link to original reddit post by /u/AustinNothdurft
I'm sure this is an opinion most of you have thought, but decided not to write down. I just want to discuss the elephant in the room.
You've all seen ANTIFA on tv and seen anti-facist rhetoric on Reddit. Fascists are bad, they deliberately oppress people that aren't a part of their ingroup. The mainstream opinion in 2021 is that we can no longer tolerate people like this in any facet of normal life. They have legal rights but not social approval and if you see nazi's and people like them you shouldn't allow them to feel welcome in your community. If they have a decent job you should heckle their boss until they're fired, etc....
I don't disagree with this, and I think outside of the free speech absolutists, a majority of libertarians agree with this too. Very few of us would approve of a state that's even more powerful and often bigoted.
The unspoken question that follows should be: If ANTIFA is acceptable, why shouldn't ANTICOM or ANTILEFT? Marxists have openly expressed their desire to dismantle the capitalist system. Leninist's and Maoists wrote about how it might be done. Some libertarian leftists argue that instead of "justified" violence, we should only democratically vote a person out of their capital and seize it if not forfeited. The figureheads of leftist though have time and time again in writing advocated for theft at best and guerrilla warfare at worst. If practical example needs to be discussed, you have all read about the USSR, Maoist China, Communist Cambodia, etc.
We don't pull our punches with Nazi's, so why do we with leftists? Why are leftists allowed to have high level academia or corporate positions? Why are leftists allowed to discuss the redistribution of wealth or how to take power from capitalists inside a capitalist system? To be clear, I don't mean "why do people in charge of fortune 500 companies allow this?" We all know that many titans of industry focus more on their personal capital then then politics. What i'm trying to say is: why aren't capitalists from neo-cons to ancaps leaning into the cancel culture that currently only affects them and never harms the purveyors of critical theory?
~~Personally, I think the answer is that the majority of capitalists don't want to lift a finger and are too afraid that they can't push the Overton Window without hurting their own reputations. Rich neo-cons don't want to lose their assets and would rather pretend to act concerned then actually enact policies and regular people don't want to be put on a blacklist. I could definitely be wrong about this and I'd like to hear from you.~~
~~tl;dr I think the majority of politically aware capitalists are either cowards or essentially controlled opposition.~~ (EDIT: this section is obvious and not relevant)