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Nope. I've been looking at responses like the comments at this Reddit thread. Bits like:
and:
and:
and:
and:
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That's the whole "frontlash" idea ā the real issue is all the innocent people who will be hurt by the likely "backlash". To quote a 2016 tweet from the late Norm Macdonald satirizing this view (in the context of Islamic terror attacks):
The problem, says this narrative, isn't that someone tried to kill Trump, it's all the horrible things he and Republicans are going to do to innocent people when they lash out blindly in retaliation.
Edit: add on this bit of sarcasm:
This is just boo outgroup stuff. If a rightist made an attempt on Bidenās life there would tons of conservative forums and even users here making essentially the same comments inverted, about how woke and the left had divided America and fractured society racially and politically and this was the unfortunate consequence.
You are making this up.
"The left actually did this. Well, the right didn't actually do this, but I'm sure they would do it if they had the chance!" is not very good reasoning.
Err.. She's positing a counterfactual, that's not "making this up", anymore than if I say that if I went and punched you, you might punch me back.
She's positing the counterfacual of "if a rightist made an attempt on Biden's life". but she's making things up when she then decides how conservatives would behave in response. The behavior of conservatives isn't a premise of the counterfactual, it's an assumption about what conservatives are like in the real world.
You cannot have a counterfactual without assumptions. I happen to think, given observed behavior on both sides of the political spectrum, that there would an absolutely non-negligible number of people on the Right doing the things she spoke about.
You're welcome to disagree, but it's impossible to talk about things that didn't happen without said assumptions. Criticize those, as you're doing now.
The required assumption of such a counterfactual is "if a rightist made an attempt on Biden's life". Also assuming the conservative reaction to it isn't making a point by using a counterfactual, it's just exhibiting your own assumptions.
No, the counterfactual and associated, unavoidable assumption is:
You cannot divorce one from the other. You might well disagree with @2rafa or me about how reality works, and given that it's pitting one set of observations about how massive numbers of internet partisans behave against another, there's not much room to resolve it conclusively beyond what a given person finds plausible.
That's a useless counterfactual; it doesn't convince anyone of anything. A useful counterfactual would require that the consequences of the counterfactual be agreed upon.
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