Political Violence for Me, but Not for Thee

Whether January 6 saw a march on the Capitol or a storming of the Capitol, the event was manna from Heaven for the Democratic Party. Having encouraged the extremist political violence of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, the American left clung to the Capitol violence as a life saver-- it could not have done better in designing an event that would allow it to shift the blame to the right, to Trump supporters.

As I said at the time, the people who stormed the Capitol fell into a trap. They had imagined that since the left had made political violence acceptable, that meant that political violence was acceptable.

Now, Daniel Greenfield explains that the radical left, the woke left, is far more likely to accept and even to foment political violence. (via Maggie’s Farm) Blaming it on the right is a ploy, designed to exculpate those who have been inciting the violence.

The Democrats and their media have spent the past few months crying about political violence coming from conservatives, calling for gun control, and militarizing the nation’s capital. All of the agonizing about political violence came after a year in which ‘woke’ Black Lives Matter mobs killed, beat, and burned their way across the country in an orgy of ‘mostly peaceful’ violence.

He reminds us of the cost of the spring and summer BLM protest, which Greenfield calls woke terror:

Even the most modest estimates of political woke terror in 2020 place it at 8 dead, over 700 injured, and over $2 billion in damages. And the year could have ended even more bloodily with the Left prepping for mass protests with “bail funds that could be activated in response to mass arrests" and a fund “for the families of anyone killed in violence on or around Election Day."

Where does the impetus come from? Why, Greenfield remarks, it comes to us from the Ivy League, especially from those students and faculty who are most woke. That would be humanities and social sciences students. The least woke people are studying science and do not have the time for political violence. They are, dare I say, living in the real world.

The 'wokes' weren't directly represented, but so-called non-binary gender students, an almost certain 'tell' of wokeness, were the most violent with 1 in 10 believing that violence was sometimes or always acceptable, and a third believing that political violence could be justified. Three-quarters of this group identified as some variety of liberal: the highest number.

Support for violence was lowest among the sciences, and highest among interdisciplinary studies and the arts and humanities. This tracks with the percentages of the left-leaning students, 68% for interdisciplinary, 64% among the arts, and only 48% among the sciences.

Evidently, as has often been pointed out, wokeism borrows Storm Trooper tactics. It is an extremist movement that stokes conflict and power struggles in the everyday affairs of students:

2020’s racial violence, like the political violence of previous years, was an outgrowth of ‘woke’ campus radicalization. And ‘woke’ is just a euphemism for radicalization. To become ‘woke’ is to turn extreme and to see society as a brutal struggle for power between polar moral opposites.

It’s a cultish term for a political cult that reframes extremism as a revelation, and was used by the Nazis who made "Deutschland Erwache!" or "Germany Awake!" into their slogan.

As it happens, Democrats were far more tolerant of political violence when they could make it appear to be a protest against the Trump administration. Some might call it insurrectionary. And yet, Greenfield questions whether the current hiatus will continue:

Support for political violence rises and fades with the political moment. After the Democrats took over the White House and the Senate, their tolerance for political violence suddenly vanished. In a matter of weeks, the party of rioters declared that riots were now seditious insurrections.

Washington D.C. is now under permanently military occupation to stave off riots by the party of riots. The Democrat politicians who painted Black Lives Matter slogans on the street and called federal law enforcement fascists for trying to keep the ‘woke’ mob from burning down the White House and the Church of Presidents are very eager to use the military to suppress protests.