A.R. Moxon (juliusgoat.bsky.social) Profile picture
Nov 11, 2021 25 tweets 7 min read Read on X
One thing that the Rittenhouse trial throws into stark relief is a strongly held belief among a huge percentage of white conservatives that people protesting for Black lives should be killed, and that white conservatives should be allowed to personally do it.
They are protecting their right to self-defense as exclusive to white conservatives.

No white conservative with a gun can ever be deemed a threat worthy of self defense.

The immediate danger they clearly pose must always be deemed pre-facto AND post-facto self-defense.
They are protecting their right to pre-and-post justification of any threat they pose and any violent act they commit, their right to frame their violence and only their violence as self defense, their fear and only their fear of bodily threat as valid.

Your body. Their choice.
Why did he carry a gun? Self defense.
Why did he shoot? Self defense.
What about the people he shot? They attacked.
Could THEY have attacked in self defense? No.
But he held a deadly weapon. Yes, for self defense.

To white conservatives, self-defense is their exclusive property.
Again: To white conservatives self-defense is their exclusive property. Deadly force is their birthright.

They're protecting their right to kill who they see fit to kill, when they see fit to do so.

They'll do anything to protect that right.

They'll certainly kill to do so.
The right to walk somebody else's street with a massacre weapon and not be deemed a threat.

The right to decide who is a threat, and then use the massacre weapon without penalty.

The right of white conservatives to self-deputize themselves to kill.

Your body. Their choice.
It was the police who rioted as a pretextual justification for increased violence, but nm.

What’s being said here is:

“if white conservatives perceive a riot, they should be allowed to travel there with massacre weapons and engage in civilian killings upon targets of choice.” Image
One person has a skateboard; another an AR15.

The one with the AR15 killed the one with the skateboard.

Yet they’re convinced the one with the skateboard was the dangerous aggressor, and the one who killed him with an assault rifle was his endangered victim.
This perfectly describes the actions of a person with only a skateboard defending themselves against a person armed with a gun.

By the white conservative standard, Huber was perfectly within his rights—except they believe that self-defense is their exclusive property.
Here's the problem:

The fact that he held a deadly weapon means he posed an active threat—underscored by the fact that he killed people. Which means that by the very logic of white conservative self-defense, attacks upon him are justified.

The only way that Rittenhouse's armed presence doesn't invite completely justified attacks in self-defense is if you assume that the use of self defense is the exclusive property of white conservatives—an assumption that informs every defense I've seen of Rittenhouse.
"Any threat a white conservative poses to the people around him can be justified by the fact that he feels threatened. Any violence he enacts is therefore self-defense, while no violence enacted by anybody against a white conservative can ever be self-defense."

Catch-AR22
To white conservatives it's impossible for a white conservative to be a threat.

So the person with no gun must be the threat, and the person with the gun must have been threatened. The person who he killed must be the aggressor. The killer must be the victim.

They'll tell you.
A man with a skateboard was shot to death by a man holding an AR15.

The skateboard is the murder weapon in that scenario to a white conservative, who believes only white conservatives can exercise self-defense.

"Of course Kyle shot him! He had a skateboard!"
Think of this: The very act of disarming a shooter is seen as pretext for the shooter to exercise self-defense, as long as the shooter is a white conservative.

"Of course Kyle shot him! He was trying to take Kyle's gun!"

How else would one defend oneself against a shooter?
What is happening is this: white conservatives are claiming for their civilian populations the qualified immunity that police officers currently enjoy in order to terrorize and murder within Black communities.

And that's really what's on trial here.
And here is the exact thing mentioned in the original post:

A strongly held belief among a huge percentage of white conservatives that people protesting for Black lives should be killed, and that white conservatives should be allowed to personally do it.

Beyond parody. Look how impossible it is for conservatives to see any violence by conservatives as aggression, or any act by non-conservatives as self-defense.

They believe self-defense is their exclusive property. They think they should be allowed to kill.
Let’s end the thread by QTing the original post, and noting if you go through the comments all the conservatives are essentially saying “here’s why people protesting for Black lives should be killed, and here’s why white conservatives should be allowed to personally do it.”
Quite seriously I think they mostly all say “you’re insane, we don’t think that” but then every single one of their arguments are “now here’s why we’re right to think that.”
I mean: “he did what the government should have done.”

You can wish that this isn’t what white conservatives were saying; the only problem is, they are saying it.
Being a white conservative means bringing an AR15 to a crowd, shooting 3, killing 2, and still demanding to be understood as not only innocent but heroic; not just justified but peaceful.
One thing that the Rittenhouse trial throws into stark relief is a strongly held belief among a huge % of white conservatives that people protesting for Black lives should be killed, and that white conservatives should be allowed to personally do it.

One thing that the Rittenhouse trial throws into stark relief is a strongly held belief among a huge % of white conservatives that people protesting for Black lives should be killed, and that white conservatives should be allowed to personally do it.

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More from @JuliusGoat

Apr 28
Seven lessons learned from a quarter century in a war-oriented society.

It's 2001—the year the movies promised we'd make contact with aliens—and the United States has rather recently been attacked by terrorists who flew passenger planes into buildings.

the-reframe.com/war-or-nothing/
I have a distinct memory from the day of the attacks, of a news anchor announcing—before the buildings even fell—that we were now at war, which we technically weren't yet; thanks to my high school civics class I knew that news anchors aren't empowered to declare war.
But sure enough, here in late 2001, old what's-his-name the news anchor has been proved right: we're heading to war in Afghanistan. Old what's-his-name knew, with the sage wisdom of somebody living in a war-oriented society; when you are attacked, war is not optional.
Read 58 tweets
Apr 20
In 2017 American Nazis invaded Charlottesville, VA, which is a major U.S. city in case you didn't know. Maybe you remember this. They called themselves "Unite the Right." They wanted what Nazis want, and did what Nazis do, which was to kill.

the-reframe.com/americans-who-…
They also wore polo shirts and held tiki torches, and chanted Nazi chants; about blood and soil, and others predicated on the idea that the white race was being replaced by races that Nazis view as inferior.

Probably it is worth talking about what 'the white race" means.
"The white race" is a pretend thing that certain people made up in order to consolidate social and political power and wealth by organizing the application of brutality and violence.

Anyway the Nazis believed they were white, and this was very important to them.
Read 29 tweets
Apr 7
Cargo ship Dali lost power and from there it was only a matter of time before it destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

We hadn't maintained the bridge for collisions of this type, we're learning. You'd think we would have—it's critical infrastructure.

the-reframe.com/blame-manageme…
But we're often the sort of place that fails to maintain what it has built; mostly because maintenance costs eat into tax revenues, and revenues could be used for tax cuts, and tax cuts help profits, and profits are very important, so collapses are just a thing that is coming.
But even if we had performed adequate maintenance, the bridge was probably doomed. Dali is the size and mass of a skyscraper (far larger than container ships used to be—but larger ships lower prices in supply chains, and lower prices help profits, and profits are important).
Read 37 tweets
Mar 24
I'd like everybody to yell at me, so I wrote about the upcoming election.

Or, to put it more specifically, I wrote about what an anti-fascist coalition might look like and how it might fall apart, using the election as a context.

the-reframe.com/binaries-and-i…
We’re dealing with rising fascism both globally and domestically, as I might have mentioned once or twice recently—“domestically” for me meaning the United States, though maybe you find it is true in your part of the old cosmic blueball, too.
I think there are a lot of people who realize this and agree that it should be stopped, and that’s good for people who want to stop fascism’s rise—people who I am going to assume includes you, the reader of this. Isn’t that nice of me?
Read 14 tweets
Mar 19
OK, let me tell you a joke. It’s a joke about context.

(One of the most popular topics for jokes, I know. I give the people what they want.)

Here’s the joke:

Say somebody gave a rally, and a lot of people came.

the-reframe.com/the-way-it-is/
Say that the person who was the focus of the rally was a politician, a man who had once been president of the United States, had stopped being president of the United States, and now was running to be president of the United States again.
Say the person was going to use the rally to talk about all the violence he thought should happen, and who he thought the violence ought to happen to. Say all the people who came to the rally came because they liked to cheer at suggestions of violence.
Read 47 tweets
Feb 19
EVERY ACCUSATION A CONFESSION

At the U.S./Mexico border, Republicans are defending their right to make themselves feel safe by murdering refugee men, women, and children, using as rationale a once-fringe Nazi conspiracy theory they are promoting.

the-reframe.com/every-accusati…
They’re talking about a civil war in order to protect this "right." And yes, they’re framing it all as self-defense, as if they—the ones eager to murder both foreigners and fellow citizens—are the ones in danger, and the rest of us—who they are eager to murder—are the danger.
And yes, they’re also against antisemitism, they’ll tell you, whenever they aren’t promoting their Nazi conspiracy theory.

A Nazi conspiracy theory? Yes indeed.
Read 28 tweets

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