It’s all so infantile isn’t it? Antifa jackals harass Donald Trump fans during their ‘Million MAGA March’ on the streets of DC. The ‘protesters’ steal Trump caps and set them on fire. They throw fireworks at people. Skirmishes break out, some people get hurt. There’s a stabbing.
Underpaid online reporters stalk the scenes with their iPhones, trying to record the violence and make it go viral. Social media users dutifully share scraps of aggro-porn. President Trump, sounding not unlike a teenager reporting on fisticuffs in high school, tweets: ‘ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back.’ Which hills?
Those underpaid reporters do catch some nasty scenes. An old man in a Trump t-shirt is abused and shoved to the ground. A woman holding an American flag is attacked. A girl screams as she and her boyfriend are targeted. It is ugly, but it isn’t quite The Passion Of The MAGA that some conservative social-media addicts are frantically clicking for. Nor is it some orgy of racist Proud Boy viciousness.
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Most of the brawls appear to have been fairly inconsequential, even boring. The police seem to have done a reasonable job of keeping order. There are no reported deaths. We are not entertained. After several months of watching BLM-inspired riots on social media we’ve all come to expect a least a manslaughter or two and something truly awful caught on camera. We’ve all been desensitized, to put it mildly.
So people argue about crowd sizes — that recurring theme of the Trump presidency. Those who don’t like Trump said they saw no more than a couple of thousand MAGA marchers. Those who do pointed to the aerial shots showing many more. Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham berated the journalist Shawn McCreesh on Twitter for minimizing the scenes: ‘Where are your overhead shots, Shawn?’ she asked. ‘Sadly, I’m not in a helicopter,’ he replied, not unreasonably.
Others bicker about policing. BLM fan-girls accused the police of ‘protecting’ the Proud Boys. The Proud Boys suggested the police were far more harsh towards them than the BLM types. He said. She said. It’s not fair. Politics in 2020 — maybe it’s always been this way.
