“But an email is not tantamount to violence.”
Tell that to the judge if you sent an e-mail to the president along the lines of what those frat boys in Oklahoma did, you send an e-mail to the president (or even an e-mail talking about the president) and it comes to the authorities attention, you are dead meat. Talk about lynching the president, wanting him dead, and it is treated as a real threat and you will be charged. What this leaves out, too, not surprisingly, is that threats of violence are as much a form of intimidation as actual violence, you are going to spill the beans on some mob type and you get a phone call that says “you know, you have a beautiful wife, be a shame if something bad happened to her” or sent you an e-mail, you wouldn’t think “oh, it is just an e-mail”.
There is a line with free speech of any kind, and it is easy for a white person to see a bunch of yahoos from Oklahoma sending such things, and laugh it off, ha ha isn’t that funny, but it isn’t, because that kind of stuff has led to real violence and blacks like with that. Someone sends me, a white person, a threat of being lynched, I likely would laugh it off, but I don’t have a background where people were routinely lynched either. That anonymous e-mail could very easily be backed up by some angry, stupid people with guns who actually think blacks should be killed, and there is a long history of that kind of violence in our country that didn’t happen hundreds of years ago, either…
And yes, the line is fine sometime. The Nazis marching in Skokie was a fine line, because Skokie had so many holocaust survivors, but there also was the fact that the Nazi’s in this country were powerless and their threat to those in Skokie was minimal, plus the Nazis were out there marching in public, not hiding behind e-mail they thought was anonymous like the cretins in Oklahoma.
As far as what they are protesting, they are protesting that we have elected a president who openly espouses violence, who casually mentions using nuclear weapons as if it was something to joke about, who at the very least has attitudes towards women that reflect the worst of society, not the best, they are protesting a president who has openly (rather then the subtly) appealed to the worst of our society, the racists, the haters, the misogynists and basically told them “go ahead, boys, this is what our America will be”. Even arguing that Trump doesn’t really believe what he says, he set a tone, and it was ugly, it harkened back to Strom Thurmond and the days of Bull Connor, it harkened back to the days when Mike Pence’s state, Indiana, set records for how many blacks were lynched in a year, and times and places where the KKK could openly operate and were proud of being members, and this wasn’t just the deep south (the KKK was very active in Sussex and Warren counties in NJ, more then a few Klan members were in office in the pre WWII era).
What’s to protest? A chief advisor who ran the Breitbart web site, that is one of the most racist, rabid (not to mention peddler of untruth) out there? Rudy Giuliani as Secretatary of State, our head diplomat? Obviously, Trump hasn’t taken office, but what I think they are protesting is that someone got elected who never even should have been running for office (in their eyes), and who represented, not the country they knew or wanted, but a country based in the open hate and bigotry of the past as being ‘normal’.
