DocWatts

Partial agreement. It might be worth clarifying my stance here, since it differs in emphasis from Leo's. I'm less interested in what's ultimately 'real', and more interested in a descriptive account of how we arrive at our conceptual distinctions. My contention is that knowledge need not have an absolute ground - regardless of whether that ground is an inferred 'mind independent Reality' (materialism) or whether it's purely mental (idealism / mysticism). Whether our shared Reality is physical or mental isn't what's important here - what's important is that mind and world blend into one another in a circular way. Our lived perspective is the canvas upon which we experience a shared Reality, yet this canvas itself is shaped by the shared Reality it presents. Trying to find an absolute ground in either of these two poles is like asking if a coin is 'really' heads or tails. The takeaway isn't some New-Age pseudo-profundity that 'you are the whole universe'. It's that the relationship between 'mind and world' is highly porous - less like a brick wall, and more like a permeable membrane where the boundaries are fluid and constant exchange is the norm. Does all this mean that the Absolute doesn't exit? Not at all - just that it can't be cleanly separated from our lived perspective within Reality. Observer dependent, but not 'made up' or 'imaginary'.

Thank you. I've appreciated your thoughtful political posts over the years and, I hope you'll consider throwing your hat into the pro-democracy struggle if you haven't already. We could certainly use someone with your nuanced, pragmatic outlook. Finding my local Indivisible chapter and attending an in-person meeting was easily the best decision I've made since the election. Authoritarian regimes want us to feel isolated, afraid, and disempowered. Our cynicism and despair is their ammunition. Spending less time on the internet and more time engaged in in-person civic participation with people in my community has made me feel much less anxiously cynical than I would otherwise be. We haven't had to fight for our democracy in America in a long-time. But we're not in this alone. Millions of people are standing up this cruel, idiotic regime.

Putin has maintained a relatively high approval in Russia despite being an autocrat, because his regime is credited with the country's economic recovery. Russia's transition to capitalism was disastrous for ordinary people, producing a decade of Great Depression-like conditions following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Economic shock doctrine was traumatically ruinous for ordinary people. Despite being a brutal dictator, Russia's economic situation stabilized under Putin's regime. Conditions for most ordinary Russian citizens improved. While Putin was gutting democracy he was replacing it with a mafia-like patronage system. Millions of pensioners in Russia literally depend on Putin's regime for their survival, since state subsidies are the only thing keeping them destitution. Trump's approval rating on the other hand is hovering around %40. The first 100 days is the honeymoon period where presidents are usually at their most popular, and Trump's approval ratings are already in the toilet in a historically unprecedented way. His economic 'policy' is little more than an idiotic extortion scheme that will make life much worse for most ordinary Americans -off exactly the opposite of how Putin was able to stay in power. Americans are about to go from disliking Trump to truly hating him once we're no longer shielded from the collapse of our supply chains from his idiotic tariffs. Economists are predicting empty store shelves by the summer, the domino effects of which will almost surely spark a major recession. When I say that Trump's regime is weak and unpopular, what I'm referring to is that Trump sucks at being an autocrat. The smart play would have been to move quietly and take credit for Biden's economy. Instead he started a trade war with the world while bragging about how he's taking away out due process rights. It's almost the perfect conditions for galvanizing a large, ideologically diverse resistance to his cruel, idiotic regime. The democracy that Putin dismantled was in its infancy, within a country that was autocratic for the vast majority of its history. Trump is trying to dismantle a 250 year old democracy with the oldest written constitution in the world. Putin has had 15 years to consolidate his power before launching the disastrous invasion of Ukraine, while Trump is much earlier on in that process in a country with a much more democratic civil society.

@Hardkill @integral To clarify, I'm not a pacifist. Simply put, nonviolent tactics are much more strategically effective at challenging authoritarian regimes than violent insurrection. The long term aim with the nonviolent pro-democracy campaign is to separate the regime from its pillars of support, by engaging a large and ideologically diverse cross section of the public. Nonviolent resistance has an enormous participation advantage here, owing to its lower physical, moral, and commitment barriers relative to violent resistance. Basically, the eventual aim is for the pro-democracy movement to snowball into something too big to suppress or contain. The threshold for this is smaller than you might think - when just %3.5 of a country's population is actively participating in the resistance is when this starts to happen. There's safety in numbers, but this only works if we maintain nonviolent discipline. Violent tactics on the other hand tend to produce a rally around the flag effect. This is to be avoided at all costs, since it makes a regime's supporters much more likely to perceive the conflict as a zero sum game, pushing them to fight on to the bitter end. In addition to all that, nonviolent campaigns produce much more democratic outcomes afterwards. Violent conflict is anathema to maintaining a stable democracy afterwards, which is why civil wars - whether in Russia or China or Yemen - produce autocracies, not stable democratic regimes. In the 20th and 21st century almost every successful transition from an autocracy to a democracy happened through nonviolent resistance rather than armed conflict.

Please DO NOT bring weapons to the protests. Don't give law enforcement or the feds an excuse to crack down. The primary thing that's protecting us is safety in numbers and goodwill with the public, and that vanishes if the protests are perceived as violent. Trump's gestapo isn't arresting people at large public protests. ICE prefers to catch people when they're unaware and isolated, who they think they can get away with disappearing. If you want to purchase a firearm, keep it in your home or personal vehicle. Don't bring it to a nonviolent protest - you'd be endangering everyone around you. (Note: I'm pro second amendment, just be strategic about when are where you bring a firearm. The problem isn't an ethical one, it's strategic. In theory, I have no ethical issues with someone using deadly force to protect themselves from being abducted by ICE - gestapo lives don't matter. In practice, the regime would like nothing more than for the resistance to turn violent. Don't give Trump his Riechstag Fire Decree.)

You know that the Vatican made a good choice when the American Nazis are already losing their collective shit over it. If Jesus came back tomorrow MAGA would have him extradited to the gulags for not being a christian nationalist - and for not being white.

The problems with Relativism, as I see it, are twofold. 1) It lacks a firm, emotionally compelling reason for why we should reject harmful/dysfunctional viewpoints. Relativism tells us that we should try to understand viewpoints and practices from within their own historical and cultural context - and that any judgement we pass necessarily reflects our own cultural conditioning and individual biases. This is true - but if this insight isn't paired with some other non-relativistic underlying principles, the best that relativism can do is tell us that accepting or rejecting a particular viewpoint comes down to the preferences that we've been conditioned into. When the Chinese government calls human rights 'Western rights', does our knee-jerk rejection of this just come down to cultural chauvinism? Or is it a reflection of cross-cultural principles that are worth striving for? Slavery 'made sense' from the POV's of the subcultures that enacted these practices - is there a more substantive reason for rejecting slavery, other than that it rubs us the wrong way because of the culture we grew up in? 2) It's self undermining. Basically, if relativism itself is just one viewpoint among many, why should we adopt it over the totalizing viewpoints it critiques? While this approach might look like humility, in actuality no one adheres to an epistemology without an implicit belief that it’s more valid than what it’s critiquing (otherwise, why embrace Relativism over some other viewpoint)? In short: relativism can't advocate for itself within its own framework. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Granted, there are 'strong' and 'weak' versions of Relativism, and these two critiques are much more salient for its 'strong' incarnations. You're right though - not all relativists cling to such extreme forms of equivocation. It can be applied with varying degrees of nuance. The larger point isn't that Relativism is wrong, per se - it's that it's partial. These critiques only jump to the forefront when Relativism is treated as complete viewpoint, rather than one heuristic among many that we should keep in mind when evaluating perspectives.

I thought I might create this thread as a Public Service Announcement to counter some disinformation I've been seeing on this topic. While Trump likes to puff himself up as a strong man, in actuality he's resorting to terror tactics - ICE abductions, arresting judges, sending Americans to concentration camps - not because his regime is strong, but because it's unpopular and weak. He's attempting to govern by decree like a King because his administration is too weak and disorganized to get actual legislation passed. Trump wants us to feel that he's invincible - that he has a popular mandate from the American people, and that any resistance to him is futile. This is NOT true. First up, a majority of American didn't vote for him: %31.8 of voters did, the rest voted for other candidates or stayed home. More importantly, Trump 2.0 is already historically unpopular. 100 days in, when presidents are normally in their honeymoon period, Trump is underwater on every issue - including the economy, which is what he won the election on. His 100 day approval rating - 39% as of 4 / 28 / 2025 - is the lowest of any president since the Great Depression. Biden's 100 day approval rating was at %57, for comparison. Bush and Obama were sitting in the 60s at this point in their presidencies. Any of the (undeserved) goodwill from voters on the economy is GONE as Trump's chaotic policies have thrown the markets into chaos. This will only get much, much worse when Americans start to wake up to empty grocery store shelves, as global trade to the United States dries up. Trump has set up his party to lose big in the 2026 midterms, and the GOP knows it - which is why voter suppression efforts like the SAVE Act are on overdrive. "So what", you may ask - "it's clear that Trump's intent is to become a dictator, he doesn't have to care about whether or not he's popular." This is also not true. Even authoritarian regimes require some level of public support in order to survive. The Chinese Communist Party is still around because it managed to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, despite its blatantly authoritarian policies. Hitler and Putin's ability to survive long enough to consolidate centralized power was in large part due to a national economic recovery that they were credited for. Trump's chaotic policies are INTENTIONALLY causing economic hardship, so that he can offer selective relief in exchange for kissing the ring. This mafia-like behavior is not only evil, it's a dumb strategy. A typical American may not care if the US Constitution is being ripped to shreds and people they've never met are being sent to concentration camps in El Salvador, but they will care once the price of everyday goods skyrockets as a result of his mismanagement. Blaming empty store shelves on Biden or trans people may work for Cult, but not for the other %70 of the country that are being crushed by his disastrous policy. "But the Democratic Party is even more popular than Trump!" This is true for the party as whole, but largely because the Democratic base is furious that the Democratic establishment is treating Trump's coup as 'business as usual' - rather than breaking with outdated norms to fight Trump. But this too is changing - Bernie and AOC are regularly drawing in tens of thousands of people in a year where there's NO ELECTION taking place. In April 9 million people took to the streets to protest Trump's regime, and this will only continue to snowball as the weather gets nicer and Americans are crushed beneath of the malicious incompetence of his policies. The American resistance is alive and well, and if you live in the States YOU can be a part of it. Instead of doomscrolling, find an in-person group like Indivisible or 50501, and attend a meeting. Grab the 5calls app and be the annoying person who calls every single week to demand that your Senator vote NO to Trump's bills and NO to all future cabinet appointees. In short: you are not powerless. Part of Trump's game plan is to leave us feeling isolated in our individual despair. We fight this by organizing into networks of resilient communities that fight back with a STRATEGY and a UNIFIED PURPOSE. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-lowest-100-day-approval-rating-80-years/story?id=121165473

If Republicans are going to paint anyone to the Left of Ronald Reagan as a 'socialist' anyways, far better just to own it. 'Socialism' brought us the 40 hour work week, the weekend, Medicare, Social Security - popular programs and reforms that are as American as apple pie. (I use quotes here since this is really just Social Democracy stuff, but with how uneducated a typical voter is it's not worth splitting hairs over).

Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico's president who ran on a platform of Left-wing economic populism, is an excellent case study on how to do this well. There's a reason that Bernie and AOC are regularly drawing crowds of tens of thousands of people in a year with no election. It's that Left-wing economic populism ala the New Deal is genuinely popular. Dems trying to rebrand themselves as Republicans-lite is a losing strategy, as is Rainbow Capitalism idealism which spouts vapid pseudo-profundities about the 'promise of America'. The Dems need to be dragged kicking and screaming in a bold new direction, or risk becoming irrelevant. I've been to the Bernie rallies, been to the regularly occuring protests which drew out 9 million people in the month of April. The energy and excitement is there - it just needs to be properly cultivated. David Hogg, the new young vice chair of the DNC, has the right idea - fight back against Trump's fascist takeover of our country, or get primaried by someone who will.

Economists are predicting that summer is when the bottom is going to drop out from Trump collapsing our supply chains. American consumers have been largely shielded from the effects of this, but that won't last much longer as domestic inventories run out and international cargo ships aren't coming in anymore. Make sure to bulk up on those 'I Did That!' stickers with Trump's face on them for those empty grocery store shelves. I mean it. Be as obnoxious about this as the MAGAts were about egg prices during Biden's presidency. They have no one to blame for the upcoming summer of scarcity but themselves for giving the Incompetent Felon his Revenge Tour. The tariffs aren't trade policy - they're economic warfare engineered to cause hardship, so that that Trump can offer selective relief in exchange for kissing the ring. Real mafia boss type shit Imagine if you could go back in time and tell Trump voters that in six months toothbrushes will become a scarce commodity, and they'd be driving to six different grocery stores to find pet food... _____________ Americans Really Dislike Trump. But They’re About to Truly Hate Him. Welcome to the summer of scarcity and the full-blown Trump recession https://newrepublic.com/post/194705/trump-scarcity-tariffs-recession-economy

This brings to mind an article I read awhile back about the rise of Left-wing Conservative parties in Western Europe, which combines Left-wing economic populism that's framed around more culturally conservative values. https://open.substack.com/pub/discoursemagazine/p/the-rise-of-the-conservative-left?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1riug7

The consensus I've seen is that Trump won due to perceptions about the economy - inflation, the cost of living crisis - rather than cultural issues. Incumbent parties on the left and the right lost pretty much everywhere in the world in that same year, as other nations deal with the same issues under Late Stage Capitalism. This goes hand in hand with Biden's approval reaching its high water mark - %57 - when he passed expanded benefits to help people survive during COVID. This approval rating dropped off at an almost 1:1 ratio as these programs ended. Kamala could have made a clean break with Biden like Mark Carney did with Trudeau in Canada, and signaled that her presidency would be a bold new direction for the country. But she chose not to. Add to that the fact that 4 million voters were strategically were purged from voter rolls in the months leading up to the election, and that almost certainly was a factor in tipping the outcome in Trump's favor. But to your larger point, I agree - the Dems should abandon performative Rainbow Capitalism, and run on bold Left-wing economic populism ala the New Deal. The problem that we need to address over the coming years is that Rainbow Capitalism is preferable for the wealthy donor class that the old-guard is beholden to, due to our corrupt campaign finance system. Interestingly, while none of the Democratic candidates are 'popular' with conservatives, Bernie and AOC do much better than establishment Democrats and centrists like Harris and Biden. Americans are hungry for substantive change, and in lieu of genuine economic populism from the Dems they'll continue to be marks for grifters on the right.

Was that not glaringly obvious from the beginning?

The Constitutional checks and balances are being shredded as we speak, and the adults who reigned in Trump during his first term are GONE. Why would anyone outside of the Cult think that this is anything other than a declaration of intent, when we've seen how Trump's 'joke' about being a dictator on day one is playing out. Less than 100 days in and Americans are being sent to a CONCENTRATION CAMP in El Salvador in open defiance of the Supreme Court, for fuck's sake.

You realize that 'white' is not a race (ie, an ethnicity), right? 'German' or 'Polish' are ethnicities. Whiteness is a ad-hoc social class for who gets preferential treatment within Western societies. To see how silly the whole notion is, as recently as the 19th century the Irish weren't considered 'white'. Neither were Italians, Poles, or Jews during that same period.

Greetings! It's been a hot minute since I've posted on the Intellectual Stuff forums, but I thought I might share some of what I've been working on for the philosophy book I'm writing, 7 Provisional Truths. The section below is an introduction to a chapter on perspective-taking - what perspectives are, their limitations, and how to use them as tools for meaning-making. The aim in this chapter is to develop a form of perspectival pluralism which manages to thread a pragmatic 'middle way' between rigid absolutism and paralyzing relativism, without being a lukewarm attempt to split the difference between two played-out extremes. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Perspectives are like sketches of a house, drawn from different angles and for different purposes. Just as a dreamy watercolor painting and an architectural blueprint reveal different aspects of the same building, perspectives derive their value from what you're trying to accomplish. Perspectives And Purposes At this juncture in our journey, we ascend from the corridors of context and into the panorama of perspective. The insights we've been gathering so far form a coherent methodology with a name: Enactivism. Its purpose is to help us navigate ambiguity without getting lost in it, by charting a flexible 'middle way' between rigid certainty and paralyzing skepticism. No lukewarm compromise between extremes, Enactivism forges a third path where meaning is enacted through our lived interactions with the world - yet no less 'real' in its lived significance. A guiding meridian of this framework is that our situated position within Reality isn't an obstacle to overcome, but a condition to be embraced. It's these situated positions, also known as perspectives, that will be our focus here - along with the assessments we attach to them. The pivotal insight: these assessments are never neutral or purpose-free. They have everything to do with where we stand in relation to the world. Purpose directs perception, but not all purposes are created equal. And critically, this doesn't mean that a perspective is worthwhile just because it helps us achieve some instrumental aim. The purposes that underlie our perspectives are themselves subject to ethical scrutiny (a subject we’ll be returning to when we discuss Malicious Perspectives later-on). Which brings us to our thesis: all perspectives are partial. 'Partial' means localized, limited, and incomplete - inevitable consequences of having a perspective at all, rather than a God's-eye view. Any vantage point we occupy is necessarily a 'view from somewhere', not a view of 'everything, everywhere, across all time'. A trite point? Perhaps - until we find ourselves in an argument over something that matters to us, and our vantage point morphs into an all-seeing eye with a 360-degree view of Reality. While the lenses we view the world through both reveal and distort, that doesn't mean they're all created equal. Some are serviceable enough for general use, some excel only for highly specialized tasks, and some are so distorted that we're better off discarding them entirely. But how do we separate the functional from the defective if these lenses can be swapped out, but not left behind entirely? If the only way to evaluate a perspective is from within another perspective, does that doom us to a hall of mirrors with no way out? Not at all. While a sweeping view of the full mosaic has been a holy grail for philosophers, the everyday mug that we actually drink from need not be so grandiose. Our lenses don't need to be flawless to provide a reliable view - they just need to be 'good enough' for the task they're applied to. In a messy Reality where control is an illusion and complete information is a pipe dream, it's practicality rather than perfection that's sublime. The House of Perspectives Envision a group of professionals from different fields descending upon a house to represent it through their specialized lenses: The artists set up their easels from different vantage points, and get to work in their chosen mediums The photographer searches for angles that showcase elegant landscaping while avoiding unsightly power lines The architect updates schematics for the addition of an enclosed patio The historian writes about how the house fits into the neighborhood's shifting cultural landscape The city inspector notes code violations that are invisible to the untrained eye, but compromise the building's safety Each of these perspectives reveals something vital about the house, but none are exhaustive. A dreamy watercolor painting doesn’t reveal the house’s structural flaws. Detailed schematics tell us nothing of what it’s like to live in the house. Photographs for a real estate website don’t convey its cultural significance within the neighborhood. The mistake comes from thinking of partiality as a 'flaw' to be overcome by painting on a bigger canvas or drafting more detailed schematics. Even if we archived this collection of viewpoints into an oversized scrapbook, the composite would still reflect our particular interests and priorities. No matter how meticulous our curation, how diverse our contributions, the house will always be more exhaustive than our attempts to catalogue it. The takeaway? Partiality isn't a failure to be rectified but a condition to be understood. It's the inevitable consequence of having a perspective at all - a viewpoint rather than an everything-point. Breaking Free from False Dichotomies Human psychology being the engine for meaning-making that it is, we feel an almost gravitational pull toward certainty and closure. When this quintessential desire collides with the messy complexity of the real world, however, our sensemaking can get trapped between a rock and hard place. On one end, we may mistake our partial sketch for the complete picture, insisting that we occupy a privileged vantage point rather than a situated position with unavoidable blind spots. On the other, we may retreat into a cynical relativism where the sketches blur into a murky blot of subjective opinions, none more reliable than another. Or, with no means of escape in sight, we might attempt to split the difference - settling into an indecisive middle ground that offers neither the conviction of the former nor the humility of the latter. The solution to this dilemma is as deceptively profound as it is frustratingly straightforward. When we pause to consider how we got ourselves into this situation in the first place, it becomes unmistakably clear that we’ve been wedged within a false dichotomy. The rock and the hard place that once seemed immutable begin to reveal themselves as constructed facades, assembled upon a foundation of emotionally intuitive assumptions that feels solid enough - if you don’t probe it for cracks. And lest you mistake this epistemic hygiene for some dramatic revelation about a hidden Reality behind appearances - there’s no red or blue pills to be found here, and your tour guide is no Morpheus. Instead, it’s just the mundane mechanics of social learning, combined with the everyday discomfort that accompanies ambiguity. The sensemaking trap we'll be stepping out of is twofold. The first misconception is an either/or fallacy. Either our viewpoints are valid insofar as they correspond to an inferred mind-independent Reality, or else they’re merely subjective constructions with no truth beyond our individual preferences and social agreements. The second misconception follows from the first: the assumption that there's an 'out there' and an 'in here' - as though the knowing subject and the world they inhabit can be cleanly separated. The takeaway isn't some New-Age pseudo-profundity that 'you are the whole universe'. It's that the relationship between 'mind and world' is highly porous - less like a brick wall, and more like a permeable membrane where the boundaries are fluid and constant exchange is the norm. The alternative we'll be exploring is that perspectives can be better or worse than one another, but not in the way that a yardstick measures against a fixed standard. Instead, perspectives are purpose-bound - useful or inhibitory to the degree that they shed light on whatever it is that we're trying to understand. Not a God's-eye view, and not just a matter of whim, but a situated disclosure that reveals aspects of the world in relation to our concerns. This path leads not to a flattening relativism where all lenses are equally valid, but toward a rigorous pluralism where multiple viewpoints overlap to reveal complementary truths.

Bernie Sanders is a great example of how to do this well - while he's clearly very progressive on social issues, pretty much all of his messaging is laser focused on how ordinary Americans are getting screwed over by a system that favors billionaires and corporations at thier expense. When he's asked about social issues, he's very adept at framing his response around economic populism in a way that ordinary people can understand. There's a reason that Bernie has the highest favorability rating of any US Senator.

Less intellectualizing and more instrumental action in the real world, for one. Find a way to integrate civic engagement into your life. The way we get through this is by organizing into a network of resilient communities with a solid political strategy behind it. Find a group that shares your values and attend an in-person gathering. If you live in the States, Indivisible is a great place to start - it's a broad-tent pro-democracy movement which has local chapters in most major metropolitan areas. Bernie Sander's Fighting Oligarchy Tour is a class act on how to do this well - regularly drawing in crowds of tens of thousands of people in a year when there's not an election. No one is coming to save us - the public rising up through a sustained nonviolent civil resistance to make it through to the next election is how we perseverance against fascism in a modern context.

About 4 million people, over %1 of the entire US population, took to the streets to protest the Trump regime on Saturday April 19, many in small towns and deep red counties. The April 5 Hands Off protests drew out 5.2 million, and that had weeks of planning behind it. While yesterday's protest drew out the numbers it did on less than a week's notice in many or most cases. https://bsky.app/profile/mskohut.bsky.social/post/3ln7u74v73s2t https://www.reddit.com/r/50501/s/Wnj2W4M3nH

Not really sure what you mean by this.

Realistically, we're not going to get far fighting this as isolated individuals. This is a collective action problem - that means organizing into resilient communities that can come together to form a Popular Front against fascism. A nonviolent resistance movement that involves active and sustained participation by at least 3.5% of a country's population has proven to be the most successful strategy for resisting authoritarian regimes in the 20th and 21st century. Indivisible and 50501 are good places to start. There's a good chance that there's a local Indivisible chapter for whatever metropolitan area that you lived in when you were in the 'States. Groups like these help channel individuals into forms of civic participation with a coordinated strategy behind it. As an individual living abroad, you can still attend demonstrations and participate in sustained boycotts against companies like Amazon, but honestly your best bet is finding a pro-democracy group to work with. Remember - apes together strong.

Thank you for this - talking the talk isn't enough, you also need to walk the walk. We need less intellectualizing on 'what this moment means', and more instrumental engagement. You don't have it figured-all-out to make a positive impact in the pro-democracy movement - unsexy stuff like attending demonstrations, providing mutual aid, and having difficult conversations with friends and family who are tuned out to what is going on right now. Find a way to integrate in-person civic engagement into your life (posting on an internet forum does not count as civic engagement, fyi). If you live in the States, one easy way to get your toes wet is to find your local Indivisible chapter and attend the next meeting. Another is to grab the 5calls app and flood your state representatives with voicemails to uphold the Rule Of Law and the US Constitution. Yet another is to withhold your wallet from companies like Amazon and Target that have bent the knee to Trump. If you ever wondered what you would have done in 1930s Germany or during the Civil Rights movement, you're doing it now.

As someone who's involved in the broad-tent pro-democracy movement, believe me we're well aware that this is the intent. Maintaining nonviolent discipline and cultivating positive optics with the American public are at the top of the priorities list. If you look at these demonstrations you'll see the American flag, and that's very much intentional - the intent is to make these demonstrations impossible to dismiss as a fringe-Left movement. You'll also see lots of white faces and grandmas with American flags at these events - there's a reason these don't look like the BLM protests, since there's an understanding that the mere presence of large numbers of young black and brown men will itself be used as an excuse for bad actors to instigate violence. As much as I dislike it, it would be foolish to ignore that being white gives you FAR more protection against violence from law enforcement. 5.2 million people took to the streets for the Hands Off protests across 1400 events nationwide, and not a single violent incident took place. And believe me, if there was anything that Fox News could be using against us we'd be hearing about it nonstop. The best the propaganda machine has been able to come up with so far is that that we're supposedly 'paid protestors'.