In the wake of Charlottesville, both GoDaddy and Google have refused to manage the domain registration for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that, in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is “dedicated to spreading anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism.” Subsequently Cloudflare, whose service was used to protect the site from denial-of-service attacks, has also dropped them as a customer, with a telling quote from Cloudflare’s CEO: “Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.”
We agree. Even for free speech advocates, this situation is deeply fraught with emotional, logistical, and legal twists and turns. All fair-minded people must stand against the hateful violence and aggression that seems to be growing across our country. But we must also recognize that on the Internet, any tactic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against others, including people whose opinions we agree with. Those on the left face calls to characterize the Black Lives Matter movement as a hate group. In the Civil Rights Era cases that formed the basis of today’s protections of freedom of speech, the NAACP’s voice was the one attacked.
Protecting free speech is not something we do because we agree with all of the speech that gets protected. We do it because we believe that no one—not the government and not private commercial enterprises—should decide who...
Now that most of the political juice has been squeezed out of the events in Charlottesville, Va., the country is preparing to move on from yet another ugly incident.
Just as after Ferguson, Baltimore, San Jose, Santa Barbara and Berkeley, the immediate reaction from the usual suspects went according to script. It was a shameful display by the media and the political class.
First, the political class sprinted to the closest microphone or TV camera they could find — at a speed that would impress Usain Bolt — in order to score points. Both sides of the political class exploited the opportunity to flaunt their racial sensitivity and moral superiority. Why do they feel the need to denounce hatred and violence every time one of these incidents occurs? Because if they don’t, their opponents say their silence equates to tacit approval of what took place. It is a game of political “gotcha.”
It is telling about the self-righteousness of the political class that they would sink so low for political gain as to use an incident where one young lady lost her life and others were injured. It is reprehensible. The incident amounted to hate versus hate.
The liberal media also forges these incidents into a club to bludgeon their political adversaries. Those adversaries include President Trump, conservatives and...
Apparently, as long as violent leftists label their victims “fascists,” they are free to set fires, smash windows and beat civilians bloody. No police officer will stop them. They have carte blanche to physically assault anyone they disapprove of, including Charles Murray, Heather Mac Donald, Ben Shapiro, me and Milo Yiannopoulos, as well as anyone who wanted to hear us speak.
Even far-left liberals like Evergreen State professor Bret Weinstein will be stripped of police protection solely because the mob called him a “racist.”
If the liberal shock troops deem local Republicans “Nazis” — because some of them support the duly elected Republican president — Portland will cancel the annual Rose Festival parade rather than allow any Trump supporters to march.
They’re all “fascists”! Ipso facto, the people cracking their skulls and smashing store windows are “anti-fascists,” or as they call themselves, “antifa.”
We have no way of knowing if the speakers at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally last weekend were “Nazis,” “white supremacists” or passionate Civil War buffs, inasmuch as they weren’t allowed to speak. The Democratic governor shut the event down, despite a court order to let it proceed.
We have only visuals presented to us by the activist media, showing some...
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