Here are roughly comparable situations, one taking place on private property and the other taking place in the public domain. The first is a Soros-funded flash mob in a Target, protesting the Citizens United decision and the fact that Target gave money to a politician they don’t like.
As you can see, Target tolerated this nonsense without resorting to violence.
The second video is of a mob dancing at the Jefferson Memorial. Some of them get bodyslammed.
A phenomenon I’ve found interesting is how the left and the right seemed to have changed places in terms of being the morality police. It used to be the right who was considered the censors, the enemies of fun, whereas the left were the advocates of free speech. Now, free speech is considered a right-wing code word for the ability to say racist, sexist, or other prohibited things.
The right used to be considered the preachy ones, and perhaps still are since the morality of the left has become so dominant in the media that people barely notice. They do notice when it is over-the-top and explicit, such as with Gillette’s silly commercial (of which some left-libertarians came to the defense, saying that it had a good message, whereas it is hard to believe they would say the same if the moral message had been more of a traditional sort, such as being faithful to one’s wife). It seems the left has played a successful strategy of dialing up their message to 11 all the time, which progressively shifts the Overton Window at a rate that makes what was unthinkable just a few years ago the new normal.
I am reminded of an episode of the Free Thoughts podcast which had former FEE president Lawrence Reed on to talk about the relationship between liberty and character. Trevor Burrus asked the following question:
Some people might listen to you say character and think that you sound antiquated is the word I want to—that the discussion of character belongs in a different era. It’s the kind of thing that leave it to beaver, talk about and, you know, sits down whiley in the beave and he tells some about these things and we don’t really do that anymore. It all seems kind of quaint to talk about character with such earnestness. So, two questions, if you agree with it that that’s kind of changed, why do you think that has changed and is it a valid critique to say that character has kind of—it’s kind of passé and we need a new way of talking about markets.
I don’t think the concept of “character” fits within a leftist morality.
Update 3/29/21:
I’m currently going back through drafts I wrote that I didn’t publish (I’m setting their publication date as close to possible to when they were originally written. As we’ve seen then, it’s just more of the same. Leftists are not rebels against the orthodoxy in any sense. But it is interesting that this idea of character would be considered quaint and I think part of that is because leftist morality is collectivist – there is no “stand” to take when everyone already agrees with you. Can we imagine any of these people, who are so quick to assure you that they hold all the acceptable views, being against slavery in 1850, when it might have actually cost them something?
Anarcho-Buddy! 