In the months leading up to and immediately after the election of Donald Trump, one could honestly observe that the Left has never been more fair — or, more accurately, more “Fair.”
The “Fair” referred to in this instance is Georgetown professor Christine Fair, who this week is being hailed in many quarters for confronting notorious “alt-right” leader Richard Spencer in a D.C.-area gym last weekend where he was working out alone.
According to Fair’s account in the Washington Post, she walked up to Spencer and accosted him, saying, inter alia, “I find your presence in this gym to be unacceptable, your presence in this town to be unacceptable.” When a woman who witnessed Fair’s challenge attempted to step in and stop her from verbally abusing Spencer, she told her, “You’re actually enabling a real-life Nazi.” (For the record, Spencer denies that he is a Nazi and refers to himself as an “identitarian.”) The general manager approached Fair and asked her to leave in response to her tirade. Afterward, when Spencer’s identity was revealed, his gym membership was revoked — while Fair, who even by her own account was harassing Spencer, went unpunished. (One should note that Christian bakers are not allowed to be so choosy about the clientele of their establishments.)
Let’s stipulate that Richard Spencer is a man who has embraced values that are anathema to America’s, and that his vision is quite obviously not one that conservatives or Republicans share. But Fair publicly claims that Spencer’s very presence in the gym, because of his political views, creates an oppressive environment, which is a much more dramatic and potentially dangerous claim. If you are still cheering on Professor Fair, consider the case of another Spencer — Robert Spencer (no relation to Richard), a persistent critic of political Islam and a favorite of Steve Bannon and other figures in the Trump administration.
After he spoke to a large audience last week in Reykjavik, Iceland, a leftist approached him as he was dining with companions and managed to slip a combination of MDMA (“Ecstasy”) and Ritalin into his drink, causing him to become ill to the point that he was hospitalized. Fortunately, police seem to have identified the perpetrator. But despite Spencer’s relative prominence and the dramatic nature of the crime, this political poisoning attracted almost no attention from the mainstream media.
As Spencer put it ruefully, “The lesson I learned was that media demonization of those who dissent from the leftist line is a direct incitement to violence. By portraying me and others who raise legitimate questions about jihad terror and Sharia oppression as racist, bigoted ‘Islamophobes’ without allowing us a fair hearing, they paint a huge target on the backs of those who dare to dissent.”