"Last Easter, the Right was celebrating the [Cliven Bundy] Bunkerville rebellion, and the Left was calling for severe measures – drone strikes, if necessary – to beat down armed resistance to law enforcement. By Christmas, the roles were neatly reversed, with the Left protesting against the ever-growing tide of law enforcement abuses and the Right accusing police critics of fomenting “revolution.”
Both sides agree that nobody needs to worry about getting hurt as long as they render immediate and unqualified submission to the police. They also agree that individuals have the right to resist when they are being abused and their lives threatened by the police. They can embrace these mutually exclusive propositions because of a third point on which they tacitly agree: The duty to submit, and the right to resist, depend entirely on the identity of the person or people on the receiving end of state-licensed abuse.
This is to say that both sides agree with Vladimir Lenin's dictum that in politics the basic question is “Who does what to Whom.” (...)
"Many of the same right-leaning commentators who extolled Cliven Bundy's resistance to the BLM and the Las Vegas Metro Police have dismissed Garner as a “thug” and a “career criminal,” and insist that the murder of two NYPD officers is a direct result of “anti-police hate speech.” (...)
"Words mean things,” insisted another right-wing proponent of collective guilt in the murder of Officers Liu and Ramos. “Words cause actions." The journal published by the organization over which that individual presides peddled a similarly expansive indictment, identifying the “real enemy” as “those who stoke the fires of racial unrest with rhetoric forged on lies and feeding, every day, on blood."
Transpose those sentiments into a slightly different collectivist idiom, and they are indistinguishable from the rhetoric that came out of the Clinton White House, and the State-aligned media, following the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.
That terrorist act, we were told, precipitated from a "climate of violence" created by "anti-government extremists" who condemned the Waco Massacre while routinely -- and quite properly -- referring to the ATF and other federal law enforcement shock troops as "Jackbooted Thugs."
At the time of the bombing, the cover The New American magazine – the publication alluded to above -- depicted an ATF badge with the headline: "Freedom's Foes." For the next several years, TNA and its sponsoring organization were routinely denounced as part of the "real enemy" who "stoked the fires of [political] unrest" with anti-government rhetoric.""