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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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