Watch: Teen Wearing MAGA Hat Attacked by Two Grown Adults
What is it with Seattle? Its particular brand of liberalism has always stuck with me since a visit to the Emerald City back in the 1990s, back when a prepubescent me was accosted by a homeless man who told me to tell my “cheap parents” to give me some money.
I haven’t been back in the interim for obvious reasons, and various idiocies like former Mayor Ed Murray (an accused pederast who only resigned after the fifth alleged victim came forward), and a sugary drinks tax that almost taxed diet soda too since so many white people drink it have proved I haven’t made the wrong decision.
Some of us, however, can’t avoid the city of Seattle. And, at least for one teenager, his decision to show his political beliefs publicly while there led to yet another case of MAGA hat harassment, courtesy of two idiot adults.
According to Fox News, Ashton Hess and his family were waiting outside of a Starbucks Reserve Roastery when a woman knocked “Make America Great Again” cap off his head and a man spat on it.
“That’s my property dude,” Hess can be heard saying in a YouTube video posted July 18. “Come on.”
The man can be heard saying “get the f*** out (of) this city.”
“You’re not welcome here,” the woman can be heard saying in the video, which can be found here. (There is some NSFW language, so viewer discretion is advised.)
The man, Hess wrote on the YouTube video, “continued to curse at and flip off my family. I did absolutely nothing to provoke anyone around, and was completely blindsided when I was hit.”
A Twitter user going by the handle @3thanshane — a self-described 22-year-old “nonbinary they/them” — has admitted being one of the two people involved in bullying the Belleville, Washington, honors student, according to Heavy.com.
“Literally taking one MAGA hat off has triggered TENS OF THOUSANDS of conservatives to voice their opinion about fags and ‘trannies’ needing to die,” 3thanshane tweeted. “Pretty obvious why I did it, no?”
https://twitter.com/3thanshane/status/1020694708853432320
Well, death threats are pretty appalling, but so is what this “nonbinary they/them” claims to have done. The same user also retweeted a post that said “Can we just take note that whenever we’re talking about MAGA s*** and the word ‘assault’ is used it always seems to mean ‘inconvenienced/made to feel unwelcome’ as opposed ‘actually physically harmed.’ Matthew Shephard was assaulted. This guy’s ego got bruised but he walked away.”
Right. So Matthew Shephard — a gay man who was brutally murdered in Wyoming in 1998 — is now apparently the only yardstick against which a conservative can claim to be “assaulted.” Anything else is just a mere “inconvenience,” including telling a teenager he isn’t wanted in a city and then physically attacking him because of something he was wearing. (Standards for non-conservatives are somewhat different.)
As it turns out, this kind of “inconvenience” is against Washington law, as Hess pointed out in a tweet: “In WA, a person commits the crime of assault in the fourth degree, by hitting, touching, or attempting to injure another; or intentionally placing another in fear of injury by some physical act,” he noted.
So, yes, not just making someone feel unwelcome. But why let facts get in the way? Anyone responsible for that 280-characters-or-less fusillade of nonsense probably wasn’t doing that in the first place.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen something like this happen over a hat with four simple words associated with the current president of the United States that apparently drives people to uncontrollable rage. The most infamous incident happened at a San Antonio, Texas Whataburger on July 4, where a teenager had a soda thrown in his face and his MAGA hat ripped off.
The admitted perpetrator, 30-year-old Kino Jimenez, “said seeing the hat had the same effect on him that a Ku Klux Klan hood would have had.” The media was also willing to run with a single unconfirmed report that the teenager in question was saying racist things before the attack (something Jimenez himself didn’t count as a contributing factor in the attack during an exceedingly self-defeating interview with a local television station after his release, so you can pretty much throw that out as a motive).
Now we have someone also apparently willing to take responsibility for this crime (it could just be a troll, but @3thanshane has posted a number of pictures that certainly look exactly like the green-haired perpetrator), and also willing to retweet someone calling it all an “inconvenience.”
In other words, in the presence of a MAGA hat, nobody is responsible for their actions. The hat (and the person who chose to wear it) are actually the responsible parties. It’s like a Klan hood or a swastika.
Except it’s not. It’s a hat expressing support for Donald Trump. If you’ve defined down the symbol of arrant bigotry to a MAGA cap and then acquitted yourself of whatever you do when you’re around someone wearing it, you’re no longer just expressing your opinions. You’ve become a very real danger — or “unsafe,” to use the parlance of the left — to those looking to exercise their First Amendment rights.
As for the MAGA hat itself, Hess has decided to lay it to rest in the wake of the incident.
RIP trusty MAGA hat, you will be missed. pic.twitter.com/jDgJQVp42G
— Ashton Hess (@HessAshton) July 19, 2018
This, I suppose, is what you get for visiting Seattle and bringing your own opinions with you.
Requiescat in pace, dear MAGA hat, and may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
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