Over the weekend, the paper of record’s editorial board described a “chilling preview of what the future might look like if violence from the right begets violence from the left.”
The event that precipitated those fears at the New York Times offices in Manhattan? A would-be showdown that never was at a Roanoke, Texas, restaurant’s family-friendly drag brunch. An armed far-right group, including Proud Boys and self-identifying “Christian fascists,” turned up to harass brunch-goers — a sadly commonplace form of fascistic intimidation that’s hardly news.
Instead, what concerned the Times about this event was that the armed fascists were met and obstructed by armed antifascists, who had been asked by members of the local community to provide security for the brunch.
In the end, no one was hurt in this alleged portent of political violence and the restaurant owner’s son, a performer at the drag brunch, thanked the antifascists of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club for “keeping us safe.”
Just a week had passed since the Club Q massacre, which left five attendees of an LGBTQ club dead, when the Times decided to draw an equivalence between the fascists who threaten LGBTQ-friendly spaces with guns and the antifascists with guns who volunteer to defend those spaces — a new low in bothsidesism.
For as long as marginalized and minority communities have been threatened and imperiled by armed white supremacists and fascists — a violence foundational to this country — they have been condemned for taking up arms in self-defense.
It is a profound mischaracterization of the history and principles of armed community defense to suggest that armed antifascists and anti-racists are engaged in escalatory political violence that is worthy of the same condemnation as the fascists they confront.
The dignified stance of the New York Times:
