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2 days agoPersonally, I think they should be allowed to threaten - and for those minorities and good folk to openly promise bloody murder if the racists tried their luck.
The right-wing traditionally has a monopoly on violence, not just physical, but also in speech. When you are free of consequence, your reach will grasp ever further. Like what Trump is doing with his EOs.
IMO, the thing of most value for my position is that it normalizes opposition and resistance. After MLK died, the media was used to enshrine his approach in the history books…and Malcom X was a footnote at best for most students. It is through offering the promise of violent revolution if peaceful evolution wasn’t negotiated, is how we got here without too many corpses.
By removing the notion of violence from protest, things were lost:
1: Fewer people to protest anything. The elimination of ‘rough’ characters simply meant fewer people to raise signs, fists, or to speak.
2: It has become taboo to associate with people who believe in giving as good as they get, or being aggressive. This means that kind protestors simply don’t communicate with the violent ones, so there is less coordination for their goals.
3: A wider array of actions to do for protest. For example, ignoring ‘safe space’ rules, such as the perimeter around JD Vance’s house, or burning Teslas in America, or displaying the (wax) severed heads of Trump and friends. These aren’t kind things, but they certainly give a message to the people in charge.
If roughness in politics among everyday people was ordinary, we might have more work strikes - or the people in the US Treasury could have denied DOGE unlawful entry, because the spirit of opposition was ingrained into people in that other timeline.