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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.
Identifying arguments as structurally similar is useful if you're studying how people argue, but it's not an especially insightful regarding object level disagreement. Certain patterns of argument frequently recur, but you can't substitute that observation for actually resolving the disagreement, because the substance of the disagreement is in the object level. The question of whether or not Ashli Babbitt was a traitor or a martyr depends almost entirely on whether or not you think the 2020 election was stolen*, not on whether or not you think it is legitimate to resist the government under at least some circumstances.
To put it another way: liberals and conservatives both generally agree that you are obligated to obey legitimate laws and you are not obligated to obey illegitimate laws** (and, indeed, may be obligated not to obey - 'orders are orders' not being considered a good excuse for bad behavior). Observing this doesn't help you adjudicate the differences between cases, because you still need to make judgments about the specific details of the case.
I don't think you can infer that from their actions. If you ask them, they will generally argue that their actions are upholding rule of law and democracy, and for the most part they mean it.
*one could conceivably argue that the shooting was unjustified and the insurrection was unjustified, but that seems to be a marginal position
**In reality, people ignore all sorts of laws all the time, including laws they don't really question the validity of (e.g. traffic laws), which also raises the secondary question of which laws are important enough to care about violations. One could think a law is legitimate, but the measures taken to enforce it are not
I think there's another question, which is whether it is okay to break otherwise legitimate laws in order to oppose various kinds of bad behavior. Presumably most Leftists would agree that in general, it should be illegal to block streets, burn other peoples' property, and so on.
I think leftists actually believe that the ability to engage in annoying protest, particularly including blocking streets, is a form of free speech. It is a rare case where the tactic is tribally-coded, not just the target.
Right-wing protesters whose message the left considers within the bounds of free speech (like pro-foxhunting protestors in the UK, or pro-motorist protestors almost everywhere) get the same kid glove treatment from the leftist establishment viz-a-viz enforcement of public order laws that leftist protestors get. Anti-immigrant, anti-COVID-restrictions, and explicitly racist protests get the jackboot, but then those messages got the banhammer when expressed peacefully on social media.
The only groups in Europe that come to mind that are remotely comparable to what the anti-ICE people are doing, are the climate activists that glue themselves to highways. Most of everyone else files for a protest permit at the town hall.
I'm mostly thinking about the various trucker and farmer protests involving deliberately blocking roads in the UK and France. These are usually nominally about fuel tax, but are clearly right-coded. They get the kid gloves, because tax policy is the type of issue where the left considers occasional roadblocks to be free speech. The Canadian trucker convoy got the jackboot because the left doesn't consider COVID-19 to be an issue where free speech applies.
The largest right-populist-coded protest movement in Europe in recent years is the gilets jaunes in France, which didn't touch the hot buttons around race and immigration and got the kid gloves.
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