In their effort to #whatabout yesterday's Capitol invaders, people on the MAGA-sympathetic right are making two glaring mistakes about last summer post-Floyd movement.
The first involves failing to make a distinction between the protests and gatherings that were largely safe and legal, and the rioting and looting that were decidedly not.
Conflating everything into some sort of rhetorically effective but substantively empty descriptor like "summer riots" or "BLM riots" just marks you off as a partisan hack. The majority of post-Floyd assembly was fine.
I understand backing your guy. But that doesn't necessarily require you to back him to the fullest extent that he's asking.
If my friend asks me to give him a letter of recommendation, I'm there. If he asks me to sign an affidavit that he's a ninja turtle, too far. Can't do it.
I want to make a quick point about the importance of cultural commentary.
It's something we regularly provide at @ArcDigi, so a brief word on it is perhaps in order.
This sort of work sometimes gets framed as "culture war" writing. That's accurate sometimes. Or accurate in one sense. But not quite right in the main way that word is now seen.
The way many of us—myself included—have come to understand the "Culture War" is as a kind of intellectual failure. As a genre involving the elevation of petty and unremarkable grievances into a privileged place within our discourse.
It's neither cute nor winsome to be a discourse mark.
Troll accounts, like the one being defended here, don't deserve to be shielded from their misbehavior by Not On Your Side Centrists harnessing their shitposting into a narrative about platforms being totalitarian. Get a grip.