How a New Jersey brewery unwittingly became the latest culture war battleground

How a New Jersey brewery unwittingly became the latest culture war battleground | Spectator USA

"The party capped off a day-long conference called ‘Ending Violence, Racism and Authoritarianism,’ put on by Mythinformed, Subverse and minds.com, three organizations bound by the common conviction that promoting viewpoint diversity and freedom of expression are the only antidotes to an ever-more fractured and polarized America...

A targeted harassment campaign led by ‘No Hate NJ,’ a group whose social media presence seemed to have only spawned spontaneously around August 18, was purportedly successful in getting the original conference venue, the Broadway Theater, to cancel the contract, leaving organizers scrambling to find a new host just two weeks before the event’s scheduled date on August 31, 2019.

Speakers and attendees – all 485 ticket holders – were informed of the new location, the Sugarhouse Casino located across the Delaware River in Philadelphia, just two hours before doors opened. The entire operation had a clandestine feel, as if the organizers were running a pop-up speakeasy during Prohibition. The casino’s air-tight security prevented protesters and hecklers from disrupting the event, but that was of scant comfort to Rich Myers and his business partner, Megan Myers, co-owners of the Human Village Brewing Company who hosted the official conference after-party. Despite facing harassment from all fronts, Rich and Megan refused to cancel their contract with the organizers.

The ensuing ordeal has transformed their story into yet another flashpoint in the wider outrage mob-fueled political and cultural war. ‘We’ve been getting terrible reviews on Google as far as like “these guys are Nazis”, “Nazi supporters” and they started a call campaign against us,’ Rich said. ‘There were three days solid of phone call after phone call, from as far away as San Francisco.’...

This caught Rich Myers completely off-guard, so he decided to take a closer look at the ‘Minds IRL’ speakers. ‘When we host events we don’t ask many questions. They’d tell us if it’s a wedding or christening or baby shower. As far as details about guests, we don’t care,’ he said. The first speaker he researched was Tara Devlin, a comedian and progressive commentator who founded the unapologetically liberal website RepublicanDirtyTricks.com. Stumbling upon a YouTube video where she opened with the phrase ‘we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,’ Rich found it incongruent with the protesters’ accusations and so, he went down the political YouTube rabbit hole, consuming video after video for three days straight, just to get a better idea of the people who were going to be attending this maligned after-party. ‘It was clear that there was just no way this was a white supremacy meeting,’ he said. ‘You don’t bring in gay people, black people, trans people – the gambit of people that were represented by this, or the number of women that were represented by this, made the protesters’ claims extremely unlikely.’...

Initially, when the onslaught first began, he had naively attempted to engage in good-faith debates with the callers. He asked the first activist who called the brewery’s business line, ‘have you actually listened to a single one of these speakers?’ His interlocutor replied, ‘I’ve seen enough of this stuff online.’

Rich told the caller he had taken the time to sit down and evaluate the content for himself and provided examples of speakers with bona fide liberal cred... Someone called in with a lead-in story about wanting to patronize the business but then abruptly changed her mind because she had apparently found out that they were ‘hosting Nazis.’ Rich asked her if she knew who the keynote speaker, Daryl Davis, was.

She didn’t.

He described how Davis was single-handedly responsible for pulling 200 people out of the Ku Klux Klan by infiltrating the group, befriending his enemies and de-radicalizing them in the process. ‘She said, “I don’t care who else is going to be there, but you got some terrible people coming,”’ Rich said.

This appears to be a strange application of a political version of the One Drop Rule: the social principle of classification where an event featuring just one person with remotely right-wing views is grounds for condemning it entirely as a ‘neo-Nazi’ or ‘far-right’ rally... the entire affair is judged only by its most extreme participant and thus branded accordingly. This same concept also extends to evaluating individuals and businesses in the public show trial of performative wokeness, often by making tenuous connections via guilt by association.

Megan Myers, whose personal social media accounts were linked to the brewery’s business pages, faced a barrage of personal insults online. She was first accused of hosting Nazis, and before long, the charges evolved and escalated to her being called a Nazi herself. As a Jewish woman, she considers the malicious use of the epithet ‘Nazi’ morally unconscionable. ‘You cannot idly use the word “Nazi” and not offend me,’ she said. Rich agrees: ‘I had family disappear in Germany in World War Two. There are a couple of ancestry lines that stopped around the time of concentration camps. To be throwing these words out, it’s really offensive.’...

The outrage mob, intent on destroying the lives and careers of innocent bystanders who refuse to conform to their orthodoxy, employs a form of guerrilla warfare. Campaigns are launched by a faceless, amorphous adversary well-versed in weaponizing online review systems for political and social gain, all made possible by an asymmetry of power and reputational risk between the activists and their targets. A small, anonymous activist mob with copious amounts of free time, nothing to lose and an infinite will to prevail has a far lower opportunity cost associated with waging this proxy battle across platforms. ‘It is funny listening to the narrative of these hate groups saying “we’re here defending our home town.” Well, none of you are from here – you’re not defending, you’re just coming here and attacking’...

The most recent sacrificial lamb to the altar of wokeness is the Manhattan-based Lucky Lee’s. Owner Arielle Haspel, a white female former health coach, was excoriated by the outrage mob for opening a restaurant which served up ‘sanitized’ Chinese cuisine, adapted to meet healthier, clean-eating standards. This drew charges of both cultural appropriation and racism, especially for implying that Chinese food is, by default, ‘unclean’ (read: greasy). Yelp temporarily suspended reviews and removed politically-motivated ones due to high levels of ‘unusual activity.’

In a world where everything is politicized, no business owner or individual is safe from the mob... Apart from refusing to cower to the morally callous agenda of the protesters who nonchalantly throw around the word ‘Nazi,’ she also believes that, just as the El Tiempo case had proven before, apologies to the mob are futile."


"Anti hatred" seems remarkably hateful


Since Daryl Davis was mentioned, I will repost something from October, a great example of the incredible hatred and spitefulness of performative wokeness, where antifa anti-racists called him, a black man who has spent over 3 decades of his life countering Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, a white supremacist:

Daryl Davis

"Hey Folks,

You want to hear a good one?...

I have spent 30+ years talking with Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, White Nationalists, White Supremacists, White Separatists, Black Supremacists, Black Separatists, Alt Right members and just about every other group you can imagine with a superiority complex. The purpose of which, is bring some reconciliation amongst different ideological groups to reduce violence and racism and bring about a sense of normalcy and civility among my fellow Americans.

For my efforts, many of which have been successful, I have been called a nigger, a porch monkey, a pavement ape, by racists, an Uncle Tom, an Uncle Ruckus, an Oreo, a race traitor, a sellout, both a pimp and a prostitute, by some of those who look like me and who claim to despise racism. When you add it all up, I've been just about called every name but my own name.

In my 61 years on this Earth, i've seen a lot and I've heard a lot. But a few nights ago I was called something I could not imagine being called in a million years. I was part of a panel in Philadelphia, assembled by the conference organizers to discuss ways to de-escalate racism, antisemitism and violence in our country.

Meanwhile, a group known as Antifa (short for /Anti- Facist), threatened to do violence to the conference organizers and panel speakers and burn down the building where we were to speak. Despite the threats, we had a very successful conference. We celebrated with an after-party in a room filled with people from all walks of life and every political persuasion from MAGA hat wearing Trump supporters to supporters of those at the opposite end of the Make America Great Again people and everyone in between on the spectrum. We ALL got along fantastically.

Meanwhile, the police department shut down the streets surrounding the site of the party as a crowd of about 40 Antifa members gathered outside the building to protest, accusing the the speakers and organizers of being racist

We invited the Antifa members to come in a join the party and have an opportunity to talk with us. They refused. I thought I had seen and heard it all in my 61 years and nothing would surprise me, but I was mistaken. Now are you ready for this? The Antifa people called me a White Supremacist. What??? Are you kidding me??? Wow!!! That's right, you heard me!!! They called ME, a White Supremacist. Now, I KNOW I've heard it all. It's good to be colorblind sometimes, but this is ridiculous!!!"