It didn’t take long for the hope for a better 2021 to die, did it? In the very first week of the year a small horde of rioters surged out of a larger horde of “mostly peaceful protesters” and into the Capitol building of the United States of America. People were killed. A Constitutionally ordained procedure for the peaceful transfer of Presidential power was interrupted.
This is absolutely maddening and sickening. Conservatism and libertarianism are going to be paying for this for a long time. Perhaps as long as I live.
I had intended to publish the third part of the “How much do black lives matter to @BlackLivesMatter, anyway?” series of articles but I have put a temporary hold on that, because neither that nor probably my brain was going to get much oxygen this last week. Look for that probably in the next week or so.
Stephen L. Miller is probably right that there is no point even talking about last year’s political violence until Trump is out of office. He makes this argument passionately and persuasively in one of his latest Patreon podcasts.
Being an obstreperous fool I have not heeded his admonitions, and predictably the way many people react is to accuse me of downplaying the seriousness of the riot at, and invasion of, the Capitol.
The point of comparing the Capitol Riot to the Black Lives Matter riots isn't to minimize the Capitol Riot. Not one bit. It's to show how much seriousness of the Black Lives Matter riots has been minimized. Over six months the media variously:
ignored riot violence;
downplayed riot violence;
justified riot violence ; and when none of that worked,
clamed, usually without any basis, that riot violence was akshually by white supremacists or other right wing extremists.
Many people on the Left happily sang right from the choirbook and didn’t even notice how the themes were changing, or how they were all incompatible with each other. But everyone else saw it. We saw political violence being excused and normalized by our media institutions and often by our political leaders. I don’t think I need to rattle off a bunch of examples. You remember.
So again, the point of comparing the Capitol Riot to the Black Lives Matter riots isn’t to minimize the Capitol Riot. The point is that the BLM riots were a necessary prelude to the Capitol Riot. Because of the BLM riots, for the last six months millions of Americans have, to one degree or another, organized for (what they see as) their own protection in the face of civil unrest.
Most of those people did so legally, morally, and responsibly: they just bought a couple of guns and exchanged phone numbers with neighbors in case the rioters ever came to their neighborhood. There’s nothing wrong with this.
But just like Black Lives Matter has a lot of bad actors (who for convenience we call Antifa) buried within their nominally legitimate protest movement, there are a lot of bad actors on the Right too. And both sides have been terrible at calling these bad actors out. Just terrible.
Now, restraining the bad actors is almost impossible to do in real time in the context of an actual mass protest. That's my biggest reason for opposing mass protest as a tactic, actually. There's not really any good "defense" against your protest being taken off the rails.
The best you can really do is to make it clear who the organizers are & make sure your organizers call off a protest entirely once it starts getting violent; not to protest without a permit; not to hold protests at night; not to engage with counter-protesters, etc.
Of course, Black Lives Matter took literally *none* of these steps in most of their larger protests. (I am told there are some places in the country -- like Raleigh, NC -- where they did better.) And neither did the Capitol Crowd. No one these days is doing protests the way Martin Luther King, Jr. did. We collectively put up with and even celebrated this sorry state of affairs for the entire latter half of 2020. It was inevitable that things would get worse.
And it’s not like nobody saw it coming. If it seems like "whataboutism" to talk about #BlackLivesMatter riots in the wake of the Capitol Invasion, keep in mind that some of us were in fact warning, for over six months, that normalizing Left political violence would inevitably lead to a violent response from the Right.
This wasn’t a “threat”; I can count the right wing extremists that I personally know on the fingers of zero hands. It was a warning that should not even have been necessary, like those warning labels on lawnmowers that tell you not to put your fingers or toes under the thing when it is running.
One is reminded of the scene from Fight Club where the members of Antifa — excuse me, the members of Project Mayhem — drag in the corpse of “bitch tits” Robert Paulsen. They have been out trying to destroy a coffee shop (“Operation Latte Thunder”) and they now are standing around the corpse in shocked disbelief that the “f—-in’ pigs” shot Bob in the head. And all “Jack” (Edward Norton’s character) can say is:
“You’re running around in ski masks, trying to blow things up. What did you think was going to happen?!”
“Jack” of course is promptly and completely ignored and the space monkeys keep on doing what space monkeys are gonna do. Those of us who warned that the political violence of 2020 was bound to escalate were ignored too. When we weren’t being called “racists” or “white supremacists” for failing to approve of the “93% peaceful” protests.
Well, that’s enough for now I guess.
Be seeing you!
Gideon Fell