Radicals Stop a Rose Festival

I saw this on Althouse, Ann Althouse’s excellent blog:

“You have seen how much power we have downtown and that the police cannot stop us from shutting down roads so please consider your decision wisely,” said the anonymous email that caused Portland, Oregon, to cancel its Rose Festival Parade.

The local frenzied left said it would disrupt the parade, dragging and pushing people, because the 67th group in it was the Multnomah County Republican Party.

“We will not give one inch to groups who espouse hatred toward LGBT, immigrants, people of color or others,” it said.

Althouse: “So now that’s all it takes to end freedom of expression in Portland. What a flimsy, pathetic place.”

This is what has been going on at Berkeley, Middlebury, Claremont McKenna, UCLA, Brown, Rutgers and many more campuses. The Brownshirts won’t go away on their own. They will have to be confronted.

Author

  • John Leo

    John Leo is the editor of Minding the Campus, dedicated to chronicling imbalances within higher education and restoring intellectual pluralism to our American universities. His popular column, "On Society," ran in U.S.News & World Report for 17 years.

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3 thoughts on “Radicals Stop a Rose Festival

  1. I think I may have worked out why the 82nd Avenue parade was canceled. Antifa threatened to attack the Republicans on the parade. Oregon Republicans are armed. They would have killed some of the Antifa – legally – and the organizers decided to avoid that.

  2. “There is nothing wrong with your television set, your universities, your Kafkaesque State, or this the New Inquisition. Everything is as it should be.

    Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the foreseeable future, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. Eventually we will control what you think.

    We repeat: there is nothing wrong with anything. You are already participating in a brave new world. You are already experiencing the Totality which is Social Justice, Full Inclusion, Complete Diversity, and an End to All Wrong Thought. Welcome to THE YEAR when everybody was finally equal.

    “They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213 th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. ”

    “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

  3. It’s actually far worse than even this — it’s an attempt to bully the majority into excluding a minority group. The message is clear — exclude the minority group for the greater good of the majority — or the majority will be harmed.

    The question I ask is what would happen if the Klan (which doesn’t particularly like Black people) were to demand a “White-only” parade? What if the KKK were to threaten violence unless parade sponsors “saw the wisdom” of excluding their Black friends from the event?

    Or if there were a demand to exclude Jews, or Catholics, or Pipefitters, or Left-Handed Lesbians — or anyone else… This is terrorism, and it needs to be dealt with as such!!! Why are we tolerating this?

    The parade sponsors did the right thing — a month earlier, in South Boston, the folks there didn’t. You don’t threaten the physical safety of women & children, which is what the thugs did.

    Why are we tolerating this?

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