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Myth #2. Groups like Patriot Prayer that engage in public demonstrations are primarily “trolling,” and trolling involves intentionally offending “progressives” so that they become angry and belligerent, furthering the right’s narrative of “politically correct” persecution.
Here’s the deal: “Trolling” involves people exerting power over and inflicting violence upon marginalized people in public. Folks often dismiss behavior as "just trolling" to retroactively justify their failure to interrupt the harassment and dehumanization of others.
Those who “troll” do so because they enjoy, and derive political power from, treating marginalized people like shit in public and getting away with it. Many “Patriot Prayer” members have done this for a long time—since way before their behavior garnered this much media attention.
So the idea that more highly-evolved humor and satire from Portland’s left/liberal mainstream can effectively combat the rise of far-right violence in this city is, at best, frighteningly self-involved.
Patriot Prayer isn’t out on the streets because they think Portland’s political mainstream will consider them cool or legitimate; they’re out on the streets because they want to exercise their power to attack oppressed people in public spaces, both physically and verbally.
They know that this will help draw mainstream attention to their ideology—Overton window shifting, anyone?—and attract like-minded individuals to their future events. Those people see that they too could exercise that kind of power and get away with it, and they’re eager to try.
Public mockery is all well and good—it’s a form of political action we at RCA practice with great regularity and some skill—but framing your own laughter as the model for public engagement with the far-right is supremely privileged.
White nationalists do and say many things that aren’t actually funny. So, you know, sometimes laughter is a fucking inappropriate reaction. When someone is harassing vulnerable people, and spreading hateful ideology in public, stopping that from continuing is the priority.
It’s the priority because it’s a basic ethical imperative. And it’s a strategic priority, because white nationalists, Nazis, and far-right extremists like getting punched in the face—then publicly named, shamed, and fired—about as much as the average person does.
(To be clear, they don’t like any of that stuff. Nobody does. All of those things objectively suck to experience. How is that not obvious?) What they want is to spread/enforce bigotry and experience no consequences. If your strategy allows them to do those things, it has failed.
Don’t want their ideology to spread? Don’t give them cushy interviews where they get to recite their talking points. Want to show their absurdity and hypocrisy? Do comprehensive research on individuals. Want them chased out of the city? Put on your running shoes.
(Or your Doc’s. Doc’s are also acceptable footwear.) But you’re definitely not going to counter the fascist creep by all acting less angry, or all making funnier jokes, or any other variation on ironically distancing yourselves from the realities of far-right violence en masse.
(And, lastly: “Just publicly ridicule these violent bigoted men! They’ll simply go home, embarrassed, and their days of attacking people in public will be over,” is gold-medal mansplaining. Have you, like, met toxic masculinity? Or, for that matter, anyone in Patriot Prayer?)pic.twitter.com/onIVaSPNeZ
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