This comes after the Washington Post ran a piece glamorizing left-wing thugs. Now Jeff Bezos' social justice tabloid continues hitting new lows in its war against civil society.
Today's entry is a cutesy Black Nationalist piece by Nathan D. B. Connolly, a History professor at Johns Hopkins who writes "about racism, capitalism, politics". Even though Connolly is on sabbatical, Hopkins'The Hub decided to promote his rant. It's also on the AP wire.
I'm not going to waste a lot of time taking it apart as I might have in some other context. It's the usual Black Nationalist bundle of revisionist history combined with "insights" about the evils of capitalism. And the failure of a liberal society to achieve his prefered objectives.
The whole thing is built around a "rock, paper, scissors" framing metaphor. But the metaphor is an obvious dog whistle.
The title is, "Charlottesville showed that liberalism can't defeat white supremacy. Only direct action can."
The conclusion is, "Segregationists have again assumed their pedestals in the Justice Department, the White House and many other American temples. Paper alone won't drive them out. Start throwing rocks."
There's enough plausible deniability that Connonlly can pretend that the "rocks" are a metaphor. Except no one is really that stupid.
"Resistance, be it forceful or clandestine, threatened or explicit, stands as our "rock." Rocks can look like armed self-defense or nonviolent direct-action campaigns."
"Then, in April 1968, amid a flurry of other "rocks," riots shook American cities following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It took that rolling unrest, not the promise of further economic growth, to spur President Lyndon Johnson and Congress to action. Within a week they had passed the Fair Housing Act."
The "rock" is a metaphor for, among other things, violence. That's the same game the political arms of terrorist groups play.
Enough.
We have the Washington Post running an editorial calling for street violence.
That's a crime. We have very specific laws about inciting violence. It's time that they were applied.
The left has shown that it will not control its extremists. Instead it champions them. Conservatives have three options.
1. Back street violence in return. Which effectively moves us toward a civil war and dissolution of civil society.
2. Ignoring the violence and letting the left get away with it.
3. Legal sanctions against those engaging in violence and those behind the violence
Door number 3 is scary. But numbers 1 and 2 are not viable options unless we want to wreck the country.
I don't believe any court will hold the Washington Post accountable for this, but it would send a forceful message that there is a price to pay for inciting violence.