Luke Ford

From Steve Sailer’s comments section:

* Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough is a thorough examination of the now largely forgotten leftwing terror that afflicted the nation in the early 1970s. As retired FBI agent Max Noel put it, “People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over 1,900 domestic bombings in the United States.”

What is most interesting to me is not the riots, bombings, bank robberies and assassinations of that period, but that the perpetrators got away with little or no punishment, due to the Leftist control of so many institutions, a situation that has gotten much, much worse. During the 1970s, Weatherman terrorists who were being hunted by the FBI were being financially supported and sheltered by the National Lawyers’ Guild. The Puerto Rican terrorist group, the FALN, responsible for numerous bombings including the bombing of Wall Street’s Fraunces Tavern on Wall Street that killed four and wounded 40, was supported by the Episcopal Church.

When the most prominent terrorists turned themselves in or were arrested, they got a slap on the wrist or eventual clemency. Bill Ayers went scott free. Cathy Wilkerson did a year. Bernardine Dohrn got three years probation and a $1500 fine. President Clinton gave clemency to 14 imprisoned FALN terrorists. President Obama commuted the sentence of FALN terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera.

Afterward, they were taken care of by leftist institutions. Bernardine Dohrn was a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University for more than 20 years. Eleanor Stein, arrested in 1981, got a law degree in 1986 and became an administrative law judge. Radical attorney Michael Kennedy, a key player in keeping the Weather Underground alive, was special advisor to the President of the UN General Assembly.

During last summer’s riots, we learned that arrested Antifa rioters were released on bail the following morning, courtesy of the radical National Lawyers’ Guild. In a video, an Antifa rioter showed how he had its hotline written in Sharpie on his forearm. (Can you imagine a Reactionary Lawyers’ Guild that actively assisted rightwing agitators and criminals being allowed to exist?) The Minnesota Freedom Fund is endowed with with $35 million dollars to bail out left wing rioters. Kamala Harris tweeted support for it.

This is a key difference between the consequences of being a rightwing protestor and a leftwing protestor. The law comes down on rightwingers like a ton of bricks. Recall the two Proud Boys sentenced to four years in prison each for a street scuffle with Antifa in NYC in which no one was injured and their opponents refused to identify themselves or press charges. The DA used an obscure law to bring charges against them. The January 6 protestors are being treated extraordinarily harshly, hunted down by the FBI if they so much as entered the Capitol (sometimes even if they didn’t) and held without bail. Meanwhile, the FBI appears to have as little interest in Antifa as it does in the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. White House Resident Joe Biden absurdly called the January 6 riot at the Capitol the worst threat to our democracy since the Civil War, ignoring such leftwing violence as the 1950 attack in the House chamber and the assassination attempt on President Truman.

Clearly, the Powers that Be more-or-less condone leftwing violence, but will not tolerate even a moderate reaction to it from the right. Googling reviews of Burrough’s book, I see that most leave out the really shocking part of the story, the institutional complicity in the violence, and many even excuse it as an appropriate response to the Vietnam War and racism.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Wokeness is guaranteed permanence by the framework of workplace civil rights and harassment law, which means that businesses can be sued for not accommodating a woke employee with a protected identity. Look at the Bostock case which extended sex discrimination protections to trans employees.

* New Atheism didn’t fail because Christians proved they were wrong about God’s existence. It failed because a hipper generation of young people accepted all their premises but declared them uncool for caring about it too much.

Scott Alexander writes:

The first milestone on that path was Milo Yiannopoulos. As outrageous and offensive as he was, he was actually a step above everyone who had come before him in terms of visibility and respectability – at least nobody expected him to shoot up a school or anything. The second milestone was Jordan Peterson, who was an obvious step up in respectability beyond Milo. There was a really interesting period in 2016 when the media was trying to decide whether to unite in character-assassinating Peterson the same way it had character-assassinated all previous people in this space, or treat him as some sort of interesting and potentially sympathetic phenomenon, and it decided on the interesting phenomenon angle. After that, being anti-SJW lost about 90% of its stigma, to the point where people would roll their eyes instead of freaking out. This New York Times article on the Intellectual Dark Web essentially turned the semi-respectability of anti-SJWism into common knowledge, and makes a fascinating contrast with the TIME article on MRAs linked above.

The whole process was a very clear example of a respectability cascade. There’s some position which is relatively commonly held, but considered beyond the pale for respectable people. In the beginning, the only people who will say it openly are extremely non-respectable people who don’t mind getting cast out of normal society for their sin. Everyone attacks them, but afterwards they are still basically standing, and their openness encourages slightly more respectable people to say the same thing. This creates a growing nucleus of ever-more-respectable people speaking openly, until eventually it’s no longer really that taboo and anyone who wants can talk about it with only minor stigma. It’s the same story as atheism, gay rights, and a hundred other things that were once taboo but eventually became mainstream.