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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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