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Would you allow that? Because it doesn't seem hard.
There might be violent criminals that no one's going to accuse the Left of liking, such as the Olympic Park bomber (although.... There are definitely 'criminals' like Dexter Taylor that none of the institutional and anti-racist left cares about, no matter how grossly unreasonable their charges or sentence. The steelman is the same argument with asterisks and fancier words. If you want to be charitable to a fault you can give a paean to criminal justice reform and trying to fight recidivism in the dumbest way possible when anyone notices the constant and consistent low-ball numbers going left-ward, and when people notice the harsh punishments going one direction wave your hands about anti-racism and sentencing disparities.
But then I'll point to Matthew Dolloff again.
If I were to tell you there was a vehicular homicide attack this week, and that the murderer had a long history of past association with violent crime before this event but was left off with a slap on the wrist in the one case he was convicted over, what do you think the odds would be for political alignment? Because a 7B LLM can tell you, and that single fact distinguishes the case from the counterexamples someone like MKC's going to try and reach for. Hell, if I scratch out vehicular homicide, there was a mass shooting, too, and guess what?
Because there's a connecting thread, here, even as Tuscon Arizona and Germany are geographically and politically quite far from each other.
And the trivial disclaimer that would cover even the most self-aggrandizing defense progressives bring up doesn’t seem likely to actually solve your Reddit complaint.
The asterisks and handwaves are pretty naked. Yes, there's a tiny number of people who are leftist or liberal and Actually Committed To The Bit, and a larger number that pretend at it when it doesn't cost them anything. We have numbers, here: at most one-in-seven Democratic voters thought this wonderful array of comments weren't okay, and that's assuming that none of Jay Jone's many other scandals persuaded a single person. Is the requirement here sated if the OP had stuck "A strong majority of the progressive movement and almost all of its major advocates and leadership" in place of the first "They"?
Ten months ago, in response to the Kirk shooting, I gave you a list of varied bad actors ranging from federal Congress down to my own literal recreational social environments, predicting that none of them would be punished in the immediate aftermath. None of them were, and the only arguable examples in the following ten months was James getting suspended for other unrelated conduct, and TheSchism -- the 'we absolutely don't allow dehumanizing our political enemies place' -- have its eventual retrospective include "Kirk should not be dead. But I will not reflect on our shared humanity, nor will I mourn his passing." go unmoderated.
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