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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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The George Floyd riots certainly count as terrorism in my book. I, personally, was terrified. They blocked off the main highways going through downtown that I used everyday and burned buildings.

The Don Lemon stunt also looks like terrorism to me. But it was done with intimidation, rather than violence itself. So some kind of terrorism lite. The point is, if they weren't charged, there would be nothing to stop them from shutting down that church every week.

I would be happy with calling some of the BLM stuff terrorism, yes!

Not all of it, mind. I think blocking roads is fairly normal protest stuff that doesn't really serve to create a climate of terror in any straightforward sense - not sure how it could terrorize you, would honestly appreciate elaboration. Were the Canadian truckers terrorists? If anything, blocking roads looks to me it's a straightforward show of strength. The protesters demonstrate the ability to actually impede everyday life and the local economy on a meaningful scale if they don't get their way. That's not really the same kind of strategy as the archetypal terrorist attacks - small-scale acts of extreme violence which the terrorists couldn't scale up to a strategically meaningful extent, but which they leverage to frighten people into getting what they want anyway.

(Maybe 9/11 confuses the issue because it's intuitively "big"? But as I see it, what makes it a terrorist rather than merely military act is still the fact that the people who did it could not have repeated it enough times to actually defeat the US militarily. They merely hoped that taking out one or two high-profile targets would freak the enemy out to an irrational degree. Which, alas, it did.)

But certainly, a lot of it was terrorist in nature. Burning buildings is a very good example.

"Terror" is just shorthand for "anti-Establishment activity", because 'the state of being terrorized' is trivially gamed.

Everything $political_opponent does is terrorism- always has been, and it always will be.

Were the Canadian truckers terrorists?

Under this definition, yes. The reaction to it (freezing bank accounts) was also an act of terrorism for reasons I don't think I really have to explain.

I mean, I was afraid. They were damaging property downtown and I lived a mile away. They were blockading the major thoroughfares that I used every day and I saw videos of people being ripped from their vehicles. They were establishing physical dominance and scaring people to make a political point (that we better reduce police funding... or else). And that is what my city did.