Coyote Blog

Some follow-up thoughts on this post about the murder of Charlie Kirk.

• Pam Bondi has proven herself unqualified to be America's lead attorney.  First she talks about a hate speech exception to the First Amendments which does not exist.  Then she threatens to prosecute service providers who refuse service to someone she disagrees with.  I understand that there is an enormous gulf between laymen's understanding of the First Amendment and settled law (and her boss is one of the worst offenders, at least in his understanding of libel law), but there is no excuse for the US Attorney General to be reinforcing public myths and misunderstandings on this critical topic.  It is particularly incredible to see a Republican AG take these positions, as Republicans have for years fought Progressive attempts to make hate speech illegal and have defended any number of service providers (eg bakers who won't make a cake for gay weddings) who have refused service over matters of conscience.  I will give her credit though for rallying even Progressive MSNBC to attack the notion of a hate speech exemption.
• I have been critical of Republicans for going overboard on cancellation demands (eg so-and-so should be fired) over reactions to the Charlie Kirk shooting.  But I have to give them kudos for almost as one coming down on their own party and hammering Pam Bondi's ignorance.  I had thought that Republicans seemed ready to eat whatever dog food the Trump Administration served, but it is good to know there is something they will send back to the kitchen.
• For all the over-the-top invective I have seen this week, most people (whether they admit it or not) assume there will be no rioting this weekend as Republicans tend not to riot, loot stores, and burn buildings when they are upset.  To some extent I think January 6 was notable because it was such an exception to this.  I live in Phoenix where the Charlie Kirk funeral is this weekend and -- unlike in some past national explosions on the Left -- no one is boarding up the stores in Scottsdale this week (after the 2020 riots caused millions of dollars of damage in Scottsdale Fashion Square, we had prophylactic boarding up several other times after, including around the 2020 election when store owners feared a violent response on the Left if Trump were to win).  It should go without saying, but violence is not speech and is not First Amendment protected.  Maybe we can get Pam Bondi to say that violence is protected by the First Ammendment to get Progressives to finally accept that it is not.
• With all the words spilled this week over this terrible event, I still think what the Utah governor said was the best:  "We need to learn to disagree better."  Which actually is an initiative he has been pursuing for several years.  I have not looked at his program, but I always have some skepticism on such efforts.  Like tax harmonization which always turns out to have all taxes set to match the highest one, calls for cooperation across political divides often boil down to giving more power to the state on the issues the Right wants and giving more power to the state on issues the Left wants.
• The last time there was some violence against Conservative speakers on campus, many universities responded by instituting onerous security rules and fees on Conservative groups trying to bring their speakers to campus.  I hope universities don't go down this road, but it would be typical of them.  Universities have trained their students and faculty for decades that Conservatives are beyond the pale and thus should not be engaged as doing so would legitimize them.  It's like a 19th century English Duke being encouraged to sit down and share a meal with his long-time butler -- it just is not going to happen.
• My wife really likes the Left-Right-Center podcast / radio show.  I confess I have not listened to it as I don't listen to radio and have mostly eschewed non-history podcasts.  I feel like the information rate in audio is too low for my patience level (I listen to audio books at least at 1.5x and don't even get me started on how much I hate voicemail).  But I do think given how on-point the show's concept is to what I think we need more of, I will have to give a listen.  I have always loved Bryan Caplan's Ideological Turning Test concept and try to force myself through the exercise when I get overly angry about some issue.

I would describe myself as an intellectual and a pacifist.  Not a pacifist in the sense that I would accept any outrage to avoid violence, but a pacifist in the sense that violence is way down my list of solution approaches to any problem.  My first, second, and third options are always to try to have a reasoned discussion.

So I was particularly horrified by the news of the murder of Charlie Kirk.  While I frequently disagreed with his positions, and do not share his religious zeal, he was doing exactly what I would have liked to do and what I wish everyone else did – engage in reasoned debate with those who disagree.  He was a model for non-violent engagement with one’s opponents and to be killed while engaging in such debate is a terrible irony.

I can’t find the post but a while back I wrote about what I would do as a college president to combat cancel culture and the toxic intellectual environment on many campuses.  My lead recommendation was to ban the heckler's veto but require that every campus speaker make themselves available for at least an hour of open discussion and debate after any presentation.

As to the motives of the killer in this case, I am not sure I really give a sh*t.  It is an exceedingly popular but absurd game to try to count coup on one’s political opponents based on the actions of a single fringe participant in some of their beliefs.  In my lifetime pretty much every major public assassination of this type has been by someone who turned out to be mentally unbalanced or a total loony.  I am not sure how much value there is to parsing the motivations of the mentally ill – I remember all the attempts to pin the actions of the nut who shot Gabby Giffords on Sarah Palin, which turned out to be 100% a political points-scoring exercise and 0% useful in understanding anything useful.

What has worried me more than the confused politics of mentally ill kills has been watching the public reaction to Luigi Mangioni's cold-blooded murder of Brian Thompson.  Instead of treating him like Charles Manson, we instead see young progressive women treating him like a Teen Beat cover boy.  People have contributed over $1 million to his defense fund and the “Luigi Mangione Access to Healthcare Act" is a real ballot initiative gathering signatures in California at this moment – presumably the Initiative’s promoters felt Mangione’s name had positive marketing power in the California progressive community.

Equally, anyone should be horrified by folks going online to celebrate Charlie Kirk's murder.  Many examples of such social media celebrations have been dredged up and archived by Conservative commentators.  They are all awful, though it is hard to determine just how representative they are of general feelings on the Left.

There is a funny dynamic in which both team Red and team Blue believe their side to be well-behaved while the other side is steeped in violent rhetoric.  There is a reason for this, as alluded to earlier:  Opinion-makers from both teams love to explore the other team's fringe supporters to look for craziness, and inevitably find it.  They amplify those crazy opposing fringe views to their own supporters, building the impression among their supporters that the other side is violent and dangerous.  But since most folks don't read across the red-blue line, they don't see such accusations of their own side.  In fact they are confused if you mention to them that their side has violent rhetoric, because they honestly may never have seen it in the mainstream sources they read.

I once had a feature on this blog where I would take advantage of being one of the few to read both sides of the aisle to post interesting juxtapositions from Left and Right.  One of the most common I saw (and still see) is the statement "our side loses too much because we are too genteel, we need to start being more bare-knuckled like the other guys."  I once saw this on the same day at Conservative Powerline and from Progressive Kevin Drum.

A typical formulation of this you will see a lot is "we need to start playing by their rules"  or "they made the new rules so they are going to have to live with them now" or even to an extent the "FAFO" mantra used by Trump supporters nowadays. At this moment the Left is blaming Charlie Kirk's death on the Right's violent rhetoric and is saying the Right needs to have a timeout while the Right responds to his death by urging its supporters that it is perhaps time to stop being so genteel and passive.  Both see Charlie Kirk's death through a lens where their side is well-behaved and the other is toxic and violent.

All of this is a (typically) long-winded intro to what I actually was going to write about, which is the people getting fired for posts on social media celebrating Charlie Kirk's death.  In particular, a lot of these seem to be public school teachers and public university professors.  And I can understand the concern one would have if their kid had a teacher who in their private hours was celebrating violence on social media.

But here is the "but" from the post title.  If this stuff is actually happening in the classroom, then these terminations may stick.  But otherwise, if they were terminated for private speech in their free time, it is very likely administrative or legal appeals will result in these teachers being back at work very soon.  Public school teachers are public employees, no different than clerks in the DMV.  And it is highly unlikely that they can be terminated over their private protected speech.  Celebrating a death is protected speech.  Even saying "such and such public figure should die next" is protected under many circumstances.  Of course this is going to drive the Right crazy when "liberal judges" send these folks back to work, but it is going to happen.**

As ugly as this stuff is, it is also depressing to see the Right engage in cancel culture after so many years of being its victim.  Yes, I know folks like Amy Wax and other educators with libertarian or conservative opinions have had to fight suspensions and terminations over their speech.  And some of these statements are really awful, but a gay parent or student might argue that anti-gay statements by a teacher are equally awful.  The acceptability of speech is often in the eye of the beholder and thus the very reason why its legality needs to be absolute.

I am not a Conservative but I am an opponent of much of the Progressive / woke / Marxist dogma and thus make common cause with Conservatives on some issues.  But I find myself drifting apart from Conservatives of late on tactics, even on issues where we agree.  It is impossible to call a trend after just a few days, but a LOT of Conservatives are responding to the Charlie Kirk murder by saying its time to stop being so genteel and to play by what they perceive as the Left's rules,  Folks like myself who respond to escalation by trying to de-escalate are treated as losers, rubes, patsies, etc.

Well, I hate the totalitarian Marxist woke culture on the Progressive Left.  And I am coming to hate the Conservative FAFO response (where they have adopted a term from drunken bar fights).  I am determined to find a reasoned way out.  Which, by the way, is exactly what I think Charlie Kirk was trying to do.  Perhaps instead of FAFO, Conservatives organized an initiative where many of them went to campus and propped up Charlie's "prove me wrong" sign.

I would find it horrible if we were to further escalate the most toxic elements of the current political culture as the primary memorial to a man who tried as hard as anyone to de-escalate them.  De-escalating does not mean one is giving up advocating for you are passionate about, it means trying to get there in a reasoned, collegial manner.

In this way, I'm with Charlie Kirk.

** Postscript:  Don't like having crazy progressive idiots for teachers of your children?  Instead of working to get them fired -- there are too many! -- advocate for school choice.  I don't think there is a bigger problem in this country than the state of the K-12 education system.  It is the meta-problem from which many, many others flow.  We have got to stop giving the same people who run the DMV and the Post Office a virtual monopoly on our kid's education.  I have had the resources to send my kids to private school -- and I have seen how much better it can be.  My kids in K-5, for example, went to a private school with very high standards that taught math and reading at a high level and cost less per year than the Phoenix public school system pays per pupil of the same age.

Earlier this year I wrote in the context of a post about racism:

I do think the system goes wrong for blacks but it is not in any arena controlled by the proud boys.  And I  have a strong opinion on where that system failure lies:  K through 12 education, and probably even more specifically K-5 education.  We have affirmative action in the workplace for blacks.  Why?  Because there do not seem to be enough prepared candidates so we give less-prepared candidates a leg up.  Before that we have affirmative action in college for blacks.  Why?  Because there do not seem to be enough prepared candidates so we give less-prepared candidates a leg up.  We keep changing the SAT test.  Why?  Because blacks historically struggle to score as well as whites and other races on the test.  We keep changing (lowering) high school graduation requirements.  Why?  Because to many black children fail to graduate with the higher standards.

All of this stuff are after-the-fact attempted work-arounds that avoid fixing the real problem:  K-12 education is totally failing black kids.  Any root cause failure analysis would get to this conclusion.  You want to say that systemic racism exists?  Well here is the place where the system is totally failing one race.  If I were more of an expert, I could probably tell you which grade it is where things go off the rails but my guess is that it is an early grade where reading and basic math are not getting taught.  And it has little to do with money -- school districts like East St Louis have some of the highest per-student spending numbers in the country but their kids graduate completely unprepared for modern life.

If I were the biggest racist in history and wanted to come up with a Dr Evil scheme to destroy blacks in America, I could not come up with a better plan than the K-12 education system, particularly in many large cities.

Just before inauguration day I wrote a post about the state of the world, saying in part:

To a large extent, US moral and intellection leadership post WWII on free speech and free trade has been critical to keeping these concepts alive around the world against the headwinds of authoritarianism.  Now, with a breakdown of support in the US for both, one wonders what future they have.

I held out some small hope that while it was depressing to consider that Trump was likely to further trash the notion of free trade (and he has certainly delivered on this bad promise), Republicans -- after years in the wilderness rightly complaining about government censorship and growing opposition on the Left to free speech -- might, just might, do something to make things a bit better. I thought JD Vance calling out Europe on its deteriorating free speech environment in his Munich speech was great. But its easy to call out other countries on this topic, much harder to remain disciplined in one's own country. It takes a lot of backbone to respect speech from people you really dislike and disagree with. And apparently this administration lacks such a backbone:

It’s been three days since the government arrested and detained Mahmoud Khalil for deportation. This afternoon, the administration finally stated the basis for its actions. Its explanation threatens the free speech of millions of people.

Yesterday, an administration official told The Free Press, “The allegation here is not that [Khalil] was breaking the law.” This was confirmed today by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who announced Khalil is being targeted under a law that she characterized as allowing the secretary of state to personally deem individuals “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America.”

WTF? Is that really a law? Some holdover from the Alien and Sedition acts? I can't believe it would stand up to First Amendment scrutiny and as a minimum any court should demand a LOT more due process before a green card holder was kicked out of the country. Heck had the Biden Administration dug up this particular chestnut they likely would have slapped the label on Trump.

The administration is wielding this standard — deportation for people whose activities could cause “serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” — to arrest and detain an individual graduate student. In explaining how he met this standard, the administration did not allege Khalil committed a crime. But it did explicitly cite the content of his speech,  characterizing it as “anti-American” and “pro-Hamas.” Protesting government policy is protected by the First Amendment, as is rhetorical support for a terrorist group (if not directly coordinated with it, which the government has not alleged here).

Disrupting college classes and harassing students is not protected expression, to be sure, and Leavitt stated that Khalil organized protests that may have done so. But the administration has not detailed Khalil’s specific actions with respect to those protests, so it remains unclear whether Khalil himself violated any campus rules against discriminatory harassment. Whether any such violation justifies detention and deportation is a separate question. In either adjudication, Khalil must be afforded due process. 

Congrats to the Trump Administration for taking a random asshole -- who few have heard of and many would disagree with and probably dislike -- and making him famous and likely far more effective in the future. Its like they never even heard of the Streisand Effect.

So my thin hopes that this Administration might have some positive effect on free speech are likely dashed. But that is no surprise. As I wrote in the article linked a the top:

I am not a Pollyanna -- I see threats and worrying trends in every direction, and will be writing about them.  For example, tomorrow we trade a President with an immense set of flaws for another with an immense set of entirely different flaws.  Perhaps I am not as disappointed as some by recent trends because I have always treated politicians and the media and academia with immense skepticism, so I am less surprised by their obvious failings.  I have always expected people in power -- government, corporations, wherever -- to abuse their power and believe the trick is to wire the system in a way that they cannot do too much damage.  In preparation for blogging again, and looking back over my old writing, one consistent theme I see is a disdain for solutions that boil down to "if only we replace their people with our people."  That's a hopeless approach.  We have flip-flopped the Coke and Pepsi parties in power more times in the last 50 years than we did in 100+ years before that, and its not making things better.  If anything its escalating a tit for tat power grab as each new administration pushes the precedent frontier forward more toward Presidential authoritarian power.  This is not a secret: Trump is bragging about it.

I have gone about a week now without even opening Twitter, which makes me both mentally healthier as well as slower to post my thoughts on various issues.  But those who were reading me on Twitter earlier in the month know that I am far more worried about the reaction to the events at the Capitol on January 6 (J6) than I ever was about the events themselves.

We are experiencing a weird moment in history as a great number of people, IMO, are grossly over-reacting to what would have been called a "protest gone wrong", a "riot", or a "building occupation" in almost any other circumstances.  Instead, there seems to be a consensus to call the storming of the capital by a bunch of crazy painted selfie-taking, souvenir-hunting knuckleheads an "insurrection."  Even moderates and free speech defenders (I am thinking of folks like Ken White at Popehat) -- people who should know the dangers of using such inflammatory language to drive an exaggerated reaction -- are using this term.  Folks online tell me that this was "Literally the definition of insurrection."  In turn I would say that this is literally the first time the general public has used this term to describe ... anything since the Civil War.  The Native Americans that took over Alcatraz weren't described as insurrectionists.  The Bundies and the Branch Davidians weren't insurrectionists.  Nixon wasn't an insurrectionist.  The Antifa and anarchist folks declaring independent nations in the center of Seattle weren't insurrectionists.  But by God the dude in the Fred Flintstone water buffalo hat was an insurrectionist.

Since I tend to criticize people for assuming single-dimension solutions to complex issues, I can think of multiple reasons why reactions to J6 might be exaggerated:

• Some folks are nearly insane on any topic touching Trump.  I am going to write my retrospective on Trump later, but in short I consider him to be a bully with bad policy instincts who gathered followers by bullying folks on the Left that the Right doesn't like.  He was a disaster for the dignity of the office and public discourse -- though his opposition has some blame too for the latter -- but (consistent with my contention that our system is robust to tyrants) who did remarkably little damage from an actual policy standpoint.  But given that the anti-Trump media has been incredibly harsh on perfectly peaceful Trump gatherings, a riot and occupation of the capital is going to send some folks into orbit.
• There is a clear asymmetry in how the media covers protests from the Left vs. form the Right.  I believe I can state this as a fact without bias, particularly since I tend to be more sympathetic to the drivers behind 2020 Leftish protests and violence  than to the motives of the J6 rioters.
• The US Capitol building obviously has special symbolic value, though I think this targeting is more a function of how dumb this J6 group was rather than any special evil on its part.  I think many, many other groups Left and Right might have tried this themselves if they thought it was possible.  But who believed that the Capitol police, which has more officers than some large cities just to cover about 4 buildings, would show all the defensive prowess of an NBA all-star game?
• I do think that a lot of the overwrought response to this is because it happened inside the beltway.  If this happened in Portland (and a mini version seems to happen there most evenings), it might not make the news.
• I hate to be cynical, but I do also think there is an element who have focused-grouped the "insurrection" word and inserted it in the narrative in order to prepare the ground for the maximum amount of ex post political retribution and speech restrictions.  These are the folks who are essentially emulating that greatest of all 20th century de-platforming events, the Reichstag Fire Decree.  The lesson from those events and many others in history:  Hang the actions of one mentally ill Dutchman with a lighter on all your tens of millions of political enemies.  Pretend every person of goodwill who disagrees with you is personally responsible for the actions of extremist yahoos.

So in response to all this I was going to write about an article Will Wilkinson wrote at the Niskanen Center the other day (I would describe both Wilkinson and Niskanen as Leftish but at least within sight of the middle of the road but both have had some of the quality of their work reduced over the last 2 years with what I consider an irrational level of Trump hatred).  Given this source from a long-time member of the libertarian community, I found this article he wrote hugely depressing (since I first read it, Wilkinson's byline has been removed, probably for reasons we will get to in a moment).

I am going to leave aside the Trump impeachment stuff, which is a lot of the article.  I will just note the absolutely over-dramatic presentation and suggest there is a deep deep anger here that is simply not compatible with the policy role he wants to play.   I guess if you demanded I take a side, I would say that prosecuting your political enemies that you beat in the last election is a bad precedent.   Even the Republicans in Congress, after the unseemly "lock her up" campaign chants in 2016, managed to mostly avoid the temptation with Clinton and others.   Before I move on, I have to present this bit from the impeachment portion of his piece:

There is too much at stake to further delay mounting a trial, or to draw it out for days or weeks past Biden’s inauguration. There is no need for a lengthy Senate trial because the facts that justify impeachment and removal are not obscure.

It is interesting to see the Niskanen center parroting the words of every law-and-order Conservative demanding some dude get lynched because "we all know he's guilty."  I think it is clear to most folks that Trump was insufficiently diligent in restraining the fringes of his party.  But to convict Trump of  "[sending] his mob to the Capitol to make that threat vivid in the minds of legislators" is a stretch, and does actually need to be proved and not asserted.  I actually am not sure Trump is guilty of an act of commission for J6 -- I see him more as the sorcerer's apprentice, messing with forces he didn't really understand and having it spin out of control.  Which is a good reason to get him out of office, but not necessarily sufficient for Congress to attempt a bill of attainder against Trump under the banner of an impeachment of a dude who is already gone.

But it is the part that followed that really depressed me, leaving me to wonder if there is any intellectual support for the First Amendment any more:

Blame for the insurrectionary riots cannot be laid entirely at Donald Trump’s feet. Many Congress members actively encouraged Americans to believe that the election was tainted by fraud, that Biden may not have been legitimately elected, and that our democracy could be irreparably harmed should he be allowed to take office. They should be held responsible for the dire consequences of propagating these lies. The worst offenders may merit official censure or worse. Most deserve to be abandoned by donors, saddled with strong primary challengers, and punished by voters at the ballot box.

It appears that some Republican members did more than amplify destabilizing falsehoods. Some may have actively planned to bring a mob to the Capitol steps with the intent of influencing the electoral count. If that is the case, they should be removed from Congress and face criminal prosecution.

However, it is essential that any such sanctions imposed on Congress members be grounded in a scrupulous, comprehensive accounting of the factors that contributed to the siege. This disaster was caused by the opportunistic deployment of lies for political gain. If we are to have any hope of restoring stable, functional, constitutional government, the process by which we investigate these events and mete out justice must be a model of careful, proper procedure.

Amy Zegart and Herbert Lin of Stanford University have developed a careful proposal for a commission on January 6, based on an extensive assessment of past commissions (including the 9/11 commission). Congress should expeditiously create such a commission and commit across the aisle to follow its findings, wherever they may lead.

Wilkinson can use words like "careful", "thoughtful", and "proper" all he wants but the fact is he is advocating asymmetrical punishment (even if the punishment is just the process) for what is fairly normal political invective.  Had Republicans called for a 9/11 commission to investigate Congressional Democrats who voiced support for riots last year that turned violent, I am positive Mr Wilkinson would have blown a gasket.  Raising questions of election fraud is well within the bounds of acceptable political discourse.  As often happens in politics, the discourse can become overheated, with words slipping from "potential fraud" to "illegitimate."  But this again is fairly normal.  Why, we would have to go all the way back to the distant election of 2016 to see a similar example, where many many prominent Democrats argued Trump's election was tainted by fraud (RUSSIA!) and he was illegitimate.  In fact, there were many protesters in DC on Jan 20, 2017 protesting exactly that and a number of them turned violent.  In fact, we might even cite Wilkinson himself, who has written similar things about Trump many times, including this in Vox:

Trump’s presidency has been dogged with doubts about legitimacy from the beginning. There’s a real possibility that he would have lost but for Russian interference. At this point, however, that in itself is not the biggest stain on Trump’s legitimacy.

This is the problem with all calls for speech limitation or retribution of some sort -- they are always asymmetric.  My protest is entirely justified and important -- yours is trivial and a super-spreader event.  My invective is "passion" while my enemy's nearly identical invective is "violent and threatening."   If nothing else, 2020 has been a giant lesson in the hypocrisy of our elites, both public and private.

Which brings us to the rest of the story, where someone turned the irony dial to 11:

Will Wilkinson is a vice president at the left-leaning Niskanen Center, a contributing writer at The New York Times, and someone who has frequently quarreled with me about so-called cancel culture. (I think it's generally bad when people are fired, expelled, or dragged on social media for saying stupid or poorly phrased things they quickly come to regret; Wilkinson has suggested to me that I've made too much of this problem.)

On Wednesday, Wilkinson tweeted, "If Biden really wanted unity, he'd lynch Mike Pence."

Lynching humor is virtually never a good idea, and this joke was especially badly executed. (Wilkinson said he was making a joke not at the former vice president's expense, but in reference to the Capitol rioters who had expressed a similar sentiment. The joke being that this time it was the far right calling for violence against a Republican official rather than the left.)

Nevertheless, widespread outrage—some of it stoked by conservative news sites like The Federalist and The Daily Caller—ensued on social media. Wilkinson apologized, describing his tweet as a lapse in judgment.

"It was sharp sarcasm, but looked like a call for violence," said Wilkinson. "That's always wrong, even as a joke."

Nevertheless, the Niskanen Center fired Wilkinson and made it clear that they did so explicitly because of the tweet. "The Niskanen Center appreciates and encourages interesting and provocative online discourse," wrote Niskanen President Jerry Taylor in a statement. "However we draw the line at statements that are, or can in any way be interpreted as, condoning or promoting violence."

I guess it would be sort of satisfying to react by saying that I was happy to see him hoist on his own petard, but really I am not.  I am not sure how we are going to do it but everyone has to just chill the hell out and accept speech as speech, and not as violence.   I am subscribed to Glen Greenwald's newsletter because he is one of the few folks on the Left who is willing to call out this ridiculous anti-speech culture that is developing.  He has a good column on Wilkinson's firing here, including:

So a completely ordinary and unassuming liberal commentator is in jeopardy of having his career destroyed because of a tweet that no person in good faith could possibly believe was actually advocating violence and which, at worst, could be said to be irresponsibly worded. And this is happening even though everyone knows it is all based on a totally fictitious understanding of what he said.

Greenwald does not say it, but it has become a habit of Trump critics to take his every statement and read it, no matter what the obvious meaning of the words, in the worst possible light.  While this is something folks have been doing in the editorial business since time immemorial, the migration of this pattern in the Trump era to the news division has been toxic.  It started way back at with the treatment of Trump's Charlottesville comments -- these actually surprised me as I for years had accepted that Trump had defended neo-Nazis as was portrayed on every news feed until I actually read his actual comments.  Trump wasn't supporting nazis and Wilkinson wasn't threatening the VP.  Any reasonable person reading either set of comments in context would agree, but we are living in a word dominated by post-modernist narrative.   Greenwald ends with this warning to both sides:

Unleash this monster and one day it will come for you. And you’ll have no principle to credibly invoke in protest when it does. You’ll be left with nothing more than lame and craven pleading that your friends do not deserve the same treatment as your enemies. Force, not principle, will be the sole factor deciding the outcome.

I will end with a few tweets from the same source, because I think he was been spot-on during the past few weeks: