re: #6 Charles Johnson

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The way that the police have practiced narrativizing their actions on fast media formats should be indicative of a systemic problem.

If you have a working script up and ready to explain the violence you just did, then you’re regularly premeditating your violent acts. If time and labor are put into these acts of misdirection because public opinion effects accountability, then you are effectively conspiring to abuse power.

The problem is…this will work because it ties into three existing tropes that Americans will accept as an excuse for retaliation:

[thing] is terrorism and thus justifies anything;
[thing] is sign young people are being so stupid they have to be sharply corrected so they can “understand”;

and

[thing] is disruptive and unaesthetic and therefore cannot have any value.

We’ve spent decades training people to view protesting as a sign of weakness, rudeness as a sign of invalidity, and collective action as sinister. The de jure right to protest cannot stand straight checked by the cultural force of the American desire to not care and never be called out for not caring.

Fascism doesn’t gain ground because people become utterly convinced, but because it’s solutions to complicated problems are attractive to the those that don’t want to think any more and those that think that talking about problems is the real problem.

It’s not just that people don’t want a nuanced understanding, it’s that they’re actively rejected a nuanced understanding: the world is an easier place to be in if the cops are always justified and the protesters are whiny privileged naifs that understand nothing of the world but are also irretrievably evil organized terrorists sympathizers…impossibly strong and pathetically weak at the same time, you might say.

Nobody gave a shit that Portland kicked off because of Patriot Prayer having free reign to assault people because the cops were hands off with the white guys driving in from other regions to attack queer people, they just cared that the protesters looked angry and ugly.

Nobody gave a shit about “hateful rhetoric” when it was Christian white dudes invited to campus; quite the opposite, we were told that openness and civility meant respected the men on stage and the goons that came with them when they discussed whether women were people, LGBTQ were crazy, and Muslims were antithetical to Western Civilization.

A nation’s values are not what they declare them to be, but what they allow happen unremarked.