Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance states that if a society tolerates intolerance, that allows intolerant people to destroy tolerance over time. Therefore, a tolerant society must not tolerate intolerance (or intolerant people). In practice, it isn’t really an ethical paradox because intolerant people have chosen to violate the social contract, and are therefore no longer protected by it; they are enemies of the social contract. Regardless of whether their actions are technically legal or not, they are unethical and dangerous, so ethical people are obliged to stand against them.
Wilhoit’s Law states that, “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Thanks to Wilhoit’s Law, and the fact that nearly all police are conservatives, we have to deal with selective enforcement.
If you have a good understanding of Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, Wilhoit’s Law, and selective enforcement, then the next thing you really need to understand is the concept of “proportionality” and, in particular, how proportionality applies in a world controlled by conservatives (especially, conservatives acting as police).
Self-defense law requires the response to match the level of the threat in question. In other words, a person can only employ as much force as required to remove the threat. If the threat involves deadly force, the person defending themselves can use deadly force to counteract the threat.
Self-Defense Law: Overview
Note that the law assumes that we are all equal people, and that the law will be enforced in an objective, just, and equal way, but we know that in practice both the judicial system and (especially) law enforcement does not see it that way because they are made up of human beings, who are all more or less flawed. We should, however, talk about proportionality in the context of an ideal society.
Proportionality Under Ideal Circumstances
If someone politely asks you to change your behavior, it is proportional to either comply or respond to them verbally in a similarly polite way. If someone yells at you, it is now proportional to yell back. If someone hits you, and is about to hit you again, it is proportional to hit them back.
This last example may seem a little odd because physical violence is such a violation of the social contract that it seems like it might be appropriate to respond with an escalation (an increase in violence) by hitting the attacker with an object (for example). The law does not see it that way; from a legal perspective, any escalation harms the innocence of the person who was attacked and makes them a participant. From an ethical standpoint, the answer is more nuance, but still, under most conditions, escalation is morally wrong. In fact, from the viewpoint of leftist ethics, de-escalation is almost always the ethical response to conflict.
I mentioned that if a person hits you, and is about to hit you again, it is proportional to hit them back. What if they are not about to hit you again? What if they walk up to you, hit you, and immediately walk away? Under these conditions, the law assumes that you would contact an agent of law enforcement (i.e., the police) and that they will objectively apply the law to this circumstance and that the attacker will be appropriately punished by the legal system. If you follow the person and hit them back, you’ve committed a crime. Under these ideal circumstances, the jury would agree that you’ve committed a crime.
To extend that concept, if a person shoots someone, but then runs away, they no longer pose an immediate threat, so it is no longer proportional to shoot at them. To state the obvious, in this ideal world, you cannot shoot a person for knocking on your front door, pulling their car into your driveway, or running away with your “Patti the Platypus” collectible Beanie Baby.
To respond to yelling with a fist would not be proportional. It is not proportional to respond to a fist with a knife. If you bring a gun to a knife fight, that is an escalation (it is not proportional), but not nearly as bad as bringing a knife to a fist fight.
The Real World is Different
Imagine you are at a gathering of people. You are threatening no one and behaving legally. A person approaches the gathering and brandishes a firearm, pointing it toward the gathering, and you reasonably assume that the person intends to shoot into the gathering (i.e., at human beings). It is now proportional to shoot them.
Let me back up. In this example, the person is brandishing. Simply possessing a firearm (perhaps slung on your back or in a holster) is not a threat to other people. They are also pointing the weapon. It would take only a tiny movement of their finger to fire the weapon, so it reasonable to believe your life (or someone else’s) is in imminent danger.
You’re probably thinking of some real-world examples and wondering how this applies.
Kyle Rittenhouse
Rittenhouse walked into a semi-chaotic demonstration holding a rifle. Whether holding a rifle is the same as brandishing is a very good question. I think a reasonable person would conclude that entering a somewhat hostile environment while holding a rifle is an escalation (though perhaps not brandishing), but we’re talking about real-world America, and in that place, a white conservative can enter a liberal (right of center, but left of the average American) protest with a rifle and he is not guilty of escalation; if anyone physically attacks such a conservative, they are guilty of assault.
Why is that? First off, the position of the protesters was a threat to the conservative position because it intended to change the identities of ingroups and outgroups; it is perceived (in an implicit way) as having been the initial threat. Second, the police and the judicial system tend to be conservative institutions in the sense that they actively resist changes to ingroups and outgroups and see violence flowing down their preferred hierarchy as more legitimate than violence flowing up their preferred hierarchy (the people Rittenhouse shot existed at a position lower on that hierarchy).
In short, leftist violence must be less than proportional to be seen as proportional in the United States. This would include violence from people who aren’t really leftists but are perceived to be leftists (e.g., BLM).
But let’s look at another example.
Michael Reinoehl and Aaron Danielson
Reinoehl and Danielson were at the same pro-Trump rally. As a member of Patriot Prayer, Danielson was a fascist but was not necessarily a racist. Reinoehl was a Portland-area antifascist, but was acting independently at the rally (he was not a member of any organized antifascist group). Danielson was openly carrying a can of bear spray and a metal baton and had a pistol in a holster. Portland is one of the few left-leaning places in America, and conservatives planned the Trump rally for that location specifically as an act of antagonism toward Portland’s left; the rally itself was an attack. Though Danielson was openly carrying weapons as a Trump supporter in a left-leaning city, American society (generally speaking) does not evaluate him as the initiator of conflict. Rather, Reinoehl, who pursued him and shot him twice is the initiator of the conflict — he initiated and escalated. Please keep in mind that even if Danielson were (appropriately) perceived as initiating the conflict, Reinoehl would still have been escalating the conflict by introducing a gun into the situation (and that would be true even under ideal circumstances). Moreover, pursuing Danielson would also be an escalation under ideal circumstances.
Reinoehl claimed that he thought Danielson was about to stab someone with a knife. Perhaps he thought the baton was a knife. Whereas a conservative might be able to get away with saying he believed someone’s life was in danger, a leftist (or perceived leftist) is held to a higher standard.
In response to this event, the police arrested Reinoehl without incident, and even bought him food at the Burger King. I’m kidding! That’s what happened with Dylan Roof, the right-winger who murdered 9 unarmed people in 100% cold blood. Law enforcement executed Reinoehl in the street; they turned off their body cameras ahead of time, so we know it was premeditated.
Watchful Coyote
A TikTok user who goes by “watchfulcoyote” posted a video where he explains his philosophy and praxis for dealing with fascists under very specific circumstances. In essence, if they are standing around openly portraying themselves as Nazis, scream at them until they go away. In his example, the Nazi is standing near a sidewalk holding a sign that says, “Hitler was right,” smiling, while liberals standing near him try to figure out what to do; some are crying. Watchful Coyote approaches the Nazi and yells at him in a threatening way until the Nazi goes away. This is a clear escalation, and Watchful Coyote says so.
Why did that work out?
First off, we can’t say for sure that it worked out. There’s still plenty of time for the Nazi to file a complaint saying his civil rights were violated.
Second, by saying, “Hitler was right,” in such a clear and unmistakable way, the Nazi revealed himself to literally be a Nazi. If the sign had been claiming that a Jewish billionaire was funding Pride, or that trans people are groomers, liberals and conservatives would not have been sure that the man was a Nazi (or at least, they would pretend they were not sure). If he’d been standing there holding a rifle instead of that sign, we would not know that the guy was a Nazi; in fact, the (hypothetical) rifle is the least clear sign that the guy might be a Nazi. We make jokes about this, right? The joke is that liberals won’t believe someone is a Nazi unless they show up in uniform, announce that they are a Nazi, and goosestep — and even then, conservatives will pretend they aren’t sure.
Third, Watchful Coyote never touched the guy, so given that the guy was admitting to being a Nazi, screaming at him was not perceived as an escalation (even though, technically, it was). People were crying about it, and that was perceived as harm even though this harm was ambiguous from a legal perspective.
Proportional Harm
In formulating a strategy for approaching the problem of fascism, it might be helpful to think of it in terms of proportional harm rather than proportional force. It’s an imperfect way of framing it, but I think it gets closer to making sense of how we as leftists have to do things.
Because of our marginalized position in this conservative society, leftists can only apply force as a response to continued, unambiguous harm without risking harm to ourselves, including societal backlash, injury, and death. Terror is a form of harm, but it is ambiguous, so it doesn’t count. I’m not telling you what you should or shouldn’t do — just my perception of the risks based on what you choose to do. I’m also not a lawyer, so don’t take any of this as legal advice.
The horrible upshot of all this is that the fascist must harm someone, and we must see that they are about to continue harming people before we can act against the fascist, and then the force we apply must be proportional and result in a proportional amount of harm.
Reinoehl and Danielson are a good example to illustrate this way of conceptualizing the problem. In reality, Danielson had not harmed anyone in any clear way; nobody was even crying in response to him. Let’s pretend, though, that Danielson had used the bear spray on someone — that would have been harm, and a leftist could have responded by spraying him back, or punching him, and that would have worked out. They could have taken his weapons at that point, even, and that might have worked out. Even if Danielson had drawn the loaded pistol he was carrying, though, Reinoehl could not have shot at him because Danielson still would not have caused unambiguous harm. If Danielson had fired the gun at a person — harming them with the bullet — now, Reinoehl could respond by shooting him.
This is all in direct opposition to how gun people — and the law — typically approach the issue of force, and initiation of force in particular. From that perspective, you can shoot the attacker before his gun even “clears leather” — the mere act of starting to draw clearly indicates an intention to kill someone and you can respond with deadly force (as long as you aren’t initiating the conflict). (If we’re talking about an attacker with a rifle, having it securely slung is essentially the same as “holstered” and “low ready” is essentially the same as starting to draw.) The next moment of clarity would be when the attacker points the gun at a person; from the perspective of gun people, there’s absolutely no ambiguity that a person pointing a gun at another person intends to kill them. That you would wait until the attacker pulls the trigger sounds like insanity.
Recommended Reading
I recommend that you read The Law of Self Defense: The Indispensable Guide to the Armed Citizen by Andrew Branca for a lot of important detail about how the law of self defense works in the United States. Unlike me, Branca is an attorney and is qualified to provide legal advice. In that book, he does touch on the issue of defending someone else, so it isn’t just a text about self defense.