Iowa City Mayor Jim Throgmorton hops aboard progressives' anti-Constitutional rights bandwagon

The Iowa City Press-Citizen recently ran a guest opinion piece by that city's top official, "Mayor Throgmorton: Iowa City rejects neo-Nazis, white supremacists." 

It was the sort of full-throated denunciation of racial and religious hatred that we all appreciate hearing. It's important for governmental officials to make clear their robust opposition to such execrable, divisive beliefs.

And, were only those titular objects of rightful condemnation soundly batted in Mayor Jim Throgmorton's article, there would certainly be no cause for good persons to find fault with it.

A full reading, though, reveals that such cause does exist. 

"A few days ago, Charlottesville was the site of a 'Unite the Right; rally by armed white supremacists," Throgmorton wrote, adding that they "brandished Swastikas, Confederate battle flags, anti-Semitic banners, and 'Trump/Pence' signs while chanting 'blood and soil.'"

The Mayor might have thought himself clever, linking the duly elected President of the United States with the relatively scant,   odious hate mongers. Instead, he betrayed scorn for the common man: Trump did win election with the support of more than 60 million Americans. And, national commentators were knocked back on their pins when Iowa turned from a deep blue state to a rich red one by some ten percentage points. (To its shame, Johnson County, including Iowa City, endorsed Clinton over Trump.)

Tellingly, Throgmorton offered zero criticism of Antifa violence, or of the communist hammer-and-sickle banners boosted high by his destructive Charlottesville comrades. (Not without reason did former Des Moines Register political editor David Yepsen refer to "The People's Republic of Iowa City.")

Throgmorton was practically giddy in his lambasting of President Trump for assigning culpability for the Charlottesville violence to "many sides." The mayor's is a common misrepresentation, though no less blameworthy for that prevalence. 

Racism and anti-racism are philosophical essentia. There can be no morally equating those ideas, nor did Trump ever imply such. Instead, the president made the wholly logical comparison of each side's employ of physical violence as an offensive tactic. 

Charlottesville first-person accounts and videos illustrate that various players were indeed armed and engaging in offensive, not defensive, acts of violence. So, any person who condemns offensive violence as a matter of principle must share Trump's initial judgement.

One feels safe in assuming presidential critics like Throgmorton well understand the distinction between offense and defense, between philosophy and tactic, and only pretend at obtuseness for momentary partisan edge.

Later in his essay, the Iowa City mayor proclaims "We reject hate speech and acts or threats of violence." As before, Throgmorton's attempted rhetorical sleight-of-hand falls to failure in the eyes of perceptive readers. "Hate speech' is a subjective concept, and not one recognized by the First Amendment. Speech enjoys Constitutional protection, as well it should. Violent actions do not. Speech and violence cannot be equated.

All expression is legally protected, whether it be comforting or provocative, nice or ugly, positive or negative. Digesting expressed ideas, and either accepting or rejecting them, is a responsibility for each citizen to freely undertake. And, it is not for individual rights-restricters, campus speech code-contrivers, or office-ensconced, authoritarian-inclined elitists to wrench that intellectual liberty from us.

To freely believe and speak one's mind is the God-given and Constitutionally-safeguarded right of every America citizen. Doubtless, opportunistic mischaracterizations of Constitutional principle, and inherently flawed speech/violence bonding -- like those penciled by Throgmorton -- enjoy beaming sanction among persons preferring authoritarianism and the straitjacket of identity group-think to healthy, liberated individualism.

(Hopefully, the ICLU will, when appropriate, rise to defend free speech's noble cause. But then, remember that the national ACLU now opposes the First Amendment, preferring instead to stroke faddish, progressive terrorists.) 

Worth note, in closing, is that Mayor Throgmorton does have another reason for reviling the president: Trump has long advocated that the federal government withhold millions of tax dollars from so-called "Sanctuary Cities" that routinely flout applicable citizenship laws, indulging illegal immigration over the legitimate interests of national sovereignty and legal citizens' safety. Iowa City effectively is a Sanctuary City. Its legal citizenry, then, could suffer tremendous financial punishment for local officials' vote-covetous virtue signaling.