That is the question that Glenn Reynolds asks in his column in the New York Post:
In Michigan, protesters opposed to Gov. Rick Snyder’s austerity budget broke a window to get into the capitol building. One faces felony charges after assaulting police with an edged weapon; 14 were arrested.
In Washington, DC, the windows at GOP headquarters were shot out, not the first time that Republican offices have been subject to such attacks.
In Madison, Wis., the state capitol was occupied for weeks by teachers-union members and their supporters. Doors and windows were broken; a mob tried to keep Republican state senators from entering the Senate chamber to vote.
And blogger Ann Althouse — a Wisconsin law professor who voted for Barack Obama — received nasty threats for the crime of posting video depicting this thuggish conduct on YouTube….
The GOP state senators who supported Gov. Scott Walker’s budget also received death threats, including an e-mail reading, in part: “I want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and your republican dictators have to die….” This threat was more credible because mobs of union protesters had already visited senators’ houses, screaming and banging on the windows.
[T]he big-media folks seem so anxious to peddle the same tired storyline — right-wingers are violent and ignorant, left-wingers are peaceful and virtuous — that they almost have to ignore anything that will spoil the narrative.
But in doing this, they only undermine their own position more. Word still gets out — even to liberals at the Huffington Post. And people catch on: If there are big stories out there that traditional media won’t cover because it offends their storyline, then why listen to traditional media at all?
Why, indeed? Not all of the recent left-wing violence and threats of violence has originated with labor unions, but a lot of it has. As I wrote here, the time has come to reconsider whether unions deserve special, favored treatment under the antitrust laws.
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