Progressitarian Delusions: LaFayette Square: "The Second Battle of Charlottesville"

I try. 

I do try.

I know I could do better. Undoubtedly more patient people than me do better.

But just about every time I try to read stuff from the progressive-left in order to get some perspective (note that I didn't say: keep), it's just flat-out nuts. It just drives me further away.

The Atlantic is a publication I used to love. I hard-copy-subscribed for years. 

But now it's just propagandistic bullshit. 

Take this, by Jonathan Karl, for example, which, as is so often the case, I couldn't even finish.

First, the f*cking faction-aggrandizing delusion of referring to the events surrounding the Unite The Right rally as a battle--"the battle of Charlottesville," fer Chrissake… The brawl--or, more properly, the antiliberal leftist attack against the UtR people--was an unconstitutional violation of their First Amendment rights facilitated by the City of Charlottesville and the police. The city tried to illegally stop the event, and the police pushed the participants into the teeth of the leftist mob--where it was met, among other things, by urine-and-feces bombs and aerosol-can flamethrowers. The participants may have been racist assholes--but racist assholes have First Amendment rights just like everybody else. And virtually no one anywhere near the left complained about this. Fields was a nut--but that's a different story that has nothing to do with any of the above.

As for the Lafayette Square incident--we'll know for sure what happened eventually, but odds are, Barr's account of it is true. As Turley has noted: it'd be nuts for him to have lied about it, since he knows everything is going to come out in hearings, and it's all a matter of record with the Park Police. Had it been me, I'm fairly sure I'd have made the same decision. The mob had already committed arson against St. John's the night before. I'll be damned if I'd leave it to their tender mercies one more night. Waiting until the next morning to drive out the mob would have been ridiculous. 

But, as is their wont, the progressive left got its "narrative" in place--among progressives, anyway--right away. And that's their story and they're sticking to it.

And none of that is to deny that the shrieking little Jacobettes had and have First Amendment rights. Nobody in my sector of the political spectrum denies that. They'd had lots of time to exercise those rights, and could exercise them just as well a few blocks away. And they'd been committing violence and arson, and would undoubtedly do so again--preferably elsewhere. Of course they'd soon enough be trying to destroy the Jackson statue...

Anyway.

Progressivism has just flat-out lost its damn mind.

Sure, Trump's caper was artless and cringey. Nobody's denying it.

But this kind of histrionic TDS on parade actually makes the photo-op seem not all that bad...

Needless to say, I'm not a lawyer. Perhaps forcing the protestors back was illegal. If so, that'll come out too. I'll be happy to know the truth about it. Though, even if a violation of the protestor's rights, it will, compared to their in-principle anti-First-Amendment lunacy, barely move the needle. Trump, in general, is pro-free-speech. The progressive left, by comparison, is anti-. Nothing that could reasonably be discovered about the Lafayette Square incident will in any way change that.