by Roger Simon
When I saw a video online of Antifa attacking demonstrators in front of the Wi Spa in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, I realized why, in the immortal words of Thomas Wolfe, “You Can’t Go Home Again.”
But unlike Wolfe, who, in his famous novel, was loath to return to his native Asheville, North Carolina, I am in the south, resistant to returning to California where I lived most of my adult life.
It was the homeless coming down in the morning from Mulholland Drive on the way to free food and not-so-free drugs, making even walking the dog a perilous activity, that had initially propelled our family out—at least in part.
But things have apparently only gotten worse since, considering what transpired at the Wi Spa. That was a place I knew because, in the eighties and nineties and into the first few years of this century, I had become an occasional habitué of LA’s Korean spas, excellent places to relax in the hot water, although I can only recall patronizing Wi once.
Nothing happened there then remotely similar to what occurred the other day—a man walking buck naked into the women’s only side, declaring his “gender identity” female, while not bothering to hide the contrary evidence in front of the assembled biological women and their children.
Later, a black woman expressed her justifiable anger at this display before management only to be herself confronted by a particularly obnoxious “woke” individual defending the right of the gender dysphoric to freak out kids. (This is also on video at the link, if you haven’t seen it.)
The next chapter had defenders of traditional human privacy (aka “normals” as my friend Kurt Schlichter calls them) protesting in front of the spa when they are confronted by the violent Antifa psychos who are apparently immune to any kind of serious prosecution by the district attorneys of Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle or, for that matter, our Department of Justice.
What are we to make of this other than it is all too predictable by now?
America, in its blue states at least, and they are doing their best to spread the poison elsewhere, has turned us into a land of the “woke” where near-total conformity rules the day, the populace terrified to speak up against the real intention behind this basic Marxist behavior—the destruction of the family as we know it.
When you look at the silent faces standing in the lobby of the Wi Spa while the “woke” spokesman pontificates, you see this fear and all you can say is “Welcome to Weimar Los Angeles.”
Indeed, the direction of our republic is eerily similar to that of Weimar, Germany, in everything from social mores to inflation.
One of the more interesting books that gives a sense of what it was like then is—doubly apropos since we are in the middle of Wimbledon—“A Terrible Splendor” about the epochal 1937 Davis Cup duel between America’s Don Budge and Germany’s Baron von Cramm—a handsome gay man who was under the thumb of the Gestapo at that time for his proclivities so that he would win against the Yankee.
Meanwhile, license prevailed for others in 1930s Berlin beyond anything we would even conceive of today.
What the self-described “progressives” of LA and elsewhere have to learn is this is not about whether you are pro or anti gay. There are plenty of gays on the right these days. Or how you feel about the transgendered. Personally, I’m live and let live.
It is about something much more basic we all learned in school when school really was school and not a Cultural Revolution indoctrination camp. I’m going to put it in caps, lest it be forgotten:
RESPECT THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS!
Disrespecting others is what Antifa, BLM and virtually everyone else on the left is doing now at a level unknown since the Weimar Republic. We all know how that ended.
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Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, editor-at-large for The Epoch Times. His most recent books are “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (nonfiction). He can be found on Parler as @rogerlsimon
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