Pro-Trump protesters can be thieves too
“Protesters? Sorry, they look like looters to me.”
Thatwas howI responded last summer when a Black LivesMatter organizer tried to justify a brutal rampage of thievery and vandalism through downtownChicago’s ritziest shopping district as a protest against police brutality.
And that’s howI feel nowabout the angry tide of President Donald Trump’s supporters who stormed the U.S. CapitolWednesday, a rampage of broken windows and pilfering that resulted in five deaths, numerous injuries and the most damage to the Capitol since theWar of 1812, when British invaders set it afire.
Yet, even as the chaoswas lighting up video screens around the globe, emails and tweets began to stream into my smartphone fromTrumpists and other anger addicts to remindme of violent episodes last summer committed byBLMand Antifa.
Note tomy friends on the left: Beware the hazards of forming new-wave “leaderless resistance” movements without media spokespeople. It leaves you vulnerable to any doofus who claims to speak for you, including those who aim to speak against you.
Sure enough, before the sunwent down, internet conspiracy theories were churning up on social media to blame the Capitol Hillmayhem on Antifa activists disguised inMAGA hats.
By then, my email and newsfeed were percolating with a new whataboutism: What about last summer’s Black LivesMatter andAntifa violence?
Among other pundits, radio rightwinger Rush Limbaugh sarcastically remarked the next day, “So you can set fire to a downtown strip of any blue state city— Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, New York— and it’s called a peaceful protest. But you dare not set foot where the political class lives and works and does its job.”
Excuse me? Sorry, Rush. With all due respect to your lung cancer diagnosis (keep up the good fight, fella!), violence by one side does not justify or excuse violence— regardless of which side you’re on.
But the Anger Industrial Complex, which some also have called the Outrage Industrial Complex, doesn’t allow enough airtime in our public discourse for such simple logic.
The Anger Industrial Complex describes the tangle of social, political and media systems that find profit in whipping up public anger. Like the “military industrial complex” that outgoing President Dwight Eisenhowerwarned us about, it describes a necessary system that over time can be corrupted when pursuit of financial interests undermines the public good.
That’swhyTVvetTrump cares so much about “ratings.”
Unfortunately, too many people don’t seem to understand the difference between news and opinion. (Psst, here’s a clue: This is opinion, folks, but it’s backed up bymy knowledge of news, forwhat it’sworth.)
Or evenwhenwe do, we can find a bit too much comfort in tuning in only to content that supports our point of view, even when that content pushes paranoid conspiracy theories like QAnon, a goofy but popular notion that includes the viewpoint that President Trump is fighting a secretwar against a pedophile ring run by top Democrats. Sounds like a potentially good spy thriller. Or fever dream.
Nevertheless, this president’s claims have long ago hit a nervewith those whowere most eager to believe what theywanted to believe.
Smallwonder so many people join Trump in refusing to accept his Democratic rival Joe Biden’s election as fair and resounding, even after more than 50 court decisions rejected his persistent but baseless charges ofwidespread voter fraud.
What to do now? Trump is on his way out, whether hewants to realize it or not, but other aspiring hopefuls like Republican Sens. JoshHawley of Missouri andTed Cruz ofTexas have been quick to perpetuateTrumpian fantasies about Biden’s “stolen election” in an apparent grab forTrump’s voters.
I hope that effort fails. Maybe only Trump can doTrump. I hope.
But I said that aboutTrump’s bogus claims about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, too. Trump got elected anyway. He understood a lot about howto appeal to an audience in this media age.
He’s not alone. It’s up to the rest of us to undo the rise of anger media and rediscover the art of persuasion. It may requiremore homework thanmost peoplewant to do, butwe need to do it.