The Temporary Retreat of the Left

As it happen, on the evening of the second day of the visit here by our friends, the news feeds erupted with reports of riots on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, right in Erika's hometown.

Already it had seemed like a whirlwind day of events concerning actions of the new Trump Administration. By 6 p.m. it felt like a full day of news had occurred, but we hardly knew that the bulk of the days events had yet to play out.

Most of the Righties on social media had already figured out that many on the Left had gone all in on the idea that Trump supporters are Nazis and therefore deserve no quarter. What played out in Berkeley, which was a rampage of the members of the "Antifa" faction to (successfully) shut down a speech to be given a flamboyant gay Jewish immigrant Trump supporter, who has made a name for himself attracting attention this way.

The reaction on social media was rather predictable. For the first 24 triumphs, many voices on the Left were crowing with triumph about having prevented the speech. The basic maxim was that the speech itself was a form of violence, and that violence by the Antifa demonstrators was actually a form of free speech in response.

I saw very few Leftist voices (in fact none) condemning the actions of the Antifa group. But then something rather predictable started to happen over the next day. Somehow there was an awareness among the Left that they had screwed up and crossed the line. But the Left is never able to admit such things. Anyone saying that the violence was over the top would be susceptible to being called a Nazi appeaser at this point.

So instead came the predictable response that in fact the violent Antifa crowd were not in fact Leftists at all, but were rather secret Trump supporters who were pretending to be Antifa in order to discredit the Left.

This is about as close as possible as the Left gets to admitting they made a mistake. It signals a temporary retreat from the fervor of recent days, and a roundabout way of condemning the violence without actually condemning the result.

It won't last, of course. The fire has been lit. College campuses are the new battleground. We are in for a long haul of this thing. They have drawn the line regarding the people they see as evil: they shall not speak.