The Right to Assemble

Hateful Heretic
The Right Stuff
March 15, 2016

As everyone who would dare to read an article on this right-wing hate site knows, property rights mean nothing without the right to use physical force. If I can’t express my claim to my wallet over that of a pickpocket (who was totally going to college and just getting his life together) via the medium of my fists, then my wallet isn’t mine. It’s his. He gets to take it, and if I try to stop him, I go to jail. That’s why we all recognize the UK’s criminalization of self defense as a human rights violation.

This includes when the thief has not physically attacked you. The thief has intruded on your property rights in a way that can only be repelled by physical force, and that is what gives you the moral right to use it.

What about the right to assemble? The left’s tactic of “no-platforming,” which they’ve now used successfully on everyone from Christina Hoff Summers (m’lady) to Donald Trump, is to infiltrate and disrupt a peaceful assembly so that it cannot proceed unless physical removal (so to speak) occurs. This isn’t a “protest.” This is an attack on people’s ability to assemble. It’s as much an attack on their rights as breaking and entering is.

An actual protest is speech, and thus can be countered by speech. It can be answered with boring editorials in magazines only old people read. It can be counter-protested. No-platformers give you only two choices: Either you hand over your assembly to them, or you use physical force. Every single conservative decrying the use of force (and no, we’re not talking about the one guy who punched a no-platformer that had already been restrained) against the hired muscle that MoveOn and BLM used to no-platform Trump in Chicago is advocating for the right of raging liberals to take over any political assembly of their choosing. You think they’ll stop with Trump?