A month ago I was reported to Facebook by an individual who didn’t like my response to the comments he made about an article in The National Post newspaper. The premise of the article was that “the anti-fascist Left were the real fascists all along”. The individual who ended up reporting me declared in his comment that “This article was written by a Nazi sympathizer…”
As is the standard for those who gravitate to the Left these days the individual felt no instinct or obligation to offer anything resembling a rational justification for such an extraordinary denunciation. It was the act of criticizing the actions of mobs of self-proclaimed ‘anti fascists’… ANTIFA for short… that was the sole justification for pronouncing the author of the column to be a “Nazi sympathizer”.
Anyone in the comment thread who pointed out the self-evident lunacy of this kind of reasoning was instantly labeled a Nazi as well. In my case, not only was I called a “fucking Nazi” by this arbiter of moral excellence for alerting him to the fact that his comments made him appear “incapable of generating a perspective that any thinking adult would take seriously”…. he took it upon himself to report me to Facebook claiming that my comparatively mild criticism of his vile accusations amounted to “harassment”. The full account of our brief interaction can be read in my previous Going to Getugly post “Leftist intellectual pipsqueaks have power to get you banned by Facebook.” Facebook of course instantly accepted the assessment of the guy calling people Nazis that he was a victim of harassment and I was declared to be the one in violation of their strictly enforced ‘community standards’. My punishment was banishment from posting anything on Facebook for 30 days.
Fast forward to this week and we have yet another example of the kind of people my accuser, Facebook, much of the mainstream media and many people on the Left who take their own moral excellence as given have gone out of their way to endorse and defend.
The video footage of independent reporter Andy Ngo being assaulted in Portland by his moral superiors from ANTIFA is hard to watch. He is surrounded by a crowd of black clad and masked thugs. Not only do they take turns hitting him, they pour drinks over his head and spray him with silly string. It’s our era’s equivalent of tarring and feathering. The intention is to not only inflict pain but to humiliate. To treat him as unworthy of the basic dignity one should afford any human being. Dazed by the blows and the shock of the circumstances Andy manages to stumble away from the mob. They bravely continue to shout abuse and throw things at him as he makes his retreat alone.
The result of having all of this moral superiority inflicted upon him was a trip to the hospital for Andy and a diagnosis of a brain hemorrhage.
Like the individual who pronounced the author of the National Post column to be a ‘Nazi sympathizer’, the justification for this vicious attack was Ngo’s record of critical reporting on the tactics of ANTIFA. The message to Andy and to everyone is clear: Opposition to us will not be tolerated. The absolute righteousness of our ideological preferences justifies any action we choose to take. To put it simply… disagree with us and we will beat the crap out you. Maybe you will think twice about opposing us in the future.
This is what members of the mainstream media and ‘progressive’ Leftists in the general public who take their own infallible moral perfection as given are supporting when they defend ANTIFA.
Nothing reminiscent of the actual fascists in the attitude and tactics of these ‘anti fascists’ whatsoever, right?
As pointed out in the previous Going to Getugly post, the Orwellian double-think they rely on to justify supporting all of this is that acting exactly like Hitler’s Brownshirts becomes virtuous if the mobs beating up people in the street wear t-shirts with the phrase ‘anti-fascist’ printed on them while doing it.
I think it’s worth noting that I’ve personally seen nothing about this assault in the mainstream Canadian media. Nothing came across my Facebook feed from international mainstream outlets. If you go looking for it there is a smattering of coverage in some mainstream US, UK and Australian sources.
Contrast this with the coverage of the assault on two lesbian women on the tube in London from a couple of weeks before the attack on Andy.
What happened to those women was appalling. But it was a random assault on public transit in a big city. There must be dozens if not hundreds of similarly appalling and violent incidents that occur in major cities all over the world every week. Yet this particular random assault made international headlines and the story with its accompanying imagery was unavoidable for days afterwords.
But the brutal attack on a well known Conservative journalist by a mob of far Left extremists in broad daylight on the streets of a very liberal American city? Not so much.
How should we account for the discrepancy in interest shown by the media to publicize the two incidents? It would seem to me that one of the assaults fit a narrative that the mainstream media is invested in promoting. The other did not.
It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out which is which. But it may take one to help journalist Andy Ngo fully recover.
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