Conservatives have nothing but good things to say about James O'Keefe and Breitbart's tactics of using hostile video crews to harass people in public. They don't complain when abortion protestors bomb clinics, or when Trump encourages violence at his rallies. ("Knock the crap out of them, would you? I promise you, I will pay your legal fees.") But they think it's awful when liberals confront Trump apparatchiks who orchestrated the unthinkably horrific practice of mass child cagings. Liberals are rude and uncivil! Bill O'Reilly, who harassed women so viciously that he had to pay $32 million to buy their silence and lost his platform at Fox News, is aghast that a restaurant owner privately told Sarah Huckabee Sanders to dine elsewhere. Some Democrats are also telling protestors to pipe down. But Michelle Goldberg, opinion columnist for The New York Times writes that "we have a crises of democracy, not manners."
The entire column is worth reading, but here is one of many highlights in here piece.
The civility police might point out that many conservatives hated Obama just as much, but that only demonstrates the limits of content-neutral analysis. The right’s revulsion against a black president targeted by birther conspiracy theories is not the same as the left’s revulsion against a racist president who spread birther conspiracy theories.
Faced with the unceasing cruelty and degradation of the Trump presidency, liberals have not taken to marching around in public with assault weapons and threatening civil war. I know of no left-wing publication that has followed the example of the right-wing Federalist and run quasi-pornographic fantasies about murdering political enemies. (“Close your eyes and imagine holding someone’s scalp in your hands,” began a recent Federalist article.) Unlike Trump, no Democratic politician I’m aware of has urged his or her followers to beat up opposing demonstrators.
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