You need to go right now and take a good, long look at these photos Charles links to, of which this is only one shameful example:

These people are not just antiwar; they’re not just on the other side. They’re not just stupid, or misguided, or eccentric or well-meaning or “just kids” or any of the thousand other dodges we employ to avoid acknowledging the appalling truth. These people are the enemy – just another tentacle on the body of the beast that would sooner see us destroyed than accommodated or compromised with. I don’t have any practical suggestions on the best way of hacking this particular tentacle off, but we’d better start thinking about it. Because sooner or later, the impulse to treason on the part of these detestable mouth-breathers is going to have to be reckoned with just as surely – and quite possibly just as harshly – as the impulse to murder on the part of anybody sitting in Gitmo right now has been. They might well be simply dupes, useful fools – but does their blind ignorance make them any less of a threat to victory?

Reasoning with them doesn’t work; they’re impervious to little things like facts and logic. Our own principles dictate that their vileness be tolerated, at least to some degree. But that’s the big question here: to what degree must they be tolerated? What obligation do we as a free society have to them simply by reason of the accident of their being born here? How far will we let them go towards undermining, halting, and eventually rolling back all progress in the WoT before clamping down? Social approbation and scorn has been enough to keep them and their excesses in some kind of check in the past, but now that we as a society are no longer working from a shared assumption of the essential superiority and rightness of Western civilization – and clearly, we are not; if you asked any of the people in the pics, they’d straighten up any misperceptions on that for you with no hesitation – can we entrust the defense of our culture to such a passive mechanism as that? Or are more active measures called for? I don’t know the answer; to tell the truth, I’m not all that comfortable with the question in the first place. But if this isn’t plain treason, then at the very least that fine line is inching closer to us with every latest mad parade these lunatics put together. And denying it, hiding ourselves from it, won’t make it go away.

Their numbers are pretty small, and seem to be getting smaller, and I suppose that in itself might make the issue moot: as the freaks further marginalize themselves, more reasonable people – those who truly are misguided, or stupid, or just too young to know better – will recoil in disgust. Simple demographics might solve the problem for us. But meanwhile, we’ve got real people committing real acts of protest that dance ever closer to real treason (usually in a pink tutu or on stilts, for some reason), and the response so far has been almost astonishingly mild. That will change sooner or later, most assuredly, either by spontaneous acts of aggressive confrontation on the part of patriots deeply offended by this stuff, or some more official means – because they seem determined to paint us into a corner, to provoke the very reactions they rail against. They won’t ever allow for the fact that they might be wrong, that their own actions might be more responsible for the coming repression than any natural tendency towards it on the part of the people they so hate – which is us, in case you missed that little factoid.

Look at the pictures, walk away and cool off some, and then go back and look at them again. If you can come to any other conclusion, a more positive one than I have, I’d love to hear about it. Sometimes I think it’s going to be a very ugly summer indeed. And sometimes I get sickened enough by this mindless, vicious crap that the only reply I can muster is the most belligerent one: bring it on.

Update! Michele is thinking along very similar lines.