We Need To Talk About Optics

Leftists Keep Stepping On Their Own Dicks And Fascists Are Benefitting

I spent the better part of this weekend trying to explain this picture to people.

I’m not talking about Donald Trump supporters – I don’t talk to them anymore – but normal people who don’t care for Trump but are concerned or have had concerns about the direction of the Democratic Party and left-of-center movements this decade. The type of voter who votes for Andrew Cuomo or John Fetterman, and the type who are open to voting for Republicans even in the Trump era, if Democrats push them away.

When they saw this photo, they all had similar reactions:

“Why are they vandalizing property?”

“I thought they wanted to be Americans, why do they have a Mexican flag?”

“They’re not convincing me they genuinely want to be American?”

“This makes me think Trump has a point.”

This weekend, as protests arose against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in the Los Angeles area that have picked up, among others, children. Violent agitators setting cars on fire, tossing bricks at cops, and waving Mexican flags in front of the damage they caused joined otherwise peaceful protests.

The reaction was overwhelmingly brutal and made me feel defeated. It felt like deja vu - another left-wing cause damaged by progressives’ inability or lack of desire to acknowledge the importance of optics in political movements.

Progressives don’t want to care about optics. I get it. It seems like a relatively trivial concern to worry about optics when the world is on fire. As one activist said on social media: “people are being kidnapped, fuck your optics.”

It feels like Katniss Everdeen being followed around by a film crew in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. Spending time and energy trying to manufacture a response that will be aesthetically pleasing to Middle America feels phony and contrived. Burning cars and waving foreign flags evoke a sense of genuine bravery. It’s in your face. Not caring about optics feels courageous. After all, why should we care what Middle America thinks when they were willing to vote for Trump in the first place? They’re just as complicit in all this as Trump is. Perhaps even more so.

There’s a good reason to care, and you’re not going to like it.