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This is a fair counter to the innocently-unaware angle, but not to the more layered second option I presented, where people were aware that there was violence happening, but thought it should be tolerated for the sake of the protests, because allowing the government to use the excuse of the riots to suppress the (purportedly historically important) protests themselves would be even worse.
If Blues "didn't want it to happen", but actively denied it was happening, attacked anyone that claimed it was happening regardless of their evidence, actively supported the people making it happen and refused to punish them, refused to take any action to stop it from happening, refused to allow anyone else to take any action to stop it from happening and fiercely attacked them if they tried anyway, and finally broadly celebrated it happening... The honest truth is that they wanted it to happen, but didn't want to accept responsibility for it happening.
Blues make accusations against Reds like this all the time, re: spree killings. We're unwilling to do what's needed to stop the killings, ie banning guns, so we want killings, or at minimum bear full responsibility for them. But we are willing to do lots of things to stop killings, from fortifying targets to literally shooting the would-be killers dead.
You tell me what Blues were willing to do, not say, but do, to stop the riots.
And the fact that we are still playing language games over this issue shows that nothing has changed, and no lessons have been learned. I cannot trust Blue Tribe to provide me equal protection under the law, because they have generated common knowledge that they absolutely will not do so. I understand that most Blues are unwilling to admit this, but the facts speak for themselves. Your arguments don't seem to dispute this fact in any substantive fashion, only to explain why they think it's a good thing. But I already know why they think it's a good thing: they believed, and many of them apparently still believe, that police kill two or three orders of magnitude more unarmed black people than they actually do, that ACAB, that we should abolish police and prisons, and that crime is either imaginary or caused entirely by insufficient leftist policy or not actually that big a deal or that the victims deserve it, as is maximally convenient for them in any given situation.
I am not willing to have my tribe reduced to second-class-citizen status, and I am not willing to allow Blues to use lawless political violence to suppress my views and political activity. If that is Blue Tribe's best offer, as it in fact seems to be, I and many Reds like me prefer war.
And when the Blues use their domination of institutional power centers to so reduce you, what're you gonna do about it?
And when Blues do use political violence so, what're you gonna do about it?
And after your so-called "war" — composed entirely of poorly-aimed, uncoordinated "lone wolf" attacks (because anything more effective would require levels of coordination of which the Red Tribe is incapable, and also to which the Red Tribe is utterly hostile (just spend time in Sarah Hoyt's comments section, or the Instapundit comments, about how anyone who so much as utters the words "organizing" or "joining" or "coordinating" is a "fed" and will be shot in the face, and that the only "strategy" is for each individual household to fort up to defend, all on their lonesome, when "they" Come For Our Guns™)) — is defeated, not by the military, but by ordinary civilian law enforcement (because that's all you need to handle such independent actors), what then?
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I think this is wrong too. The "Reds want killings" conclusion at any rate. Reds accept killings as a trade-off, because they care about other things more; just as the Blues accepted rioting as a trade-off, because they cared about their ability to protest more. Neither side actually "wants" the bad side-effects of the policies they pursue, not as ends unto themselves. Flattening cases of "wanted a policy which entailed negative side effects XYZ" into the much-worse-sounding "wanted XYZ" pollutes political discourse on both sides, and I hate it.
...And yet, we are willing to take other actions, even costly ones, certainly effective ones, to deter people from becoming spree killers, and to stop spree killers from achieving their objectives. We are not willing to handle the problem the way Blues want it handled, but we are in fact willing to handle the problem.
I repeat: You tell me what Blues were willing to do, not say, but do, to stop the riots. Tell me what the analogous action to shooting would-be spree killers dead is for Blue Tribe with regard to riots.
Uniformed gangs on men with rifles took over a chunk of a city, declared it a no-go zone for the police, and began threatening and shooting at people. Blue Tribe not only stood back and let them do this for over a month, but when they actually murdered someone, they allowed them to retreat anonymously, made no effort to apprehend or even identify them, and did their best to memory-hole the whole incident. They did this collectively, as a tribe, systematically disabling all of our society's safety rails and lockouts in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening or punishing it when it happens anyway or even retaining memory that it had happened. I have no reason to believe they will not do it again.
Nor is this some principled stand. They did not mind aggressively prosecuting Rittenhouse or Baca or the boomer couple who didn't even fire a shot or any of the other reds who attempted to defend themselves, all the way back to Based Stick Man. No blue objected to Babbit, an unarmed woman, being shot dead on Jan 6th; suddenly rioting was very, very dangerous, actually. Antifa in Portland continue to routinely assault peaceful Reds, and the police continue to turn a blind eye. This is not a one-shot process, we have a decade's worth of data-points at minimum, and they all go the same way: our speech is violence, blue violence is speech.
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Shouldn’t those people want the riots to stop even more?
Abstractly, yes. But so long as they believe cops are instruments of the would-be fascist blah blah blah, and absolutely cannot be trusted, then they cannot countenance the government actually doing anything to make the riots stop. (This is in many ways just a larger-scale version of the broader piece of BLM wisdom about how you should never ever call the cops on a situation involving a black person unless you want their death on your conscience - which is thought to apply even when wrongful actions genuinely have been committed.)
Isn’t this just another way of saying “blue tribe supports the riots because it thinks without the riots other what they view as good things won’t come to fruition?”
Maybe you think that’s unfair, but I really struggle to understand the above thinking as it’s divorced from reality.
Wouldn't you agree there is a meaningful, important difference between "supporting holocaust denialism" and "not wanting holocaust denialism to be censored by the government, because wrong and dumb as it is, suppressing it is the thin end of the wedge on the government choking out free political speech on a larger scale"? I think that is a good analogy for the mainstream Blue position on the riots. "Obviously looting and arson are wrong, but if we let the police seriously intervene, they'll use that as an opportunity to squash legitimate protests, too, so que sera sera." It seems worth distinguishing, on a moral and norms-maintenance level, from the accusation that Blue Tribe genuinely, actively wanted buildings to be burned and looted. Reluctant tolerance isn't support.
(Obviously this is reliant on a… biased… view of how institutionally untrustworthy cops are. But granting this factually-dubious belief, then it seems coherent to be leery of riots-suppression without properly "supporting" the riots. And in fairness, the validity of that leeriness is not necessarily reliant on the straightforwardly-wrong claims about how prevalent police killings are. Conceivably the police may be tempted to unfairly suppress legitimate BLM protests even in a world where the core claim of the BLM protests was wrong, precisely because it's all the more tempting to suppress your enemies' speech if you genuinely, sincerely believe them to be spreading damaging lies about you.)
Personally I do think there's some amount of illegal violence you just have to grudgingly tolerate, if you want a meaningful right to protest to exist in your country. Crowd control is notoriously hard, let alone in a grassroots, spontaneous movement. In the real world, "Sure, you can protest… but if even a hundred people nation-wide get violent, then we'll send in the troops and condemn the entire movement" is as good as a ban having large-scale protests at all. Now, I think the BLM riots clearly passed that threshold, at least in some states. But it's not a binary. Tolerating some amount of rioting makes sense to me, just on general principle - never mind that cops had plausible motivation to hold special ill will against BLM because their own interests were at stake.
I don’t think that argument coheres. There is just a step difference between permitting Holocaust denialism and permitting massive multibillion dollar mayhem.
One could make the argument about protest if there was maybe a car or two turned on fire. Still despicable but within the pale to say “but all of the peaceful protest is worth not shutting down the very small rioting.”
But when you get to night after night attempted to siege a federal courthouse it’s just too far removed from a concern about protest.
I think there's a deep difference of gut-level instincts between the tribes here. Someone left-wing will quite naturally think that permitting Holocaust denialism would be much worse than permitting arbitrary thuggish looting and mayhem, because the former is the first stepping stone on a road that leads potentially to dictatorship and genocide, while the second (they perceive) is only ever going to be a marginal problem, not an existential threat to civilization.
Well, I don't know that they'd see the besieged courthouse as falling under the "rioting", or indeed, that I do. That seems to be a different matter. By "riots" I would refer to the random, apolitical, anarchic mayhem using the broad context of the protests as an excuse to run amok and pillage from random businesses. The arson, the theft, the intimidation and extortion of random homeowners. This was clearly not the motivation behind laying siege to the courthouse, which was obviously a targeted political act. Perhaps the tactic is too aggressive to fall under permissible civil protest, perhaps it tips over into revolutionary violence; but that's an issue of degree, not of kind.
Except the left cheered on (or tried to downplay) the siege and was worried about “police violence” vis-à-vis the attackers. I would’ve shot the lot.
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I'm on the left, and I disagree heavily. And many on the left do as well. That thought process requires buying into a particularly anti-liberal view of the world, which many progressive leftists certainly do, but which is nowhere near defining or universal among leftists. Notably, believing that one knows so much about the future and cause-and-effect that they can have confidence that permitting Holocaust denialism would be more likely to lead to dictatorship and genocide than less is certainly a massive act of hubris and could only be justified through faith, given what we know about history. Which is all well and good, but it certainly should be openly stated.
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