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Collateral Damage in the Culture War
There is an air of incivility in American society today: A simple elevator ride can turn in a lecture on social justice, an editor of Think Progress is calling for people to “confront Republicans where they eat, where they sleep and where they work” and simply wearing a hat in a restaurant can touch off a violent attack.
Which got me thinking: What would I do if I were in a restaurant and a politically-based fight broke out as I was eating? Would I get involved if, say, a political argument broke out and it degenerated into fisticuffs? Would my reaction be different if I was by myself, or if it happened when I was with my family? What would I do if the fistfight turned even more violent and lethal force was clearly about to be used? Would I use lethal force in that situation? How far would I be willing to go to defend not only my life but my ideals as well?
It’s important to think of what might happen and what your actions might be before such things happen, because a plan isn’t going to suddenly materialize when you need one. Will you get involved in a shouting match if “your side” seems to be losing? Will you stop someone from being assaulted just because the message on their clothing has driven someone to violence? Will you step into a fight that was caused by a political disagreement? Where do you draw the line between minding your own business and standing up for what’s right?
I think about these things because it gives me a starting point to form a plan that I can put into action if such a thing happens in front of me. Rather than be frozen with inaction, I’ll have a starting point that I can use to evaluate what is happening and what I can do about it. I can do this because I’ve imagined what political violence in a restaurant or other place might be like, it won’t be an unthinkable event for me.
It saddens me that I have to think about such things. It would sadden me even more to be caught in the middle of a life-threatening situation without a plan or the means to defend my life and the lives of those dear to me, so I train and I prepare for a day I sincerely hope never happens.
Published in Guns
Many states keep list of registered voters, and some have closed primaries. If you have access to Lexis/Nexis, you can easily get those lists. Or you could just film all the license plates at a rally and get your DOJ mole to look up the owners and their addresses.
How about when a guy makes sure a baseball field is full of Republicans and shoots them? Is that political violence?
I was agreeing with you too–sorry! Should’ve made that clearer!
This.
I was say so, yes. Luckily such acts are extraordinarily rare.
Yes, they are. For now.
Here’s the thing that worries me. We in the applied violence community preach de-escalation and avoidance pretty much 24/7 because we know that lethal force should be be used only in the gravest extreme.
Nothing, and I mean NO-THING will make you realize the consequences of your actions like carrying around a portable, concealment means of dispensing lethal force with you. Because you know you hold the trump card, you become calmer, more easy going, more willing to let things slide.
However, this is not how Antifa thinks. Their childish view of the world (“Why can’t I have everything I want and not have to pay for it!? It’s just not FAAAIRRRRRR!!!!!”) also includes a childish view of violence. They see themselves as having no choice to “fight back” against any slight. I mean, if your opponent is LITERALLY Hitler, why wouldn’t you?
This is a big, big problem, and it’s made worse by elements on “our” side who seem eager for Civil War 2.0 to kick off.
No one on either side seems willing to ask the question “Do we really want this to happen? Is this what we want?”
God help us all.
In the meantime, I’ll have a plan. And pepper spray.
After reading quite a few articles, books and listening to podcasts about self defense, I always check for exits, sit where I can see who comes into a room, etc. I thought this was prudent since I travel internationally for work and need to be aware of my personal safety. I do this 100% of the time just to keep my skills up and have trained my 15 year old daughter to do the same. I wonder now if we need to do this because of the threats and actions we have seen in the last month in our political/cultural world. How sad this is.
@fredcole, Steve Scalise just called; he advises you to recalibrate your threat assessment.
I made a comment in the last week on another thread that anyone on any side who cites anonymous social media threats as evidence of anything is straining for credibility and even loses some credibility by exaggerating their significance. Everyone public gets them; they mean nothing. Sadly, our political culture has gotten to a point where empty threats are plentiful and likely drown out legitimate threats. This doesn’t make empty threats non-alarming to the recipient, but it also doesn’t make them actionable.
We also seem to be in the grip of a panic of imagination, in which whatever worst outcome we can conjure in our minds becomes an actionable fear. Saying that it was reasonable for Flake to feel as threatened as Scalise when confronted in an elevator, because those things have happened, is no different from a college kid saying that political ideas make them physically unsafe, or for a woman saying that a drunken groping at a party is a threat of rape and murder. Just because your mind goes there doesn’t make it so.
Part of de-escalation, which is always the prefered response to confrontation (followed by escape), is calming your own fears so that you don’t react irrationally and make it worse. Talking yourself up into situational paranoia is not conducive to de-escalation. And, remember, that the other party, if already behaving irrationally, is probably paranoid about you, too.
That’s our standard now? What a horrid time we live in.
By whom? What is it?
Heckler’s Veto, meet American Politics.
The act of a high school kid being assaulted for wearing a baseball hat is vastly more sinister than a bunch of Senators being shot at. It is a common occurrence for conservatives to be assaulted for just wearing Trump, NRA, Republican paraphernalia. Breitbart had a running tally a few months ago on the various acts of violence against conservatives and stopped at over 700 because it just became tedious. That’s 700 acts of violence over a period of about a month. In most cases it was acts not much different than the kid that had his hat stolen. Very few were stabbings and people being shot at. The truth is, if you are on a leftist college campus or live in a leftist city and you are a conservative, white, Christian male, you better keep your thoughts to yourself or you will be assaulted verbally and or physically. I’ve personally witnessed many acts of political intimidation by leftists here in Pittsburgh.
After 911, there were warnings everywhere not to be mean to Muslims or people of Middle-Eastern decent. I never saw or heard anything approaching a derisive comment or act to warrant any such fear. I’m immersed in the Democrat society where I live and work. It is almost daily that people who have no idea what I believe reveal themselves as the most vile racists, sexists and bigots. If I and those like me were to walk around in MAGA hats outing ourselves, Pittsburgh would turn into 1950’s Jim Crow South with people spitting on us, cat-calling us, keying our cars, slashing our tires and even worse. Large scale intimidation is the new reality. If you think it isn’t you are living in a very protected and isolated bubble.
Are you friggin’ serious?!?!
harassment
(either harris-meant or huh-rass-meant) n. the act of systematic and/or continued unwanted and annoying actions of oneparty or a group, including threats and demands.
definition from https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/harassment
I tend to agree with you, Ryan. My guess is that a kid could wear an Obama t-shirt to my nearest high school, college or local coffee shop without a problem, but a MAGA hat would invite…what?
Not a physical assault, probably. But it doesn’t have to be a physical assault, does it? All you really need to do to silence alternative viewpoints is to make it more trouble than its worth to put yourself out there.
Anyway, in answer to the question posed in the OP, I would like to think I’d call the police and then intervene somehow. There have been a few moments in my recent history in which I have intervened in public disputes—a loud marital argument that seemed to be about to get physical on a New York city street, for instance. Sometimes an unexpected move from outside can distract the aggressor and defuse the situation, but of course, I’ve also been really lucky not to have pushed myself into a situation that was more volatile than it appeared.
But I’d like to think I wouldn’t just sit there in a restaurant and let Ted Cruz and his wife get screamed at. Or Kamala Harris and her family, for that matter.
He looked like a puppy that got caught peeing on the carpet. Next time take the stairs. He could use the line I used as a cop when I was dealing with some screaming harpy; “Ma’am let me know when you’re going to take a breath, because I have something to say.”
Handwaving and mischaracterizing doesn’t work either. I didn’t say it was reasonable for Flake to feel as threatened in that elevator as Scalise felt when he was being shot at. Hell, I don’t even make any claims as to whether or not Flake was actually afraid. My point there is that confrontation in an elevator is just that, and justifiably alarming in and of itself. It isn’t reasoned discourse and it a degrading of any sense of privacy and separation. It’s a bad development. Obviously things could get worse, but I’d rather that not happen so I’d prefer to start arguing against it now.
And yes, physical confrontation is an entirely different thing than differing political ideas in college.
Meanwhile, a Conservative at Berkeley says: “I have been harassed, stalked, chased, punched, and spat on during my time at UC Berkeley, and in early 2017, I was chased by a mob of masked, black-clad thugs. These thugs, members of a fringe political faction, threw bricks at police officers, launched Molotov cocktails, set fires, beat innocent bystanders, and cut a wide swath of destruction through the downtown area of an entire city.”
I think if I were being chased by masked, black-clad thugs, I’d feel threatened. And not just that day, but for a long while afterward
That’s the point of the molotov cocktails, bricks, punching, spitting and harassment —-to make ordinary, non-heroic people feel like it’s just too much trouble to stick your neck out by, for example, expressing your opinion.
I am remembering the men—grown men—in the class on Domestic Violence I took in Seminary. I was impressed that about half the students in the class were male, but they knew better than to say anything. No masked antifa members in the class, just a bunch of middle aged women whom one might otherwise characterize as awfully nice, sensitive, thoughful people.
But the men didn’t say anything.
Yeah, Jeff Flake looked scared to me. Yes, Politicians get yelled at all the time . Jeff may be more cowardly or thin skinned than almost all other politicians.
We have police to take care of this sort of thing. If the police refuse to intervene on a citizen’s behalf, I would think you’d have a case for suing the city. Seems like either of those options are preferable to bringing your own bricks and bat.
I agree—was that what we were talking about?
Actually, if I was a conservative at Berkeley, I might carry some serious pepper spray around with me.
Assuming the police aren’t right there handy, I mean.
It’s hard to sue if you’re dead.
For at least two decades now, Leftists in academia have been striving..often successfully..to shut down speech that they don’t like, whether the speaker be an invited conservative guest, a professor with Badthink ideas, or the Prime Minister of Israel. It was inevitable that this toxicity would spill out into the wider society, and now it has.
@katebraestrup didn’t say that this “Conservative at Berkeley” had been murdered. Presumably, they are still alive, as they are quoted above. (Maybe it’s @johnyoo!) So whatever steps they took successfully averted death. Plenty of time to file a police report. If they had decided, without first trying the proper law enforcement channels, to confront these thugs, there is, I think, a greater likelihood of being harmed in the process.
I’m sure Ian Milwhatsisname would be keen to clarify that he meant Republican officeholders only, and that people who support the GOP should be treated with respect and allowed to go about their lives, enabling evil and the end of the American experiment. He seems to be a reasonably guy who understands the distinction between the personal and the political, and probably rushed to the blood bank after hearing about the Scalise shooting.
Hope so, because if Ian confronts me where I sleep, he’ll find out that the door was locked for his protection, not mine.
My money says he didn’t rush, or even stroll, to a blood bank. I’ve run across him a few times on Twitter.
Gr,
A United States Senator was attacked from behind on his own property by a politically motivated neighbor who broke six of his ribs. A United States Congressman was shot at a softball game by a politically motivated madman and nearly died. Let’s not forget that Abraham Lincoln was murdered out of pure political vengeance.
I think that leftwing incitement has been over the top for quite some time. Granny, nobody is safe as long as the grotesque lying by the left continues unchallenged and even amplified by the media.
Regards,
Jim
I agree with you. And, as I think I wrote someplace? it tends to escalate.
Again, most people don’t have to be clonked in the head with a bike lock or actually chased by masked Antifatheads to be persuaded to self-censor and self-silence. Civilized people do not like confrontation and will avoid it. So the ordinary, casual, quotidian exercise of freedom of expression—asking questions in class, offering an argument over beers at the pub, wearing a MAGA hat or anything that resembles a MAGA hat—- becomes not worth the hassle.
This really isn’t about legitimate policy disagreements. The differences between Democrats and Republicans on campus are no more stark and dramatic (let alone consequential) than they were when I was in college. We thought Reagan was going to plunge us all into a Nuclear War, but we didn’t shriek at speakers, shut down their speeches or smash up Starbucks, let alone attack people. Nor were our liberal professors advocating or excusing any of the above.
Disagreement was interesting, debate generally enjoyable, and it probably made us all a lot smarter than we otherwise would’ve been.
Probably why that sort of thing couldn’t be allowed to continue, eh?
I don’t quite see your objection. Does “harassed, stalked, chased, punched and spat upon” not seem like strange and alarming behavior that would be quite likely to discourage open self-identification as a conservative? I don’t know about you, but I don’t think it’s healthy when it demands this sort of courage to merely advocate—suggest, entertain the notion of — lower taxes and less regulation