One of the great conceits almost all of us have about ourselves is that when we look back on history we always like to think that we would be on the side of “the good guys“, whoever they might be in any given situation.
We’re the Athenians, not the Spartans. Roman Republicans not Ceaserians. We fight with the Union, not the Confederacy, the Allies not the Nazis or Japanese Militarists in WWII.
It gets more complex as we approach modern times; many Westerners are still willing to fight for Communism than Western Capitalist Democracy and consider themselves to be on “the right side of history“.
So I was interested in this little set of rules that a Princeton University professor named Robert P. George came up with for his students when he presented them with the same question. The rules he put out in a series of Tweets, but then he compiled them into one stream.
- I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.
- Of course, this is nonsense. Only the tiniest fraction of them, or of any of us, would have spoken up against slavery or lifted a finger to free the slaves. Most of them—and us—would have gone along. Many would have supported the slave system and happily benefited from it.
- So I respond by saying that I will credit their claims if they can show evidence of the following: that in leading their lives today they have stood up for the rights of unpopular victims of injustice whose very humanity is denied, and where they have done so knowing:
- That it would make them unpopular with their peers;
- That they would be loathed and ridiculed by powerful, influential individuals and institutions in our society;
- That they would be abandoned by many of their friends;
- That they would be called nasty names, and;
- That they would risk being denied valuable professional opportunities as a result of their moral witness.
- In short, my challenge is to show where they have at risk to themselves and their futures stood up for a cause that is unpopular in elite sectors of our culture today.
No Minister 
Oooh, oooh, pick me, pick me! Tommy wants us all to be thinking that being a conservative Trump supporter is the moral equivalent of being a white southern abolitionist! He’s that morally superior! Really he is! And he’s the victim of the most horrible treatment from Antifa as a result of that superiority! There you go. Andy Ngo, Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs are society’s true heroes.
So I respond by saying that I will credit their claims if they can show evidence of the following: that in leading their lives today they have stood up for the rights of unpopular victims of injustice whose very humanity is denied, and where they have done so knowing:That is exactly what those of us on the left do, all day, every day.We stand with the downtrodden worker, the women denied healthcare, the people persecuted for the color of their skin, the people whose land has been stolen. We stand against corporate wars, and we fight for the rights of our military to not have religion thrust on them. We leave food, water, and clothing near border crossings, and we welcome refugees. We adopt unpopular causes, and when we win, as we do, those who opposed us at every turn now claim they were always supporters.And for all of this, we are attacked by the police, spied on by security agencies, beaten by mouth breathing deplorables, and sneered at by the likes of Tomas who has never seen a human right he didn't want denied.We are ANTIFA.
We take over parts of cities and turn the areas into vast piles of shit and rubbish.We do that because we don't know how to build or create or run anything like a powerplant or a sewerage system.We run out of food and beg outsiders to send us more because we don't know how to grow food and our attempts to do so cause only laughter among our enemies.We're only good at tearing things down, smashing things up and burning them. We're Critical Theory in practice.We kill unarmed Black boys and threaten to pistol whip them when we realise they're not quite dead yet. We call this revolutionary justice and we say that Black Lives Matter with straight faces.We violently attack cops and anybody who doesn't fight back.When they do fight back we run away like the snivelling cowards and privileged blowhards that we are to our trust funds, investments and our second houses that we rent out as AirBnB's.Finally we give up running our shitty little autonomous zones and just allow ourselves to be pushed out by cops on bicycles because we've grown tired of our uselessness and it's much more fun to return to our homes where we can scream online and organise another protest.We're the cannon fodder of the Far Left, as always, and if we ever achieve our Utopia we'll be put up against the wall because we're no longer needed by the hard men of the revolution, the Lennists, Stalinists, Maoists, Che's and Razists.We are ANTIFA and we're morally corrupt, bullying, morons.
Tucker Carlson has been telling Tommy scary bedtime stories, and he's wet the bed.
We need to shut down universities. Defund them. Spray the hornets nest. It's coming.
Thoughtful of 'captainofthegate' to give us an example of what people who'd support fascism are actually like.
…where they have done so knowing:That it would make them unpopular with their peers;That they would be loathed and ridiculed by powerful, influential individuals and institutions in our society;That they would be abandoned by many of their friends;That they would be called nasty names, and;That they would risk being denied valuable professional opportunities as a result of their moral witness.This is the crux of it. I'm seeing it in the TERF wars, in which those of us who don't want to be ostracised or even sacked post under pseudonyms, and it takes someone as colossally wealthy and un-cancel-able as JK Rowling to speak out under her own name. These pampered students kidding themselves they're taking a brave stand for the down-trodden have all the courage and moral sensibility of any other mob.
Thanks Milt. That's the first thoughtful comment on this entire fucking thread. …have all the courage and moral sensibility of any other mob.And to that end I'm going to add a copy of a Tweet that I had considered having in the original OpEd.