Can Anyone Be Normal For One Goddamn Minute?

Politics in the age of zero chill

Two days ago, menswear commentator and internet provocateur Derek Guy shared a series of longer posts on X about his family history, ICE’s raids taking place throughout the country, and his view on protests. I think they’re thoughtful and encourage you to go read them yourselves, but to summarize:

• Guy’s parents are Vietnamese and fled the Vietnam war in the 1960s. They first went to Canada, but eventually moved to the US without clear documentation.

• Guy was brought into the US when he was a baby. He states that he was an illegal immigrant and implies (but does not outright state) that he’s still undocumented.

• Guy expresses sympathy with illegal immigrants, especially those who are brought here as children and have never known another home. He’s highly critical of ICE’s recent actions.

• He also encourages non-violent protesting over violent protesting, and encourages people to volunteer their time and money to help immigrants

If you were told this kind of thing in person, I could imagine you having a range of reactions. Perhaps you’d be in complete agreement with Guy. Perhaps you’d disagree with Guy’s stance on immigration, but you’d likely disagree politely and express sympathy for the hardships he’s talking about.

Unfortunately, we don’t live our lives in the physical world any more. We live on the internet, so a bunch of MAGA chuds started jerking off about how much fun it would be to deport him:

This wasn’t just a group of internet randoms. The sitting Vice President got in on the fun, posting meme reactions to the idea of deporting a menswear commentator:

You might be tempted to shrug this off as just another another cursed day on X, our best living example of the Nazi bar story. Those insane right wing guys, am I right? But at least the leftists had his back:

It turns out the leftists wanted to dogpile him as well! Guy made the mistake of saying that non-violent protests are better than violent protests, after which the left started writing fan-fiction about how his parents are Tools Of Imperialism.

There’s a lot of things I want to say here. But mostly, I just want to ask whether anyone, anywhere, can just be normal for one goddamn minute.

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We should be really clear here that none of this is normal. Above, I asked you to imagine what you might say to someone in a real life, face-to-face environment. The proper response to someone telling a story about how their family fled a war is never “Giggle in glee as you imagine them once again being kicked out of their homes” or “tell them you hope they get sent to a foreign torture camp”. Similarly, the proper response to a disagreement about protest tactics is not to invent stories about how someone’s refugee family were evil imperialist collaborators.

These are deranged behaviors, but they’re sadly common online. Maybe it’s because online, you’re not at risk of being punched in the face. Maybe it’s because you don’t have to own up to your cruelty online in the way you do face to face, or because some of the people we’re dealing with online are literally 14 years old. But saying this kind of thing in the real world would cause people to be disgusted with you, while saying them online gets you lots of attention and applause from a crowd of fellow assholes.

I’m not the first person to point out that people are crueler on social media than they would ever be IRL. But it’s a fact that I don’t think we appreciate enough. It has absolutely enormous implications for how we relate to each other as human beings. The fact that nobody can be normal is poisoning our politics and our culture.

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Perhaps the best way to point out how this normal/extremist dynamic influences our politics is to return to one of Derek’s original points - that non-violent protests are better than violent ones. The entire point of a protest is optics. You’re trying to win over the public by highlighting the injustice of a particular situation. In a very real sense, the optics of the protest are the only thing that matters.

In Activism is Not a Social Club, I wrote:

Activism is not a set of boxes you check. I don’t particularly care what you did or what you organized if it doesn’t lead to change. Activism is not about media stunts, virality or online popularity. Activism is not throwing soup.

Activism is not about ‘making a point’ and it’s not about ‘being right’. Everybody thinks they’re right. Everybody thinks their preferred policies are the best and morally righteous ones. It’s not about making loud declarations. It’s not about renaming things.

Activism is about winning. It is about power. It is about changing the world. If what you’re doing doesn’t lead to concrete change, if it doesn’t WIN, if it isn’t about seizing real power and using it in the messy real world, it’s not activism. It’s political masturbation. It makes you feel good but accomplishes nothing, and it probably makes a mess in the process.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people for whom activism and protest is essentially a social club. The vast majority of protests in Los Angeles and across the country against ICE have been peaceful. 99% of people are protesting peacefully and being very normal, but there’s a dedicated fringe group of anarchist assholes who show up to every major protest and make things worse. They’re the kind of people who call Waymo taxis to the protest just so they can smash them up and burn them.

I cannot possibly imagine a worse set of images for anti-deportation protests than someone waving a foreign country’s flag in front of a burning car.

These people aren’t here because they genuinely care about helping immigrants. They’re people who get off on property destruction and giving a middle finger to The Man, and they’re not picky about who The Man might be in any particular situation.

This isn’t how protests used to work. Protests used to have a dress code where protestors were expected to wear their Sunday best and present themselves as cleanly as possible:

Why doesn’t this happen today? Because the internet decentralizes protesting. During the civil rights protests, activity was strictly controlled by groups like the NACCP, SCLC, NUL and SNCC.¹ These organizations were grounded in the real world and their leadership strictly planned protests, told its members exactly what to do, when to do it, what to wear, how to behave, etc. They were disciplined. They had an explicit media strategy that involved looking more dignified than the authorities. You can decry this as ‘respectability politics’, but respectability politics worked.

Today, protests are announced by vague collections of people on social media who barely know one another. There’s no way to gatekeep or control an online protest, so protests organized through social media (which is all of them, today) end up attracting normal people as well as psychopaths who turn to violence at the drop of a hat.

And you know how the story develops from there - the 1% of protestors that can’t be normal end up ruining it for everyone else. They burn and loot and create terrible optics, public support for the protests is harmed, but hey, at least they got to set some things on fire and mug for the camera.

So to answer the original question posed in this post - the truth is that most people are still normal, but the internet marginalizes anyone who isn’t an extremist psychopath. There’s always been a part of society that can’t be normal unless they’re forced into it by real world social shaming. In the pre-Internet age, this rump of idiots could be controlled by organized society, but social media has unleashed them. They’re people who delight in cruelty and for whom real world tragedies are nothing more than a game of social positioning. And our media systems and algorithms give them power. They push the fringe onto our feeds, onto the front page of the paper, into prime time. The internet is structurally biased towards extremism. It’s making our online discourse worse, it’s making our activism worse, and these losers are slowly poisoning the rest of us with their anti-social behavior.

The majority of people are normal, but we’re living under the influence of people who cannot for one single minute be normal. And they’re going to keep dominating our discussions until we find a way to shut them out.

1. Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), National Urban League (NUL), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).