IMPORTANT INFORMATION ON U.S. SHUTDOWN PROTESTS
by George J. Dance
There are two types of Americans protesting their state governments' emergency shutdown and stay-at-home orders. In order to understand the protests, it is essential to be able to tell the difference.
The first type of Americans consists of libertarians. They support the goals of the emergency orders (to reduce human interaction by 50-75% through 'social distancing'), but believe that achieving social distancing should be done voluntarily, to prevent violating the Constitution and vandalizing the economy. Accordingly their protests obey social distancing guidelines: they mainly stay inside cars, drive past legislatures (and governors' offices and homes), and honk their horns.
The second type has to be called (with apologies to intelligent supporters of the President) trumptards. They often defy social distancing guidelines to crowd into state legislatures, looking like an armed mob trying to take over. Their position is unclear, though it appears to be that the pandemic is no threat, and the Democratic governors used it as a pretext for causing a depression in order to defeat Donald Trump.
Since trumptards have joined and (media-wise) hijacked libertarian protests, it is easy to confuse the two types. However, in order to understand the shutdown/lockdown protest phenomenon, it is vitally important to understand the differences between them.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
by George J. Dance
There are two types of Americans protesting their state governments' emergency shutdown and stay-at-home orders. In order to understand the protests, it is essential to be able to tell the difference.
The first type of Americans consists of libertarians. They support the goals of the emergency orders (to reduce human interaction by 50-75% through 'social distancing'), but believe that achieving social distancing should be done voluntarily, to prevent violating the Constitution and vandalizing the economy. Accordingly their protests obey social distancing guidelines: they mainly stay inside cars, drive past legislatures (and governors' offices and homes), and honk their horns.
The second type has to be called (with apologies to intelligent supporters of the President) trumptards. They often defy social distancing guidelines to crowd into state legislatures, looking like an armed mob trying to take over. Their position is unclear, though it appears to be that the pandemic is no threat, and the Democratic governors used it as a pretext for causing a depression in order to defeat Donald Trump.
Since trumptards have joined and (media-wise) hijacked libertarian protests, it is easy to confuse the two types. However, in order to understand the shutdown/lockdown protest phenomenon, it is vitally important to understand the differences between them.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
There are some protesters in Canada who fit the Libertarian description and there are others who seem to be "trumptard" lite. They don't seem to know what they are protesting but they saw protests on TV or social media, were bored with everything shut down and felt going out to join a protest was a good thing to do.
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