Those Awful, Violent Activists
They’re rude. They’re crude. They show up precisely where they’re not wanted and shout inappropriate, vulgar things. They not only make threats of violence, but engage in it as their preferred method of exercising their free speech rights. You know the type, right? What have they been up to lately?
When a political author hosts a book signing and speech, they shout him down, hound him from the stage and attempt to physically assault him.
Crowds of them gather, hurl eggs and shout obscenities at supporters of the other party’s candidates.
They deliver death threats to members of Congress and their families so serious that they are arrested by the FBI.
We all know who is being discussed here. The Democrats and the progressive liberal movement. From these and other examples we should readily be able to draw the general conclusion that liberal Democrats are violent people who wish to suppress the free speech of others and will stop at nothing to make sure they shut down their opponents, right?
If that sounds like an absurd leap off of the data wagon to you, you’re right. Taking tens of millions of engaged voters with a common set of goals and painting them with one brush based on the idiotic actions of a few bad actors is rather pathetic. And yet I’m hard pressed to click on the pages of any political blogs or news sites and not see the exact same type of generalizations being made about tea party activists and conservatives who gather to oppose Obamacare and support conservative candidates for office. (You know who you are.) Doesn’t this blind, one-sided distortion of reality give you a crick in your neck?
When 25,000 people gather together on the National Mall, you’re going to attract a couple of nuts. But when bloggers and cable news media types ignore 24,995 of them and focus exclusively on the handful who showed up holding a sign with a picture of a gun on it – as if that was the homogeneous tone of the entire event – you identify yourself as having the exact same level of credibility as the silly example I cited above.
When millions marched in protest of the Iraq war some years ago, did these same sources focus only on the handful of people who got arrested for throwing bricks or spilling symbolic blood in a military recruiting station? No. They did not. Large crowds attract elements of the fringe. It’s a rule of life.
Get a grip. There are a lot of people who are once again generally upset with the direction and actions of the government. They’re taking to the streets and making themselves heard. Stop with the generalizations. The only people being made to look foolish are the authors.
18 Responses to “Those Awful, Violent Activists”
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by TMV, PunditKix. PunditKix said: NEW: Those Awful, Violent Activists | The Moderate Voice – http://is.gd/b6xT0 [...]
Nice conservative talking point…
But within the last couple of years, we had a church shot-up in TN because it was to liberal, we had some guy go into the Holocaust Museum in DC and shoot the place up, we had a doctor who performs abortion killed by some right-winger, we had a guy fly a plane into an IRS building cause he was pissed off about his taxes…
Hell just last week, we had some right-winger in TN attempt to drive someone off the road because they had an Obama sticker on their car, and those are just the cases of violence I can remember of the top of my head…
DQ, thanks for reinforcing Jazz's point. Last “couple of years”? My, if that's all you can come with, that's amazing restraint on the part of 99.9997% of conservative activists.
Every one of the events, except the Car incident I listed, left dead bodies behind, and every one of those people were killed by pissed off right wingers…
In eight year of Bush in power, how many Americans were killed for purely political reasons by liberals on a rampage?
[...] Jazz Shaw on those “violent right wing hate group activist” [...]
One of the things I will miss most when the comments are turned off is being able to keep the daily score in the tu quoque game.
I guess Jazz never complained about liberals justifying Obama's acts because “Bush did it too”.
Crowds of them gather, hurl eggs and shout obscenities at supporters of the other party’s candidates.
Just watched the Breibart video(oh the pain). Where is an assault? One vague verbal threat is all I heard…
I guess you're right, Jazz. Those of us that bemoaned the actions of “liberal” activists such as you mentioned, should just suck it up about the tea partiers.
If someone, other than the guy that the FBI already arrested, actually kills someone – THEN is the time to berate the tea partiers.
Tell it to the Hutree.
One side kills. The other hurls obscenities. False equivalency much?
“Maybe the real point is that both sides have their crazies. Peta members fire bombing scientist's homes come to mind… I'm still more concerned about conservative crazies than liberal ones.”
I agree ShannonLee, well said.
Oh come on. Does no one remember the shooting at a Synagogue a few years back? Liberal wacko. Every repub convention loons come out to riot. What is it about saving the earth that seems to make some throw bottles at cops, because that's seems to be a common event. Wackos are wackos and maybe some viewpoints attract a greater number but the real truth is that for normal people either side goes bonkers. As bad as the rhetoric may get reasonable people don't get violent because of it. So demonizing either side is stupid, unreasonable, and partisan. DQ is a fan rooting for his “team”. He doesn't care how they cheat, how dirty they play, what the consequences are, just roots for the win and he will trash the opposition no matter what they do. That's fine and all but it makes for a boring conversation.
My counterpoint to what DQ is saying is that those incidents were the work of lone wackos, not organized movement activists. Meanwhile on the left, there is a history of violence within movements as in the case of the Weathermen (they may have been incompetent but they certainly had the intent to cause injuries and/or deaths.)
I'm not suggesting that rightwing activists will never do such things (the militia type groups would be most likely, much more so than the much larger Tea Party group.) But since the history for a movement to splinter off radical revolutionaries is on the left, not right, it seems a bit disingenuous for all of the concern to be coming from the left about the current agitation among conservatives.
As for lone wackos- I would potentially entertain the notion that there might be something that would make it more likely for a disturbed individual to be attracted to some twisted version of conservatism, than for them to have some pretense of liberalism that might motivate them to attack. I'm not quite sure what that 'something' is or how to describe what I think it might be- I guess fundamentalism is the best way to describe it, with a paranoid perception that there's a threat to some principle they hold as absolute.
Timothy McVeigh… Terry Nichols… Michael and Lori Fortier… 4 lone Wackos at work… 168 dead bodies…
Favorite book: Turner Diaries…
Yes, point taken, DQ, but again that speaks to competence, not the strength of the desire to do harm by wackos from each side.
And really, isn't that the difference that most Americans felt after 9/11- that the people who wished to do harm to the US had found a new way to do so, in a big way, with a small number of people and a relatively small amount of funding. So since I hear repeatedly from liberals that we shouldn't allow ourselves to become fearful because of this, and that the threat should be put into perspective, it's not at all clear to me why this is different.
Why do we not hear comparisons of how much more likely we are to die in car accidents than to be victims of right wing domestic terrorism?
The difference is that every conservative will tell you that the speeches heard in the Mosques and the Madrassas will affect the behavior of Muslims, but for some strange reason the speech used by conservative leaders/broadcasters will not have any effect on the behavior of their followers…
Touche in that that is an example of a double standard on the other side.
I'm still not feeling the distinction between the relative danger levels though.
And your double standard example works in the opposite direction, too, because most liberals will disagree with the conservative viewpoint you stated, and will instead say that mosques are not preaching hate or inciting violence, and that the conservatives who believe this are bigoted. If it's not OK to cast aspersions on the majority of Muslims based on the behavior of a few, or to claim that certain leaders among Muslims are druming up hatred (or for that matter, claiming that they're not adequately rebuking the extremists)- which, by the way, is not OK by me- then why is it OK to make those same claims and accusations against a very broad group of Americans?
I would assume that any native born terrorist organization would be far more dangerous in that it would be operating on it's home terrain, and if said organization was predominantly white and christian it would even be easier for it to blend into the wood works…
So far, Americans are far more likely to die in a car accident or of the flue than in a terrorist incident…
But all that could change as the right's rhetoric gets more violent and paranoid…