Cheap Seats 2016
When Vulcans Cry - 06/08
By Rich Trzupek
There has been and there will continue to be violence outside of Trump rallies across the nation. According to many on the left and many in the mainstream media, the violence is Trump’s fault, notwithstanding the undeniable fact that the vast majority of those being assaulted are Trump supporters.
Though this sort of “blame the victim” justification from the left seems odd to my fellow conservatives/libertarians, there is a certain logic to it, albeit a logic so tortured that it would reduce Mr. Spock to tears. To understand it, we must start with the First Amendment.
The First Amendment guarantees the right of free speech, but it does not guarantee the right to say anything in any situation. Though there have been First Amendment absolutists among Supreme Court justices from time to time who claim the latter (Hugo Black being perhaps the most famous) the majority of the Court has consistently held that the two concepts are distinctly different.
The classic example is, of course, shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre when no actual fire exists. That is illegal because the false warning knowingly incites people to engage in an action – rushing for the exits – that places themselves and their fellow patrons in danger of physical harm. That is distinctly different from writing a blog entry that expresses your opinion that the theater is a fire trap, or saying that to your friends.
Similarly, you can be in a feud with a neighbor and, in the course of things, express your opinion during a family dinner that you wish the SOB next door would just roll over and die already. You can’t, on the other hand, tell your teen-aged son to go next door and shoot the bastard.
One can think of a thousand examples, but the point is clear: you are free to say or write whatever you want, so long as what you say or write is not part of an illegal activity or directs someone else to engage in an illegal activity.
In twenty-first century America no political leader, with the exception of the few in lunatic fringes, is going to direct or encourage his followers to engage in illegal activity, like violence against others. In Trump’s case, for example, he has never directed or encouraged anyone to persecute, assault, denigrate or engage in any form of discrimination against people of Mexican heritage or citizenship living in the United States.
There was a time when political leaders did encourage their followers to engage in discrimination against classes of people they found objectionable. Jews, blacks, Catholics, the Irish, Japanese, Eastern Europeans, and many others have found themselves the target of organized political attacks throughout our history.
Those kind of attacks don’t happen anymore, because – in my judgement – we have become so much more of a tolerant, accepting society than we were just fifty years ago. The left does not agree with that statement, but how to resolve their view that we are a bigoted, racist, misogynistic society, particularly on the right, with the lack of anyone on the right calling on their followers to engage in open attacks on their supposed targets?
In order to resolve that conflict, they conclude that those of us on the right are a horde of morons lead by evil geniuses, with Donald Trump providing the latest and most important example of the phenomenon. Thus, when Trump says he wants to build a wall to reduce illegal immigration, or deport criminals who enter our country illegally, they believe that this is in fact code that we drooling idiots understand to mean that we should kick all the damn Mexicans out of the country, after depriving them of their rights and employment and thumping a few heads along the way.
For the left, what Trump is doing, in other words, is the twenty-first century equivalent of shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, while for us on the right, what he is doing is the equivalent of asking somebody to put out his cigarette because it’s dangerous, annoying and illegal to smoke in a theater.
No matter. The left believes Trump to be so dangerous and his followers so stupid and violent, that a certain percentage of lefties thus feel obliged to “protect” society from theoretical assault by initiating actual assaults.
Last Thursday, Emmett Rensin, an editor at the lefty website Vox tweeted this: “Advice: If Trump comes to your town, start a riot.” He has since been suspended, but follow up tweets show that he believes the left is not only justified in resorting to violence to fight the “danger” that Trump represents, but is in fact obligated to do so.
Clearly, Rensin is not the only person on the left who is so sincerely deluded. And while we may understand the delusion, we should in no way defend it. Anyone who chooses violence over debate in the political arena is a coward, a fraud and a failure - period.
e-mail: rich@examinerpublications.com
www.threedonia.com
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