Last night, my comrades and I decided to attend a town hall meeting for local Trump lackey and Virginia Rep. Scott Taylor. We didn’t plan an action or a protest and planned for no contingencies. We were simply there to observe. That all changed pretty quickly.
It started out with a peaceful chanting of “Hold Trump Accountable.” Folks kept chanting and walking around, then the first incident: someone grabbed my dear friend by the arm and screamed in her face. I immediately stepped in between them, he was pissed but his wife dragged him and their “Defund Planned Parenthood” signs away. I could feel the tension rising and I knew that we were outnumbered by people who would either turn us into the police or beat us themselves if given the chance. We stuck together.
Then, the first assault. A man who tried to push through us was pissed at a comrade and started getting in their face. All I saw was his angry face and posture to hit and immediately ran in between them. He had a good 100 lbs of pure muscle on me so all I did was hold up my forearms in front of me defensively. He pushed against them. The cops did not intervene. His friends pulled him away again, telling him we weren’t worth it.
Not even ten minutes later, we were standing in the same circle and they were surrounding us and taking my picture, putting their phones in my face and telling me that I was in big trouble. The same man got in my face again, so I simply turned around. He punched me in the back and after that it was all a blur. I was mixed in the tussle and don’t really know how many times I was hit or where. A friend tried to defend me from the attacker. The cops arrested him immediately without questioning or hesitation, but the man who attacked me twice walked free. The police separated the Trump supporters and the protestors, facing us, with their backs to the people who initiated and encouraged the attacks. Behind the police line stood the man who attacked me, pointing, laughing, and threatening me.
Several friends and I tried to tell the police that the man had assaulted me, but of course it fell on deaf ears. Several among their liberal crowd put their hands on me, telling me that we were on the same team, but I needed to calm down and just go to the police station and file a report. That I was making “their cause” look bad.
Dear liberals: don’t tell me that we’re on the same side. We are definitely not if you’re telling me to calm down because I’m upset that the man who assaulted me not once, but twice is now standing behind a line of police, pointing at me with his friends and chanting “lock her up!” You are obviously not here to protect me. Your cause is not my cause.
I asked the police what they were going to do about the man who attacked me, and they threatened to arrest me for disorderly conduct for speaking to them that way. Then, I guess the man who assaulted me decided that he wanted to press charges on me for “assaulting” him. The cops forced me to give the man my full name and home address.
– Comrade 1
One of the Trump supporters involved in attacking protesters.
Last night was the most alone and in danger I’ve ever felt at an action, including the DC shitshow of J20 infamy. Last night saw three friends get attacked by a white supremacist bristling with muscle. My friend was punched in the face and given a concussion. My ankle and knee were sprained. A line of cops protected the white supremacists jeering at us, while clucking libs took our photos, chastised us, and tried to pull off my mask in front of the damn pigs.
These people were too fucking liberal to chant “black lives matter” – every time we tried to start it, they would drown us out with “all lives matter.” They chanted about Putin, about small hands, about tax returns. They waved American flags and thanked cops while the Trump supporters roared “blue lives matter” and “lock her up” to the woman they assaulted. They shouted “this is what democracy looks like” to that very crowd of armed guard-thugs, gleefully unaware of the irony. They discussed his social infractions of base un-respectability with the same gross indignation with which they discussed the un-respectability of the victim of assault before their very eyes.
As Research and Destroy wrote:
This is why liberals are so dangerous and so supremely out of touch. They are still hoping for that final scandal that will prove their enemy unreasonable; they still believe that one must manage one’s image, appear the civil party, engage in discourse, persuade with moral argument. If this fails, they will not hesitate to raise the stakes with a good satire. This is why they are so quick to imagine every riot funded by Breitbart and every election hacked by Russia, why they are willing to turn over to the cops someone who makes opposition to Trump look bad. They were okay with Obama’s drone strikes and deportation campaigns in so far as the aura of mild reasonableness swathed these brutalities. But they are the only ones who care how it looks anymore. They failed and will fail again, probably, because they are not about anything; they have nothing positive to offer. In the face of white revanchism, they can offer only table manners.
Last night a crowd of white liberals told a woman who was attacked by a Trump supporter to calm down or she would be ejected, that she was “making the cause look bad.” Elsewhere in the Trump-protesting crowd, they chanted “USA! USA!” I shit. you. not.
I’ll say it again: this is why liberals are so dangerous. They will flaunt their admirable pacifism so as to politely excuse themselves in the face of any real bodily threat, throw victims under the bus or blame them for their assault, meanwhile excusing or pooh-poohing the absurd and inexcusable violence of Obama, the Clintons, and the police, because it is violence they benefit from and whose victims are comfortably emotionally distant.
This is why protesting Trump’s stupidity, or incivility, or ugliness is so supremely dangerous. Because it explicitly calls for, not an end to authoritarianism, but a return to RESPECTABLE authoritarianism. Polite authoritarianism. An autocrat who pats you on the back for your progressive politics with one hand while arming the police against marginalized communities with the other. Civility is not love, and respectability that drowns out the voice of people being threatened is DANGEROUS.
And, of course, this kind of protest for respectability uses only respectable methods of protest. A white, polite, pinched-nose “all lives matter” and “love trumps hate” to police and ostracize the rage appropriate to all-out warfare against muslims, immigrants, women, trans people, and black communities. Because the kinds of liberals that show up to these events are not actually affected by the threats they pretend to themselves they are protesting, they cannot stand to hear a black or Muslim voice, they cannot stand to see a fist in the air, they cannot stomach the idea of those actually at risk defending themselves meaningfully.
Shut down chants about small hands. It’s ableist. Shut down chants about Putin. It’s a distraction. Shut down chants of ‘all lives matter.’ All lives will matter when black, brown, and trans lives matter. A crowd chanting “love trumps hate” that would not even put a body between a misogynist attacking a woman, let alone take up arms against ICE raids and police brutality is a dangerously delusional crowd. Never have I seen hypocrites so actively destructive and so disgustingly delighted with themselves.
It is imperative as the regime of Trump accelerates that we identify who are our allies and who are our enemies. Do not fear ‘alienating’ liberals out of the illusory hope that they could be helpful. These people are not helpful. They are accomplices to the terrorism of the system that they so desperately want to preserve. They protest Trump not because he signals the heightened militarization of the police and criminalization of black and indigenous people and Muslims, but because he represents a real threat to the respectability that makes systemic racism and authoritarianism sustainable.
The rise of fascism is not the time for fence sitting. If they’re not defending and intervening, and they’re criminalizing those who do – they’re a part of the problem. Period.
– Comrade 2
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