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Your Behavior Doesn’t Matter. The Republican Right Wing will Escalate Anyway.

This photo is from 2017 — Can you tell? Alex Radelich

I keep hearing the dumbest take from the “not-right-wing” imaginable. They keep saying stuff like, “Don’t get violent, cause they’ll use it against us,” or “Don’t show up in black, cause it’ll look like the armed resistance they need.” “Don’t give them what they need.” Truly stupid crap like that.

Of course we should not start any violence — absolutely that’s true, and it almost goes without saying. But the rest — why is it stupid? It literally could not matter less what you do, or how you look, or what you say. It’s the “because” — the expressed consequence of bad behavior. No. It does not matter if you behave “badly” or wear the wrong color or style of clothes, but numbers do matter. Stop dis-inviting people because they wear the wrong clothes. Understand what is happening.

The Right Wing has an entire media ecosystem, a messaging strategy, and an echo chamber, and nowhere in any of that is there a concern for reality. They will simply say you did something, they will say you said something, they will say you looked a certain way, or that you dressed funny, and then repeat it over and over again. They’ll show stock footage of unrelated events from foreign countries, or from 20 years ago. They’ll use AI to fake the footage they want. YOUR BEHAVIOR CANNOT IMPACT THEIR DECISIONS.