Rolling Stone calls for political beatings
"Punch away!" giggles RS writer

                       Lilly Dancyger, Twitter page photo

It is wrong to suppose Rolling Stone is the home only of PR for creatively flabby pop personages, cloying Obama fantasies, glossy corporate advertisements, and lurid rape-hoax reportage.

In her Rolling Stone article ("Charlottesville Jury Fines Man $1 For Punching White Nationalist: The Virginia jury might have just settled an age-old question"), Lilly Dancyger explicitly recommended physical assaults as a legitimate means of political expression.

Really. 

Dancyger noted that a jury had fined Jeffrey Winder a token dollar for punching Jason Kessler at a press conference the latter had convened following the Charlottesville tragedy. She noted that as Winder struck Kessler, others booed the speaker and otherwise sought to drown out his Constitutionally protected speech.

She cited left-wing journal Mother Jones' own endorsement of political violence and closed her overly lengthy writing by chirping that "it seems this Charlottesville jury made an official ruling: Yes, punch away!"

Even odious messages like Kessler's (and Richard Spencer's) enjoy legal protection. And violence and other message-obfuscating tactics are devices found in the fascist tool kit. But those elementary truths are apparently beyond the grasp of wet-eared, simplistic skimmers of whatever Michael Moore is publishing, these days. 

(Note: I submit we true opponents of the detestable Kesslers, and of racism in general, are persons who advocate robust debate and other democratic freedoms. We do not use fascists' historic means: speech-quashing, property destruction, and politically motivated violence. Dancyger and her comrades cannot make our fine assertion of unvarying principle.) 

Dancyger's strangely cheerful Rolling Stone advocacy of political thuggishness was not her first call for law-breaking in the name of ideology. In an article she wrote for the August 18. 2017 Glamour, Dancyger called for the dropping of charges entered against the destroyers of a federal Charlottesville monument. 

"This willingness to show up and take a public stand for the right thing even if what's right is considered vandalism is part of how we can stop the current wave of hatred in this country," she claimed.

In her view, laws against violence, civil rights abridgment, and destruction of public property are not objective products of the democratic process, but mere options to be heeded or disregarded, however suits the subjective desires of the moment.

The interests of legality, democracy, and justice are imperiled by those who would ignore their mandates. Some sport pointed hoods. 
Others, Rolling Stone bylines.