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One angle I haven't seen anyone here bring up yet: someone from the ACX open thread brought up this question (granted in a snarky, annoying way) of whether this would hurt Trump's cred with the "Back the Blue" crowd. This is interesting. I don't expect it will, but I don't know why. At a high level, you'd think there's be a natural separation between populists, and people who enforce state-law, but I find at least where I am that police and their supporters are the most intense Trump supporters there are.
So, will the more avid police-supporters think this is some type of betrayal? If not, then I'm curious to know why.
As one of the most pro-law-and-order posters here, I would like to register that I think this is an awful decision — a total betrayal of those of Trump’s supporters who were (and still are) hoping that he will be an effective avatar for our ideology. Starting off your presidency by pardoning violent rioters is a highly counterproductive act as far as what I want from Trump is concerned.
I agree. Sometimes I feel like the only person who wants both the J6 rioters and the BLM rioters to be punished harshly. Lawlessness is lawlessness, riots are riots, violence is violence, and the fundamental duty of the state is to maintain its monopoly on violence by curtailing violent uprisings with great fire and fury.
That being said, I suspect you and I are more Auth than Trump or Trump supporters are, and at least he got this out of his system so we can focus on other things.
You're not alone. I want both groups of rioters to get significant prison sentences (like 5 years or so) in order to send a message that such activity is not acceptable in our society. But unfortunately most people are all about punishing rioters right up until they agree with the rioters' politics.
1- Our rules, fairly: both groups punished [prosecution of BLM rioters will be limited due to multiple factors including widespread public support, taking the L here is politically expedient and ultimately conciliatory]
2- Their rules, fairly: both groups pardoned [we are here now]
3- Their rules, unfairly: one group pardoned, one group condemned [we were here a day ago]
Going from 3 to 2 discourages corruption in the demos just like going from 2 to 1 does.
Ideally, we would have stuck with 1, since going from 2 to 1 is seen as the higher road (against the people but for the laws; though you'll recall this was an argument Charles I used and it didn't go so well for him) whereas going from 3 to 2 costs you support mostly on our side (in this case, our non-corrupt voters can be swayed by one faction's arguments that their corruption was Good, Actually, and then the non-corrupt vote them in and we go from 2 to 3 in an action/reaction cycle, in this case BLM/J6).
It's possible to go from 3 to 1; for example, if one tribune of the plebs (with a corrupt faction of the demos behind him) kills another one (who formed a corrupt faction of the demos behind him as a reaction) the survivor still gets banished. This could have happened on Day 1 of Biden's term, with an effective prosecution of BLM rioters on as flimsy a legal pretense as would be used on J6ers, but of course that's not what happened.
This should be on the sidebar, if we had one.
This website does have a sidebar, though it's hidden if your screen is narrower than 992 pixels.
Turns out my screen is wider than 992 pixels but I have sidebar blindness.
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