Short Take: The Punch and The Disappeared

The group Turning Point USA had a table on campus at UC Berkeley, where legend has it that the free speech campus movement was born. Whether you like the group or not is irrelevant or all that matters, because they’re either entitled to express their views or not based upon whether you believe free speech is a right or speech is violence, and therefore to be met with violence.

This fellow falls into the speech is violence crowd because of his refined sensibilities of morality. Or maybe he embraces the punch a Nazi, punch a teenager in a red MAGA cap, punch anyone who disagree with you. Or he just likes to punch. It’s impossible to say for sure since he has yet to explain himself.

The College Fix posted a video of this punch on Youtube and posted a story about it. While the video can still be found on Youtube, at least for the moment, it won’t be the video College Fix posted, because that one was taken down.

How, exactly, a video “appears to be posted in a shocking, sensational, or disrespectful manner” is unclear, as these words wouldn’t apply to the “manner” in which a video is posted. That it’s content is “violent or graphic,” again two words that don’t entirely make sense together to those of us for whom words have meaning, fails to distinguish it from a million other videos. Indeed, as videos of police violence are pervasive on Youtube, without incident, it seems quite the norm for Youtube.

But not for College Fix. Not for a conservative on campus being sucker punched by a guy in black. Disrespectful? Is that really the hill upon which Youtube chooses to die?

Roughly 60 seconds of video obtained Thursday by The College Fix shows one angry man saying “you are fucking encouraging violence.” Another man comes up and calls him a “racist motherfucker” and tells him he would “shoot his ass.” They tussled for a bit, with the conservative activist, Hayden Williams, appearing to try to defend himself as the man comes at him, batting at his face and phone.

He then punched Williams in the face with a haymaker and calls him “fucking cunt” as he walks away.

There was a story about this video at The Hill as well, and the comments to the post immediately devolved into whether Turning Point USA was literally Hitler or figuratively Hitler, either way begging the question of whether violence was the proper response to speech.

That the “punch a Nazi” rationalization has slid down the slope, as every half-wit or better knew it would, comes as no surprise. The propensity toward violence and ignorance knows no political agenda. But the decision by Youtube to disappear the video, while lawful as it’s under no duty to host any video it chooses not to host, is too reminscent of Stalin’s best days to go unmentioned.

Youtubde can delete any video it chooses, because this is America and it’s not the government. But that video showing violence is deleted under the rubric of it being “posted in a shocking, sensational, or disrespectful manner” for no reason other than it reflects a progressive punching a conservative isn’t merely Orwellian, or even just biased, but anti-factual.

Without video, it didn’t happen. Except it did. What it means can be subject of debate, even if one might hope for a debate slightly less moronic than that at The Hill, but if no one sees the woke dude punching the evil kid, then we’re lying to ourselves, courtesy of Youtube’s community standards.

Short Take: The Punch and The Disappeared curated from Simple Justice