Liberal fascist thought crimes and the 'largely peaceful' big lie about the mobs

Veronika Kyrylenko:

Amid COVID-19 pandemic hysteria, racial tensions, and demands to defund the police, putting in real danger lives and businesses across America, the most disturbing part of the leftist "activism" in the overheated political climate is, perhaps, a vicious attack on First Amendment rights.  In business and academia, media, and sports, we see people holding opinions that deviate from the leftist discourse being attacked.  Practically anything, any piece of fact, statistics, sentiments like "all lives matter," any picture, any opinion expressed as civilly as possible, may cost you your job, reputation, and even life.

"Social justice warriors" are torching traditional liberal beliefs about free speech and tolerance with ideas so toxic and destructive that they shut the debate down, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation — all while calling for a "discussion" about race.  Evidently, only unarguable support is allowed.  Deal with your "white fragility," you racist, and then fully submit.  There's no middle ground.

Just like in a Rorschach inkblot test meant to measure thought disorder for the purpose of identifying a mental illness, racism is spotted virtually everywhere.  Is it a bunny or a monster that you see in that picture?  Is it a rational argument, or is it an insult?  Your opinion or a hate crime?  And if you don't see a monster here, then you are a monster yourself — and will be treated as such.

We're witnessing organization after organization being bullied into searching out thoughtcrime.  We're talking about not some KKK proclamations, but cases where people were punished for common sense that was found offensive.  Even a UCLA professor may be placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" to his students, or his colleague could be suspended from his job after refusing a student's request to effectively cancel final exams for black students amid protests over the death of George Floyd.

There's a data scientist who once worked for President Obama's re-election campaign who was fired from a research firm for retweeting an academic study suggesting that nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones.  We're seeing conservative media — Zero Hedge and the Federalist — being pressed by Google to censor their content by barring them from Google's ad platform.  We're seeing corporations changing logos of their products dubbed racist on Twitter.

We're seeing leftist journalists who managed to preserve the most valuable professional skill — critical thinking — becoming victims of this insanity, too, when groups of fellow staffers demand the firing or reprimand of colleagues who made politically "problematic" editorial or social media decisions.  The New York Times, the Intercept, Vox, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Variety, and others saw racially based challenges to management, which was brilliantly depicted by Matt Taibbi in his refreshing piece "The American Press Is Destroying Itself."

In the most discussed and infamous case of Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) op-ed entitled "Send in the troops," The New York Times editorial page editor, James Bennet, who allowed for its publication, was ousted out of his position.  Even though senator did not call for "military force against protesters in American cities," but spoke of a "show of force" needed, in his opinion, to manage a situation, which a considerable part of the country saw as spiraling out of control, some of the Times' staffers felt threatened: "Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger," tweeted many of them.

Out of fear of getting in trouble by bringing up anything even remotely controversial, journalists are twisting themselves into knots by presenting us with mind-blowing titles such as "27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London."  This is the BBC, the world's largest broadcast news organization, that generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online news coverage, and has an annual budget of £350 million (roughly $432 million).  How about MSNBC's Ali Velshi reporting in front of the burning police precinct headquarters that the "protests" are "not generally speaking unruly"?

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"Largely peaceful" has become one of the big lies of the left when describing the riots and destruction wrought by the tantrum that grew out of the George Floyd death in the custody of the police.   The Washington Post described the riots in DC as "largely peaceful" ignoring the 150 casualties of police that required trips to the hospital and the nearly 50 secret service agents injured by the rioters.  Not to mention burned buildings and discretion of monuments by the "largely peaceful" mob.