John Hayward: Leftists who spent four years role-playing as “the Resistance” against a “stolen election” suddenly start telling us dissent and resistance are treason

The twitter feed of John Hayward is adapted into a straightforward article by the Bookworm (obrigado per Sarah Hoyt).

The 1/6 rioters should be treated with the same severity as Black Lives Matter rioters. Since that is not remotely possible, all else is political theater and raw exercises of power, and I am weary of pretenses to the contrary.

I’m weary of our ruling class sending the message that your home, business, and personal safety are at the mercy of violent Demcorat-approved grievance groups, but don’t you DARE do anything that makes the aristocracy in D.C. uncomfortable.

I’m tired of hearing the Abolish the Police Party demand limitless scrutiny and aggressive defunding of the police who protect the rest of us, but unquestioning support and increased funding for the police who protect THEM. Why not protect the Capitol with social workers, huh?

There are Democrat-controlled parts of the country where theft has literally been decriminalized, and not just during Democrat-approved riots. You have to stand and watch helplessly while your business is looted every day. But the rules are different for THEIR place of business.

The entire premise of the theatrical 1/6 hearings is supposedly that further “insurrections” are a serious threat that must be proactively addressed. That is FAR more true of Democrat-approved grievance riots. They were vastly larger, deadlier, and more likely to occur again.

No group that might contemplate barging into the Capitol was given billions of dollars in funding by politicized corporations, as BLM was. None of them enjoys anything like to [sic] the political and media support of the 2020 rioters, who even got a pass from coronavirus restrictions. Democrat-approved rioters were even given free passes from coronavirus restrictions.

Every rule on the books was bent and broken for them. Prosecution for their offenses has not been zero, but it hasn’t exactly been thorough. The message sure as hell isn’t “never do this again.”

The Democrat Party normalized and celebrated political violence for months before the Capitol riots. Let’s have some hearings on THAT. Let’s talk about how incredibly dangerous it is for one Party to think it has a monopoly on grievance-mongering, street theater, and violence.

Let’s also have some hearings about how one Party thinks it has a monopoly on questioning the outcome of elections. We could roll video of top Dems, including sitting officials, doing that for HOURS. You want theater? I’ll make the popcorn and bring the tapes.

I’m not really interested in hearing any Democrat, or their GOP footstools, give tearful speeches about sacred democracy while their party systematically destroys every bit of protection for our elections and wantonly undermines every outcome they don’t like. We have every reason to fear the full power of bloated, hyper-politicized government being turned against Americans who dissent from the ruling Party.

Show trials designed to establish the predicate that dissenters are potential violent terrorists are not exactly reassuring. There is no need to excuse or valorize anything that occurred on 1/6 to be disgusted by this week’s political spectacle. Our media tells us that “context” is everything. Well, in the full context of 2020, hysterics over 1/6 are absurd and hypocritical.

You can’t say THIS city is sacred ground, but THESE cities must be abandoned to mobs and criminals as lawless wastelands. Hell, most of D.C. outside the Capitol IS a lawless wasteland. You shrieking potentates can see murder factories through your barbed wire fences.

You can’t say THESE cops are sacred avatars of law and order whose actions merit no public scrutiny or investigation, but all the rest of them are trigger-happy racists who should be micromanaged, distrusted, disarmed, defunded, and replaced by community organizers.

You can’t say THIS politicized violence is totally unacceptable and should be prosecuted unto the end of time, but THESE people are allowed to use violence and vandalism whenever they feel the system is not addressing their grievances quickly enough.

You can’t tell me the 1st Amendment must be bypassed to silence “disinformation” because it might lead to “insurrection,” while embracing media outlets that spread Hands Up Don’t Shoot lies with wild abandon, resulting in real and immediate crime and violence.

When people who spent four years role-playing as “the Resistance” against a “stolen election” suddenly start telling us dissent and resistance are treason that will be punished without mercy, we know exactly what’s going on. It’s a grim story repeated throughout human history.

By all means, let’s have universal respect for universally RESPECTABLE elections. Let’s have zero tolerance for political violence. Let every American’s property be treated with the respect afforded to a congressman’s office. These hearings obviously aren’t about that.

Related:
• Inside of a month, Democrats have redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy — And by “democracy”, they mean the Democrat Party

• Isn't America Being Governed by a Mafia Family Dynasty, setting things up so that there will always be Democrats in power?

• The Mote in Thine Own Eye: Why Are Conservatives So Naïve That They Refuse to See the Beam in the Eye of Those Who Hate Their Very Existence?

• How to Reply If You Are Being Badgered by Leftists Insisting that You Accept the 2020 Outcome as Fair'n'Square (based on Americans Anonymous)

• Leftists' Abhorrent Behavior: The Democrat Party seeks to demonize, criminalize, and extinguish dissent from the 75 million supporters of Donald Trump" 

• Voter Fraud — A Note to Leftists Who Claim that "Not a shred of hard evidence has been produced"

• Dennis Prager: The Numerous (and Sweeping) Anomalies Regarding the 2020 Election That Cannot Be Ignored

• The Take of Bill Maher's Coronavirus Expert Guests Happens to Apply Perfectly to the 2020 Election 

• One of Erik's French TV appearances: 99% of the Capitol Protestors Were Entirely Peaceful, as Were 99% of the Group Which Entered the Premises 

• Stare Decisis: The Areas that Precedent Is Not Supposed to Include and Be Concerned With 

• How Would Reagan React to the November Election's Voter Fraud and the Riots of 2020? How About Abe Lincoln?

• What judge will stick his neck out for Trump knowing he'll be destroyed in the media as a violent mob burns down his house? Judges have families, too

To live in a society run by left-wing authoritarians is to be surrounded by institutional hatred

To be a left-wing authoritarian is to feel the certainty of anti-conventionalism, the passion for top-down censorship, the thrill of revolutionary aggression

writes Ben Shapiro in a New York Post excerpt from his “The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent” (thanks to Instapundit).

Tomorrow belongs to them. 

For the rest of us, a society run by left-wing authoritarians is extraordinarily burdensome. It is to be surrounded by institutional hatred. If you are conservative — or merely non-leftist — in America, the hatred is palpable. 

They hate you in academia. They hate you in the media. They hate you on the sports field, in the movies, on Facebook and Twitter. Your boss hates you. Your colleagues hate you — or at least have been told they should. 

They hate you because you think the wrong way.

Perhaps the problem is that you attend church regularly. Perhaps it’s that you want to run your business and be left alone. Perhaps it’s that you want to raise your children with traditional social values. It could be that you believe that men and women exist, or that the police are generally not racist, or that children deserve a mother and a father, or that hard work pays off, or that the American flag stands for freedom rather than oppression, or that people should be judged based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. 

Maybe it’s that you haven’t put your preferred pronouns in your Twitter profile, or hashtagged with the latest pride symbol for the latest cause, or used the proper emoji in your text messages. Or maybe it’s just that you have friends, or family members, or even acquaintances who have violated any of the thicket of cultural regulations placed upon us by our supposed moral betters. Guilt by association is just as damning as guilt through action or inaction. 

The reasons they hate you are legion. They change day to day. One day, you might be a ballyhooed champion of justice for standing up for gay rights or feminist ideals; the next day, you might be told that you have been banished for your refusal to acknowledge that a man calling himself a woman is not in fact a woman (Martina Navratilova or J. K. Rowling). One day, you might find yourself a hero of the intelligentsia for your cynicism about religion; the next, you might find yourself a villain for the great sin of suggesting that cancel culture breeds radicalization (podcaster Sam Harris or professor Steven Pinker). 

This is not a question of Democrat or Republican. Not one figure named above would identify as a Republican, let alone a conservative. There is only one thing in the end that unites the disparate figures deemed worthy of the gulag in our ongoing culture war: refusal. The standards matter less than the simple message: You will comply, and you will like it. 

 … The consequences of woke cultural authoritarianism are real, and they are devastating. They range from job loss to social ostracism. Americans live in fear of the moment when a personal enemy dredges up a Bad Old TweetTM or members of the media “resurface” an impolitic comment in a text message. And the eyes and ears are everywhere. One simple tip from someone on Facebook to a pseudo-journalist activist can result in a worldwide scandal. Cross the social justice warriors, and you will be canceled. 

Perhaps the most galling aspect of our culturally authoritarian moment is the blithe assurance whereby Americans are informed that they are exaggerating. There is no such thing as cancel culture, our woke rulers assure us, while busily hunting down our most embarrassing political faux pas. There’s nothing wrong, they say, with calling your boss to try to get you fired — after all, that’s the free market just working! Why are you whining about social media censorship, or about social ostracism? People have a right to tear you to shreds, to end your career, to malign your character! It’s all free speech!

In a certain sense, they’re not wrong: Your boss does have a right to fire you; your friends and family do have a right to cut you off. None of that amounts to a violation of the First Amendment. 

It simply amounts to the end of the republic. 

 … We have been silenced. 

And now is the time for the silence to be broken by one simple, powerful word, a word that has meant freedom since the beginning of time:

No.