An Insight on Political Violence

This post from Insty tonight is three years old, but the intervening three years have confirmed this insight
A friend of mine who is a political activist said something interesting the other day, and that was for most people on the left political violence is a knob, and they can turn the heat up and down, with things like protests, and riots, all the way up to destruction of property, and sometimes murder… But for the vast majority of folks on the right, it’s an off and on switch. 

We've seen that rheostat function at work over the last year. BLM/Antifa have gone all the way to setting Federal buildings on fire and burning police stations, sometimes lowering to marches that cut off interstates, sometimes raising to beating people in the streets (or even murder). 

People on the right are still thinking we'll hold some forensic audits, after which we'll have the evidence to pursue a new round of court cases and legislative actions, maybe some elections in 2022 or 2024. Whereas BLM and Antifa enjoy widespread support on the left, the much-smaller right-leaning groups like the Proud Boys are broadly disdained as drunken yahoos rather than ideological allies. 

The switch has still not been flipped. The political right is communitarian. If it flips the switch, it'll flip it all together at once. Church groups and communities, not tiny activist groups, will be the mechanisms. State governments will start lining up with it because, well, what choice would they have? 

That's what keeps them up at night, I guess. There's still time, though, for the government to discover a workable prudence that could let us stumble through all this peacefully. Let those audits happen. Let the court cases occur. Legislative processes are functioning even now. Give it time, government. If you don't force the issue through foolish action, in time it will work itself out. 

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