On Protest Trolls and Finding Out

It’s unclear exactly how this altercation started. The girl says my friend started hitting on her. My friend insists he was just asking her a question. It wouldn’t be the first misunderstanding to happen here at Victoria’s (Secrets? Sharky’s? I can’t remember names or faces but my knowledge of Fayetteville strip clubs remains encyclopedic). It’s about 1:30 AM, we are all very drunk, today was payday, and we’re having a great time wasting money on b******t because when you’re in the Army you mostly have food and shelter covered and also your life sucks so why not put girls through college and drink a beer or ten? Anyway, this girl my friend was talking to isn’t a dancer, just another wayward weirdo at the rack watching the show. She’s in my friend’s face now, really letting him have it, which is unfortunate, because he’s not really the apologizing type. So he’s being a bit of a dick, she’s getting extremely aggro, her group of guys starts assembling, we start assembling, and she says something like, “don’t mess with me. My boyfriend’s in Seventh Group.” A word about Fayetteville: Fort Bragg, which sits just outside town, is the largest military base in the United States. Not only does it house the 82nd Airborne Division, which was our unit, it also houses a variety of Special Forces units. Seventh group is one of them. So here we are, drunk, surrounded by SF guys, who are also drunk; this evening has certainly taken a turn, but this friend is not known for backing down from any fight and so, without missing a beat, he says “Seventh group? F**K Seventh group!” And then, for reasons I will both always and never understand, my friend hops up on one of the tables, throws both his middle fingers up to form a 7, and begins to shout it over and over again. “F**K Seventh Group! F**K Seventh Group!” After about a minute of this it became clear that this was only going to end one way and so one of the SF guys lunged. But he’s as wasted as we are, so he sort of crashes into the table, my friend falls off and lands more or less on his feet, and here come the bouncers. It’s definitely time to go so I start steering him towards the door and he says something like “I’m not afraid!” and I say some drunken equivalent of “nevertheless, we are leaving” and so we are escorted out, rapidly, by the bouncers, never again to return, until next week, because no one really gets kicked out of a Fayetteville strip club, not really. This was, and remains, one of my favorite memories of the Army. Every couple years I’ll text this guy “F**k Seventh Group” and he’ll text it back and it’s still funny almost fifteen years later. It probably wouldn’t have been as funny if he’d gotten punched in the face, but it still would have been pretty funny, because when you make a 7 out of middle fingers and tell SF guys to go f**k themselves, a punch is about what you’d expect. No one would have felt particularly sorry for him, I don’t even think he would have felt particularly sorry for him. Our chain of command would have been actively furious at him. F**k around, find out. Anyway, some guy who calls himself Billboard Chris got tackled to the ground by a woman at a protest because he was standing in the middle of a Trans Day of Visibility rally and giving interviews wearing a billboard that said…well. This. I really enjoyed this long post-J6 lull in protest violence videos. It was so nice not to endure this dreadful discourse popping up every few days. I’ve thought about this issue more than anyone should—my undergrad thesis is a 200-page history and participant-observation study of propaganda creation at right-wing protests. A lot of academic theses gather dust. I wish mine would. Anyway, I am incredibly qualified to write about the question once again burbling to the surface like Keystone oil in a Kansas creek: is it OK to punch a protest troll in the face? Morally? Absolutely. Pragmatically? Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Let’s go through it. F**k Around, Find Out Few people would have called that Seventh Group soldier a monster for laying my friend out back in 2009—even me, who fully believes he was not hitting on that girl and that the whole thing was a giant misunderstanding. Even fewer people on the conservative side of the aisle would wax poetic about middle-finger-related free speech at bars. But what’s the difference? After all, my buddy didn’t do anything illegal. He didn’t assault anyone. All he did was say some words, maybe make a gesture. That’s free speech, isn’t it? Of course it is. But free speech, like freedom, isn’t free. Long before the bill of rights, before kings and warlords and chieftains, before Hammurabi chiseled his Code into a clay tablet—and long after our current troubles are over, once the Butlerian Jihad frees us from our technological shackles and mentats duel with crysknives—there was and will be one basic rule of human interaction: if you provoke someone far enough, you will get punched. Feel free to argue with me in the comments that it shouldn’t be that way. There’s no “should” about it; it just is. It has to be. Society doesn’t work without it. Nothing would ever get done if there were no repercussions whatsoever for being an a*****e. Would you really want to live in a world where free speech meant free-from-consequences speech? Where someone could, theoretically, follow you around for your whole life screaming “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!” with everyone powerless to stop him? I have not personally punched anyone since elementary school, and it didn’t exactly go well for me when I tried. I’m not a puncher. I’m a word person, an idea guy; I prefer arguing to violence. Which, by the way, is what professional sadboy Billboard Chris insists he was doing. Let’s look at the text of that tweet again: I’ve been at this for 2 and a half years, with the audacious idea that having intelligent conversations out in the real world would help educate millions, and spread awareness about the abuse of child transition. This is an absolute lie. Chris isn’t trying to have an intelligent discussion with anyone. He’s trying to have a fight. A protest is no place for rational, calm debate. A protest is what happens when debate has gone wrong somehow. When a group feels unheard. When they want to bring attention to a cause, or demand a specific change, or express outrage at a policy decision or police action, or assert their right to exist in the face of bigotry. A good protest provokes conversation, but it is at its heart a primal scream. It is cathartic. Protests are very loud; people are often chanting. Protests are very intense; people attend because they’re too passionate for mere words. Protests build community. People who are heavily invested in an issue can find others who feel the same way. They can shout together, they can feel less alone in their terror or sadness or determination. When you go to a protest with a provocative and rude sign, you are not inviting debate. You are consciously setting yourself up as the embodiment of whatever thing these protesters are protesting against. You are doing that knowing full well that no one is in any mood or state to argue with or debate you. You are doing this to provoke a reaction. Full stop. (Think of it like someone showing up to your birthday party and demanding you tell them everything you’ve accomplished so far in your life and your detailed five-year plan. What’s the problem? Why are you celebrating your life when you can’t even explain why your life is worth living?) People who ACTUALLY want debate do things like write articles, or email people, or go to discussion groups, or leave Internet comments. They initiate discussion in places where people are likely to be interested in chatting. Billboard Chris is not, to my knowledge, writing articles—I suspect he’d have a different name if he was. He is not engaging in discourse outside of protests. He is showing up and hoping, praying he gets punched in the face. O… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.firewalledmedia.com/subscribe