Take ten minutes and watch this profoundly creepy conversation between Tucker Carlson and a left-wing fascist named Yvette Felarca, who smirks with pride as she describes the riot she helped foment in order to "protect" her community from the threat of words. Carlson opens the segment by showing another clip of Felarca personally engaging in violence during an anti-fascist rally in California last year, then questions her about her big anti-speech "triumph" at Berkeley earlier this month. She calmly -- and almost sociopathically -- makes the case that speech she deems to be "fascist" could lead to "genocide," and "rape," and therefore must be forcefully suppressed "By Any Means Necessary" (BAMN), which is the name of her radically illiberal organization. I'll be back with a few more thoughts after the video, but as you watch this, please contemplate the fact that this woman is a public school teacher:
(1) Felarca's concept of "fascism" doesn't really match what the dictionary says that word means, but at least she's defining her terms. A fascist, she claims, is someone who is organizing a bigoted movement in the furtherance of genocide. Milo Yiannopolous whips up a "lynch mob mentality" everywhere he goes, she asserts, which in some cases leads to his supporters attacking other people. I'm no fan of Yiannopolous, but he does not commit violence, nor does he encourage violence -- unless you adhere to the speech-crushing attitude that conflates subjectively objectionable speech with physical violence. She says that Yiannopolous is merely a "token" with a thin veneer of respectability who is deployed by Steve Bannon and Donald Trump to "recruit" young people to carry out attacks (or even "mass murder") against members of marginalized communities. As she sees it, her destructive riot is properly viewed as a heroic defense of "our campus and this community" from bad ideas. She smugly justifies her own violence as a means of preventing hypothetical future violence that might be perpetrated by people who listen to Yiannoplous' non-violent, non-inciting speech and decide to lash out. Without a shred of irony, she casts herself as an anti-violence champion while footage of her 'necessary' violence plays on a loop next to her face. It's truly beyond parody.
(2) One of Carlson's clever questions that his guest repeatedly skirts is what should be done with "fascists." She responds that of course they shouldn't be allowed to speak in public about their ideas, lest they recruit any new adherents. More on that later. She also doesn't dispute that physical violence can be appropriate (her group's conduct also makes that plain), nor does she expressly reject Carlson's suggestions that under her paradigm, maybe people she decides are fascists ought to be incarcerated or even killed. I kept waiting for an "of course not!" in response to those prompts, but they never came. This woman is a fanatical anti-freedom fascist, a fact of which she appears to be blissfuly unaware. Or maybe she relishes it.
(3) If air time had permitted, I would have loved to see Carlson ask Felarca apply her "logic" to, say, the Black Lives Matter movement. Its leadership abjures violence, yet a handful of people associated with, or at least exposed to, their protests have carried out brutal attacks on police officers, including cold-blooded murders. Using her standard, provocative but non-violent BLM advocates could be accused of being "softer" crypto-recruiters for a vigilante squad of cop killers -- and their free speech could not only be legitimately shut down through rioting, but counter-protesters ("resisters"?) could be excused for roughing them up a bit to ensure that they get the message that a "genocide" against the police is not acceptable. Never again, she intones -- invoking the Holocaust and predictably violating Godwin's Law -- as if that's a catch-all justification for all manner of repression. The ease with which she employs this repugnant and hyperbolic analogy is unsettling. Her response, I'd bet, is that BLM protesters have the correct message, whereas fascists do not, so the double standard is righteous.
(4) Felarca's contempt for the "abstraction" of the First Amendment's free speech protections drips from every answer. "This isn't about Ben & Jerry's versus Stone Cold Pizza, or something," she says at one point, apparently believing this to be a brilliant insight. In her final dodge of Carlson's central question (to which he returns several times, in vain), Felarca finally invokes the First Amendment...in the context of condemning Senate Republicans' Rule 19 gambit last week. I actually laughed out loud at this piece of clumsy and ridiculous misdirection, delivered calmly and sanctimoniously, as if it's a final rhetorical master stroke. One can only imagine what the middle school children she "teaches" are subjected to in the classroom. Allahpundit watches this performance and concludes that Felarca is arguing very explicitly for a "heckler's veto" that only she and other "anti-fascist" warriors may wield. It's all in the name of preventing new "fascist recruits," you see. Just one problem, AP points out: "All political speech is a form of recruitment." Exactly. She surely knows this, and she's smart enough to grasp the potential implications of the standard she's setting. And because she's a fascist, she's perfectly comfortable with it. Frightening. I wonder if she'd be willing to write the foreword to an End of Discussion sequel.
