Of Course They Cheered The Murders

A few months ago I was in a stupid Reddit RPG discussion where someone asked if murderous abolitionist John Brown would be an example of a “Chaotic Good” D&D alignment. I objected to the “good” label and said he was neutral at best because he organized lynchings of people for politically supporting slavery and killed their older sons too. He went on to organize a failed arms seizure where his men killed a black worker who was about to raise the alarm.

As can be expected, I got a lot of pushback from leftists who focused on how brutal slavery was and were happy to see its supporters killed. The dead black porter was tragic, but to them, an acceptable casualty.

Naturally, I brought up Nat Turner’s failed slave revolt. Turner and his men, all slaves and former slaves, roamed the countryside looking for white people to murder. They targeted people completely uninvolved with slavery simply because of their race. They decapitated and burned a baby. I honestly thought those details would mean something.

The leftists wouldn’t budge. They still supported Nat Turner and while they wouldn’t call the baby evil, they adopted a peculiar distanced stance on the killings, saying it wasn’t their place to judge as they had never experienced slavery. The baby would have grown up to be a white oppressor, I was told.

It’s not that their stance surprised me, but that they didn’t weasel out of it like they normally do with platitudes about “resistance” and “solidarity.” They addressed the intentional murder of children and saw it as acceptable.

Sound familiar yet? Cheers and celebrations for the gruesome violence in Israel weren’t a shock. It wasn’t a change in character. It was the exact thing the far left has proclaimed for decades. The big difference here is they are championing fresh slaughter instead of historic murders.

I looked up “Nat Turner” on Twitter and whackjob academic Norman Finkelstein made the same comparison I did to the Hamas attack. The difference is he brought up Nat Turner’s horrible crimes to justify machine-gunning people who attended an outdoor concert, not to condemn them.

If there was any doubt about what he supports, he wrote a blog post where he simply cut and pasted the Wikipedia description of Turner’s racial genocide campaign, and somehow he wants people who read this to support Hamas.

Historic killings, contemporary killings; Finkelstein and I completely agree that the ethics are parallel because they are. The only difference is I’m on the side against decapitating babies.

There is no “After Socialism” without reflection

Every so often I rewatch Alan Charles Kors’s remarkable 2003 speech “After Socialism” where he lays out the scope of the killings in places like the Soviet Union and Maoist China and contrasts it with the disinterest among Western intellectuals. The speech is an hour and a half long, but there’s a summary that gets to the point in only eight bullet points.

Kors said that our culture and educational programs correctly honor and lament the horrors of the Nazi death machine, but ignore the even larger genocides that happened in communist countries. Young people simply do not know about the dizzying scale of the socialist death toll or its systematic oppression of regular people.

In the 20 years since Kors gave this talk, the situation has gotten worse. In my cultural circles, I’m bombarded with people who embrace the violent far left, and it’s become normalized in the wider society. The DSA openly states that it exists to overthrow capitalism and uses phrases like “Seize the means of production” and “eat the rich”.

The press does not care; neither do mainstream Democrats. Marxism is an explicitly violent ideology, prophesizing a deadly revolution where the capitalists will be slaughtered. When the views of the DSA are reported on, the press engages in “sanewashing” and acts like they just want modest reforms.

The radicals are not your friends. You share some positions with them, but they are nothing like you.

When Senator Diane Feinstein died, a viral thread on Twitter smeared her legacy with cherry-picked examples to make her seem far right, one of which was that she supported sanctions against North Korea. This was casually wedged in the middle of the thread, like a loaded gun stored in a dollhouse.

As I write this I’m sitting in coach on a plane. I passed a guy sitting in first class wearing a clean Rage Against the Machine power fist T-shirt. I’ve seen yuppies in convertibles wear Che Guevera icons and folks in resorts openly display hammer and sickle T-shirts. People display communist tattoos at their jobs. No one cares, this is completely normal.

But not only does the public not care, neither do institutions. I saw a local city with a “Black Lives Matter” mural painted on the street with sections celebrating the Black Panther Party, the trigger-happy Maoist revolutionary street gang. The same Black Panthers are currently enjoying a reputational overhaul as if they’re civil rights heroes. Defenders on NPR highlight the community breakfast program and skip over the organized rape, torture, and murders.

When leftists do try to kill people, it’s in the news but it never triggers an examination of the dangers of the radical left. Look at the sympathetic “Copy City” conspiracy theories after a radical shot a police officer before dying in the return fire. The failed firearm attack and failed bombing at the Standing Rock occupation. Remember Portland Antifa member Michael Reinoehl who shot and killed a Trump supporter, or the murders of two black youths at the infamous CHAZ/CHOP insurgency in Seattle?

All the pieces are there, but not enough people put them together. This shouldn’t be a “black pill” moment for anyone.

Remember the gunman who used AOC’s phrases in his manifesto? CNN doesn’t, but its anchor Jim Acosta was happy to draw parallels between the openly violent “Antifa” group and our own World War II veterans.

With zero shame, I’ve seen full-grown adults claim that because the name comes from “Anti-Fascist” that’s the entirety of our understanding of the group, the label is appropriate for anyone who is against fascism, and the only people that should be afraid are fascists.

Left-wing activist and self-described journalist Taylor Lorenz was decked by an Antifa protester for filming a public event, but as far as I can see, has never spoken out about the group. Is she a fascist now too?

Meanwhile, chants of “Gas the Jews” by pro-Palenstine supporters attracted zero interest from Antifa groups. When pro-Palestine activists display swastikas – not to compare Israel to the Nazis but to endorse Nazism – these self-described anti-fascists do not care. Their claims of being against “fascism” are simply a branding decision, as the group is best understood as an anarcho-communist brawl club.

All of this has been public information, but no one cared. Will that change now that we have recent murders?

The New York Times celebrates communist stooge Angela Davis but decided against giving her friend and comrade Reverend Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple positive press.

I honestly do not understand why the Rwanda genocide isn’t celebrated by leftists. Perhaps they do not know that the murdered Tutsis were economically successful while the machete-wielding Hutus were poor. Lefties will defend the French Revolution, so why not Africa’s famous genocide?

I’ve seen Chris Pratt get a lot of bad press for being a conservative Christian, but almost nothing for Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and his support of Peru’s murderous Shining Path group. Oliver Stones endorsed and glorified Hugo Chavez of all people. Where was the outrage?

Annoying sitcom actress turned annoying Screen Actors Guild president Fran Drescher is openly anti-capitalist, but this gets treated in the press like a cute quirk and not a red flag for evil. We endlessly look for terrible views related to fascism and racism, but communism? That’s just a novelty position, and if people like Malala Yousafzai or the late Nelson Mandela openly endorsed it, how bad can it be?

Noah Smith wrote about how widespread it was this week to see leftist activists praise the murders of civilians by Hamas, emphasizing that it was not the leaders in elected office but grassroots organizers.

This is the kind of action that would be rightfully denounced as a war crime in any war. I’m a big supporter of Ukraine, but if Ukrainian commandos massacred a Russian music festival, I would condemn it harshly and demand that the Ukrainian government make sure it doesn’t happen again. But many of the American leftists holding pro-Palestinian rallies gleefully celebrated the targeting of civilians as an act of liberation, even joking about the murders. For example, you can watch a video where one of the speakers at the NYC rally says:

And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.

The audience cheers his description of the atrocities, whooping with delight. Meanwhile, posters for other rallies were decorated with heroic images of the paragliders that the Hamas attackers used to attack the festival. Some chapters explicitly praised the attacks.

Smith’s explanation for the support of Hamas, but strange opposition to Ukraine, is one called “campism” where the far left sees different groups that oppose the West as heroic underdogs, even if those groups oppress women and homosexuals such as Hamas or Iran. They care very little about what those groups believe as long as they oppose Democratic capitalism.

Their side is anyone opposed to the oppressors, you see, and any violence against oppressors is righteous. Who is an oppressor? Their decisions look inconsistent if you believe the lines about caring for downtrodden groups.

Their decisions make perfect sense if you instead focus on Western civilization, the “oppressors”, and those who want to tear it down.

That’s why someone wants to burn Chick-fil-A locations to the ground because the founder gave money to anti-gay marriage campaigns more than a decade ago, but has no reservations about cheering on Islamic social conservatives who publicly hang men for being gay.

This makes no sense if you believe their concern is the protection of minority groups That’s just a story they tell. It makes perfect sense if you look at it in terms of Western capitalism and its enemies. It’s a simple binary – they don’t make room for nuance or complications.

Nothing we saw in the West this past week should surprise anyone; be it on a college campus or from the Black Lives Matter chapter of a major US city. These extremists have told us what they believe for years.