In their campaign for a $15 job-killing minimum wage, the leftwingers at MoveOn.org have declared low wages "violence." Kid you not, here is their tweet:

Low wages are violence. Knowingly letting people suffer is violence. It must end. - @fightfor15 #FightFor15 pic.twitter.com/EM2yPMTPNY

— MoveOn (@MoveOn) July 20, 2018

The semantic idiocy is just the sort of thing that might have come out of the more extremist elements from the 1960s. It's the sort of thing Bill Ayers would have said to justify his bombs and not doing enough. It's something his wife Bernardine Dohrn could have said in between praisings of the Manson murders as "wild." Everything is violence. Sex is violence. Inequality is violence. Free speech is violence. Debt is violence. Words are violence. Silence is violence. Republicans are violence. Hannah Arendt noticed the left's fascination with calling everything violence in the New York Review of Books in 1969, bringing up a quote from a famous Marxist:  “All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence,” said C. Wright Mills,[.]

Because it shows how unserious they are, and it also shows that by negating the meaning of words, they can justify real violence as their result. If the minimum wage as it is is 'violence,' well then what is to stop a bloody uprising in response?

They characterize everything except real violence as "violence" these days, as Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds has noted.

It goes to show that the left really has a hostility to the idea of words having meaning. This fuels their extremism, as ever crazier things ever more divorced from reality are said, as words are completely drained of meaning. Brute force follows, because all that are cognitable are animal squeals and grunts, the law of the jungle replacing the laws of words.

MoveOn's idiot statement did go over like a lead balloon on Twitter, and Twitchy has a spectacular xpert curation of the best witty and mocking responses - it's a must-read here. My favorite is the wag who said that by that logic, McDonalds, with its no-wage automation, has got to be committing genocide, then.

Word, bro.

Image Credit: Tim Pierce, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0