Berkeley’s Antifa Takeover Shows There Is Evil On Both Sides
The Federalist - Wednesday August 30, 2017
by Robert Tracinski
The media spent the last two weeks, after the deadly riot in Charlottesville, denouncing the notion that there were two sides responsible for the violence and specifically praising the far-left’s black-clad “Antifa” brawlers as freedom fighters who are saving us from Nazism. Then, on Sunday, Antifa was filmed attacking random people on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, looking and acting exactly like a fascist militia bent on imposing rule by force.
This is a timely warning that the media is using the shock and horror of one evil, a newly brazen white nationalism, to panic us into submission to the horror of another evil. This media trope was established by criticism of President Trump for condemning violence on “both sides” in Charlottesville. Since anything Trump says must necessarily be wrong, it therefore became unacceptable for anyone to say that there was violence on both sides in Charlottesville.
But there was violence on both sides. That was clear from videos and photo essays and was described by reporters at the time. That even includes reporters who, in the process of factually describing the violence on both sides, still imposed the narrative that both sides weren’t to blame.
For example, New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg acknowledged the “hatred” with which the black-clad Antifa attacked their opponents, but then the Twitter mob pressured her to recant. In the old days, we used to speculate that reporters and commentators tailored their views based on what they thought would get them invited to DC and New York cocktail parties. Now they tailor their views to avoid the amplified gossip of random people on a social media platform. Decide for yourself which is worse.
But the new edict had been delivered by the vox populi of political Twitter, and everyone fell in line. The Left has given up violence, having “cleansed itself through a painful process of introspection,” according to an opinion piece in the Washington Post. Even if they are violent, it’s just not the same thing, because they’re not motivated by “hate” when they club people over the head. They’re violent in a good way, and only against the bad guys. In fact, come to think of it, they’re just like the GIs who stormed Omaha Beach!
No, really, this actually became a meme, the most famous version of which came from The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg.
Funny, I must have missed the part in “Saving Private Ryan” where Tom Hanks’s character is a radical socialist. Maybe it’s in the director’s cut.
After the media worked so hard to establish this new dogma, Antifa thugs repaid their courtesies by staging what can only be described as a violent takeover of the Berkeley campus. Ostensibly this was in response to a “No to Marxism in America” rally that never even happened. But it didn’t matter whether it happened Antifa used it as an excuse to attack any passersby suspected of being white nationalists or merely conservatives or Trump supporters.
Here was the scene.
Clip is from live chopper feed by @kcranews in #Berkeley. No cops seen, this is #Antifa. https://t.co/vQHUculNTXpic.twitter.com/AJvowKzbev
— Nick Short
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