[AMERICAN POLITICS] The Protest in the Park and the Incendiary Nature of Invoked Response

Look, I'll be honest. I don't want to write about American politics. I don't want to write about politics at all. There was a phase in my life where being a political journalist was one of the things that I really wanted to do, that I really wanted to invest my time in and explore.

One of the first things that I discovered in that exploration is that no sane person wants to be a political pundit. It is an exercise in emotional masochism, the act of submerging yourself in the most deliberately asinine expansion of high school society to what might otherwise be mature adults, with all of the fun that that implies.

So when I tell you that I feel compelled to write to this, I want you to know exactly how large that compulsion must be, how much I would really rather not do it, and by implication – how long something like this has been bubbling around in the back of my head looking for a place to escape.

Having prepared the ground to receive my seed, as it were, let us move onward.

I find myself in a very annoying position in regards to this sort of thing:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1063673153199599617.html

• On the one hand, I understand that individuals in the United States have the right to protest, the right to assembly in a free way, the right to be heard. These are all very important rights which are, in fact, inalienable – they are inherent to the human condition and can only be recognized or failed to be recognized by a government.

• On the other hand, what I really want to do is load up a couple of suicide drones with Molotov sprayers, make a few passes over the group, and then detonate the things right in the middle. Because these people are absolute assholes who are providing ever more evidence that spitting on your hands and hoisting the black flag (political pun fully intended) may be the only way to educate them fully on the responsible use of personal freedom.

Luckily for everyone, I'm entirely too lazy to become a domestic terrorist or to actually engage meaningfully in this sort of thing. My general disdain for humanity and distaste for interacting with it works to their advantage.

And I'm angry about it – and being angry makes me angry about being angry. I am a rational entity who chooses to act in rational ways and these are assholes who deliberately choose to provoke an irrational response with the full knowledge that I am too rational to respond as they need as human beings.

At some point they are going to encircle someone and start intimidating – and that someone is going to pull a 14 inch blade out of their sleeve, grasp it firmly, and begin stabbing in earnest, aiming straight for the throat and sweeping gently to the side. And on that day, these guys will have come to the protest in the full and complete expectation that they are untouchable, that the worst that they can expect is maybe, on a good day, a fistfight where they get some bruises they can blame on "the fascists." Maybe a short arrest and dropping a couple of hundred bucks to walk free. They will be entirely unprepared for someone who shows up and is exactly the person that they claim everyone who isn't a member of their organization is.

Because these guys are entirely unprepared for someone willing to adopt their methodologies and step beyond them to the logical embodiment of response within the context they've created.

And on that day, I am going to have to pretend in public to be horrified. I'm going to have to pretend in public to be offended. I'm going to have to pretend that I did not just experience a massive sense of relief, a sense of deep gratification, and a sense of deferred justice. I am going to have to pretend in public to be a civilized human being.

In private, I'm going to gloat, wallow in schadenfreude, and privately mutter "a good start."

And I resent them, wholeheartedly, for putting me in that position preemptively. I resent them for being the public manifestation of hypocritical stupidity and I resent the environment in general for not accepting that I might point at them and refer to them just thus.

But I'll do what I need to do in public, and I'll do what I need to do in private, and I'll feel what I need to feel and resent the lot of it. I'm self-aware enough to know where it comes from but – there you go.

I have never labored under the delusion that I am a good person. It saves a lot of effort to actually just say, upfront, "I am a terrible person and I'm okay with it." It reduces the amount of guilt that other people can lay on you for their hangups. So if your immediate response is to scream at the screen "you are a bad and terrible person!" – believe me, I'm well aware. You are not telling me anything I don't know already.

But… Then what? I acknowledge my emotional state and likely emotional reactions. I recognize that other people are responsible for deliberately inducing that state. I make conscious decisions about how to deflect and defer their power over me in that sense.

And this is why I never completed the transition into being a writer about political issues. Because at the end of the day these assholes, these self-righteous pricks, are still out there pulling their bullshit on people who haven't managed to generate my level of cynicism. They are still experiencing the benefits of civil society while deliberately engaged in the effort to tear down the one thing that protects them – civil society. And they are completely, utterly, without question absolutely unaware that they are engaged in the worst kind of self sabotaging behavior. They have absolutely no historical perspective, they have no understanding of what they're doing, and they're proud of that ignorance. There enabled by a press corps who, almost to a man, want to dignify this as "a movement," and a political class who don't want to get involved because to do so would be to be stating a judgment while soft peddling the idea that choosing not to get involved is stating a judgment.

I think above all the one thing that I resent most, the one thing that pisses me off beyond all account, is the fact that antifa and related groups count on the fact that the rest of us want to be rational, we want to make choices which maximize freedom, we want everyone to have a voice, we want the levers of politics to be visible at all times, we are generally against taking people's stuff by force and oppression – and they make the only choice when dealing with them to engage in all the worst parts of their accusations.

It's one of the reasons that I find political monoculture which has spread throughout the political class, yes – both sides of the aisle in the US, to be so toxic. It makes the political class predictable. It limits the number of possible responses coming out of the political class. There is no state in the Union which will respond to these guys with riot shields, truncheon lines, water cannons, and good, solid beatings every time they show up.

I resent the fact that, as a free speech maximalist, these guys are making me actually defend that position as a sane and reasonable responsible thing to say.

I can't be the only one. I can't be. I can't be the only person who wants to say "normally, I'm pretty easy going, but for you guys maybe being set on fire a little bit will help you feel better about yourselves."

"I absolutely agree with the idea that you can say whatever you want in the public fora, but maybe if you get off the highway I won't run you down with this truck."

"I fully accept that you believe that the engine of legal enforcement often goes off the rails, but right now what I really want them to do is crack some heads and get you the fuck out of the way."

I can't be the only one. And I can't be the only one that feels conflicted and angry about the fact that they make me feel conflicted and angry.

And now, on top of the rest, I have to decide if I want anyone that I know to know that I posted this. I have to decide if there is a community interested in freedom enough to say unpleasant but necessary things. I'm not even sure most of my friends, such as they are, are interested in reading this sort of thing for me.

Scratch that, they know what I am.

The rest of you, however...

Maybe you agree with me.

Maybe you were marching with antifa Portland and you're just spoiling for the chance to go toe to toe with LEO.

Maybe you're a European anarchist and a day that doesn't end with all the cars in six city blocks burning merrily doesn't even register on your radar.

Maybe you're someone in the Proud Boys, a perfectly reasonable and rational response from primarily young men who feel targeted by and socially disdained by the traditional antifa political spectrum who nevertheless want to get out there and bust a few heads themselves, just with the occasional social advantage of it being antifa heads they smash.

Maybe you are one of the vast and far more reasonable, far more rational people than any of us who just want to keep your heads down, go about your lives, and hope it all goes away.

The last group are the smart people. The last group get the most static, but they are the smartest. Nothing lasts forever and nothing reflects that so much as the trends of political activism.

In the 70s, we saw organizations just like antifa (and in many cases exactly like antifa, down to their choice of outfit and logo design) engaging in outright terroristic activity, up to and including bombs, targeted murders, hijacking airplanes, and all the other fun of the 70s. Are the current batch bold enough to work themselves up into sufficient frenzy to reach those storied heights again?

Should we, as good, solid, rational people, allow them to?

As much as anything, I resent being forced to ask this question. You probably should, too.