I’ve been spending the day pointing out the bias and hypocrisy of various Facebook friends who posted emotional, warped, virtue-signaling junk assuming they would be greeted with the sounds of a thousand well-trained seals clapping. I’m not sure why I bother: it gets close to the cartoon about the guy who tells his wife, “Someone is wrong on the internet!” I feel like the alternative is to  just let a brain virus run amuck. These once intelligent people just know the President is secretly a white supremacist. He’s obligated to specifically condemn the white nationalist group, because they were “emboldened” by his election. And, they say, their “side’s” violence is “less disgusting” than the violence of the bad people….because, though they don’t say this, the ends justify the means.

I think the reason I subject myself to the sneers and abuse—did you know I must be a Donald Trump supporter and a white nationalist?—is that the Left’s assault on free speech, which is the cornerstone of democracy,  has to be opposed, called out and condemned every single time, until they either embrace the Constitution, move to Canada, or haul us off to re-education camps. White supremacists aren’t a danger to the nation, because that kind of prejudice is antithetical to core American values, and no credible, respectable institutions and individuals support them, or ever will. Fascism of the Left is a real danger, because it is seductive and misleading, and it is infecting the most powerful and influential institutions we have. We saw it in Charlottesville. In a college town indoctrinated in the progressive cant that the wrong opinions don’t deserve to be heard because they constitute harm and violence by spoken word, the state and local government  combined to use violence to stifle political speech.

One of the best and most objective political, government and ethics websites around is City Journal; I really should cite it more often. Today Bob McManus posted an excellent essay which began with this…

Why did the city of Charlottesville, and the state of Virginia, suspend the First Amendment for Saturday’s calamitous “Unite the Right” rally? And would the outcome have been different—one protester dead in a deliberate car-ramming, two state troopers killed in a demonstration-related helicopter accident, and a nation’s confidence in its institutions severely shaken once again—had the authorities vigorously defended all parties’ constitutional right to free expression?

and concluded with this…

Almost at first contact, Charlottesville mayor Michael Signer and Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency and cancelled the demonstrators’ permits, whereupon police began funneling the alt-right protestors away from the designated demonstration site—and, some reports have it, toward the counter-protestors. The carnage followed in short order. Whether the breakdown in police protection was purposeful—that is, intended to quash a constitutionally protected demonstration and provoke a violent confrontation—is a question unlikely to be pursued in Virginia’s present political environment. As partisan eye-gougers go, Governor McAuliffe, a Democrat, is near the top of the list; Mayor Signer, also a Democrat, seems to be cut from the same cloth.

But deliberate or not, the effect was the same: when the sun went down over Charlottesville Saturday, the First Amendment was lying in the dust, and the civic ties meant to bind all Americans were just that much weaker.

Bingo.