Back in July, Millie Weaver, or Millennial Millie of Infowars, recorded a video where she went to a rally in Cleveland, Ohio to speak to the anti-Trump protesters. Her intention here was to show how silly these people are: she titled her video “Anti-Trump Protesters vs Reason” and wrote the following description:
Millie Weaver strikes up dialog with outspoken anti-Trump protesters whose contrarian views appear to be contradictory. Is “anti-Trump” actually “anti-reason”?
At the 6:25 mark, she engages a group of International Workers of the World (IWW) members and asks what their movement is and then continues with some more questions. Watch it here:
If you’ve spent more than ten seconds on this blog, you will know that I am on the opposite side of the anti-authoritarian spectrum from the IWW, but they absolutely mopped the floor in this exchange with Weaver. They were friendly, quick with their responses, witty, and were either laughing or had smiles on their faces the entire time. They were never flustered at any point and it was obvious that Weaver was just fishing around for anything that might trip them up.
And despite what the video description says, they never contradicted themselves.
This does not mean that their philosophy is correct, but there is nothing that they said that should lead to criticism other than “I disagree with you on…” Weaver tried some “gotcha” questions, but she was clearly grasping at straws and seemed (was) weak. I believe this was the case for two reasons:
- Weaver thought she was going to be talking to idiots.
- Weaver does not understand leftist anti-authoritarian philosophy.
As a result, she was completely unprepared to have a meaningful debate. She heard a few Marxist buzzwords and then, for example, tossed out this monstrosity of a question:
So you guys believe in basically seizing the means of production. So how would you do that? Would you just, like, if somebody has a business registered in their name or a corporation, would the government do that?
They already said that they were anti-authoritarian (and restated that in their response to this question). She was so arrogant that she must have ignored everything they previously said and just assumed they would contradict themselves. And then to cement the idea that she was completely outmatched, she randomly asks, “Were you guys Bernie supporters?”
Her final attempt to get a contradiction out of them was to ask if they were going to vote in the upcoming election, to which they answered yes. She thought she had them by following that question with “So I thought you said you don’t believe in the system, so why are you going to vote?” But since these guys aren’t idiots and have clearly thought about all of this before, they very rationally explained that while they don’t expect the political system is going to create the change they want, it’s still a decent and easy tool to use (which is a view shared in common with many libertarians).
If it wasn’t enough that Weaver looked horrible, she is so delusional that she must have thought the opposite about it because she included the exchange in a video about irrational protesters! Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that Weaver and Infowars support Donald Trump (since I do not agree that Donald Trump is the solution to leftist ideas) and let me say this: while it’s great that people want to go out and make videos debating leftist ideas and showing their many contradictions, you have to make sure you actually do it well. And it is true that many of them will contradict themselves, it is very dangerous to assume that all of them will do that or that they are unintelligent simply because they have leftist views. First of all, that’s a very arrogant position to take, but it can also make you look like a complete fool. It’s better to actually engage them in a conversation in order to make them to see their error so that maybe they’ll change their minds instead of trying to simply put them down.
I would say that Weaver learned that the hard way, but it’s clear she didn’t learn anything.
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