Thread by @AlexandraErin

There is a prevailing (and dangerous) line of thinking that says since Nazis are looking for confrontations, the worst thing you can do is show up.

This is not true.

The worst thing you can do is abandon the people who have no choice to avoid Nazis.

https://twitter.com/chick_in_kiev/status/1158529561660973056

Nazis are looking for fights they can win, or fights they can look valiant in. They are not looking to face overwhelming numbers, they do not want to look small and weak and irrelevant.

If nobody shows up, Nazis get a PR coup. They can spin whatever story they want, they can normalize themselves, they can say "Obviously we're not so bad or why were we welcomed so openly?", denying their fascist ties when convenient and owning them useful.

If nobody shows up but some scattered, unsupported antifa... they get their desired rumble. And their allies in the cops and allies, sympathizers, and browbeaten bullying victims in the media will all help make sure it looks like they were the lawful victims.

But when their gangs are forced to huddle behind police lines, hide out in transit stations, etc., while thousands of people march and dance and shout and laugh... they look small, they look ridiculous. It deflates them. It defeats them.

Every time this happens, in any appreciable scale, there are some brain geniuses who go "You gave them what they want, congrats on the PR coup."

But it's not. Their preferences, ranked, are:

1. No resistance
2. Just enough resistance they can crush
3. or look valiant losing to

So please, if you're in the orbit of Portland and you're able to, go turn out on August 17th. Drown them out, shout them out, shut them down. If there are enough people, it will feel incredibly positive, not negative at all.

We lost so much ground in 2017 to people who said that protesting was a trap, resistance was a psyop. I would really like to think we're past that.