Harassing conservatives is “the right thing to do,” according to a left-wing oped in The Washington Post.
Liberals have been urging their supporters to be more aggressive targeting the right. This followed the media furor surrounding the harassment of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders by liberal activists this past week.
Tom Scocca, a former contributor to Gawker, wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post on Monday, calling for the same sort of harassment that Rep. Maxine Waters’ demanded when she told democrats to further humiliate Trump officials in public.
Scocca’s thesis was that since children are being detained at the border, the left should be allowed to jettison what constitutes “civil” reaction, and harass the right. “Children, some still in diapers, have been seized from their parents by the government and locked in cages, with no clear way to reunite them with their families afterward,” he wrote.
He argued that the media didn’t understand the fight at hand, and that their debates on civility, and whether or not the public protests directed at Trump officials were part of a “normal” democracy, are misguided. “The protestors who yelled at Nielsen were not aiming to be a part of the political process, but to respond to extraordinary events with extraordinary actions.”
“The self-appointed civility police, the voices of respectable political journalism, are unable to understand this,” he continued.
Scocca claimed that the discussion of how to maintain proper societal behavior perpetuated by the media is foolhardy, especially considering the complete lack of civility from Donald Trump officials and their supporters. “No appeal to decency can ever bring Trump or the Trumpists around. It is not possible to mollify a political cult that runs on outrage, and it’s not worth trying.”
“The people who narrate our current events have a strange shared fantasy that there is some other, nicer way,” he wrote. It seems that what Scocca really wants, like Rep. Waters, is to say screw taking the high road. They’d rather have social upheaval than solve disputes through law and constitutional debate.
This is nothing new for Scocca. He was a writer for Gawker, a sensationalist journalism platform that went bankrupt. This was due to a hefty lawsuit from Hulk Hogan for publishing a sextape of the wrestler without his consent.
Now, Scocca is set to be the editor of Hmm Daily, an upcoming media platform which describes itself in its mission statement as deviating from the current bleak and mundane journalistic environment. “Hmm Daily is here to do something else. Our mission is an old one and also, fundamentally a new one.”
“We’re here to write and publish things that people can’t get anywhere else… We’re here to criticize the culture and make a new culture, to say things nobody else might say and listen for the things we haven’t heard yet.”
If Scocca’s feelings presented in his article are any indicator, it seems that he is advocating for a reality away from sanity, where all manner of getting-even politics and leveling the status quo might thrive. In his view, the arguments over right and wrong that underlie the current narrative, are constricting and get in the way of real action.
