This is bringing hope to millions of people and setting the precedent of democrats actually resisting. It’s changing what is normal and energizing others to do their own good work, to get into their own ‘good trouble’. It’s doing a lot of fucking good. What the fuck are you doing?

A good criminal justice system ought to have comprehensive mental health services as part of the goal of rehabilitation. Therefore, for his own good, he should be in prison and we should reform the prison system.

We don’t need back, we need forward, and a lot of us aren’t interested in giving into doomerism. It is still the time for peaceful resistance and that might still work. It might not, and if it doesn’t the time for widespread destruction of property and civil disobedience will come and that might work, and then soon after the time for armed resistance will come and that might work. If it all fails we can at least make them hurt and show the world that we don’t take fascism lying down. It’s dark times but we don’t get out of them by giving up.

Hell, there’s a chance we come out of this better than we were before, and not just because the bar is so fucking low. We (americans) might find our passion for liberty and justice again and we might find our courage and we might express our decades of resentment against the creeping in of inequality by swinging to the left with new and more inclusive rights and protections for working class people. That’d be nice but even if we can’t have a good ending it’s still the right thing to do to fight fascism with everything we have.

That’s how they get you, with a nugget of truth that in your context is reasonable and in theirs is explicitly unreasonable. The idea that one can’t choose peace if they have no choice is an old one and philosophers have been thinking about it for ages. There’s nothing wrong with the idea. What’s wrong is that in the context of the alt right they imagine themselves as John Rambo and use nonsense like this as wank material when they’re advocating for (or doing) violence. It’s a story they tell to infantilize and invalidate the left. If we’re all babies who couldn’t even choose violence if we wanted then they should make decisions for us, right? Including the decision to kill us.

Funny thing is that the left got most of the rights and protections that people of every stripe benefit from through outright violence. Strikes and protests and all that are the compromise, remember.