☆ Far-left groups hint at violence in protest outside of Mahan's home
In addition to getting their facts all wrong in their protests against Mayor Mahan's homelessness plans, local far-left groups extended a longstanding trend of invoking violent and bullying conventions in their misguided advocacy. An Opp Now exclusive.
Pay attention to those crossed-out eyes. For those of you who didn't read comic books as kids, those x's over the eyes usually mean one thing: you're dead.
Hence the concern when local far-left groups promoted their recent protest outside Mayor Mahan's family home with a flyer that had Mahan's eyes x'd out.
Online commenters explain:
“I’ve seen it in comics dating back to the 30s (?). No earlier than the 1890s I think, and starting in the assembly-line illustration of newspaper cartoons.
“It caught on. It’s an easy shorthand to distinguish dead (X) from sleeping (-).”
“The eyes are the windows to the soul.
“An ‘X’ has long been short-hand for something being ‘crossed out’: nullified or negated.
“At death…the ultimate nullification…the ‘soul windows’ are representing the soul’s permanent expulsion from the mortal coil.”
This is not the first time that local far-left groups have employed the x'd out eyes convention to express their displeasure with local politicians. County DA Jeff Rosen (who is Jewish) was the recipient of the same treatment when local groups, in what many considered a blatantly antisemitic flyer, targeted him when saying: "Resist against Zionism by any and all means necessary."
The groups' decision to protest outside of Mahan's family home also recalls a similar protest outside of Mayor Liccardo's home in 2020, in which the former mayor's home was vandalized.
As far as we can determine, only Palo Alto's Greg Tanaka has expressed concern about the use of violent conventions and tropes by these far-left groups.
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