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“Love It or Leave It”: Protecting the Powerful and Oppressing Dissent
A few days ago I found myself falling down the rabbit hole that is Twitter and a very right wing Tweet hit my timeline. It was from a pretty good friend I’ve known for sometime. I knew him to be somewhat on the libertarian spectrum of politics, but this tweet just kinda set me off. The tweet read, “If you don’t like a gym, you can leave it. If you don’t like America, you can leave it. Now how is this racist?”
This statement was wrong on so many levels, but I’ve heard this sentiment before. Distorting your disdain for a differing opinion, with an anti American sentiment. We see it all the time, most recently with the 4 Progressive Congresswomen the President. Going against the grain of the nativist rhetoric that floods the airwaves of mainstream media can be easily thwarted by telling someone if they don’t like the maltreatment, the injustice, the violations of civil liberties that the can just “leave”. It also is usually spewed in a way that’s easily palatable for the masses to consume. Make it relatable, oversimplified and it’s a dissent crushing argument for the right. In this case, I found it delusional to equate a sovereign nation with a private enterprise. Two extremely different things, so the argument is, a false equivalency. Also, to answer the later question in the tweet, “is this racist?”, when you’re using this…
