Today, the New York Post reported that a very controversial citizen-journalist, Andy Ngo, was beaten up by masked men. Ngo is controversial because he has done exposes on Antifa, a left wing identity group (if you say “organization”, a million people who accuse you of not knowing what you are talking about) with radical politics and a confrontational, sometimes violent and destructive, style.
An issue like this should be very simple. If Ngo is telling the truth, this is an act of disgusting gang violence against someone for reporting facts the gang does not like, full stop. (Note- I am not calling Antifa a “gang”. I’m referring to the specific group of people who planned and carried out a group attack on Ngo.) You do not need to say any more.
And you should not say more. One of the better points made by Black Lives Matter is the tendency to minimize and decentralize the issues that Black people face at the hands of police by saying things like “all lives matter”. Obviously all lives do matter, but the justified reason for talking about Black lives mattering is because society, and especially our policing system, for a long time acted as if they did not.
But this is a principle that itself has broad application. If Palestinian terrorists blow up a bus full of Israelis, or right wing extremists run over a young woman in Charlottesville, or a think tank unjustly fires a researcher for publishing research conclusions that are unpopular in some lefty circles, your first reaction should not be to look for some commensurate thing the other side did. There’s plenty of time to do that later. Your first reaction should be “this is bad and I condemn it”.
And, of course, if you check Twitter today and do a search for Andy Ngo, you will see that this is not what is going on. People are grasping at straws because they don’t want to just say that left wing criminals shouldn’t beat up a prominent right winger they don’t like. So they say things like “Andy Ngo is not really a journalist” or that “Ngo put our lives in danger by reporting facts about Antifa”. I’m sorry, if you pretend (and it is pretense- nobody honestly believes there is no difference) to not understand the difference between reporting facts and a gang of people beating someone up, you really have no place in public discourse.
The left wing discourse on political correctness / wokeness / cancel culture is full of this. Liberals and lefties are constantly telling us that both (1) there is no such thing as cancel culture and (2) the “real” cancel culture is on the right. The fact that these two concepts are completely contradictory is a sign that the smart folks who say these things know they are BS’ing. (Harry Frankfurt’s famous definition of BS is not caring about the truth- as opposed to either telling the truth or lying.) But even beyond the contradiction, when someone is canceled by liberals, can’t you just condemn it? And yes, there are plenty of examples of right wing cancel culture, going all the way back. That’s why this is a culture- whichever group has cultural power in a given situation seeks to cancel the other side. That’s the critique. You haven’t scored some blazing hit on cancel culture by just saying the other side are the “real” cancelers. (Indeed, this argument has more than a little in common with “the real racists are liberals”, a talking point that conservatives who don’t care about racism very much love to engage in.)
Everyone needs to get in the habit of just condemning stuff that is wrong. Don’t start looking around for some way to say that it is all the other side’s fault or that your side is blameless. Just condemn it. Just say “I don’t care what I think of Andy Ngo’s work product, the violent gang that beat him up needs to be caught and sent to prison.” It isn’t hard. You can go back to condemning Ngo’s work tomorrow.