That wasn’t unwanted speech. She was being threatened.
Ultimately, what to do depends on who runs the municipality you are in. If run by normal people you can defend yourself. If run by those sympathetic to those employing brownshirt tactics you might as well capitulate to the mob because if you defend yourself it won’t be them charged with a crime it will be you.
Video evidence, nor any evidence for that matter, will be sufficient because justice isn’t the goal. Compliance and submission are.
She was being threatened by speech. I thought you were all about free speech, and now you want to commit violence to shut people up?
Did she do the salute? No? And did she get hurt at all? No?
Huh, then what you just said is completely a fiction made up by your paranoid right wing mind.
What physical force was being threatened?
Be specific.
Since she didn’t do the salute, what physical force was applied?
Be specific.
Just because they didn’t hurt her didn’t mean that they weren’t threatening. They just didn’t follow through with their threats. How would you feel if that was your mother treated that way by a bunch of crazed MAGA hat wearing folks? Would you be fine with that?
My mother would probably be egging them on. She likes to tell lies in support of fascism.
It’s what people who support fascism do.
ETA: Oh, sorry, other way around. My Mother would be in the MAGA hat wearing crowd, threatening peaceful protesters.
Well, the MAGA hat is a good indication the person is unstable. So, that might be different.
Raise it.
Suppose thirty angry Trumpers surrounded you and demanded you chant “Make America Great Again.” Not asking you get a MAGA tattoo or anything. Is it so hard to just chant it once?
The BLM supporters have proven to be just as unstable. Quite unfortunate, really, because there are some legitimate complaints about the justice system yet they have been hijacked by the crazed.
I’d try to walk away if possible. I wouldn’t talk to the manager or call the cops because I wouldn’t want to make national news as a “restaurant Karen” making a fuss about “screaming-at-people-eating while black”.
On a broader note, what happened to “live and let live?” Many - not all, but many - people on the political left have argued for a long time for such a philosophy - that people should be free to live and let live. But this behavior crosses over a boundary - it’s demanding compliance from other people with one’s own viewpoints.
If saying “Make America Great Again” gets me out of a tense situation, I can live with that. It doesn’t mean that I’m casting a vote for the Trump-Pence ticket. Just because people say something under tense situations doesn’t meant that they’re sincere about what they say.
In my heavily Hispanic area there’s been some pretty heavy racial tension between blacks and Hispanics due to three months ago during the lootings in my small city an elderly Hispanic man was beaten by “protestors”. Any sort of BLM “peaceful assemblies” against other Hispanics would probably legit lead to a race riot.
Like I said, over-zealous protesters demanding compliance from bystanders isn’t cool. Getting out of an uncomfortable encounter by raising a fist doesn’t obligate you to any long-term commitment. You’re not signing up to sell HerbaLife.
OK, there’s two videos buried below the main video on the site that I didn’t see before. And, unsurprisingly, neither of them shows something that would reasonably be called an ‘attack’.
It’s amazing that right-wingers love to call everyone else ‘snowflakes’ and claim they overreact and demand ‘safe spaces’, but when there’s a crowd doing things less threatening than a typical pro-life picket line does, all of a sudden it’s an ‘attack’. Were the protestors being dicks? Sure. But it was all just angry speech, not an ‘attack’.
Why do all of the conservative calls for ‘free speech’ suddenly stop when angry speech is directed against someone who’s not an easily bullied minority like a young girl going to a clinic or a five-year-old trying to attend school?
And next week when the same BLM “protesters” start demanding money your going to say “oh well, its just money. They deserve it more than you do.”.
No, wrong is wrong. And why the heck do you try and hijack this thread into talking about abortion?
What needs to happen the next time these idiots show up is the cops need to swoop in, arrest them all, charge them whatever, fingerprint them, check for outstanding warrants, and let them know this behavior will not be tolerated.
The threat of a real jail time will stop this crap.
And it needs to be the democrats taking the lead.
My bolding. You may not be aware of this, but I’m pretty sure there is no such criminal charge as “whatever”. Feel free to describe what specific criminal charges should be brought against people yelling at diners, if you believe you are correct.
Also just so we’re clear on where I stand, fuck 'em. It might very well get me killed someday, but I’m disinclined to kowtow to the political demands of some rando, regardless of what they claim to be supporting.
Has happened to me. I used Planned Parenthood to get a recommendation for a new gyn when I moved to Norfolk VA back in the 80s, I was new to the area and knew absolutely nobody I could ask for a recommendation. So I had to brave the gauntlet of asshole pro-lifers for my temerity to decide to go and get an actual human to recommend a doctor instead of blindly picking one out of a phone book. Previously I had the ‘pleasure’ of having obstetrical issues with a dead fetus inside me in a Catholic hospital and having the asshole nuns let more assholes in to screech invective about having an abortion while waiting to have the dead baby removed from me and having to sit there in a bed while all the other women were having healthy babies pop out of me. Why they thought someone at 5 freaking months [yup, 20 weeks, not a timeframe for abortion] was having an optional birth control abortion is beyond me, especially when my records specifically said no religious visits, and not Catholic … it ended up having my doc sever relationship with that hospital because they refused to let him tie my tubes even though medically a third pregnancy had a 95 percent chance of killing me …
I get twitchy about reproductive rights, and am twitchy about white supremacy from personal ethics. While if it literally came down to a ‘burn incense for Caesar or we will execute you’ situation about raising a fist, I might accede to making an empty gesture, but if it were a small enough number of people [enough to be able to spray with my pepper spray, 3 or 4 probably] I would spray and hobble as best I can. If it were something like what happened in Rochester NY lo these many years ago when I was accosted at a red light at 0300 on the way home from a gig, I simply broke the law in front of a cop and went through the red light to get away from them. If it was down to them breaking in a window to try and get me, Mr Sauer and Sohn 38H would deploy and people would be shot in the face.
I was at the post office back last December when some guy wearing a MAGA hat noticed my long hair. He and a woman and a younger man cornered me and started telling me that I should cut my hair because I looked like a F*.
The employee had rather recently complimented the guy on his hat, so I didn’t really see any help coming from that direction.
Angry mobs surrounding and shouting at people have been known to break into violence, and the fact that this one didn’t make specific verbal threats or actually resort to violence doesn’t mean that a reasonable person might not have feared that.
Escalating shouts and raised fists and close proximity to actual violence is a bad idea, but when surrounded by shouting angry people equating what you’re doing (sitting silently) to violence, I can understand the response.