Heather Yakin: Decent people and bigots are not morally equivalent – Times Herald-Record

Heather Yakin Times Herald-Record @HeatherYakin845

The chaos and horror that erupted in Charlottesville, Va., are not, I fear, a passing thing.

These attitudes of hate, the desire of a certain sort of white person to beat down or extinguish those whom they deem less human, less worthy, have never really gone away.

The hate has been underground, ashamed. In private quarters, they complained about political correctness and how those others just dont know their rightful place. They complained about change, about progress, about their opposition to the rights and beliefs of others.

They refer to us as animals and parasites, as objects and property and above all as inferiors. They worship the false idols of the Confederacy, venerating a flag at its heart that signifies treason.

This culminated Saturday in an act of terror, a car driven into a crowd by a dogmatist, no different than the vile dogmatists who have driven into other crowds in other places in the name of other gods or ideologies.

Our president, two days later: Racism is evil. Thanks. (And then Tuesday he took that back.)

There is bad behavior, lots of it, on both sides. Brawls have broken out at other rallies. These antifa so-called activists are basically vandals looking for an excuse to break things. Smoke bombs and spray-painted slogans do nothing to change minds.

But if you see moral equivalence between these pseudo-anarchist punks who want to punch or pepper-spray people with whom they disagree and Nazis or the KKK, you've got problems.

The left needs to deal with its idiots. The right needs to take a long look at its allies, and make a decision. Real conservatives need to take back their movement. Man, do I miss real conservatives.

On Saturday, neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched in the streets of Charlottesville, ostensibly in defense of some Confederate monuments the city wants to remove.

Theyre provocateurs, proudly proclaiming what they view as their own innate superiority. In photos of these angry young men, they look like nothing so much as earnest young converts to objectivism, guys who read "Atlas Shrugged" or "The Fountainhead" and have not yet realized that Ayn Rand was a hypocrite and not a particularly good writer. Theyve immersed themselves in a virtual echo chamber where their every transgressive idea is applauded and reinforced.

Their online mantras of fake news and snowflake and go back to your safe space are kindergarten playground taunts. No, I take that back. In kindergarten, the teacher would have scolded such childishness.

The left needs to remember that these alt-right guys have a right to their speech, however vile it is, under the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court has upheld only the narrowest of exceptions to the First Amendment, and awful, pseudo-intellectual stupidity is not one of them.

Cut off one groups speech rights, and yours could be next. Fight bad ideas with better ideas.

Even white supremacists and the KKK and their sympathizers have a right to speak without government interference. Consider it a form of truth in advertising, with their terrible beliefs revealed by the light. Let decent people everywhere mock and scorn them for their awful speech, and help the marketplace of ideas to relegate their bigotry to museum shelves, as a cautionary tale.

Let us never forget the lessons of the past.

hyakin@th-record.com

On Twitter @HeatherYakin845

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Heather Yakin: Decent people and bigots are not morally equivalent - Times Herald-Record