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I'm starting a new top-level regarding trigger happy Iceman meets wine mom in Minneapolis because, rather than debating the videos, I'd like to focus more on a compare and contrast to get a true culture war angle. People have made an analogy to the woman who died on Jan 6th but I don't think it lands strongly enough. Permit me to cut closer to the bone, friends.
The only fatality on Jan 6th was an unarmed woman being shot by a federal agent[1] because she was opposing what she considered an illegitimate government action. Liberals tearlessly argued this is what happens when you Fuck Around while conservatives argued she was righteously Resisting (TM).
Today the players are the same but the jerseys are flipped. Liberals cry with so, so many tears of empathy for the dead woman in the car while conservatives argue they were obstructing a legitimate state function and put the officer in danger and this is what happens when you Fuck Around.
In broad strokes it's clear neither side cares about democracy or rule of law per se. Conservative faith in rule of law evaporates when it says no to Trump and liberal empathy for the scrappy civil disobedients dries up when it's a Chud. Both sides are happy with mob violence when it's their side doing it and cry tyranny whenever they Find Out.
Did they? Because as I recall, there were plenty of conservatives at the time who agreed that the Ashli Babbit shooting was a good shoot; it was somewhat later that some (but by no means all) groups on the right came out against. As opposed to here where on-the-close-order-of-zero leftists agree that this was a good shoot. Lots of other differences too; this looks like false both-sidesism.
I think some conservatives are sort of coming around to the idea that the unconditional solidarity on the left is a serious strength, and so they need to adopt something like that too in order to keep up. But it's difficult to maintain the same energy because it conflicts so deeply with what conservatism fundamentally is, so the hagiography of Babbitt just comes across as a cargo cult of the left's more successful hagiographies of their own martyrs. It doesn't really work without the True Belief that Your Side is so morally righteous that it is exempt from the law.
I think the more relevant conflict in the Babbitt case might just be that police (as a group) and harsh policing (as a principle) have traditionally been pretty central to conservative identity, and so it is difficult for many Reds to take sides against them, or even more generally come to terms with a world where the "boys in blue" more often than not are the enforcers of Blue hegemony. In fact, isn't all of Jan 6 really rather incongruous with conservative aesthetics?
I feel like Jan 6 was a cargo cult of the 2020 summer of love. It felt to me like a bunch of people spent summer 2020 watching leftists burn shit down with few-to-no legal or political consequences, and all attempts to stop them turning into political victories, and those people thought "hey I can do that too" without realizing that those outcomes did not come from the burning shit down, they came from the political infrastructure that the blues have spent a century constructing or institutionally capturing. It takes a lot of effort and solidarity to turn intentionally criminal and anti-social behavior into political victories, that the reds simply have not done.
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