Attacking Trumpites only helps them
San Antonio, Texas teenager Hunter Richard was dining with a friend at a fast-food restaurant earlier this week when a livid stranger approached his table, picked up Richard’s soft drink and threw it in his face. The stranger also yanked the teen’s hat off his head and walked away with it. Why?
You guessed it. Richard’s hat wasn’t just any old baseball cap. It was one of those “MAGA” (Make America Great Again) hats: a.k.a. the official uniform of the Trump campaign.
Objectively speaking, the MAGA hat is an unfashionable piece of headwear made even less so by the fact that it’s bright red — the same colour as many of the sunburned Caucasian Americans who wear it. But that’s not why the stranger, now identified as Kino Jimenez, harassed Hunter Richard and stole from him.
He did so because many anti-Trump Americans have come to view the MAGA hat as a symbol of unapologetic hatred. For example, after a video recording of the above incident made it onto Twitter and went viral, Van Lathan, the TMZ reporter famous for criticizing rapper Kanye West about his support of U.S. President Donald Trump, tweeted the following: “Wish I could take the high road but your MAGA hat reads like a swastika to me.”
It reads that way to me too, not because the Trump administration’s evils are on par with Hitler’s but because anyone who wears that hat today may as well walk down the street shouting at the top of their lungs, “I love creeping fascism.” In other words, it’s easy to understand the impulse to rip the hat off somebody’s head and throw a drink in their face. However, there’s a big difference between understanding a violent impulse and making excuses for a person who acts on it.
The former is human nature. The latter is human nature at its worst.
It’s been disappointing then, to say the least, to observe the swiftness with which many anti-Trump voices jumped to defend the hat-nabbing stranger this week (Jimenez has since been arrested and fired from his job) — or to explain away his outburst as the inevitable result of a polarized, racist society. Lathan, for example, remarked on Twitter that though he doesn’t con- done Jimenez’s actions, he doesn’t “care” about what happened either. But he should care. We all should.
At the risk of sounding like a preschool teacher, perhaps the North American public is in need of a reminder that two wrongs don’t make a right. Two wrongs may feel good. But they won’t get us any closer to ridding the world of Trump’s poisonous ideology. If anything, when we respond to MAGA-hat-donning strangers with harassment and violence, we embolden Trump supporters to rightly call us out as hypocrites, as people who condemn violence in one context but cheer it on in another.
Of course, it’s important to be vigilant and fierce in the face of white nationalism, which is why it’s understandable certain private businesses (such as the Red Hen, in Lexington Va.) have blacklisted Trumpfriendly politicians and regular citizens have begun protesting outside establishments where Trump officials eat. But throwing soda in people’s faces and stealing their hats is not a line the left should cross. And it’s not a practice that activists and journalists should even hint at condoning on the grounds that “people are really angry right now” and “the other side does it too.”
I believe it’s important to make life for anyone wearing a MAGA hat uncomfortable — to identify and rebuke hatred where it stands, right in front of you. But I also believe that liberals need to collect themselves and keep their eye on the prize: getting Trump out of office. Not turning idiot teenagers into conservative martyrs.