In the wake of the events in Charlottesville, and the national mass hysteria that the media has been trying its best to promote — to turn two groups of unpleasant people doing unpleasant things into a national emergency — I’ve found myself in some very odd arguments.

They usually start as all such arguments start with my saying both the antifa (named according to the same rules as the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, of which the last two words were a blatant and invidious lie) and the Live Action Reich Players are not just generally unpleasant, ill-informed, and power-hungry people, but that they are, as a whole, not representative of the whole nation.

This usually leads to my being called Nazi, or white supremacist, or other epithets which remind me of nothing so much as of when we had a fight over what constituted quality science fiction and I was accused of being a Mormon white male. One thing is as about as likely as the other, or possibly more so.

The normal way of these arguments is that I’m then told my writings to this site are full of “dog whistles.” Since these are on the order of the “dog whistles” we’ve heard before, in which, say, brown-bag lunch suddenly became a racist nudge and wink, and in which “unemployed” is taken by the enlightened to mean “black” (which would logically lead you to believe the enlightened are racist themselves, but never mind), I tend to respond that since I’m not a dog, I neither hear dog whistles nor feel any need to employ them. Besides, hearing “dog whistles” only your opponents can hear would seem to be daft.

If the argument goes on past this – instead of the opponents telling me they were libertarian all along, and see how evil I am to think they’re Marxists, or demanding I justify the moon ferrets and flouncing off before I tell them they don’t exist – we enter truly weird territory.

The favorite “clinching argument” of the last few days is something so bizarre, so otherworldly, that one has to wonder if one IS talking to moon ferrets. It goes something like this: You can’t condemn them both, you have to choose. Or, as a particularly bright boy put it: “This is just like an election, you have to choose one of them. You might not agree a hundred percent with either, but you have to choose one.”

Uh. What?

Why would I have to choose between racist totalitarians and Marxist totalitarians? Has the republic been toppled and the Constitution revoked? Because, you know, the program of either of these groups is in point of fact illegal under constitutional law.

Sure, in Europe the choice is often very close to this, but not really, because in addition to the blood-and-soil right (which makes some sense in countries that are smaller and far more homogeneous than ours) there is often only an array of Marxist parties starting with the (often considered right wing) social democratic parties.

But Europe is not the U.S., their concept of government is not even close to ours, and their politics are their lookout and not ours. Even in Europe, except during those periods in which law and order breaks down utterly, the decision between Marxist left and nationalist (not the same as racist, particularly in Europe; nationalist cuts much finer than race) right is not made by a minuscule amount of people having a set to on the street of an obscure town.

That the leftists speak like this, and believe the only choice is between antifa and Tiki Nazis, tells me all I need to know about them.

I’m not a hundred percent sure they (or at least the smartest among them) actually believe that Trump is a Tiki Nazi. They might be indoctrinated enough to, but I doubt it. But let’s say they do, or at least want us to believe it. (Honestly, they’ve been calling every Republican president fascist as long as I’ve been aware of American political discussion. If you don’t believe me, go look at old political cartoons.)

What is really revealing is that they seem to think the head-bashers and repulsive thugs of antifa accurately represent the left in this country. ALL of the left in this country. Which is why they say these are the only choices, and we have to choose and can’t say “a pox on both their houses.”

I don’t even know what to say to that. I’m not absolutely sure I could indict them more thoroughly than they indict themselves with that statement.

They identify with and believe themselves represented by people who put on masks and take to the streets to beat, intimidate, and destroy anyone who isn’t one of them.

Fascinating.

And other than those fascistic tendencies, in which way do they think the black shirts represent them?

What they don’t realize is that outside their echo chambers, in the vastness of the country, people aren’t taking this the way they’d like.

The danger is not that people will be so impressed with hipsters beating down free speech that vast crowds join antifa. The danger is that politically uninformed people will be so repulsed by antifa’s antics and the screams of the Democrats who think the antifa are heroes that they join the Tiki Nazis.

But I don’t think so. Not for the vast majority of America. I think the vast majority of America on being told to pick one of two poisons says “no” and mutters something about the horse they rode in on.

Because no matter how loudly the left screams that these two totalitarian horrors are our only choices, the people who retain their sanity know there is more to it.

There are the immortal words spoken in 1776:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Not the power of totalitarian idiots clashing in the streets but the consent of the governed. And that’s the rest of us, who haven’t lost our minds, and who believe, still, in the Constitution that was designed to secure those rights.

As for antifa and the Live Action Reich Players, they have the right to say whatever they want to. They’re a small minority anyway. If they come up to a million out of 300 million, I’d be shocked.

There’s more people who believe in Space Squid than those two groups combined.

However, since they want to bash each other, I suggest we get them to agree to do it in public, at some convenient arena, in groups small enough that it can be followed and bets placed on the winning side.

Just the pay-per-view on the events would pay off the national debt.

And that would be the most useful either of these groups of chowderheads could ever be to the republic.