Portland Parade Cancellation Should Be a Wake-Up Call for Conservatives

Back on January 20, alt-right thought leader, Richard Spencer, was holding forth to the press when this happened:

To my surprise at the time, a lot of people I knew were practically giddy over Spencer getting sucker punched in a weenie-armed, douchey, hipster sort of way. The reasoning being that Spencer held noxious views and that made giving him a beat down legitimate. My warning at the time was that as far as the left was concerned there was no difference between Richard Spencer and anyone else on the right and that the violence would not stop with him.

Since that time we’ve seen an escalation of confrontations between Trump supporters and the would-be anarchist left, the self-described “antifa.”

Now we’ve reached the point from which it may be difficult to retreat.

…But a violent fringe has been using Trump’s rise as a justification for political violence, as if his authoritarian impulses justify authoritarianism from his opponents.

This tiny faction knows that most of their compatriots on the left are committed to nonviolence, so they frame their aggressive actions as a narrow exception to the rule.

Most famously, they insisted that it was okay, or even righteous, to punch white supremacist Richard Spencer because he was “a Nazi.” That position impels the debate down a slippery slope. And now, activists in Oregon caused the cancellation of the 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade, a community event in the southeast quadrant of Portland, by threatening to forcibly drag “fascists” off the parade route if they weren’t excluded.

Who are the fascists that will be dragged off the parade route?

The group we’re disrupting is #67. It is registered to the Multnomah County Republicans, but these infiltrators are the same folks from Lake Oswego, Salem, Vancouver, and even Berkeley. These are the folks that attacked a woman at PDX, they harassed Latinx parishioners with slurs and threats at a local church, they spew hate, threaten and curse young women at women’s health clinics. They seek to intimidate and harass our Latinx, Muslim and LGBTQ+ neighbors and friends. Their Trump flags, their red MAGA hats and their hate group badges are all intended to normalize support for an orange man who bragged about sexually harassing women and who is waging a war of hate, racism and prejudice against our Muslim, Latinx, Black and Native neighbors. They will attempt to march from the Eastport Plaza to Yamhill, but nazis will not march through our city.

That’s right. The Republican party of Multnomah County, Oregon, is now an officially designated nazi organization.

It only took 3 months to go from “Nazi punching” to mob threats of dragging Republicans off of parades. https://t.co/PHYA6VuL72

— Anthony L. Fisher (@anthonyLfisher) April 27, 2017

If a Wonder-bread-and-Velveeta organization like that can be labeled as Nazis then you can imagine where on the political spectrum you, the RedState reader, falls.

Protestant theologian Martin Niemöller summarized the experience of the average pre-war German this way:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

What Trump’s election has done to conservatives is create the same smugness. Spencer is being shouted down and sucker punched. Coulter and Milo are being shouted down and their speeches threatened with violence. Trump rallies are disrupted by masked hooligans. No one cares because we don’t really like what those people have to say. And just like the proverbial frog in the pot of water being heated to a boil, we sit here, thinking that no one is going to shout us down or threaten us or our families with violence or actually assault us because we are not like THEM. And we are wrong. We are them.

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