ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: When The Political Guerrillas Come For You.

These appalling (and occasionally criminal) displays of contempt for common standards of civic engagement are, to some observers, utterly inexplicable. How did these fringe activists come to adopt these guerrilla tactics? Vaccine advocates who spoke with NBC News speculated that this behavior was modeled after the Westboro Baptist church—a peripheral religious group that achieved infamy in the mid-2000s for picketing the funerals of U.S. soldiers and deploying grotesque anti-gay rhetoric. To the journalism advocacy organization Poynter, however, these maneuvers were too “similar to how anti-abortion protesters will stake out women’s health clinics” to be a coincidence.

It’s revealing that these primarily Democratic victims of the new normal must reach into the annals of history to find parallels that approximate their ordeals. It’s even more telling that the examples that leap to mind are only those committed by their political adversaries. The intellectual energy it must take to avoid acknowledging the obvious—that these tactics have recently been routinized by progressive activists—can’t be worth the effort.

As an early “‘Progressive’ in a hurry” once said, “No enemies to the left.”