The Left takes playing for keeps to a whole new level

It's not just milkshakes, even wet-cement milkshakes, anymore. Or a restaurant server's spit.

Consider what has happened to a budding satirist whose object of parody was deemed off-limits by the self-appointed arbiters of what's acceptable in post-America:

The 8-year-old child actor who went viral for impersonating Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, is no longer going to make videos due to death threats and harassment she and her family have received.

Earlier this year, Ava Martinez, known as "Mini AOC," brought joy to her fans with several videos poking fun at the socialist darling, collecting millions of views on social media.

However, the fun came to a screeching halt on Wednesday when Martinez's family announced that she would no longer be impersonating Ocasio-Cortez and that all the videos created would be removed.

"The Left's Harassment and death threats have gone too far for our family. We have been getting calls on our personal phone numbers," Martinez's stepfather Salvatore Schachter tweeted. "For our safety and for our child's safety, we deleted all Mini AOC accounts."

Or consider what a movie theater in British Columbia has encountered when trying to show a movie about an abortion provider's conversion experience:

Producers of the anti-abortion movie Unplanned won a hard-fought battle to get their movie screened in Canada. Now, though, pro-abortion activists are beginning to resort to threats of violence to stop the film. Shamefully, the threats of violence appear to be working. A theater in Salmon Arm, British Columbia, has canceled a planned five-day run of the movie after receiving violent threats against theater staff.

A story published in Kamloops This Week broke the news:

Salmar Community Association board member Chris Papworth confirmed on Thursday, July 4, that the board has agreed to pull the movie’s five-day run, which was set to begin on July 12 at the Salmar Classic. He said the difficult decision to cancel the film was made out of concern for the personal safety for Salmar Theatres management, who had received personal threats via social media.

Papworth goes on to detail that the threats involved doxing the theater general manager and then encouraging people to "go after them." He added, "We just aren’t prepared for those levels of hostility towards our general manager."

This level of intolerance is finding legitimization among those providing an "intellectual foundation" for today's Left:

Dartmouth College lecturer and “historian of human rights,” Mark Bray, has refashioned himself as America’s foremost Antifa apologist. In his book and in places like the Washington Post, he’s argued that “physical violence against white supremacists is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective.” The Nation’s Natasha Lennard has similarly praised this organization’s “militant left-wing and anarchist politics,” and mocked its critics as “civility-fetishizing” liberals who “cling to institutions.” Nor is Antifa alone in this campaign. A Mother Jones profile of the many left-of-center grassroots groups whose resistance “sometimes goes beyond nonviolent protest—including picking up arms” is anything but condemnatory. Given this preamble, it’s hardly a surprise to see how the arbiters of national political discourse responded to the recent Antifa-led gang assault on the journalist Andy Ngo.

I still have a great deal of respect for what people like Ben Sasse and Arthur C. Brooks are trying to do. Dialing back the overall polarization and societal brittleness is an inarguably laudable quest. However, it strikes me as Sisyphean at this late date. I may be reading too much into the implications of their common argument, but it strikes me as having an it's-up-to-us-to-go-first quality about it.

And what would that look like? It's clear from these examples, as well as those of public figures known to have right-of-center orientations - and not just Trump administration people; Ted and Heidi Cruz were harassed out of a restaurant last year for supporting Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination - getting chased from dining establishments, or getting spit on when patronizing them, and as well as the myriad examples of people coming in for intimidation and worse for wearing MAGA hats, that everyone in post-America is expected to operate within parameters of conduct and expression that grow more narrow by the day.

We're not going to meet that expectation, of course, but the price we'll pay for refusal is going to get more dear. Count on it.