Charlottesville, and beyond

Meanwhile, assuming, as does not really seem likely, that the demonstrators and counter-demonstrators actually were equally violent, the Dems and their supporters who seem to insist that does not mean they are equally to blame seem to subscribe to the view that if two ex-cons get into a fight in a bar the one with the worse criminal record is to blame.

Possibly, many of them are doing exactly what they mean to do, totally exonerating the violence of the antifas, for whom MSNBC (for instance) has provided a bully pulpit and for whom they have shown indulgence - while at least showing a soft spot for denying First Amendment protection to the Nazis, the Aryans, and all the white organizations, anyway, committed to agendas of racial hate.

That would be a piece of Constitutional Disobedience for which I have no sympathy, and I find it dismaying that in recent years the defenders of the First Amendment have been much more often on the right than on the left.

By the way, the author of Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook, Mark Bray, was on MSNBC, the other night, arguing that since only violence in the end brought down the German and Italian fascists we ought to use violence now to keep them - er, to keep American fascists, I mean, or, er, racists - from gaining power.

Of course, they are about a lot more than anti-racism and those they are anti- extend far beyond fascists (pretty much none of them are actually that) and racists, and Bray was an organizer in the Occupy movement when it became anti-capitalist and pro-Anarchist, but never mind.

If only someone had done that in the Germany of the 30s, he said, overlooking the fact that someone did, as those in his movement generally know very well.

The Weimar hard left had their own street-fighters, and between them the Nazis and the Reds raised a lot of hell in Germany.

Didn't work.

Obviously, those supportive of the novel handling of the First Amendment I mentioned above have similar views.

They might ask themselves how that's working out, right now, in Europe - and particularly how effectively decades of prohibition of Holocaust Denial and of publication of Mein Kampf in Europe - a precedent to which Geert Wilders implicitly appeals in suggesting a ban on the Koran in the Netherlands - have prevented the rise there of the same sort of populist extreme right as supports Trump in the US.

All the same, this seems to be an idea Democrats keep coming back to.

Recall the laments of leading Democrats that actual Koran burners and Terry Jones, who threatened it, could not be prosecuted owing to that inconvenient First Amendment.

A feature of the Constitution they lamented again at the time of widespread 2012 protests, on or just after September 11, in the Muslim world of a You Tube video mocking Mohammed put up by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, whom they shamelessly persecuted in shocking abuses of power.