If you don’t know to Talia Lavin is, allow me to introduce you to her.

She is a very progressive freelance writer, and a shining exemplar of everything that is wrong in the media today.

She was a fact-checker for the New Yorker, and she was fired when she tried to publicly shame a double amputee Marine veteran who was working for ICE because she mistook his unit tattoo for a Nazi tattoo and let fly with that on the internet.

So much for her being an accurate fact-checker.

In an impressive display of failing upwards, she was hired as an associate professor of Journalism at NYU, where she wanted to teach a class “Reporting on the Far Right.”  She was fired from that job because of public outrage.  NYU was unable to answer how they thought it was a good idea to let someone who was fired for mendacious coverage of the Right Wing teach others how to report about the Right Wing, so they showed her the door.

Right about now, you are probably wondering why people continue to pay her write.  It’s because she says the right things about the right people, facts be damned.

As such, the publishers that own GQ magazine paid her for this steaming turd.

That Pro-Gun Rally in Virginia Wasn’t Exactly “Peaceful”

Here is a snip of the headline of this article so you can see the corresponding illustration.

Yep, you can see where this is going.

GQ has now published more swastikas than were flown at the Va rally.

On Monday, the streets of Richmond, Virginia, were flooded with a spectacular arsenal of weaponry; some 22,000 people from all over the country had turned up to protest the gun control laws recently passed by the Virginia State Senate. Fearing a repeat of the deadly violence that had gripped the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, three years earlier, governor Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency and barred weapons from the Capitol grounds. Some 6,000 protesters grumblingly abided. But just outside the legions of police barricades, twice that number of people roamed the streets of Richmond bearing a bristling mass of rifles, from AR-15s to massive Barrett sniper rifles. Some wore skull masks; others waved Confederate flags. Members of hate groups like the League of the South and the American Guard, as well as the Proud Boys, mingled openly; some of the latter were wearing patches that said “RWDS”—an acronym for “Right-Wing Death Squad.” Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones gave a speech from a Terradyne battle tank. Adding to the bellicose mood, some attendees paraded with a massive guillotine as a prop, and others held up an effigy strung on a noose, emblazoned with the slogan, “Thus always to tyrants.”

Wow, that sounds scary as hell.  I wonder where she saw all those crazy, militant, racist Right-Wingers.

Also, maybe it’s too much to ask a fact-checker who confused a USMC symbol for a Nazi symbol to know history, but “Thus always to tyrants” is the English translation of the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia

No one was shot—a frankly extraordinary turn of events given the sheer amount of weaponry, the density of the crowd, and the weapons stuffed casually into backpacks or held loosely in the crooks of pale arms.

Shootouts at gun rights rallies are as frequent a crossfire massacres by CCW permit holders.  Never.

This happy vicissitude of fate led right-wing groups to declare the event a triumph—in the words of fringe-right publications Gateway Pundit and InfoWars, a “peaceful protest.” Mainstream media, too, bought into this analysis: “Pro-gun rally by thousands in Virginia ends peacefully,” was the assessment of the Washington Post.

I had to look up vicissitude.  It has many definitions, but the one I think she was going with is “a favorable or unfavorable event or situation that occurs by chance.”

No, a bloodbath at a gun rally not happening wasn’t a favorable circumstance that happened by chance.  It was because all those law-abiding gun owners went there for a good-faith demonstration.

If this is how she feels about gun owners, pregnant women should stay away from the feminists marching with coat hangers at the Women’s March, less the feminists set upon them like angry dogs and perform street abortions.

All this confidence belied the fact that bloodshed—great and heavy and perhaps unprecedented on American soil—was narrowly averted.

It was pretty widely averted.  Also, there were more American casualties on each side of Gettysburg than there were protesters at the rally, just to nit-pick her use of unprecedented.

But even with the Base threat—which was thoroughly ignored by right-wing media—neutralized, it seems myopic at best to describe the Monday event as “peaceful.” There was, it was true, an absence of immediate bloodshed; but what abounded, in that armed and insurrectionist sea of humanity, was the promise that bloodshed might happen at any time, should the will of the mob be thwarted.

“It was peaceful, but don’t let that fool you, there was the threat of violence.”

Good god, I hope so.  That’s the entire premise of the founding of the United States.  When the next Democrat President decides that New York, Illinois, and California each need five Senators and Idaho, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Iowa, the Dakotas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana all need one, I hope middle America still has its guns.

America’s exceptional tolerance towards armed white gunmen—its brooking of gun-toting militias around the country, and the po-faced seriousness with which the media takes claims of “freedom” when it comes to the right to own weapons of mass slaughter—is entirely restricted to this demographic.

Nothing but white people at the rally.  Another fact not accurately checked.

Famously, California enacted gun-control legislation prohibiting the open carrying of firearms after a demonstration of armed Black Panthers on the steps of the state house; this swift reactive prohibition was enacted by then-governor Ronald Reagan.

And not one gun rights activist today would defend it.  That along with the Hughes Amendment are legitimate criticism of Ronald Reagan.

Maybe this is something the Left doesn’t understand, just because Reagan did doesn’t mean it was good.  We on the Right are not consumed with the sort of “can do no wrong” cult of personality that the Left is.  Some presidents are better than others, but no president is perfect.

The threat of white supremacist violence, despite resulting in multiple shooting massacres against black people, Jews, and Latinos in the last several years, has yet to pierce the national consciousness as the vast and threatening specter it is.

What?  Is she actually saying that America is ignoring white supremacist violence?  Or is she saying everyone there was a white supremacist and should have been arrested or shot on the spot?  Because there was nothing that tied this rally to those shootings.

[T]housands of armed individuals roaming the streets of an American city openly proclaimed their intent not to obey laws they might disagree with. Yet their very whiteness rendered them invisible as a threat: in America, if you are white, you can wear a mask and carry a gun and hang a governor in effigy, and go home quietly at the end of the day, unmolested.

If you openly display at a pre-announced rally and abide by all state and local laws regarding the carrying of firearms, yes, you go home quietly at the end of the day, unmolested.

Try hosting the same rally in Central Park, watch how fast all those white people get arrested.

I’m sorry that this is still America where you have to actually break the law to get arrested, instead of being arrested for what some freelance writer thinks lurks in your soul.

On Monday, itself the sea of armed men kept the city in a kind of artificial stillness—not safety but fear. There is a difference between peace that consists of calm and security, and the false peace of being held under threat. One may be silent when held at gunpoint, but it is not the silence of contentment; it is the silence of mortal terror.

Oh for fuck’s sake, that didn’t happen.  She wasn’t even there at the time.  She is scared because she saw pictures she didn’t like.

Here’s how not scary it was.  There were Leftist and Socialist independent journalists there taking pictures to shame people.  They left unmolested too.  Not like the violence and fear that begets journalists who try and take pictures of Antifa rallies.

If people were really silenced with mortal terror, then how did so many Left Wing reporters show up to cover the rally with the intent of making gun owners look bad?

Reporter friends who planned to attend the event went in with a sense of dread, a war-zone fatalism at what might happen. Molly Conger, a Virginia-based leftist activist and citizen journalist, told me that she had cautioned other activists to stay far from the capital and avoid counterprotest. She attended, she told me, because she felt an obligation to document the event, rather than to protest it. “I still think it was the right thing to do,” she told me Tuesday, of her decision to warn other activists away. “I would be distraught if I had the power to keep people away and didn’t and they died in a mass shooting.” At the event, she said, “the crowd was so thick I got knocked in the face and chest with rifle barrels.”

Her friend got bumped in a crowd.  Andy Ngo had his skull fractured in Portland with what the media kept telling me were “peaceful protesters.”

And it’s clear her friend really wanted to be there to document a mass shooting.  The least peaceful people there were the Leftists wanting it to all go south so they could dance in the blood.

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, a group that had hosted a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in Richmond for 28 years, canceled its vigil. “Advocates have faced armed individuals trying to intimidate us each year,” wrote the group’s president, Lori Haas, in a press release. “But this year is different; we have received information that heavily armed white supremacists will be seeking to incite violence, and our organization has decided that the safety of our volunteers, advocates, and staff, many of whom are survivors of gun violence, must be our top priority.”

I’m so sorry to the CSGV that they got out shined on one day.

An annual, long-planned march for the rights of undocumented Virginians, coordinated by New Virginia Majority, an advocacy group for working-class Black and Brown Virginians, was cancelled on the Friday before the gun lobby group. Ibby Han, a representative of the organization Virginia Student Power, which had partnered in the MLK Jr. Day event since 2015, told me that the New Virginia Majority event had expected around 1,000 attendees, many of whom were undocumented. The advocacy event was centered around drivers’ licenses for undocumented immigrants and criminal justice reform. “We are enraged,” the organization wrote, “that we cannot use our voices today at the General Assembly.”

I am too.  ICE should have come to that rally.

That the zeal of armed activists should crush the rights of others to advocate is neither novel nor unexpected, for all their loudly proclaimed adoration of “freedom.”

They did no such thing.  That other group didn’t get the spotlight or decided to cancel their events isn’t an abridgment of their freedom.  The government taking gun owners’ guns away is.  Nothing stopped the other groups from coming out, they made that choice on their own.

Americans weary of mass shootings at malls, churches, kindergartens, concerts, nightclubs, abortion clinics, hospitals, universities, and movie theaters—in short, in any place where people gather—have long pointed out that the fear marring any movement through the commons constitutes an infringment of the right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.

It does not at all.  Not in the lest.  That other people don’t like the legal exercise of my right doesn’t infringe on their liberty and happiness.

The Left has been pushing this nonsense where.  They want to silence your speech because they say it’s a violation of their speech to hear a different opinion.

I’m waiting for “Christianity must be banned because it infringes on the right of gay people to be happy” to come down the pipeline.

The event on Monday served the only possible purpose thousands of armed men gathering en masse can serve: it served as a threat, in this case against democracy itself. 

People exercising their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances in support of their Second Amendment right are a threat to democracy itself.

Orwell would be proud of that inversion.

The rally was, as one attendee put it to Vice reporter Tess Owen, intended to be “a show of force.” Not the force of popular will, nor the force of solidarity, but the kind of force that comes packed into magazines, with barrels cocked, effigies hung in nooses, white skulls etched on black masks. It was a force that silenced others who sought to raise their voices, and was meant to. Monday was a day of a clenched fist raised in menace; rather than be lulled by the temporary absence of bloodshed, Americans would do better to be poised for the inevitable falling of the blow.

But when Antifa actually attacks people with hammers and demands the total overthrow of our system and it be replaced with socialism, that’s totally peaceful and they are not a threat.

My hope is that the Va rally lights a fire under the bench of the Supreme Court and they come down and pull an Obergefell on gun rights and declare it absolute that all those state laws that ban high capacity magazines or assault weapons or require permits to own or whatever are unconstitutional, null and void, and fuck you.

The only thing I can think is that they are waiting until they are done sitting Shiva for RGB to do this to guarantee their victory.

Then we won’t have to see these rallies anymore.

The fact is, the rally was entirely peaceful, demonstrating the self-restraint of law-abiding gun owners.

Instead, she paints is as a white supremacist rally that scared Virginia into silence, and is using that as even more justification to crack down on people.

Why anyone objective would believe a writer with such a documented history of being wrong is beside me.

But until publishers catch on that she is better served to society doing something useful, like draining septic tanks with a drinking straw, we’re going to get more of her lies.