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Thanks for your lengthy response. I'm not sure if I'll have time to answer in a way that does it justice today, but I'll at least drop a few bullet points addressing some aspects now while I can:
Here's an article giving a feds-were-being-Red interpretation of Waco. I'm fairly sure I saw at least one other version of this argument during BLM.
There's a big asymmetry between the Right and the Left in that the Left has overwhelming control of the media, and I don't mean to call this asymmetry cosmetic or unimportant to questions that ultimately pertain to the Left's capability for coordinating escalation at all, but we should also try to decouple this from the sentiment of the actual masses if we are to get a handle on whether things are actually getting escalated. Take away the top-down approval, and a lot more symmetry can be seen: for example, the widespread approval among the Right for lawless killings such as the Zimmerman/Martin case (whatever you think about whether it was justified, there is little to dispute about it being lawless).
...and either way, the "Shepard tone" model does not even depend on it being "both sides", nor does it even require any particular metric to give comparable readings now and in the past! After all, a Shepard tone is made up of many separate frequency peaks that all fade in, drift in the same direction, and then eventually fade out. You may be right that, in all the ways you have described, the Left's misdeeds have only been getting worse in volume; but what about the ways you didn't touch upon? Is anything happening right now as bad as the assorted actual race riots of the past, or Weather Underground, or a coalition of blue college kids providing what should be a true Dolchstoßlegende for America's first and most iconic foreign military defeat if it didn't have so many dollar bills to wipe its tears with, or Blue spies delivering the actual crown jewels of American military secrets to the communists?
(edited in) I think you may be underestimating the degree to which "smart money"/the forces that actually steer society have taken as a lesson from WWII that maintaining normality and proving chudjak right over and over again is the winning strategy for all conflicts, and how good they have gotten at it. Russia and Ukraine are currently locked into an actual hot existential war that reduces cities to rubble and then mans cavities in the rubble with men who would rather take a few more enemies with them than surrender, and yet 50 kilometres from the front they are, with reasonable degrees of success, taking pains to keep the cute cafés and nightclubs open and running. This, if nothing else, convinces me that there are really, in some sense, still "adults at the wheel". They may be psychopathic adults with a worrying lack of concern for the well-being of their charges, but the extent of their power to delay their own gratification, control impulses and keep the machine running under the most adverse of circumstances has been proven.
I wrote a far-too-long reply, and then lost it to an internet outage. hopefully this one will work better.
....Existence proven. That is quite the article; I haven't made it through the whole thing, and it took a while to get further than the subheader. @gattsuru, you might get a kick out of this. I might try and do a writeup for it.
The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. It is not this way because someone commissioned a search of how to maximize evil, it is this way because the search is simply the sum of our collective desires. We want it to be this way more than we want it to be some other way. We are, at the end of the day, only human.
Over the last two years in particular, I think we have an abundance of solid evidence that both sides of the culture war are headless, and that no one is to any meaningful extent "in control" of the mechanisms driving the conflict. It's all paths of least resistance, incentive gradients, water flowing to the sea. Ukraine and Russia can keep cute cafes and nightclubs running fifty klicks behind the front because they are two cohesive cultures fighting an actual war centrally-directed between them, not the corpse of a formerly-cohesive culture undergoing increasingly rapid decay. We are sewn up together inside this corpse, and will likely claw each others' guts out trying to escape it. We have no front to hide behind and so everywhere is the front, and the fight is exponentially more chaotic.
The people publicly cheering Kirk's death appear to be core Progressive cadre: lots of teachers, health-care professionals, intellectuals and academics. I'm skeptical that the Democratic party or Blue Tribe more generally can actually sideline these people, much less change their minds. What can and likely will be done is to try to get them to shut up and stop scaring the hos; I think additional five-minutes-hates like this are unlikely, because the lesson learned here will be that this permutation gets you in too much trouble, so keep the murder but more plausible deniability is needed. I think this will mostly be accomplished through vibe transmission, largely subconscious, maybe through a couple essays or think-pieces crystalizing things for the slower among us.
I get that. What you seem to be arguing is that a couple years ago, support for riots increased and then decreased, and this time it's support for assassins that's increasing and then will decrease, but overall the total level of violence stays roughly equal, right?
I don't buy it. The floyd riots represented a huge increase in violence, far beyond the baseline of the post-70s decades. They were unsustainable, and so they were not sustained, and now that increased tribal appetite for violence finds new channels to flow down... but it seems to me that it is concentrating and accellerating. In the Floyd years, even in CHAZ, political killings were mostly opportunistic or impulsive, and support for them was mainly drawn from support for the riots as a whole, or from after-the-fact damage control rationalizations. Now we're seeing targeted ambush murders, with broad-based incitement and encouragement beforehand and explicit celebration afterward. That seems like a change that should worry us.
If I understand it correctly, your further argument is that in the 60s-70s, there were a bunch of other forms of conflict that were much more worrying, and we don't have those now. That's true; the Russian Collusion hoax aside, there's no hostile foreign power either tribe can ally with, and most of our foreign entanglements have been bipartisan. On the other hand we aren't the America that went into the 60s and 70s either. We're short many institutions and norms and a shedload of social cohesion, and the violence, again, is not actually coming from the fringes in any meaningful sense any more. My model is that an outright majority of Blues would be happy to see Trump murdered. That model is, I think, shared by most of Red Tribe, and we form our plans and actions based on that understanding.
Zimmerman did recieve significant Red Tribe support (although notably I don't remember anyone celebrating Martin's death), but he claimed lawful self-defense and was acquitted of his charges in court. I'm willing to agree that some verdicts are wrong; I strongly object to Angela Davis' acquittal, for example, but I would not agree that the killing was clearly lawless.
By contrast, I would agree that Drejka's shooting of McGlockton and the McMichaels' shooting of Arbery were pretty clearly lawless killings. Both cases were attempts at self-defense, but in both cases the shooter made errors in judgement that compromised the validity of their self-defense claim. Drejka recieved no support that I'm aware of; the McMichaels recieved some minimal support.
Compare these three cases to Karmelo Anthony, Luigi, and now Robinson. That's one apparent impulse murder and two premeditated ambush murders, none with even a shred of a claim to self-defense or any lawful basis for the killing. All three have received appalling levels of support from Blue Tribe broadly.
I am not seeing an equivalence here. Red Tribe supported Zimmerman and Rittenhouse also because we thought they were legitimately innocent and had acted in self-defense, and Drejka and the McMichaels we wrote off because they broke the rules, even if only in marginal and technical ways. No one cheering Robinson or Luigi or donating to Anthony is under the impression that what they did was justifiable legally, or that the illegality of the acts derives from the legal fine-print. They are celebrating the fact that their tribe can collectively flout the law, as they did in the riots as well.
Do not confuse this for an argument that we Reds are not entirely willing and capable of coordinating similar violence; the difference is who we've generally aimed it at ("Are those Level Four plates?", "I didn't lose shit", "belt-feds are the only good feds", "the tree of liberty", etc), and the fact that we have drawn and enforced lines that keeps such lawless killing almost entirely (and, arguably, comically) theoretical.
To be fair, you yourself did have to fight against a few chuckleheads here, and more people who were willing to But Arbery Might Have Stolen Something Before. But, yeah, even among pretty extreme parts of the right-wing, the McMichaels were nowhere near the cause celebre that people imagine.
Interesting, but I'll note that it doesn't actually call the fed actions Red tribe. Renfo says, instead:
And the book agrees :
While there's a lot of lurid reviews of Cook's work as talking about the Red Tribe's devolution into 'conspiracy theorists' -- and Cook does spend nearly a third of the book on that -- the other two thirds of the book are split between talking about Koresh and the Davidians were fuckups (not always fairly) and how the feds fucked everything up. Which makes the contrast pretty awkward, given the extent the theorists were sometimes right, even in his telling.
That's far from an unbiased or neutral telling, especially if you're familiar with the finer details. Cook takes every Democratic party deflection at face value (and literally mentions Freeh once in the entire book, not merely believes that the Davidians lit the fire but so certain he quotes someone calling any other possibility barmy) to pretend the FBI was manipulating everyone around them, but he does at least mention some of the multitude of lies (no flammable CS gas until oops there was) and destroyed or lost evidence (the steel door and three disappearing cameras are mentioned, though not some other records), and the absolute atrocity of a show trial the surviving Davidians received.
But for all my criticisms, it's also not saying they were Red Tribe behaviors. Cook's story is that they're just The Feds.
I want to say someone making a more dedicated argument specifically about the raid 'really' starting with local Red-Tribe-On-Red-Tribe fighting, though I can't find it in my records and I'm pretty sure it was long enough ago it couldn't have been this specific article or book. The weakman is just that the investigations started under Bush I's ATF (just as Ruby happened before the 1992 election even happened), but that struggles with the extent these orgs were clearly trying to support major policies among the then-ascendant left side of the aisle. Steelman was something about the intra-Davidian battles getting pushed up to the state, and the state indirectly pushing them to the feds, and the feds were stuck holding the bill... but that still runs into the problem of how the feds actually handled things.
I'd quibble that this is a moderately recent development: there were some parts of the early anti-abortion movement and anti- that were similarly bloodthirsty and tolerated, and it took a pretty sizable effort by both the more moderate bits of the religious right and some lawfare by leftists to shove it into a box. The Days of Rage did also have the MOOVE bombing and some amount of tolerated targeted violence that direction, even if it's often overstated by Zinnian tellings.
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