Their faces hidden behind black bandannas and hoodies, about a 100 anarchists and antifa — “anti-fascist” — barreled into a protest Sunday afternoon in Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park.
Jumping over plastic and concrete barriers, the group melted into a larger crowd of around 2,000 that had marched peacefully throughout the sunny afternoon for a “Rally Against Hate” gathering.
Shortly after, violence began to flare. A pepper-spray wielding Trump supporter was smacked to the ground with homemade shields. Another was attacked by five black-clad antifas, each windmilling kicks and punches into a man desperately trying to protect himself. A conservative group leader retreated for safety behind a line of riot police as marchers chucked water bottles, shot off pepper spray and screamed “fascist go home!”
All told, the Associated Press reported at least five individuals were attacked. An AP reporter witnessed the assaults. Berkeley Police’s Lt. Joe Okies told The Washington Post the rally resulted in “13 arrests on a range of charges including assault with a deadly weapon, obstructing a police officer, and various Berkeley municipal code violations.”
And although the anti-hate and left-wing protesters largely drowned out the smaller clutch of far-right marchers attending a planned “No to Marxism in America” rally, Sunday’s confrontation marked another street brawl between opposing ends of the political spectrum == violence that has become a regular feature of the Trump years and gives signs of spiraling upward, particularly in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville.
“I applaud the more than 7,000 people who came out today to peacefully oppose bigotry, hatred and racism that we saw on display in Charlottesville,” Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín said in a statement. ” … However, the violence that small group of protesters engaged in against residents and the police, including throwing smoke bombs, is unacceptable. Fighting hate with hate does not work and only makes each side more entrenched in their ideological camps.”
Why is it “far-right” to say “No to Marxism in America”? Why are those who oppose Marxism accused of “bigotry, hatred and racism”? And why is nobody in the mainstream media asking these questions?
The votes are in from the commentariat, and the appetizer for this week is this fine-looking redhead in a “Confederate” bikini. Somehow, I doubt either Bobby Lee or Stonewall Jackson would have approved, but those were different times.
As always, many of the following links are to pics generally considered NSFW, and the management is not responsible for any unfortunate consequences arising from ill-timed clicking on those links. Nor are we responsible for the SPLC putting you on their list of boogeymen for associating with alleged Neo-Confederates, Falangists, and *shudder* Christians. Y’all been warned.
I have seen the devastation of war. I have witnessed the final moments of young men in distant lands, far from all they love and hold dear. I have watched my daughter deploy to combat in Afghanistan and soon might my son. I recognize the personal courage required to make difficult decisions. I know the cost of war. More importantly, I know the price of freedom.
Pardon my use of “clueless” in the headline, but various other adjectives were considered and rejected as possibly offensive. It’s important for the reader to understand that @Plutoburns, the person talking about “women invested in the patriarchy,” is a white male who produces a lame (and little-watched) YouTube series about Japanese cartoons and other such nerdy topics. It’s also important to know that the conversation that led to this weird remark began with transgender pornographer Zachary Antolak a/k/a “Zinnia Jones” a/k/a “Santana Kennedy” making an all-out defense of Hillary Clinton:
Let’s pause, reader, to consider what it says about our politics in 2017 that the most ardent admirer of Hillary Clinton is “Zinnia Jones.”
This is how you get more Trump.
The coalition constructed by the Democrat Party can’t win an election because it is organized to attract kooks, freaks, losers and weirdos, and is therefore unpalatable to decent, normal people. Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla, a liberal Democrat, has tried to talk sense to his party about their identity politics problem, but they won’t listen:
The reaction of liberals to Lilla’s book has been overwhelmingly negative, which may simply suggest how deeply the rot of identity politics has penetrated his political comrades in arms.
Predictably, the New York Times finds Lilla’s analysis thoroughly distasteful, and published a review by Yale University History Professor Beverly Gage that dismissed Lilla’s critique as “trolling disguised as erudition.”
Writing in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Columbia law professor Katherine Franke went further still, comparing Lilla to David Duke, the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Identity politics is the disease, and Trump is either a symptom of that disease or an attempted treatment, depending on your perspective.
Trying to win elections by claiming that people who don’t vote for you are racist sexist homophobes is a good way to lose an election.
At any rate, when Zachary/“Zinnia” asserted that Hillary Clinton “did nothing wrong” in her campaign, and that people who voted against Clinton owed her an apology, this unleashed a firestorm of criticism, mostly from leftists who had voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democrat primaries, and who detest Clinton as an “establishment” politician. “Zinnia” was accused of a “cultist” mentality for treating Clinton as “infallible.” Then “Zinnia” declared “I relate to her immensely. How do people look at her and not see themselves?” It was to this that @PlutoBurns replied, “mostly its men who refuse to believe the pay gap is a problem and women invested in the patriarchy.”
To begin with, the “pay gap” between men and women is a statistical mirage, an apples-to-oranges comparison that fails to account for real differences between men and women, not evidence of discrimination.
The “pay gap” myth has been so thoroughly debunked that it seems futile to engage in argument with anyone stupid enough to believe it. But what about the claim that “women invested in the patriarchy” explain Hillary’s defeat? To refute this, we have to begin by asking what “patriarchy” is and how a woman can be said to have “invested” in it.
Hey, @PlutoBurns: Your mother is “invested in the patriarchy.”
That’s right — women who have sons want their sons to be successful. Mothers want their sons to grow up, get a good job, get married and produce some grandchildren for Grandma to spoil. Insofar as any woman is in favor of male success, she is “invested in the patriarchy.”
Every married women is “invested in the patriarchy,” whether she realizes it or not, because her husband’s success benefits her and her children. It is idiotic for young feminists (mainly college girls and other unmarried women) to blame their woes on “the patriarchy,” because the least patriarchal men in the world are young bachelors playing the familiar game of trying to get sex without commitment. The kind of selfish creeps a girl meets using Tinder or some other dating app? Those guys are not the “patriarchy,” but it is the emotional pain women suffer in the hookup scene that is the chief source of misery that causes young women to call themselves “feminists.” If guys were more patriarchal, they’d be romancing these girls with an eye toward marriage and making babies. And because married women are more likely to vote Republican, the best way to solve the most common complaint of young women . . .
Well, this is how you get more Trump.
The coalition of kooks and weirdos assembled beneath the Democrat banner are fools if they think they will defeat the patriarchy. There is simply no feasible alternative, as Steven Goldberg pointed out in his 1973 classic, The Inevitability of Patriarchy. The smart move for any young person, male or female, is to learn how the system works and find a way to succeed within it, rather than to base your hopes on a radical fantasy of overthrowing the system. And anyone who takes “Zinnia Jones” seriously as a political commentator is as deluded as he/“she” is.
“Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight” is pretty good advice, but evidently nobody told this to Kenneth “Kiwi” Herring. On Tuesday in St. Louis, Herring attacked a 30-year-old neighbor with a knife, inflicting “severe lacerations” on the man’s face, arms and torso. When police arrived and attempted to arrest Herring, they say he/“she” refused to put down the knife and attacked one of the officers, slicing him in the arm. The officers then fatally shot Herring, who thus became “the 18th Trans Person Murdered in 2017,” according to the lesbian blog Autostraddle.
Of course, if you attack a police officer with a knife, it’s not murder when the cop shoots you, but this is how it how social-justice crusades operate — when the facts don’t fit the narrative, the facts don’t matter.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had trouble figuring out how to report this incident, calling Herring a “man” in the lead paragraph, but referring to him/“her” as a “person” in the headline. Meanwhile . . .
A man who drove his car into a group of protesters in St. Louis on Wednesday night has been charged with a felony.
Mark Colao, 59, was charged Thursday with a felony count of resisting arrest by fleeing and two misdemeanor charges of leaving the scene of an accident and operating a vehicle in a careless and imprudent manner.
Police say Colao, of the 2900 block of St. Vincent Avenue, drove his car through protesters who were blocking Manchester Avenue and Sarah Street in the Grove neighborhood Wednesday night.
After Colao pushed his car through the protesters, he gave the middle finger to a police officer who pulled alongside his car, and “accelerated aggressively” as he left the scene, according to charging documents.
Police said in a statement on Wednesday night that demonstrators began pounding on Colao’s car with their hands and a flag pole. Several kicked the Mercedes and climbed on the hood, police say. That appears to match what’s shown in the video, an overhead view of the scene. After a few moments, the video shows, the Mercedes surges forward, sending people tumbling into the street before speeding off around the corner.
Where do these people get the idea that they have the “right” to do things like this? Blocking the street, waylaying any motorist who wants to drive through the intersection — does that seem like a good idea? Like brandishing a knife and attacking a cop who’s got a gun? Our education system seems to have failed to educate people on basic common-sense personal safety issues. “Don’t hang around freaks and weirdos,” for example, is advice that could help you avoid a lot of trouble. That advice might have saved the life of the guy who died at a kinky sex festival in England, an event that attracted 250 people who paid as much as £600 to spend the weekend hanging around freaks and weirdos.
Expecting people to exercise common sense is “victim-blaming,” according to the social-justice mob, which encourages people to do foolish things and then celebrates them as heroic martyrs when their folly produces predictably bad consequences. The transgender victimhood narrative requires us to ignore the specific facts of the cases involved and to naïvely accept the implicit claim that society’s “transphobia” is to blame for the deaths of Kenneth “Kiwi” Herring, Troy “Tee Tee” Dangerfield, Rayquann “Ava” Jernigan and others.
There are obvious common-sense reasons to avoid certain behaviors, but the social-justice mob condemns common sense as ignorant prejudice, so that people keep doing stupid things and ending up dead, thus providing a fresh supply of heroic martyrs to sustain the victimhood narrative.
