God, I hate this. I know, I know. I don't like the guy's politics, either, and if he is saying bad stuff about people for being...Jewish, then I really don't like that guy's politics.
But using social media to gang up on these individual people and then getting them fired, hounding them, and making it so they have to move strikes me as deeply and utterly wrong. Maybe I am just a naive liberal minded guy, but I find many of them are misguided souls who have experienced loneliness, or some sort of psychic pain, or something akin to that. I also find that I get mad more at the politics and economic policies that led us to where we are in so many parts of the nation over the past several decades.
I know too they don't think this way, but that doesn't stop me from thinking the way I do. I am ready to start to say to people that maybe they should wear masks, maybe they should go anonymous. It is scarier that way, for certain, but if people are going to support ganging up on individuals for exercising free speech rights, well, count me out on that gang up. I will stand with the Tiki torch marchers (most of them, not the ones who were menacing and chasing Jews out of their nearby temple) under principles that go back to at least Voltaire. I am not saying it is never good to gang up, but I must say we need more faith in our institutions in this regard than we have shown here. I think there has been plenty of opprobrium from across much of the political spectrum, and Trump's tone deafness and cynicism led him to be far more ridiculed inside his own current party than anything else. Let's move from there, rather than beat up on these lone individuals.
What even good historians in our nation do not often understand is why American Communists did not want to identify themselves as Communists in the post WWII period, particularly during the Red Scare. Well, first off, there was the Smith Act of 1940 which was quickly used to go after Communists to put them in jail on the basis of their beliefs as Communists--even though some American Communists joined in support for passing the Act, thinking it would be used against Trotskyists, I kid you not (and Trots were early targets, I should add). But more important than that was the fear of Communists that we would, as a nation, repeat the Palmer Raids and the sometimes outright severe bodily injury and even death meted out to Reds and anarchists in the period of 1917 through a lot of the 1920s in places like Montana, Idaho, West Virginia and the like. When we try to understand what people were thinking at a given time, we need to see how they saw the history of the previous twenty-to-forty years for their perspective, not engage in presentism.
