PITTSBURGH, PA—A rowdy gang of angry, riled-up Arminian believers gathered to pull down a statue of Reformer John Calvin standing in front of Calvin Reformed Bible College & Seminary, authorities confirmed Friday.
The band of Wesleyan troublemakers brought a rope, lassoed it around the neck of the stone likeness of Calvin, and yanked it down while yelling rallying cries like “Down with limited atonement!†“You’ll never take our free will!†and “For Servetus!â€
Mob members then stomped on the statue and spray-painted crude Arminian slogans on the downed Reformer, according to police reports.
KML Royal Super Constellation, cabin interior design by Henry Dreyfuss, from Revue der Reclame, 1954. Netherlands. Source. Pic 2/5: Club Lounge Pic 4: The Flying Chef offers a 7-course champagne dinner.
The Washington Post reports that many of the key companies providing social networking, financial transfer, and even web-site registration have now decided to take it upon themselves to decide just who is, and who is not, worthy of Internet services and access.
Silicon Valley significantly escalated its war on white supremacy this week, choking off the ability of hate groups to raise money online, removing them from Internet search engines, and preventing some sites from registering at all.
The new moves go beyond censoring individual stories or posts. Tech companies such as Google, GoDaddy and PayPal are now reversing their hands-off approach about content supported by their services and making it much more difficult for alt-right organizations to reach mass audiences.
But the actions are also heightening concerns over how tech companies are becoming the arbiters of free speech in America. …
The censorship of hate speech by companies passes constitutional muster, according to First Amendment experts. But they said there is a downside of thrusting corporations into that role.
Silicon Valley firms may be ill-prepared to manage such a large societal responsibility, they added. The companies have limited experience handling these issues. They must answer to shareholders and demonstrate growth in users or profits — weighing in on free speech matters risks alienating large groups of customers across the political spectrum.
These platforms are also so massive — Facebook, for example, counts a third of the world’s population in its monthly user base; GoDaddy hosts and registers 71 million websites — it may actually be impossible for them to enforce their policies consistently.
Still, tech companies are forging ahead. On Wednesday, Facebook said it canceled the page of white nationalist Christopher Cantwell, who was connected to the Charlottesville rally. The company has shut down eight other pages in recent days, citing violations of the company’s hate speech policies. Twitter has suspended several extremist accounts, including @Millennial_Matt, a Nazi-obsessed social media personality.
On Monday, GoDaddy delisted the Daily Stormer, a prominent neo-Nazi site, after its founder celebrated the death of a woman killed in Charlottesville. The Daily Stormer then transferred its registration to Google, which also cut off the site. The site has since retreated to the “dark Web,†making it inaccessible to most Internet users.
PayPal late Tuesday said it would bar nearly three dozen users from accepting donations on its online payment platform following revelations that the company played a key role in raising money for the white supremacist rally.
In a lengthy blog post, PayPal outlined its long-standing policy of not allowing its services to be used to accept payments or donations to organizations that advocate racist views.
You won’t however find any mention of ANTIFA, the CPUSA, or any group on the Left receiving this kind of attention.
When the left insists that everyone with white skin is part of white supremacy, that Shakespeare, Beethoven and all of Western civilization embody white supremacy, it’s echoing the actual talking points of white supremacy.
If you tell all Obama critics and Trump supporters that they’re racists often enough, some will decide that maybe they are racists.
If you tell a student who objects to racially segregated areas on campus that she is a white supremacist, she will be more likely to become one.
When you marginalize everyone to the right of you, some of the marginalized will accept the definition.
And when that happens, the left wins, the extremists win, and it becomes harder to maintain any kind of functioning civil society in which we settle conflicts through compromises rather than street violence.
Compromises are uncomfortable.
After the Civil War, the Union was preserved, but Southerners were allowed to honor their cause. It was an uncomfortable compromise, but it helped limit the violence from a conflict that had claimed the lives of 2% of the population. The Taliban campaign by black nationalists to tear down Confederate memorials was a deliberate effort at shattering a compromise that kept civil society working.
And that too led to Charlottesville.
Uncomfortable compromises are how we learn to live with each other. It means that there can be memorials of Robert E. Lee and streets named after Malcolm X. Tolerating people whose views we don’t like is one of the best ways to marginalize domestic extremists. When one set of extremists is empowered to wipe out the other, we end up with a civil war. Just ask Edmund Ruffin and John Brown.
Democrats claim a mandate from the “Right Side of History†to eliminate all the compromises. Catholic nuns must pay for abortions and birth control, Christian bakers and florists must participate in gay weddings, every white person must confess their racism, and every left-wing extremist must get their way.
That’s how you tear a society apart.
The Bill of Rights is an uncomfortable compromise. It says that we have to put up with people we don’t like. The Democrats, under the influence of the left, are rejecting that idea. But that goes both ways too.
You can have a liberal society or an illiberal one. But you can’t have a society that is selectively liberal when it comes to your bigotry, but illiberal of the bigotry of others, that believes you have the right to say anything you please without consequences, but that no one else does, that you can punch, but not be punched. That’s a totalitarian state. And the only way to realize it is through violence.
Democrats need to take an honest look at the street violence in Seattle, in Portland, in Berkeley and Charlottesville, and decide if this is what they really want. If they don’t, it’s time for them to stop normalizing left-wing extremism. If they do, then they are to blame for the next Dallas or Charlottesville.
Those impassive, silent guardians – will their gaze no longer shame you?
Have they been forever banished? Are you sure?
Can you finally stroll in comfort streets bereft of all reminders?
Is their valor gone, as if it never were?
Spiteful children! Did it gall you that someone so loved, respected these,
Enough to raise their monuments on high—
And you know you’ve never earned any respect, and never will,
And your blog will be deleted when you die?
“Ingrate, vandal, ignoramus,
Meddler, coward, bully, foolâ€â€”
Those are titles your pedestal might bear,
Were your legacy preserved, beyond the web and your own minds –
But I doubt it will last too long even there.
The Guardian reported last Fall that they were already protesting in New York to get rid of Teddy Roosevelt (and to rename Columbus Day).
Hundreds of activists gathered at the American Museum of Natural History on Monday to take down the “racist†statue of Theodore Roosevelt and an urgent call to rename Columbus Day.
More than 200 people cheered outside the museum as activists covered the statue of Roosevelt on horseback flanked by an African American and Native American on either side and demanded it be ultimately removed.
“A stark embodiment of the white supremacy that Roosevelt himself espoused and promoted,†the group explained in a statement. “The statue is seen as an affront to all who pass it on entering the museum, but especially to African and Native Americans.â€
Activists from the groups NYC Stands with Standing Rock and Decolonize This Place organized the protest to draw attention to the museum’s encouragement of racist tropes, and implored New York City to rename Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day.
Why would anyone want to attack the political choices and public careers of people who lived a century and a half ago? The Civil War is over. The cause of Southern Independence was defeated. Slavery was extinguished. The actual Northern soldiers who fought the Confederates on the field met with them amicably at reunions years later and shook hands. There is a video of a Gettysburg Reunion that shows elderly Yankees atop Cemetery Ridge cheering old white-haired Confederate veterans re-enacting Pickett’s Charge. A national consensus emerged after the war, that recognized that Southerners had their own honestly-held, honorable point of view in the conflict, and that their bravery and sacrifices deserved the respect of their opponents. Recently, the rancid radical Left has decided to try to overturn that consensus, as a grand masturbatory exercise in historical self-righteousness and to flatter the amour propre and fan the grievances of its dependent black clientele. This is a shoddy and divisive game, dishonorable and violative of our shared American history.
No police intervention occurred even when black ANTIFA counter-demonstrators used aerosol flame-throwers.
My various left-wing correspondents are all energized by the violence in Charlottesville, and are demanding that those of us on the Right take the blame, apologize, and get busy denouncing all those racists and White Supremacists.
It’s sad to see left-right violence, including pepper spray and baseball bats, on American streets, reminding us all a bit of Weimar Germany. But it was obviously not the Conservative Movement, not even the Alt-Right, that brought about these kinds of poisonous national divisions, that fostered all the chauvinistic identity politics, and that provoked the violence.
Our friends on the Left are demanding that we denounce all the demonstrators protesting the removal of the Lee Statue and that we agree to identify all of them as “White Supremacists” and dismiss their motivations as “racism.” There were clearly some fringe group crazies participating in the demonstrations and some unsavory people were present, but that doesn’t make everyone who demonstrated a Nazi, a Klan member, or a White Supremacist.
I don’t recall any time I have ever heard our friends on the Left denouncing the most extreme communist radicals responsible for violence. Actually, they offer excuses, blame the anger of their radical extremists on America and the rest of us, and when their bomb-building murderers get out of jail, they give them teaching positions at universities.
So, sorry, I have no intention of identifying the generality of demonstrators as White Supremacists. I think they were mostly normal people defending their regional and cultural identity, who had been at last pushed too far, who were finally fed up with being insulted and marginalized.
I don’t think most people there had any connection at all to the crazy person from Ohio who drove his car into the counter-demonstrators or to the zanies carrying Swastika flags. And it seems obvious to me that left-wing local and state government took a partisan role, instructing state and city police to stand aside and let ANTIFA thugs intimidate and rough up the demonstrators trying to defend the monument.
The Left, today, is playing its usual propaganda games, trying to stigmatize and shame the opposition, but I think they fail to understand that they’ve been using the same tactics and techniques too long. The Alt-Right is reading Saul Alinsky, too. Their pet media has lost credibility with much of the country, and a lot of us are just completely tired of having the Left play the Race Card.
[T]he police did not protect demonstrators from Antifa and did little to prevent confrontations. Attendees of the demonstration, rather than walking a clear path to the park, were instead forced to walk through a line of screaming protesters. Liberal clergyman and elderly women held signs about “peace†and “love†and smiled benevolently—as violent Leftist protesters attacked from the crowd. They are as culpable as the Antifa themselves for the violence unleashed.
But that was not close to the worst. Demonstrators did not need protection from Antifa. All the police would have had to do to ensure a safe demonstration was simply go home—which is what happened in Berkeley. Patriots equipped with shields, inured to Antifa tactics of throwing bricks and spraying mace, had secured Lee Park (excuse me, “Emancipation Parkâ€) and may indeed have outnumbered both Antifa and counter-demonstrators in terms of pure numbers. Several were armed, and the city fathers should be offering Unite The Right activists tearful tributes for the latter’s saint-like restraint in not opening fire despite more than justified provocation.
If police had done nothing, the public would have been safer. Instead, unforgivably, the police attacked (not dispersed—attacked) the legal demonstration, threatening attendees with arrest if they stayed in Lee Park.
Then activists, totally unprotected by police, were deliberately funneled into a gauntlet of attacking Communists, in a kind of Kill Zone. Injuries on both sides were predictable. (Of course, much like cuckservatives who bow and scrape to the Main Stream Media, the police were then insulted by the Communists for their trouble.
This could have been a relatively stable situation: a patriot demonstration protected by its own shield wall (and ideally, by police who actually did their job) along with a separate group of Leftist protesters, with both groups enjoying the right to free speech supposedly guaranteed them by the Constitution.
Instead, the police precipitated a running battle which engulfed all of Charlottesville. The result: Antifa running wild and chasing down isolated pockets of Unite The Right attendees as the latter defended themselves as best they could, with bystanders were caught in the melee. Police showed no interest in doing anything other than threatening patriots with arrests for “unlawful assembly.â€
In contrast, of course, Leftists were free to disobey the laws and marched merrily down the streets, many chanting “Black Lives Matter!â€, causing chaos as they went. As Rebel Media’s Faith Goldy reported, this was an absurd “double standard.†Anarcho-Tyranny was the order of the day in C-Ville.
I don’t look upon VDare as an unimpeachable source, but we are not going to find a lot of descriptions of yesterday’s violence sympathetic to the demonstrators trying to defend the statue. It does make sense that the police would be on counter-demonstrators’ side, they are working for the same City Council that renamed the park and that voted to remove the statue of General Lee.
