Screen vs Life

Only days ago, I had a conversation with a friend who stated that violence was a reasonable response to the ideas expressed by Milo Yiannopoulos. The violent protests that have since erupted at Berkley University to prevent Milo from giving his final talk on his extremely successful “Dangerous Faggot” tour, indicates that many others on the progressive left believe that this is a perfectly reasonable position. As elaborated in my previous post What’s so bad about Nazism?, it is my opinion that meeting ideas with violence is a fundamentally fascist tactic which creates the climate of fear and oppression that protestors claim to be fighting against. There are three more points about Milo that need to be made in order to develop a bit more clarity about the issues at stake in the Berkeley riots. 1. The mainstream media and opponents of Milo consistently describe him as far right. This may well be true of many of the opinions that he is known for, however, the fundam...

What is it about Nazism that people find so abhorrent? What are those elements of Nazism that we recognize in the words and actions of the politically empowered that make us rise up and say “no more”? Is it the harsh lesson of how quickly the forked tongue of a charismatic leader can whip up support to condemn a whole race of people to extermination? Is it the uncanny ability to identify the next despot, paving his or her road to political victory by spinning tales of unearned wealth and privilege accruing to an elite minority? Both sides of the contemporary political spectrum increasingly invoke Hitler to raise the alarm about the imminent danger of the next fascistic regime. It is however, towards the left that I pitch this question, because the Hitler-Nazi-Fascist triad has largely been invoked by the left to foreground the re-emergent politicization of race, and valorization of racism. And while I certainly do not condone racism I believe that this focus is detriment...

The chastisement of CNN ’s senior Whitehouse correspondent Jim Acosta as a propagator of ‘fake news’ by Trump during his press conference on Wednesday has caught the attention of commentators across the political spectrum.  Many like Sargon of Akkad have adeptly illustrated how the mainstream media has earned the ire of Trump, as well as their viewers, insofar as contemporary mainstream journalists consistently and demonstrably lie by omission. The indignation with which said journalists have responded to the ‘fake news’ moniker being flipped on them only amplifies the degree to which they live in a delusional bubble wherein they believe their own spin.  Others, like The Young Turks , Salon and MSNBC in their interview with Michael Moore, regard Trump’s refusal to talk to CNN as portending the end of first amendment rights, and the diminished ability of the media to preserve the democratic rights of citizens by holding power to account.  Insofar as t...