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One difference is that it seems to be acceptable among much broader swathes of the left to celebrate violence against the outgroup it is on the right. Look at how many people expressed admiration for Luigi Mangione, for example. It doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that the left has far more of a problem with tacitly supporting violence than the right.
Your mileage may definitely vary. I've grown up listening to right-wingers not-as-coyly-as-they-think cheer for all manner of violence against their enemies. There's a lot of stuff I ignored when I was inside the tent that I reflect back on and realize how casual support for violence was. It certainly wasn't everybody, but it was quite common and encountered very little pushback.
And these were normies conservatives and that was before Trump came in the scene and started actively riling them up.
Certainly you can find people like that on the left. IME the biggest difference is that when there's left-wing political violence, normie liberals will usually say "that's terrible" and when there's right-wing political violence, normie conservatives will split into thirds along the lines of "it's good, actually", blaming the left, and just pretending it didn't happen.
I don't know what the situation was like for you growing up, but my sense is that there's currently a clear asymmetry. I believe you if you say that individual right-wingers said those sorts of things around you, but the difference as far as I see is that you have close to entire mainstream platforms like reddit and branches of academia that openly celebrate things like this in a way there's no real right-wing equivalent for.
It's meaningless for 80% of liberals to say "that's terrible" when they refuse to disassociate from the 20% who say "that's awesome" and when that latter group has outsize influence in left-wing politics.
Do you have evidence of this? I don't live in the US so my exposure to American media is limited, but I can't think of any non-fringe right-wing group that celebrates political violence on the right. You'd have to go to really marginal groups with tiny numbers like white supremacist or incel forums. There are multiple often-violent groups often have the tacit if not explicit support of much of the American left: Antifa, the Punch A Terf crowd, the pro-Hamas people, the Defund the police contingent, BLM etc.
You would be correct.
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Jan 6 will continue to be the premier example. The conservative reaction basically split three ways between "it was a false flag", J6ers are heroes, and it was actually no big deal. Eventually this consolidated on a hybrid of the latter two positions (e.g. the lionization of Ashli Babbitt). You don't have to go dumpster diving for groypers to find this. It will come up relatively frequently on gun/hunting forums or other conservative-dominated space where they feel they are 'in private'. I mean, shit, it comes up here from time to time.
However, to your opening paragraph: half my point in this thread has been that American right-wingers don't process their support for political violence as support for political violence. When Tom Cotton calls for people to beat up pro-Palestinian protestors, or they laugh about a guy nearly beating Paul Pelosi to death, or they cheer for police brutality, they don't think of that as supporting political violence. When someone plows a truck into a crowd of protestors, they shrug and say "shouldn't have been standing there" (while laughing behind their hands). When it becomes unignorable (as in the Minnesota case), they shift the blame to mental health or somehow try to make it the fault of left-wingers.
You mention not disassociating from the 20%, but for American* right-wingers the 20% includes much of their senior leadership.
(I also want to note that this is not a new phenomenon; conservatives have been joking about murdering Democrats for decades)
*I have to specify American right-wingers because I don't think this is some timeless quality of conservatism; Americans in general seem a lot more comfortable with violence than their European counterparts
Jan 6th is fair to bring up, although I'm not sure it was any more violent in nature than many of the BLM riots or things like setting up CHAZ.
Such forums have far smaller cultural reach than places like Reddit or even Bluesky. They also have essentially no representation among university departments and college campuses, which play a critical role in shaping the attitudes of young, politically-involved people. The point is that if you're a mentally-unstable, violently inclined individual, you know you're going to get far more widespread adulation and praise for killing a right-wing figure than a left-wing one.
I googled "Tom Cotton Palestine protests" and what I found was him saying this:
That seems pretty distant for saying they should be beaten up for the positions they hold.
Do you have examples of prominent right-wingers doing either of this (for cases of unambiguous police brutality)?
Evidence? I'm not trying to be obtuse btw. I don't live in America and I don't particularly follow American news (90% of what I know about it I pick up from this website).
I have the opposite impression. That 20% on the left includes celebrities, writers, academics, politicians and platforms like reddit. I don't see an equivalent on the right.
Jan 6 will continue to be a major point of contention not for the level of violence in itself, but what that violence (along with other aspects) represents: an attempt forcibly subvert election outcomes. This is sui generis in the history of American political violence.
Firstly, physically manhandling someone against their will is assault. But, to rewind, the reason he is 'clarifying' is that he previously said this:
"I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way. It's time to put an end to this nonsense."
If you consistently characterize peaceful protestors as criminals, suggest the police should be deployed against them, suggest people should take matters into their own hands, etc... then I'm not inclined to be charitable to coy walkbacks.
Off the top of my head: Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr. both openly mocked the Pelosi attack. Mike Lee mocked the murder Melissa Hortman and suggested the far-left was to blame. I don't know what 'unambiguous' police brutality means, given how lenient the US is to police violence, efforts of state governments to curtail protest rights, and the tendency of right-wingers to equate any form of protest stronger than standing quietly for an hour or two with rioting, but one of the more notorious incidents to come out of the summer 2020 protests was the dispersal of protests in Lafayette Square in DC at the direction of Donald Trump and with the approval of prominent Republicans. We have Ben Shapiro has advocated that Derek Chauvin be pardoned, as another, later example.
On a policy level, you have things like the Trump administration pulling back on civil rights investigations related to police brutality and refusing to enforce oversight, which I would argue constitutes tacit approval for police brutality (as long as the victims are not the wrong sort of people).
For more grass roots expression, I guess you're just going to have to take my word for it that a lot of conservative voters subscribe to the Tango & Cash theory of criminal justice (and can get pretty damn racist about it to boot). Or not.
Alternatively, if you'll forgive the shitty image macro, I think this succinctly captures why left-wingers are unimpressed by right-wing scolding.
No offense, but the TheMotte is literally a forum for right-wing culture warriors and a handful of contrarian gadflies who like arguing with them. Even for the people who aren't far right, they're almost always people with progressive-critical views. It is in no way representative of American political culture, or even of normie conservative American political culture. It gives you a very one-sided view of the state of affairs, e.g. persistently highlighting RW grievances with academia while ignoring or downplaying influential right-wing media figures and general bad behavior. (If one were to base their impression of US politics purely on Motteposting, one might conclude that the right has virtually no media presence, rather than the reality that there's a massive right-wing media ecosystem).
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The left has its big somewhat-public bubbles in which anything can be said so long as it's directionally aligned with the ideology. Reddit, discord, academia, you know the rough map. But that doesn't mean that the right doesn't do the same - it just happens behind closed doors, so to speak, since right-wing spaces are by necessity less public.
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