I’ve addressed this topic many times before.

I didn’t feel the need to address it this time because my position on the issue has never changed. I’m not responding to the Pittsburgh shooting, but to violence as a tactic in general.

Violence is a stupid tactic. It doesn’t work. The same is true of militant aesthetics. It doesn’t work either. As I have said many times before here, we are a tiny, hated minority in this country. Thus, it doesn’t make any sense for us to engage in violence. We are not in a position of strength.

We saw in Charlottesville and New York City with the Proud Boys and most recently with the RAM arrests that anything that can be construed as violence, even when it is in self defense, will be used as a pretext for censorship and state repression to throttle our movement.

Supposedly, this shooting in Pittsburgh is the most devastating attack ever on Jews in the United States. The effect of the shooting is that it has left Jews in a stronger position than ever. It is already being used as political capital to justify even more censorship. It has only made the problem worse, not better.

Yes, it isn’t fair, but we don’t live in a country where justice is fairness anymore. Look at what happened with Jacob Goodwin, RAM and the Proud Boys. It didn’t matter who started it or whether the violence was justified in self defense. The only thing that mattered was their political affiliations.

Disavowing as a tactic is a separate issue. It doesn’t really work either. These people are going to call us violent Neo-Nazi white supremacists no matter what we do. We’ve already seen that it has already been decided that all of Gab is to blame for Robert Bowers. Jews have always believed in guilt by association and “disavowing” this or that person isn’t going to change anything. Ask Gavin McInnes or Alex Jones or MILO who have been identified as targets on their enemies list.

My take on this remains that it is in our best interest to avoid violence. This is even more true in our present circumstances when censorship and state repression have gone into overdrive.