There's a video going around the internet that shows Jordan Hunt, a Toronto hairdresser and pro-choice activist kicking a woman in the face for espousing pro-life views. During an annual peaceful pro-life demonstration in Toronto where many women were holding up signs expressing their views, one man came along and decided that—unlike the peaceful sign-holding pro-choice demonstrator already present—he was entitled and obligated to express his opinion more directly and silence the women protesters. He started drawing on their signs, trying to deface and destroy the message they were conveying. He started drawing and writing on their clothes with a permanent marker, trying to force them to carry around his words instead of their own. When one of the protesters started filming this behavior and approached him, pointing out that what he was doing was destroying the property of these women, his response was as follows: he asked her for her opinion on a question where pro-life and pro-choice people have differing views—should a 16 year-old rape victim be allowed to have an abortion to recover from the trauma of her rape and not have to have her life further disrupted by it, or does the life of the unborn baby outweigh the horrid circumstances of her birth and the crimes of her rapist father? When the woman voiced her opinion, which differed from Jordan's, he felt perfectly justified to resort to violence in order to silence her.
It is shocking to see someone allegedly standing up for women's rights so readily resort to using violence to suppress women who don't agree with him. It is shocking, but sadly not uncommon to see those who ostensibly stand up for oppressed groups like blacks, immigrants, and women viciously lash out at members of these groups who dare voice their dissent. Witness the racial slurs hurled at black people like Candice Owens or Kayne West by those who supposedly hate racism for these "race traitors" daring to have and give voice to a contrary political opinion. Even silence is not enough to shield minorities from hate-filled epithets for stepping out of line. Witness black police officers being treated with threats and hate for simply silently doing their jobs. Even off the streets and in the supposedly civilized halls of academia it is the same. Witness conservative women being branded with racial and sexual slurs and accused of internalized misogyny by mainstream media because they dared to vote for the wrong candidate in a free election.
The examples of this behavior could go on for days. They are limitless, and according to the left only the most extreme examples might be unjustified. After all, the social justice warriors on the left firmly believe that there's is the side of love and compassion.
And it is true that, from his perspective, it is more compassionate and loving to give a 16 year old rape victim the choice to have an abortion. It is better to allow her that abortion to relieve her suffering than to spare the mere blob of cells in her uterus. From his perspective to choice the opposite—to deny the girl the chance to relieve her suffering in favor of the "right to life" of a mere blob of tissue, a part of her body, is at best insane and at worst an act of active hatred and malice toward women. The problem is that this isn't the only way to view the situation. Others, like the woman in the video, have a different perspective. From her perspective, a fetus isn't a mere blob of cells or a part of female anatomy: it is a human being, a baby girl. From her perspective it is wrong to allow one human to end the life of another because her life or birth is inconvenient. From her perspective it is madness at best or bloodthirstiness at worst to say that a rape victim should have the right to kill her unborn baby girl for the crime her father committed.
Similar differences exist between the social justice warriors of the left and conservatives on every other issue. The left sees massive welfare programs as necessary to raise blacks out of poverty, and thus views any attempt to defund or dismantle them as hatred and oppression of blacks. Conservatives see massive welfare programs as preventing blacks from becoming economically independent and trapping them in poverty, and views attempts to expand and reinforce them as oppression and hatred of blacks. The left sees police violence against blacks as excessive and motivated by racial animus, and therefore views support of the police as hateful and threatening toward blacks. Conservatives sees violent clashes between the police and black criminals as the inevitable result of high black crime rates—which primarily victimize law-abiding blacks, and views opposition to the police as encouraging the criminals victimizing law-abiding blacks and destroying black neighborhoods. The list could go on and on. On both sides each has a perspective which leads it to see the opposition as hateful and wrong.
But actual violence and hateful rhetoric is primarily the domain of the left, not the right. The left has Anti-Fa, a large international coalition of activists dedicated to using riots, vandalism, slurs, and violence to silence political opponents (and frequently anyone else who stands in their way). They're bad enough they've been labeled as a terrorist organization. Before that they had BLM, which encouraged race riots and the beating of non-blacks, though ultimately denying responsibility for the kidnapping and torture of a white disabled student. All the time on TV, in the newspapers, and from their pedestals in Hollywood the left has the mainstream media spewing invective (and occasionally threats) at anyone who dares take an opposing political stance. While there are occasional acts of violence from conservatives (such as the murder of a counter protester by a member of the alt-right at Charlottesville) and small groups that spew violence or hate (such as Westboro Baptist Church), there are no large overarching groups dedicated to spreading violence and hate toward their political opposition. Furthermore, you can approach a conservative friend on social media or Facebook with a dissenting opinion, and while they may argue with you and some may even insult your intelligence, they won't throw hateful slurs at you to silence you and sever your friendship without even giving you a chance to finish explaining your position. A left leaning friend on social media, however, usually will.
When the disagreements are equal and proportional, why is the left so much more prone to react to disagreement with violence and hate than the right? There are many possible answers. One that many conservatives use among themselves is the idea that shouting names and hitting people is what children do when they've lost an argument. According to this answer, the left's positions are indefensible, self-evidently untrue, and so when they face opposition their only recourse is to shout obscenities and use violence. However, this ignores the fact that there is some internal logic to the social justice positions of the left. However deeply (and reasonably) conservatives may disagree with the premise, it follows that if a fetus is not alive or human and the woman who carries it is, then it is better to kill the fetus than to make the woman suffer. College university courses and professors offer abundant evidence that when the left wants to they can put together convincing arguments for their positions: else they would not be nearly so successful at converting university graduates into social justice activists. Furthermore if they all believed, at heart, that they'd lost the argument, it's unlikely many of them would continue to cling to their political views.
Instead, I believe a more likely answer for Jordan Hunt's motive lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from the tantrums of a child who knows they have lost: the hubris of a man who believes his position infallible.
Conservatives owe their tolerance for other viewpoints to a willingness to discuss, debate, and exchange ideas. It is a willingess born of a desire to understand other view points, and the knowledge that ones own viewpoint may be incomplete and flawed without information or a perspective from the other side. Conservatives are willing to admit they are wrong. They believe in an objective truth which, while obtainable, takes effort to know and that no one can fully know without looking beyond their own limited perspective. They are, on most things, willing to believe that their positions are fallible and may be incorrect. This gives them the ability to listen to and engage with other viewpoints in a non-confrontational and non-violent way—though a few, of course choose not to do so.
On the other side, as a pundit once observed, "social justice warriors always double-down." Rather than admitting they were mistaken in their claims or actions, they deflect, obfuscate, and try to push forward the same claims and actions once again, but harder. This can be seen most recently in the left's dumbfounded reaction to the election of Donald Trump: where, as any moderately neutral observer could tell them, they made the triple mistakes of being caught in political corruption, running on a platform that was more identity politics than substance, and attacking whites and males on the basis of sex and race for opposing them politically. Yet none of this occurred to the left which instead has spent the past two years chasing ghosts of Russian hacking and collusion (while forgetting that the alleged hacking was only important because it revealed the left's own corruption) only to come to the midterm elections and the Kavanaugh nomination and make exactly the same three mistakes again, but even more obviously and overtly: be caught (by doing it openly) corruptly using alleged sexual assault victims and fake gang rape charges in an effort to derail a nomination, push forward the charges and their entire political platform on a narrative of women's identity politics with no substance whatsoever, and then castigate whites and males for their race and gender when they don't fall into line. Unsurprisingly, this appears to have cost the Democrats in the polls and made a close race out of what was otherwise to be a blue landslide. Why does the left keep doing this to itself? Because fundamentally, they cannot admit that their own perspective is fallible.
At bottom, this is because they don't view truth as an objective thing we are all searching for and that none of us can fully grasp without looking beyond our own perspectives: something which we may find contradicts our own perspectives. Rather, the social justice left has a Post-Modernist view of truth as completely subjective. To them truth is one's perspective, one's point of view, one's lived experiences. There is no possibility in Post-Modernism, of finding a truth which contradicts or invalidates one's perspective or lived experiences. Those experiences are truth! And when one's perspective is truth, when there does not exist any objective truth out there that might run contrary to one's lived experiences, then one's opinions and positions become by definition infallible.
This idea of the infallibly true individual perspective was marketed by the professors and teachers of the left as something that would create a more tolerant and amicable society. Demonstrably, it has done quite the opposite. When a man's position is infallible, he need not listen to nor understand any opposing view point. When his very life experience is the infallible truth, then any criticism of what he believes is akin to an attack on his person itself. When every person's perspective is an infallible subjective truth, argument is violence and there is no point to argument except to dominate another person by a lesser act of violence. Working from this perspective, the left sees every contrary opinion as a personal attack, a microaggression, a miniaturized act of violence in itself. They have no need to tolerate it, because their position is infallibly true, and they can respond to it freely with hatred and violence the act of disagreement is in itself a violent provocation. As the left is fond of saying, "words are violence" so it only makes sense that Jordan Hunt would respond to words with violence. Whether the violence was directed towards a woman or not was irrelevant. She violated his infallible truth, and in his view posed a threat to other women. In that moment, that made it right for him to attack her in order to silence her
The left is not the first or only group to fall prey to violent partisanship based on their own belief in their inherent infallibility. Some even within Christianity believe themselves to have grasped the absolute truth completely. They believe that their perspective lines up entirely with the truth and is therefore infallible. In my experience moderating a discussion forum for Christians, these were the most contentious people, who readily resorted to name-calling, personal attacks, and questioning of other members' eternal salvation over the slightest disagreement. They believed their own position was infallible, so they had no need to hear out other perspectives, understand or even counter arguments from people with other opinions. They already knew the infallible truth so they did not need to learn anything! Further, since they believed they knew this truth from God, anyone who opposed them was engaged in hatred and rebellion against God and treating them with contempt and scorn was entirely justified. Historically of course, there were other Christians. The Bishops of Rome and Constantinople famously excommunicated each other because each believed himself and his positions infallible. From there the branches of Christianity regularly split and diverged, many times violently, because each was convinced that theirs was the infallible truth and they need only punish those who criticized them as heretics. While proclaiming love for God, they killed His children. They forgot the humility so often extolled in the Bible, and forgot that even the Apostle Peter once needed to be reproved.
Today, in the face of rising secularism, many Christians are thankfully turning toward one another with humility again, though of course, not all choose to do so. The left, meanwhile, holds ever closer to the belief in it's own birthright of infallible truth, and thus grows more and more hateful and violent toward outsiders, even those they proclaim they love and fight for. They also become more and more riven with internal schisms and crusades against heresy that would not have been out of place in 15th Century Catholic Spain, were it not for the technology in use and the fact that the left (currently) lacks the political power to torture and execute those they despise as heretics.
But then of course, I am not a leftist or a social justice warrior. I am a Christian and a conservative, and I don't believe my perspective is infallible truth. I don't kick women for disagreeing with me or call people racial slurs for having a different opinion. I listen, I reason, and I try to understand. And if you think I'm wrong here, tell me why. I am fallible, and I am willing to learn.
The examples of this behavior could go on for days. They are limitless, and according to the left only the most extreme examples might be unjustified. After all, the social justice warriors on the left firmly believe that there's is the side of love and compassion.
And it is true that, from his perspective, it is more compassionate and loving to give a 16 year old rape victim the choice to have an abortion. It is better to allow her that abortion to relieve her suffering than to spare the mere blob of cells in her uterus. From his perspective to choice the opposite—to deny the girl the chance to relieve her suffering in favor of the "right to life" of a mere blob of tissue, a part of her body, is at best insane and at worst an act of active hatred and malice toward women. The problem is that this isn't the only way to view the situation. Others, like the woman in the video, have a different perspective. From her perspective, a fetus isn't a mere blob of cells or a part of female anatomy: it is a human being, a baby girl. From her perspective it is wrong to allow one human to end the life of another because her life or birth is inconvenient. From her perspective it is madness at best or bloodthirstiness at worst to say that a rape victim should have the right to kill her unborn baby girl for the crime her father committed.
Similar differences exist between the social justice warriors of the left and conservatives on every other issue. The left sees massive welfare programs as necessary to raise blacks out of poverty, and thus views any attempt to defund or dismantle them as hatred and oppression of blacks. Conservatives see massive welfare programs as preventing blacks from becoming economically independent and trapping them in poverty, and views attempts to expand and reinforce them as oppression and hatred of blacks. The left sees police violence against blacks as excessive and motivated by racial animus, and therefore views support of the police as hateful and threatening toward blacks. Conservatives sees violent clashes between the police and black criminals as the inevitable result of high black crime rates—which primarily victimize law-abiding blacks, and views opposition to the police as encouraging the criminals victimizing law-abiding blacks and destroying black neighborhoods. The list could go on and on. On both sides each has a perspective which leads it to see the opposition as hateful and wrong.
But actual violence and hateful rhetoric is primarily the domain of the left, not the right. The left has Anti-Fa, a large international coalition of activists dedicated to using riots, vandalism, slurs, and violence to silence political opponents (and frequently anyone else who stands in their way). They're bad enough they've been labeled as a terrorist organization. Before that they had BLM, which encouraged race riots and the beating of non-blacks, though ultimately denying responsibility for the kidnapping and torture of a white disabled student. All the time on TV, in the newspapers, and from their pedestals in Hollywood the left has the mainstream media spewing invective (and occasionally threats) at anyone who dares take an opposing political stance. While there are occasional acts of violence from conservatives (such as the murder of a counter protester by a member of the alt-right at Charlottesville) and small groups that spew violence or hate (such as Westboro Baptist Church), there are no large overarching groups dedicated to spreading violence and hate toward their political opposition. Furthermore, you can approach a conservative friend on social media or Facebook with a dissenting opinion, and while they may argue with you and some may even insult your intelligence, they won't throw hateful slurs at you to silence you and sever your friendship without even giving you a chance to finish explaining your position. A left leaning friend on social media, however, usually will.
When the disagreements are equal and proportional, why is the left so much more prone to react to disagreement with violence and hate than the right? There are many possible answers. One that many conservatives use among themselves is the idea that shouting names and hitting people is what children do when they've lost an argument. According to this answer, the left's positions are indefensible, self-evidently untrue, and so when they face opposition their only recourse is to shout obscenities and use violence. However, this ignores the fact that there is some internal logic to the social justice positions of the left. However deeply (and reasonably) conservatives may disagree with the premise, it follows that if a fetus is not alive or human and the woman who carries it is, then it is better to kill the fetus than to make the woman suffer. College university courses and professors offer abundant evidence that when the left wants to they can put together convincing arguments for their positions: else they would not be nearly so successful at converting university graduates into social justice activists. Furthermore if they all believed, at heart, that they'd lost the argument, it's unlikely many of them would continue to cling to their political views.
Instead, I believe a more likely answer for Jordan Hunt's motive lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from the tantrums of a child who knows they have lost: the hubris of a man who believes his position infallible.
Conservatives owe their tolerance for other viewpoints to a willingness to discuss, debate, and exchange ideas. It is a willingess born of a desire to understand other view points, and the knowledge that ones own viewpoint may be incomplete and flawed without information or a perspective from the other side. Conservatives are willing to admit they are wrong. They believe in an objective truth which, while obtainable, takes effort to know and that no one can fully know without looking beyond their own limited perspective. They are, on most things, willing to believe that their positions are fallible and may be incorrect. This gives them the ability to listen to and engage with other viewpoints in a non-confrontational and non-violent way—though a few, of course choose not to do so.
On the other side, as a pundit once observed, "social justice warriors always double-down." Rather than admitting they were mistaken in their claims or actions, they deflect, obfuscate, and try to push forward the same claims and actions once again, but harder. This can be seen most recently in the left's dumbfounded reaction to the election of Donald Trump: where, as any moderately neutral observer could tell them, they made the triple mistakes of being caught in political corruption, running on a platform that was more identity politics than substance, and attacking whites and males on the basis of sex and race for opposing them politically. Yet none of this occurred to the left which instead has spent the past two years chasing ghosts of Russian hacking and collusion (while forgetting that the alleged hacking was only important because it revealed the left's own corruption) only to come to the midterm elections and the Kavanaugh nomination and make exactly the same three mistakes again, but even more obviously and overtly: be caught (by doing it openly) corruptly using alleged sexual assault victims and fake gang rape charges in an effort to derail a nomination, push forward the charges and their entire political platform on a narrative of women's identity politics with no substance whatsoever, and then castigate whites and males for their race and gender when they don't fall into line. Unsurprisingly, this appears to have cost the Democrats in the polls and made a close race out of what was otherwise to be a blue landslide. Why does the left keep doing this to itself? Because fundamentally, they cannot admit that their own perspective is fallible.
At bottom, this is because they don't view truth as an objective thing we are all searching for and that none of us can fully grasp without looking beyond our own perspectives: something which we may find contradicts our own perspectives. Rather, the social justice left has a Post-Modernist view of truth as completely subjective. To them truth is one's perspective, one's point of view, one's lived experiences. There is no possibility in Post-Modernism, of finding a truth which contradicts or invalidates one's perspective or lived experiences. Those experiences are truth! And when one's perspective is truth, when there does not exist any objective truth out there that might run contrary to one's lived experiences, then one's opinions and positions become by definition infallible.
This idea of the infallibly true individual perspective was marketed by the professors and teachers of the left as something that would create a more tolerant and amicable society. Demonstrably, it has done quite the opposite. When a man's position is infallible, he need not listen to nor understand any opposing view point. When his very life experience is the infallible truth, then any criticism of what he believes is akin to an attack on his person itself. When every person's perspective is an infallible subjective truth, argument is violence and there is no point to argument except to dominate another person by a lesser act of violence. Working from this perspective, the left sees every contrary opinion as a personal attack, a microaggression, a miniaturized act of violence in itself. They have no need to tolerate it, because their position is infallibly true, and they can respond to it freely with hatred and violence the act of disagreement is in itself a violent provocation. As the left is fond of saying, "words are violence" so it only makes sense that Jordan Hunt would respond to words with violence. Whether the violence was directed towards a woman or not was irrelevant. She violated his infallible truth, and in his view posed a threat to other women. In that moment, that made it right for him to attack her in order to silence her
The left is not the first or only group to fall prey to violent partisanship based on their own belief in their inherent infallibility. Some even within Christianity believe themselves to have grasped the absolute truth completely. They believe that their perspective lines up entirely with the truth and is therefore infallible. In my experience moderating a discussion forum for Christians, these were the most contentious people, who readily resorted to name-calling, personal attacks, and questioning of other members' eternal salvation over the slightest disagreement. They believed their own position was infallible, so they had no need to hear out other perspectives, understand or even counter arguments from people with other opinions. They already knew the infallible truth so they did not need to learn anything! Further, since they believed they knew this truth from God, anyone who opposed them was engaged in hatred and rebellion against God and treating them with contempt and scorn was entirely justified. Historically of course, there were other Christians. The Bishops of Rome and Constantinople famously excommunicated each other because each believed himself and his positions infallible. From there the branches of Christianity regularly split and diverged, many times violently, because each was convinced that theirs was the infallible truth and they need only punish those who criticized them as heretics. While proclaiming love for God, they killed His children. They forgot the humility so often extolled in the Bible, and forgot that even the Apostle Peter once needed to be reproved.
Today, in the face of rising secularism, many Christians are thankfully turning toward one another with humility again, though of course, not all choose to do so. The left, meanwhile, holds ever closer to the belief in it's own birthright of infallible truth, and thus grows more and more hateful and violent toward outsiders, even those they proclaim they love and fight for. They also become more and more riven with internal schisms and crusades against heresy that would not have been out of place in 15th Century Catholic Spain, were it not for the technology in use and the fact that the left (currently) lacks the political power to torture and execute those they despise as heretics.
But then of course, I am not a leftist or a social justice warrior. I am a Christian and a conservative, and I don't believe my perspective is infallible truth. I don't kick women for disagreeing with me or call people racial slurs for having a different opinion. I listen, I reason, and I try to understand. And if you think I'm wrong here, tell me why. I am fallible, and I am willing to learn.
