[guest post by JVW]

A few weeks after taking the measure of the odious Jeremy Corbin, the magnificent Tracey Ullman sets her sights on young social justice warriors with this brilliant sketch.

When you so woke, you asleep. 😜 pic.twitter.com/USEgKWPExM

— BBC Comedy (@bbccomedy) June 22, 2018

Make sure you catch Ms. Ullman’s final line at the end. Absolutely brilliant.

– JVW

Self-righteousness is the most dangerous human emotion.

And if you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere!

This is wrong. Jim Geraghty has a good take at National Review:

Angry mobs are not good for deterring a particular unwanted behavior. They are good for instilling fear and giving a lot of people an excuse to let out all of their antisocial or violent impulses with a thin patina of moral righteousness. “I’m not harassing and assaulting another human being, I’m standing up for human rights!” No doubt the man who tried to kill as many GOP congressmen as he could at the baseball field in Alexandria, Va., believed he was standing up for good causes and doing the right thing.

Harassment of public figures on the right is only going to lead to harassment of public figures on the left. No doubt everyone remembers their own favorite example of a breach of decorum and proper behavior: the guy in the Miami cheesecake factory, Joe Wilson shouting out “you lie!” at an Obama address to Congress, the man who dumped a beer on a lawmaker in a bar, the guy who harangued Ivanka Trump on a flight. The fake blood thrown at the private home of an NRA lobbyist. The guy who threw water at Tomi Lahren in a restaurant in New York. The audience disruptions at Julius C[ae]sar and Robert De Niro’s A Bronx Tale.

Some no doubt would argue that the president himself threw gasoline on this fire. At a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in February 2016, Trump said, “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, okay. Just knock the hell — I promise you I will pay for the legal fees, I promise.” And then in Saint Louis a month later, Trump lamented that no one sufficiently hurts protesters at his speeches: “Nobody wants to hurt each other anymore, right? And they’re being politically correct the way they take them out, so it takes a little bit longer. And honestly, protesters, they realize it. They realize that there are no consequences to protesting anymore.”

I’ll quibble with Geraghty’s citation of Joe Wilson, who did nothing but yell out the truth when he yelled out that Obama lied. But notice how (if you take Wilson’s nonviolent breach of decorum out of it), in that litany of threats and violence, virtually everything comes from the left. You could also talk about Charles Murray and the violent assault on his companion Allison Stanger (Geraghty does), or the protests and arrests at Berkeley surrounding a talk by Ben Shapiro, and outright violence surrounding a talk by Milo LongGreekName. All this anti-speech screaming and threats comes from the left and only the left…

…except for Trump, and his superfans (the folks at the DeNiro movie and Julius Caesar performance). Which makes his superfans cheer, and the rest of us shake our heads in disgust, that we have the equivalent of a Maxine Waters on “our side.”

If Maxine Waters cited Trump’s attempts to incite violence as justification for her own outrageous comments, saying something like “he wrote the New Rules, we’re just making him play by them” — she would still be wrong. If a bunch of conservatives yelled at Maxine Waters in a restaurant, I could see how they might feel justified — but they would still just be a bunch of loudmouth punks hassling someone in a restaurant.

The way to deal with the Maxine Waters crowd is to shine a light on them. Call them out at every opportunity. Ask every Democrat official you can whether they agree with her that cabinet members should be harassed in public.

If you are determined to “punch back twice as hard” (as our beloved former President once said), you’re using the actions of a few crazies on the other side to justify bad behavior that you want to engage in anyway. The people who carry out Maxine Waters’s exhortations are scum. The people who use those exhortations as an excuse aren’t much better.

Let me put it another way, and I’ll be blunt. If Maxine Waters dictates how you behave, you weren’t raised right.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]