist, and pro-socialist. Ironically, socialism is a form of slavery, in which the government owns the product of your labor and mind, and issues you what the government thinks you need. It is shocking how the BLM movement appears to be fighting to enslave people to the government, as if that’s a step above being enslaved to an individual. It is unfair that just because BLM is loud, and supported by politicians and celebrities, that it is assumed it speaks for all black people. There are many who are disgusted with this violent, racist, anticapitalist movement.
If BLM was really about improving black lives, then it would be using that massive treasure, focus, and national force of will to change black culture in the inner city. Black culture is not homogenous, any more than white culture is. There are different subcultures. The black people I grew up near were conservative, middle class, and were just like us. But there is indeed a particular subculture of total failure. The one that lives in high crime neighborhoods, where going to school is like living Lord of the Flies. You have to become hardened and cruel just to survive. There is intense pressure to drop out of school, get up to no good, and have kids with various non committed men who will probably do a few stints in jail. The cultural pressure is to take the steps proven to fail. That is NOT black culture. That’s failure culture. White trash culture is not white culture; it’s failure culture.
Compare and contrast with grimly impoverished immigrants who come here from the East Indies, Thailand, or China. They work incredibly hard, and put intense family pressure on their children to not only excel in school, but to become white collar professionals. They do so well that there are stereotypes about their success.
BLM should be working to improve the perception of the importance of education, and waiting to have kids until you are married, in impoverished areas. Stop protecting gangs with the attitude that it’s snitching. Boot the crime out. Promote conservative values.
What do blacks do when they go to school, study hard, go to college, get a degree, get married, and have a family? They MOVE OUT of the high crime, anti-conservative value, impoverished areas. It’s not white flight. It’s Success Flight. If you have the means, you move out of high crime neighborhoods and bad schools.
Well, darn. I was doing so well on making my posts shorter and more to the point. I think I fell off the editing wagon.
No worries, Karen. 🙂 Communicating in complete thoughts is a skill we’d do well to return to. Much better than whatever gets punched shorthand as a text message.
Thanks, Prairie Rose. Hope you’re doing well during the Age of Plague.
We are. I always enjoy your comments. I think you edit fine. I hope you are doing well, too.
BLM is a fraud and absolute lie. They only care about a black killing if done by a white or a police officer. Thousands of blacks murder one another with nary a peep by this wonderful civil rights organization.
BTW – according to the FBI Uniform Crime Statistics for 2018 the Black/White murder ratio is higher than the ratio between men and women.
7.86 Black murders for every White murder
7.37 Male murders for every Female murder
Another “hate fact”. A “hate fact” is defined as something indisputably true but does not fit or advance some sort of leftist narrative.
antonio
“What do they think they are resisting?” In a Word, Sanity.
At present, the only way to “defeat” evil-minded anarchists: TRUMP 2020. Voting for someone who isn’t mentally up to the job of USA President means endorsing views such as that about which Professor Turley enlightens us.
Just nuke em already.
Anonymous wrote, “Just nuke em already.”
It’s comments like these from obvious internet trolls that should be immediately deleted.
I want to point something important out to people. The US is trying to get a sitdown with the Taliban. The Taliban that the US sought to try and destroy about 20 years ago. The Taliban are still there and if the US can get to keep its green zone in Kabul and air force base in Kandahar then the US will probably pull out. These were probably the main strategic aims all along. Destroying the Tabliban was never possible, without destroying the Pashtun people, which was never possible nor seriously considered. The Taliban, in other words, are in a similar position to the Viet Cong, and we will hopefully be making a more politically effective exit
So yes all political matters can come down to violence and effective violence can settle political questions. It is a fantasy to think that politics should only be settled by talk, talk, talk.
I encourage normal American law abiding citizens who feel beleaguered by the last 3 months of horrifying big city chaos and riot and violence, to understand, that YOU WERE THE TARGETS OF THAT PSYOP. Not really the police, but YOU. To scare you, to intimidate you, to trick you into supporting the Democratic party leadership, to scare you from supporting Trump. This was organized violence and crime aimed at the white population, but not just them, also at the general law abiding populations of all races in this nation, to harass, scare, and intimidate you. BLM is a PSYOP.
Now organized force COULD stop the psyop. But it is letting run its course. And that is fortuitous. Because only through oppression today will law abiding people learn the lessons of history that have been lost to us in our effete, cushy, safe American spaces. So our adversaries are teaching us.
To wit:
EVERY GOVERNMENT IS A SYSTEM OF ORGANIZED FORCE
ALL LAWS ARE THE RULES BY WHICH GOVERNMENT APPLIES THAT FORCE
CONTROL OF GOVERNMENT IS ALWAYS CRAVED BY EVIL MEN
GOOD MEN MUST HAVE POWER OR EVIL MEN WITH MORE POWER WILL RULE
SOCIAL EXISTENCE ALWAYS ENTAILS GROUP COMPETITION FOR RESOURCES
ALL LIFE IS “WILL TO POWER”
“ALL LIFE IS “WILL TO POWER”
*****************************************
Amen. And always was and always will be. Freedom comes at the barrel of a gun.
Human success comes with cooperation. That is the characteristic which has led to our success as a species, not fighting.
Mao’s quote that Mespo referred to entails the sense of social cooperation that book alludes to.
fuller text from his “Selected Works:”
“Now that Japanese imperialist oppression and the nation-wide resistance to it have pushed our labouring people into the arena of war, Communists should prove themselves the most politically conscious leaders in this war. Every Communist must grasp the truth, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organizations, as witness the powerful Party organizations which the Eighth Route Army has created in northern China. ”
see that? “the Party” a union of like minded activists, “commands the gun”
one gun is nothing. ten thousand guns is something., social cooperation is indeed the greatest asset. Nietzsche explored this theme as well in his much misunderstood writings about the tribes of Israel who were captive in Bablylon. Genealogy of Morals, perhaps, if i recall
Book, I know you are interested in evolutionary psychology. That is one of those fellow’s fields you have often recommended. I am too.
“resource competition” is part of all animal life, and plants and microbes, too.
human strategies for social conflict and leadership are evolved in the context of resource competition. here’s an article that covers some of that territory. I havent read much of it, but it’s a start if you want to follow up on a non-moralistic conversation about survival, the necessary condition of life that informs all future “success”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6603082/
You’re f…ing nuts Kurtz, Check in somewhere. It’s time.
Book, you remind me of a dialogue from cinema:
——————————————————————-
Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Willard: I don’t see any method at all, sir.
——————————————————————–
See book, you just don’t get the method. The past 3 months should have made it perfectly clear
I agree that good people — not evil people — must have power. But Trump is not a “good man.”
As for the protests, millions of Americans participated in at least one protest (see, e.g., https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8488409/BLM-protests-largest-U-S-history-26MILLION-Americans-attended.html ). The vast majority of protesters have been peaceful. I’m one of them. I went to one totally peaceful protest with tens of thousands of other protesters in June. I didn’t go as part of a “psy-op.” I went to protest harmful police violence that disproportionately affects people of color. Some protesters have been violent, and I condemn that. But I’m not going to lump the majority of peaceful protesters in with them.
“The vast majority of protesters have been peaceful.”
That’s a bald faced lie, and you know it.
The majority of protests all over the US have been nothing more than a staging ground for Antifa to start rioting as soon as it gets dark.
It’s been a well planned and coordinated cookie cutter approach in almost every major city.
Get a real job.
Rhodes, you clearly don’t like the evidence that I provided.
Again: according to the news, millions of people have attended at least one protest. The vast majority of these millions have been peaceful.
If you have counterevidence about the total number of people who’ve attended at least one protest, present it. But your evidenceless claim doesn’t cut it.
As for your advice, you’re free to take it yourself.
Rhodes, cease fire. Disengage. That’s a Feminazi White Shirt bot. It doesn’t eat. It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t contemplate. It doesn’t deliberate. It just endlessly fires off rabid, canned diatribes. You’re wasting your time.
Mr Kurtz wrote, “The Taliban that the US sought to try and destroy about 20 years ago.”
That’s not exactly correct. The USA set out to destroy Al-Qaeda not the Taliban. The Taliban were physically harboring Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and they chose to fight with Al-Qaeda which made them enemy combatants and fair targets for our military.
My personal opinion that’s based on my knowledge and the knowledge of friends and family that have spent time fighting these two groups in Afghanistan is that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are indiscernible from one another, they are both radical Islamist extremist groups that are out to destroy anything that’s not like them and have zero tolerance for anything outside their ideology. They are bigots that publicly murder and maim those that do not kowtow to them or follow their rules but they are not nearly as openly violent as ISIS who tries to actively engage in genocide.
I agree Steve., though AQ looked to export there ideology and impact world events and to great effect. I think the Taliban aims no higher than their world in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The individual mentioned is of course on it’s face guilty of inciting violence. No problem with that arrest. If the Patriot Act were used the charge would be ‘suspicion of supporting terrorism.’ Not the end as there is still a trial since Patriot Act wasn’t used.