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.
Second, the attempt at drawing an equivalence between yesterday and last summer requires a *false* equivalence between the two events which gave rise to their respective outcries. I'm talking about the events that *motivated* these movements.
Here's an important difference between yesterday's Trump mob and the post-Floyd protests: assembling in order to protest the police killing of an innocent black man is a worthy aim, whereas assembling in order to assuage Trump's electoral butt hurt is . . . the opposite of one.
Lie detected
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Pre-writing a piece that will lead with this: "Today was the day Donald J. Trump became president. Not a moment too soon. In this Dog Fancy special feature I will . . . "
Honestly I might literally die if Trump's behavior on January 19, the final full day of his presidency, is just like morally exemplary and flawlessly gracious. He would go out having given us one good, pure day.
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.