During CPAC a lot of people asked where the Left’s CPAC was, and people offered up options, like maybe Netroots Nation had been at one point something like that, and lots of wingnuts think college campuses are basically CPAC every day.

And people are asking, now, what the equivalent of the NRA is for the Left, like what is the lobby that’s bought most of our congressmen and is presumed so powerful that nobody can cross it. Planned Parenthood? But there are anti-abortion Democrats as well as those who favor SOME abortion restriction, and so far as I know there are no anti-gun Republicans in any way at all so they’re only equivalent if you ignore the role of power.

And I know saying that makes me sound like some kind of insane sophomore Marxist poser but making college kids who don’t want to listen to that Milo creature out to be the equal opposite of a national news network is insane. Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon may say the occasional dumb thing but they’re not on TV coast-to-coast every single night. PETA doesn’t command the phones of every member of the U.S. Senate.

So who’s the opposite of the NRA? Children who don’t want to be shot?

I forget who said this first: Our society is so structured on binaries that we think cats are the opposite of dogs. We put two things next to each other and decide that because they’re both there, they must be in conflict.

“SJWs” on college campuses have killed exactly nobody and lack government sanction even if they had. In living memory the National Guard of the United States of America has marched onto campus and shot protesters dead.

Black Lives Matter is not the opposite of the police. Black people are not the opposite of the police. Gay people are not the opposite of guns.

It’s not just a question of if they’re actually saying things that oppose one another, with equal strength and coherence.

It’s whether what they say, what they do, what they stand for, will have equal consequences. Carry equal weight.

Murder the same number of people.

Until the body count of the Weathermen reaches that of Richard Nixon & Henry Kissinger I don’t want to hear about how the anti-war movement “went too far” and nobody who marched on Washington in 2003 blew off the limbs of any Iraqi schoolchildren. Black Lives Matter want cops to stop shooting black people without consequences.

There is no equivalent conference on the Left hosting the President of the United States while selling “rope. tree. NRA lobbyist” shirts on the side. And while I’m glad of that, for our immortal souls, it’s easy to lament the difference.

But only if you remember that the difference is the power of who shows up.

A.