Thread by @InnuendoStudios

Let's talk about Andy Ngo and limits of strategic nonviolence.

Something Bob Altemeyer mentioned in The Authoritarians is that people get more authoritarian when confronted with violence of (almost) any kind.

I covered this in my livetweet of the book:

https://twitter.com/InnuendoStudios/status/929464450792517633

When people fear society is getting more violent, they turn to the authorities to keep them safe. This increased trust in authority can be highly exploitable, which is how we get the War on Terror and why white nationalists insist Black and brown people are going to kill us all.

This happens *no matter who commits the violence*, be it the Left, the Right, or the State.

The one exception is when the State commits violence against explicitly nonviolent citizens, what Altemeyer calls The Gandhi Trap.

Gandhi's hunger strikes, Martin Luther King's protests that ended in police beatings, even, to an extent, the self-immolations that sparked the Arab Spring.

They all force the State to reveal its cruelty in front of an audience and against a peaceful population.

According to Altemeyer, this is the only form of violence that *decreases* trust in the authorities, and gets people questioning whether authority can be trusted. It's violence that could be enacted against *them*.

It's important to recognize that the nonviolence of Gandhi and MLK was *strategic*. This wasn't merely pacifism for its own sake, it was pacifism that exploited their oppressors' weakness. (Similar to many of Jesus' teachings were about resisting and shaming the Romans.)

I feel much modern protest and pacifism isn't strategic. It's basically

1. protest noviolently
2. ???
3. we win!

Most of the time all we can claim is that we "affected the discourse," which isn't nothing, but probably isn't what folks were hoping for while they were protesting.

But an equal concern is that strategic use of The Gandhi Trap is becoming less effective, because of people like Andy Ngo.

Now, Ngo is basically just my news peg for this subject; I've been seeing this phenomenon at least as far back as Occupy.

When violence is committed against protestors, whether or not those protestors were peaceful depends on what source you read.

Media has always been, to an extent, biased in favor of existing power structures, but, during the Civil Rights Movement, news media at least wasn't *partisan.* When cops beat pacifists in the streets, most channels and papers covered it as such.

We didn't have Fox News and filter bubbles back then. We didn't have Andy Ngo seeing fascists beat protestors with hammers and then reporting it as the exact opposite.

There was this video during Occupy of a cop reaching into the area protestors were permitted to gather, grabbing a woman by the hair, and dragging her out of the crowd and arresting her because she'd called him a fascist.

And I watched my conservative friend insist the footage had been "edited" to make the cop look bad. When I pointed out the video was a single, unbroken take, he insisted she probably did something illegal off camera.

We have an unprecedented ability to spin peaceful protest as rioting, police violence as proper procedure, murder as accidental death, dissenters as criminals.

What worries me about this is it makes nonviolence less strategically useful.

If the Right is only consuming Fox News and Breitbart, not only will they not see State violence against peaceful protesters as such, it will be presented as violence *against the state*, which INCREASES their trust in authority.

Much as I refuse to condemn Nazi-punching, like any moral person I would like our battle against modern fascism to involve as little violence as possible. I want us to defeat them with sit-ins, deplatforming, and boycotts.

I fear what happens if they make these methods less viable.