Some much-needed pushback:

The Ferguson Riots Are Nothing Like The Original Tea Party Protests

If you were reading left-leaning commentators over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, you probably saw a rather strange argument: that looting, arson and rioting in Ferguson, Missouri in the aftermath of the decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown was defensible on the grounds that it was equivalent to the Boston Tea Party or the Stamp Act Riots. The problem with this parallel is that it is at best willfully ignorant of history, and at worst a deliberate call for an escalation to violent revolution.

Given the emotions running high over the Brown case, protests were inevitable, and it was also inevitable that some protesters would get out of hand, as happens with angry crowds. But what happened went well beyond protests, to looting and arson of a Little Caesars pizza joint, a small cake bakery, an antique store, a beauty shop, and other businesses, some of them small concerns owned by local [black] entrepreneurs.

Among the various efforts made by people on the Left to justify or defend this, we had a Time Magazine column, celebrities and other Twitter users and even a teachers’ guide pushing the parallel between the Ferguson rioters and colonial protests against taxation without representation.

There are four major problems with justifying the violence in Ferguson by reference to the Boston Tea Party and the Stamp Act Riots, either in moral terms or in terms of the effectiveness of this sort of protest.

Click through for the details.

Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism

The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.

Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who briefly worked for the Nazis before rejecting them and fleeing the country, that he had admired much of the thinking of the revolutionaries he had known as a young man; but he felt that they had been talkers, not doers. “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun,” he boasted, adding that “the whole of National Socialism” was “based on Marx”.

Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order. His aim, he told his economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to “convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists” – by which he meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve socialism better by generating revenue for the state. “What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish,” he told Wagener, “we shall be in a position to achieve.”

Leftist readers may by now be seething. Whenever I touch on this subject, it elicits an almost berserk reaction from people who think of themselves as progressives and see anti-fascism as part of their ideology. Well, chaps, maybe now you know how we conservatives feel when you loosely associate Nazism with “the Right”.