Wednesday, January 25, 2017

The punch heard round the world

We'd rather punch him in the face. Because we're "better"

Maybe I've had a few too many, but I'm starting to regard the sucker-punching of Richard Spencer last Friday as an epochal cultural moment. Before I explain what I mean by that (and why it's not completely insane and/or the whiskey talking), here's a bit of background courtesy of the Gray Lady:

Is it O.K. to punch a Nazi? 
That is not a brainteaser or a hypothetical question posed by a magazine on Twitter. It is an actual question bouncing around the internet after an attack on a well-known far-right activist, Richard B. Spencer, in Washington after the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as president on Friday. 
Mr. Spencer, who is credited with coining the term alt-right and describes himself as an “identitarian,” was punched in the head on Inauguration Day by a person clad in black as he was being interviewed by a journalist. At the time of the attack, Mr. Spencer was explaining the meaning of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon figure adopted as a mascot by the alt-right, a racist, far-right fringe movement that is anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and anti-feminist. Video of the attack shows Mr. Spencer reeling to one side under the force of the blow and his attacker darting through a crowd after landing the punch.

Watch the video, and understand that someone could have been severely injured or even killed by that punch:


So? Violence happens at large gatherings, especially when politics is involved. It's a part of life, inevitable, like the movement of the tectonic plates. There was plenty of other violence during the inauguration, committed by all shades of the political spectrum.

Conservatives rioting during the inauguration

Victim of angry Republican mob

Trump supporters expressing their dissatisfaction with the police

Right-wing activists attacking symbols of American capitalism

So the punch is par for the course, yawn, nothing to see here. What interests me is the reaction to it all over the internet, namely... laughter. What? Yes.


Ok, the meme is funny. And why should I give a shit about 66,000+ randos on the internet laughing at a guy getting punched in real life? I'll explain, but first this:


Jon Favreau was Barack Obama's speechwriter from 2005 to 2013. In other words, he had the ear of the most powerful man in the world for five years. I'm not sure what he's up to today, but anyway he has a third of a million Twitter followers (a rough proxy measure of social influence). Favreau also made this fascinating comment:


Meh, just some mild politically motivated violence and property damage, nothing to see here...

And there's this from a journalist for Vulture.com (48K+ followers):


And this.

And this:

Newsweek apologized Tuesday for publishing a story that praised an assault on white nationalist Richard Spencer, who was punched on video on the day of Donald Trump's inauguration.
Newsweek published a since-deleted story titled, "The Infinite Joy of Watching a Nazi Get Punched to Music," by culture editor Joe Veix.
"On a day when many Americans were despairing over what they see as the transition of power to a fascist demagogue, it was a small moment of reprieve. It was possibly the first entertaining day on the internet since the election," Veix wrote.

You get the point, I hope. Now, out of morbid curiosity I read through many of the replies to Favreau's mocking tweet. The majority of them are either laughing along with Favreau, or outright defending the idea that it's cool to punch Nazis. It makes for an amazing study of human moral reasoning. The most common argument goes like this: "Normally I don't condone violence, but I'll make an exception for Nazis." There are a lot of people on the internet who share this exact view.

There is also the popular meme that punching Nazis is a heroic, all-American act. (Should I bother pointing out that the US in 2017 isn't a war zone and Spencer isn't a uniformed soldier of an enemy nation?)

Then you have the people who claim punching him only makes his movement stronger. In other words, it's wrong, but for tactical reasons. Not many people argue that assaulting Spencer is wrong because it's "wrong" or "illegal." Even the world's leading media organ shied away from this position, framing the issue as if there is a reasonable case to be made for sucker-punching Spencer. (Journalistic neutrality!)

This suggests that casual acceptance of extreme violence to make a point has become entrenched among a large segment of educated, liberal America. Ridiculous? Why? Consider if the reverse were true. The video of Spencer getting punched would trigger widespread condemnation, rather than mockery and ambivalence. If you doubt that, consider how Twitter would react to a video of a feminist getting sucker-punched at the Women's Marches. It's entirely possible that I'm drunk right now, but where's the hole in my logic?

Notice, I have not attempted to define, criticize, or defend Richard Spencer's views. Because that's 100% irrelevant. If you're googling Spencer's background to figure out how you feel about him getting slugged, you're already lost, there is nothing I can do for you. The only thing that matters is that Spencer was not breaking any laws, was not hurting anyone, and was not threatening anyone when a masked thug tried to educate him with his fist.

The reason I'm viewing the Punch Heard Round the World as a cultural inflection point is not so much that left-wing violence is a novelty in America. (Q: How many domestic terrorist bombings did the FBI record in 1970-71? A: More than 2,500. No, that's not a typo, see here and here for details. The Seventies were nuts.)



You might say it's as American as apple pie. No, the real game-changer will be the reaction from the right. If Spencer and the various factions and flavors of the right are learning any lesson from his very tactile encounter with the left, it is that the right's traditionally hands-off approach to political disputes may be a non-starter in 2017 and beyond, for the simple reason that it will eventually get them murdered.

So expect politics to start getting a bit crunchier over the next few years. And pour me another one.
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Sunday, January 22, 2017

"Not my president"

There are a lot of angry Americans who apparently believe that Donald J. Trump is not their president.


If you are one of them, you may have been misinformed. Here's a handy-dandy flowchart that should help clarify the issue:


All snark aside, it's distressing that so many of my fellow citizens believe that Mr. Trump is not what he actually is, namely, their president - or maybe they just think Trump is so radically unrepresentative of everything they believe, that he's not their leader - not "their" anything - in any meaningful sense. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that's how they see it.

But maybe that's naive of me, because here's a Guardian columnist writing in The New York Times:

Mr. Trump isn’t my president. I don’t mean it emotionally; I mean it literally. It’s not sloganeering; it’s observable truth. 
Mr. Trump has no intention of representing me, my family, the people I care about, or the majority of Americans, from the imperiled to the comfortable. It is a stretch to call him anyone’s president but his own.

Wait, literally? Hmm. And what's this about Trump not being anyone's president now? Not even the 63 million people who voted for him? My head, it hurts. But there's more:

Those who believe that straight, white men have a mandate to burn the rest of us as fuel, to sell us for parts, to mow us down and climb up the pile, never truly conceded that war. They have been biding their time, and this is their last great gambit. But I live in the America that won — the America with art and empathy and a free press and fierce protest. Not my president, not now, not ever.

Ok, but-- wait WHAT? Read that first sentence again - WTF does that even think it means?

For the record,  the writer also claims:

“Not my president” was a favorite refrain of the Tea Party, a fundamental buttress of the racist delegitimization of Barack Obama, an incantation that, in retrospect, recalled some of the first stirrings of Mr. Trump’s rise to power.

Is that true though, or is she just making shit up? I don't remember that phrase being a favorite refrain of anyone. But my memory is notoriously terrible, so I did a Google News search for "Obama" and "not my president," date range 2008-2015, and came up with... a quote from Sean Hannity, a quote from Mark Levin, and that's pretty much it. Also, I did a Google Image search for the same terms, and found a bunch of internet memes to that effect. No photos of anyone holding signs with the phrase, and zero evidence that it was ever a favorite of the Tea Party, let alone a "fundamental buttress" of anything. (I welcome correction on this.)

But I digress. It would be unfair to take one pundit's incontinent rantings as representative of the majority of non-Trump voters. And most Hillary voters of my acquaintance do not seem to think that Trump is literally not their president. Which is a start.

But the underlying problem, which is that a vast portion of the electorate is deeply hostile to Trump and feels he does not represent them in any way, is a huge one, and it raises a number of salient questions, among them: Whatcha gonna do about it? No, I'm not being snarky again. I want an answer.

Protesters on the streets of our major conurbations are chanting: "Hey ho, hey ho, Donald Trump has got to go." What exactly do they mean by that? Maybe they want the POTUS to resign? I'm sure the new occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will be happy to consider that, as soon as he gets done apologizing to Rosie O'Donnell.

So if he doesn't resign, how exactly is he going to "go"? Impeachment? You can bet there are already plans in the works for that.

I don't see a third option that isn't horrible to contemplate.

Which brings me to John Robb.

John Robb

Robb, author of Brave New War, is a deep thinker on warfare, terrorism, and the emerging chaos that is being created by runaway globalization and technological change - its dangers as well as opportunities. Presciently, back in February 2016 he described Trump's presidential campaign as an "open source insurgency" and explained why it could take the White House.

After that, Robb kind of shut up about Trump for a while. Then, after the election, he wrote this:

This year, an open source insurgency formed in the US and it took control of the White House.  I didn't write much about it this fall because it hit too close to home.  I knew what would happen.
What is an open source insurgency?  An open source insurgency is how a very large and very diverse group of people empowered by modern technology and without any formal organization, can defeat a very powerful opponent. ...
Open source insurgencies and protests can arise spontaneously and they are very hard to stop once they get going since they are impervious to most forms of repressive counter-attack and political subversion.  For example, the open source movement propelling Trump forward made him impervious to attacks on his character.  It also eliminated any need for "ground game" or standard political organization and obviated any need for information disclosure and detailed policy papers.

Other examples of open source insurgencies include post-war Iraq and the Arab Spring which toppled governments in North Africa and the Middle East.

The trouble with open source insurgencies is that they work, so they get replicated. Again and again. Theoretically.

One implication is that Trump could be swept from office by the same type of insurgency that he rode to power:

This suggests that the next open source protest we are likely to see will form to force Donald Trump from the Presidency before the next election -- a Tahrir square moment in cities all across the US.  A massive and diverse open source protest that has one simple goal: the immediate removal of Donald Trump from office. 
Unfortunately, an open source insurgency that forces a sitting President from office without the benefit of an election could result in the same outcome as Egypt (or worse Syria).

Which brings us back to this:


And this:


And this:



So here's Robb again on January 21, the day that hordes of women took to the streets in the name of "resistance" (to what?), "self-determination," and a laundry list of progressive causes that I didn't get around to reading in full, though in fairness I'm pretty sure most of the protesters didn't either:

The massive, anti-Trump women's march swept every major US city makes it [i.e. a Tahrir Square moment in America] possible. 
Of course, the people who went to this march don't agree on all of the issues.  In fact, I'm not sure they agreed on most issues.  They did, however, all agree on one simple thing:  Trump shouldn't be President. 
This agreement and huge size of the protest is what I call the plausible promise of an open source protest.  It demonstrates, to many of the people attending the protest and many on the sidelines, that removing Trump from office through protest may actually be possible.

Indeed. The Women's March on Washington manifesto devotes a bullet point to "LGBTQIA Rights." How many of the protesters even know what that "I" and "A" stand for? (Intersex and Asexual, fwiw.) But it hardly matters, that's not why they're marching; they're marching because they want Trump gone. Outta here. Skedaddle.

It's probably wise that Robb doesn't go into detail about how this particular goal might be actualized. I have some ideas, which I'll share later. But the point is that, like it or not, we may be staring down the barrel of an endless series of disruptive political movements in America. Trump let that particular genie out of the bottle, and it's almost certainly not going back in. The danger is that its next manifestation may make Trump's rude tweets and lewd wisecracks seems positively genteel.
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