condescending, certain, and incoherent
Posted on 6 December 2016 by Freddie
During the election I got into one of these social media debates. The topic was violent resistance to Trump. Protesters had gotten into some scrapes with Trump crowds. I said then (and believe now) that protesters have a right to defend themselves physically if they have to. A friend of mine went further. She said that beyond merely defending themselves, activists should be actively obstructing Trump’s message – pulling up yard signs, shouting down people speaking out in support of him, hacking Trump-supporting websites. The stakes were so high, she said, that we couldn’t spend time worrying about bourgeois concerns like freedom of expression. Because Trump was a nativist demagogue, because we were in a moment of incipient fascism, we needed to obstruct his message.
I then asked her if she thought that we should be physically preventing his voters from going to the polls, attacking them if necessary, to stop his election. She scoffed at the idea. She said I sounded like a conservative conspiracy theorist. Of course she didn’t think we should stop Republicans from going to the polls. Where do I come up with this stuff?
http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/12/06/condescending-certain-and-incoherent/
