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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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Trivially, many of the cases I've highlighted were prosecuted by the federal government in federal courts by groups prosecutors that they were enforcing the law to the hilt -- at least until they developed sudden sympathies for arsonists and firebombers and people breaking up government meetings who Cared About The Community -- or had a clear federal nexus that could have been. This is most overt with the arson (in addition to the massive risk to life and limb) since the ATF claims jurisdiction over anything even slightly flammable where any component went through interstate commerce, and it's part of why I keep harping on the dramatically different focuses from 'good' causes to 'bad' ones, but it's not solely limited there.

Trivially, the cases I've highlighted tend to revolve around attacks against a person because those seem the only things that got prosecuted seriously at all; threatening or dangerous political protests riots stunts that interact with big-name politicians more often result in little more than an arrest, if even that.

Trivially, because we're supposed to not treat politicians as if they were humans++ who's least insult Matters while someone else's house or business getting burned down around them doesn't. Relatedly, because whatever extent interfering with legislative or other government processes might serve to close the gap in theory, in practice they're normally been allowed or even applauded by people who have since done a ton of very cautious line-drawing over severity (they didn't bypass metal detectors that didn't exist!) that fails to grapple with the absence of any serious punishment or even serious attempt to prevent repetition.

More seriously, paeans to a personally threatened bureaucracy on one side and an actively hostile one on the other are... kinda my point. A cross-country movement of bureaucrats across different entire levels of government running interference as their (often armed!) thugs intimidate political opponents, achieve unlawful ends, and are using that violence as justification for political demands and to limit their opponent's access to the public square kinda matters! A lot!

And for some strange reason all of these only come up in response. You hope that CHAZ/CHOP people got punished, but not enough to check before posting or even to have a good understanding of the depth of the problem for that one single case or why people might consider it relevant as a comparison for (stupid, ineffective, and dangerous) actions to overthrow the United States. It's not even limited to Trump or Trump-related, or BLM politics: I've pointed out (and been modhatted for pointing out!) when posters here went from considering mostly-peaceful-but-the-arsons-and-murders riots "not special" to literally supporting the declaration of martial fucking law over truck horns.

Now, because of that, I'm not allowed to go posting examples through your comment history, and hey, it's not like you had a just-before-exodus post talking about how this comparison only ever comes up as a gotcha from righties to lefties. Maybe I've missed something. But it becomes more than a little uncompelling when you yourself bring it up as your best, strongest example.

Why should we expect similar charges and sentences in these two scenarios?

I mean, you're the one that brought up CHAZ/CHOP.

I don't! Indeed, I've repeatedly predicted that some criminals will get the book thrown at them, and others will get sudden bursts of prosecutor sympathy, and while I've not always been correct -- I'm still surprised Kyle Rittenhouse didn't end up with further gun-related charges, and while Dominick Black did, that they didn't result in direct jail time -- it's been surprisingly accurate as an indicator. I'm not surprised that no one knows what exactly happened with Grosskuetz's CCW permit, and I'd wager cash money the only thing we find out before the statute of limitations passes is the one situation where the ALCU will commit to defending a gun owner.

Or, for a different direction, I'll point to the Hammond case. To save you a click, the Hammonds were accused of starting a fire on the other BLM's land, under the auspices of clearing brush but possibly to cover up poaching of deer. It grew out of hand, someone could have gotten hurt, yada yada. The Hammonds were, by all reports, stellar defendants, accepting both guilt and responsibility early on to simplify the case at the earliest moment; as a result, they received a sentence of a couple months for a federal arson case, even if one that didn't burn down a police car, part of a historic chapel, or a police district office.

That'd be a wonderful counterexample, except the sentence was found appalling and appealed by the DoJ, which found that case -- not the Molotov Lawyers actively encouraging people to take further weapons and burn the system down, as soon as Trump got distracted, not any person convicted for burning the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis, often while also stealing body armor, weapons, and ammunition -- required a terrorism enhancement with a mandatory minimum sentence of five years.

This was not a case that threatened the DoJ bureaucrats, nor had long-term broad ramifications: it simply was convenient. And the others weren't. Even and especially from your theory that one side faced a unified front from the Department of Justice to enforce the law to the hilt, while the other had a bunch of bureaucrats running interference, what it says is worrying.

((And then the people who protested that in a stupid way, without any serious threats to the important bureaucrats... well, they didn't all get serious sentences, but that's because one of them got fatally shot, and the prosecution of some of the ringleaders was so hilariously and incompetently aggressive in pursuit of a long-ass sentence that it managed to hinge of a fat fucking fib it actively hid from the defense and court. Most of them 'only' got a year or two, tots normal stuff the DoJ must be trumpeting everywhere after every dumbass leftist occupation interferes with federal employees.))

Instead, when I talk about this stuff, I get requests to do statistical analysis on unavailable data to Prove Mathematically that this is real bias and not just the selection that no one seems willing to even try to find counterexamples.

I don’t believe for a minute that Trump supporters would be satisfied with 13-year sentences for the ringleaders. There is no line. Only the belief that there was an injustice, and a search for the facts which will best support it.

Beyond my normal frustration with the impressive tolerance for sudden claims your entire political opposition is both unpersuadable and has no line...

Thankfully, in addition to Trump supporters, we also have parts of the population with both working eyeballs and working brain cells, who can also notice that one group of rioters with empty-headed slogans about overthrowing the United States government wasn't that big a deal short of actual literal murder (and even that received a significant downward deviation from the sentencing guidelines at the request of prosecutors), and one of them was so dangerous that they needed almost twice the guidelines sentence for the crime.

They might find a lot of arguments much less persuasive were they not being inundated with evidence against them.