Stop making excuses when our side fucks up.
The adult way to act is stay on the sidewalks, let the signs be seen and your voices heard. Do nothing that makes your side look bad and give the other side ammo.
What is “our side”? From what I can tell, the majority of the protesters were Latinos objecting to Trump’s racism against them.
Against Trump. So what? I don’t care what they are if they start acting like the very people they’re protesting against.
I am kind of divided on this, in a general sort of way. Protesting Trump, at this point, is silly, because it makes it look like he has credibility (is worth one’s effort to protest). But the general idea of impeding some offensive person’s ability to speak is not always unacceptable. If the opposition is serious enough that they can block a speaker’s access to a venue, there is fundamentally nothing wrong with that (as long as peripheral violence is avoided): the Constitution protects our speech from Government interference but does not protect us from each other; media organizations routinely decide who gets to be heard and who gets ignored, which is hardly different from an angry crowd.
But, as I said, Trump is not worth the effort, and any reduction in his exposure is a net gain for all of us.
Citizens should value free speech as a basic principle of this country. When you try to silence the opposition, you run the risk of it happening to you. And it will be justified by the fact that you did it. Goose, gander, sauce.
I am inclined to think that Skinner was right, in Walden Two, when he said that crowds as not a good thing. If it gets “done to me”, so be it. My ideas are not so very valuable that they need to be delivered in that way, and I am not convinced that any other person’s are either. Reasonable discussion is worth a lot more than sermonization.
So as long as someone offends us it’s okay to throw rocks at motorists, bloody their supporters’s faced and attempt to physically block their freedom of speech? May I remind you that many people find Democrat policies and politicians offensive?
I think protesting Trump events is an act of patriotism. We must let Trump supporters, each other, and the rest of the world know just how offensive that sane Americans find Trump. He is easily the most dangerous man ever to seek public office since Joe McCarthy. His blind hatred and bigotry must never be allowed to have power, a man of his complete ignorance must never hold any position of any significance and the presidency in his hands would spell the end of the nation. If he should win, then let’s burn everything down and start over. Tear down the Washington Monument, level the Capitol, raze the White House. If we should elect a president as a joke, then we do not deserve these nice things.
Naw. He’s just a bozo; we’ll do fine. We survived Bush (the lesser,) Reagan, and Nixon. We can survive this joker.
Let the system do its job. Congress and the courts will limit his ability to do harm. It’s actually fairly likely he’ll do a Palin and just quit when he can’t have his way.
Cruz is the bigger danger.
Trump: reckless enough to fly off the handle and loudly tell folks to launch a nuke?
I don’t know. Maybe. Probably? It wouldn’t surprise me all that much, is the thing.
Protesting a candidate “on the stump” is not what our forefathers envisioned. America was to be a place where EVERYBODY can be heard in the market place of ideas without fear of repercussions. Everyone has a right to be heard, no matter how idiotic they sound. Our Forefathers figured the American people would be able to filter out the shit from the gold and vote saccordingly with the Nation all peacefully abiding by that vote.
Protest policies of a sitting politician? Absolutely.
Protest candidates on the campaign trail? UnAmerican. It is stifling Free Speech.
I’d draw a clear distinction between protesting in objection to a message being said with the intent of expressing a different POV and protesting in a manner intended to prevent or disrupt the what is being said.
The former is free speech; the latter is wanting to be free to prevent speech you do not like.
Unfortunately, the former is not what is occurring.
And that is worse than objectionable.
I really don’t get how anyone is defending it.
You are completely free to to object to the speech of others, to state how offensive you find it, to even offend others with speech within very broad bounds. You can say how much you think they should not be saying what they are saying.
You do not and should not have the right to prevent the speech of others.
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of speech so long as others are saying something you want to hear.
Trump is a bag of flesh controlled by a hateful alien in the shape of a bad hairpiece. It got cranky because it is a brainsucker and is starving after mistakenly bonding to The Donald. But it is stuck now. And as the host bag of flesh is a citizen it can speak and others who choose to can listen. You can speak and others who choose to can listen, including in public space near his venues expressing your disgust with the brainsucker’s bilious bullshit, whether the bag of flesh is in office or is running for office or a private citizen. Whether it is the brainsucker controlled bag of flesh or you, in both cases preventing others who want to listen from doing so is despicable and against what this country is about.
Trump is lagging badly with young voters: http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/25/politics/donald-trump-young-voters/index.html
That’s an ideal (with which I agree.) Yet there are a handful of legal and perhaps legitimate ways of silencing someone: boycotting their business is one of those. If Joe the Plumber says something offensive enough, a boycott can be organized, hurting his real-life business. That will have a chilling effect on him and on others who might have wanted to say the same thing.
Boycotts scare the hell out of me. But they, too, are a form of free speech, and there isn’t any way that they can be banned.
ETA: trashing police cars and blocking traffic is right out. That’s shitten behavior, and I’m ashamed of “my side” for employing it.
Be more efficient to have him take the nomination, then in November let the world know just how offensive sane Americans find the entire Republican Party.
Agreed albeit with some lack of confidence that a boycott in protest of offensive speech is quite silencing them.
I don’t mind the protests, but I do abhor the violence, and I don’t appreciate the obstruction. Blocking traffic is criminal, IMO. If you didn’t get a permit to close the highway ahead of time, mass filling the streets is at the very least illegal assembly and disorderly conduct.
While many of the protesters are just trying to be heard and make their opinions known, perhaps causing disruption by shouting during the assemblies, the ones throwing bottles and fighting the cops are loathsome.