Flight Facilities Slammed For “Privileged” View Of Anti-Trump Protests

The prevailing take-away from Donald Trump’s election win (apart from shock, in all its forms, from everyone) is that most of us failed to adequately address the deep political disenfranchisement felt by huge chunks of the American voting populace. 

As that becomes clearer, we’re faced with a new problem: working out how we should respect and react to voters who wanted something – anything – to change, while recognising the man they chose to instigate those changes is an unrepentantly racist, misogynist, xenophobic, and dangerous husk of a human. 

Flight Facilities, of all people, don’t appear to have struck that balance. 

This afternoon, the Aussie choon-merchants posted a wide-reaching post regarding the ongoing protests in the US against Trump’s presidency. In it, they write that “instead of kicking, screaming and insulting, maybe it’s time to stop, look around, and look inward as to exactly how this has happened.

“Protesting and rioting in response to a democratically held election, undermines the fabric on which a great country was built. Sometimes things don’t go the way we want them to. That’s life. But if we live by the mentality of turning to violence and intimidation when things don’t go our way, why should we expect our adversaries to take the higher ground when it does?”

At this point, you may be able to sense why readers would take umbrage to Flight Fac’s take, considering Trump’s pathological inability to take anything close to the high road. Still, the post continues in a similarly matter-of-fact tone, focussing on the issue of social media’s echo chamber, before this:

“The Republican party won the 2016 election with less of the white vote, than when it lost in 2012, which hopefully suggests that this week’s truly unbelievable result is less about hate, and more about the resonance of something more we failed to see.

The sun will rise tomorrow. The world will keep turning. So, be excellent to each other, especially those you disagree with, and prove to us all that, irrespective of party politics, you can still be the greatest country on Earth.”

It’s those sentences in particular that have sparked a pretty vigorous response from fans. One reminded the musos that peaceful protests have been at the heart of many of the United States’ greatest civil rights victories:

However, the strongest message to the act has been that, welp, Trump’s presidency represents a very real threat to the rights and liberties of many oppressed and disadvantaged minorities within the nation.

One commenter wrote “telling non white Americans to smile and take it (as they have had to do for all of America’s existence) is condescending as hell, and shows a huge lack of awareness,” with another saying the post is “such a privileged answer” to the issue.

Another wrote “this is not a normal election, this is not people whining they didn’t get their way,” and “there is no fucking way you’d write this if you weren’t two white men.”

An Aussie poster added a local perspective, saying “democracy also gave us Mike Baird but you’ve happily supported the Keep Sydney Open protests. Why are the Sydney lockout laws somehow more important than the rights of millions of American women, POC, and LGBTQ people?”

Perhaps fan Mike Duong landed the most pointed rebuttal. He writes that while some of his mates are white, “some are Hispanic, some are Asian. Some are Muslim. There is real, tangible, crippling fear here. And it’s not just media hype. 

Duong closed his retort by saying “I hope you have the courage to express your sweetest of sentiments to the children who come home from school being bullied, threatened, intimidated, told that they will soon be deported, imprisoned, or killed.”

FWIW, the source post also has its fair share of supporters who are fully behind Flight Facilities’ message of understanding, but you’re likely going to see more people railing against that kind of optimistic narrative in the future. 

Read the full post, and responses to it, right here.