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Notes -
Some rambling on modern attitudes found generally leftward which I strongly dislike. First, an anecdote:
There was recently a shooting at a gay bar. I share an online space with some friends and some acquaintances for general purpose discussion - no specific focus other than a general lean toward our mutual shared interests, which are unrelated to the shooting or what follows.
One person posted an article about the shooting and then something roughly equivalent to "thoughts and prayers" for the victims, and a follow up note that Bigotry Is Bad. No problem, I'm on board. A second person posted that, as a sexual minority, they are now afraid to go out. They have updated based on this attack to think the world is not safe enough to enjoy. I interjected with something along the lines of "hold on, attacks like this are less likely to get you than car accidents or [insert whatever mundane thing] - yes they're flashy and scary, but you really shouldn't update based on them - they're statistically insignificant AND if you want to view them as terrorism then you living in fear is letting them win - you shouldn't do that"
The response I got was a gentle dogpile (they did start with "I know you're just trying to help, but..." and such), saying that I shouldn't be trying to tell marginalized people how to feel about things and I should let them have space to process their trauma and etc etc, much insistence on "letting the victims speak" (by which they mean indirect victims - people that share a class with the victims, not the firsthand victims) and being a good ally by listening. I pushed back for a bit saying that I'm not making any claims about the general safety of LGBTetc folks (though they are still safe enough to not feel so afraid of the world around them if they live somewhere like the US, this was left unsaid) and that I'm only saying if you previously had the courage to face the world, the shooting shouldn't have changed that and we explicitly had a person saying exactly that they were now afraid based on this event...
But eventually I got the sense they just didn't want to hear me. I gave an apology in the vein of "when people are afraid is exactly the BEST time to reassure them, but clearly I am failing to do that, so I'll back off" and they spent a few seconds talking about how important and good it is to let LGBT voices speak first (of which there were several available in the space, many of which were in the dopile). After those seconds, we have had 24+ hours of silence. Not a word on the topic from any involved or even any spectators, though they all continued talking about unrelated things in other channels of the space.
So. What happened here? I feel like insistence on sitting down and letting marginalized voices be heard is frequently insincere, as it happens even when nobody marginalized (or indeed, anybody at all) has anything to say. It is a "shut up" button, to be deployed whenever somebody says something you don't like that's adjacent to [minority issue]. Even if that isn't how they feel about it, that is functionally what is going on.
Superweapons are bad.
So I'm getting an awful lot of responses in the vein of "of course they reacted like that, you responded with [logic] to [emotion] and that's no good" - ordinarily I would agree - case closed. I do get that, even if in this case I may have slipped a bit in practice. I'm generic nerd STEMy, not a complete sperg. That isn't the source of my confusion or the reason to bring it up. That's ordinary human dynamics 101 - and also not the reason I code the reaction as left.
I am confused by/reacting to/coding-as-left the specific reaction of "stop talking and let the marginalized speak" because in this case it demonstrably did not apply. Nobody marginalized spoke before or after about how they felt or what they thought aside from the literally singular sentence that maps to "I don't want to go out anymore because of fear of this" person.
THAT is what I code as left and am confused about. The idea of lived experience is not without merit. Some people have access to experiences others don't. But that's not the same as "always cede the floor, even if they aren't using it".
You are approaching this with a mistake theory mindset instead of with a conflict one. As you surmised their "stop talking and let the marginalized speak" was lefty speak for shut up, why did they do that? because you got between a bunch of lefties and the opportunity to affirm their "victimhood" to the audience and receive their backpats for their incredible bravery in existing. That is all it was, a self-masturbatory session, and you went and ruined it; with the added point that you are now probably in one or more shit lists in your group.
EDIT.- To further clarify: they used the "superweapon" because instead of acting like an ingroup member and praising the "victim" for his bravery and lamenting with the group the continued existance of white supremacy, you acted like a member of their outgroup and tried in their eyes to diminish the victimhood of one of their members.
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