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The killing is rare, but then it hardly needs to be common to have serious effects on our society as a whole. Lesser violence was not rare at the time by any means, with over a hundred cities were hit with serious rioting. Harassments and other forms of individual and organized meanness are completely endemic. I cite the killing not because it is typical, but because it was a high-water mark. The events surrounding it show that it is a very, very high mark indeed.
Yes, that is certainly a thing that happens. And sometimes, a single incident is indicative of a larger movement or trend.
That particular murder came just at the end of a nationwide spree of lawless political violence that saw major rioting in over a hundred cities. That wave of violence was intentionally fomented by activists and the press, who systematically lied to the public for years to make it happen. Once the violence started, it was intentionally encouraged by the press, by Blue activist networks, and by officials at the local, state and federal level, who did considerable amounts of work to encourage the violence and protect those committing it from any unpleasant consequences. The Blue public generally went along with it. They did this because they, the Blue public, the activists who spring from them, the press who speak for them, and the politicians they elect to lead them, hate people like me, and believe that harming us in any way they can get away with is obviously a good thing to do. They had not been shy about expressing that hatred previously, and once the riots started, they were not shy about acting on it.
They did so for months, through violence on the street, through greatly intensifying the already considerable harassment and persecution they'd been practicing in workplaces and social spaces for years, through malicious prosecution of those who dissented or attempted to defend themselves, through the multi-layered protection provided to their organized thug cadre and the lawless rioters generally, ranging from an unprecedented campaign of gaslighting and misinformation in the press, to ordering police stand-downs, to open calls for violence, to mass-crowdfunded legal services for those caught victimizing their fellow citizens, to vicious attacks against any authorities who attempted to restore order and any private citizens who attempted effective resistance.
They claimed that a heavily-armed takeover of several blocks of a city was akin to a "street fair", requiring no law enforcement response as the gunmen repeatedly opened fire on pedestrians. Only after a teenager was murdered did they "crack down" by ordering the rioters to disperse, while making zero attempt to identify or detain those responsible for the killing. A handful of activists were given photo-op arrests and then promptly released. One of the shooters was eventually arrested years later, far away. No attempt was made to hold the other shooters, the organizers, the people who committed felonies supplying weapons, or any of the other criminals involved accountable. The officials who let this all happen were not held accountable. The organizations who encouraged and supported it were not held accountable. It simply was not allowed to matter. And that was one incident in one city in a campaign that hit most cities in the country and lasted the better part of a year.
The riots were pretty hard to miss. A fair chunk of the country supported them. People here, reasonable, thoughtful people whom I respected, argued that people like me should accept being beaten by a mob rather than defend ourselves with firearms, since beatings are less lethal than firearms and so are the better outcome. People argued that they were voting for the party fomenting the riots and running cover for them, because things were just too crazy and they wanted them to go back to normal.
...I want to emphasize that none of this is remotely exhaustive. I'm simply throwing out random snippets from the months-long, ceaseless drumbeat.
Every prominent case of armed self-defense against the rioters was immediately prosecuted well beyond any reasonable interpretation of the law, often in a naked attempt to appease those same rioters, sometimes in explicit support of them. Every case was egregiously misreported in the press. Prominent rioter shootings, attempted shootings, and general misuse of firearms to threaten and intimidate were mostly ignored. Little or no effort was made to ID shooters who'd made even the slightest attempt to conceal their identities. Other rioters routinely destroyed evidence. When an arrest could not be avoided, the authorities cut deals whenever possible. And so on, and on and on.
And in the end, they won. The rioting worked. The lies in the press worked. The normies let them do it, and they won the subsequent election, and now they have control of the Federal government. They employed nationwide, lawless political violence to secure their partisan ends, suffered few if any consequences, and profited greatly thereby.
The riots were one instance, of perhaps a half-dozen major violations of the social compact, together with too many lesser violations to count. Blues have been steadily escalating since all this hit its inflection point in 2014. They have shown no indication that they recognize that what they are doing is unacceptable; after all, the public has accepted it, have they not? They do not know how to stop, cannot even conceive that stopping might be necessary. And normies buy their propaganda wholesale, and tell people like me that it's our responsibility to knuckle under and surrender our values and accept unlimited abuse to preserve the peace, because don't you see how much worse it would be otherwise?
Yes, that is in fact my argument, regarding the normies who can't wrap their head around the nature of the problem. Of course, this does not apply to the officials, activists, organizations and entities who did not merely stand silent, but actively worked to make these things happen, and to protect and support those who did so, and actively obstructed all efforts to defend against their actions or hold them accountable after the fact. Violence on the scale and with the duration we saw in 2020-2022 does not happen by accident or through the actions of a few bad apples. It was coordinated, and it relied on institutional support.
Likely so. Perhaps you and the other normies should have done something to keep a lid on things while the Blue Avante-Guard was burning down any hope for a peaceful future. Sadly neither you nor I succeeded in doing so. If you think what has happened can happen, and then we simply all agree to pretend it was all fine and try to go back to normal, you possess a remarkable level of optimism, not least in imagining that they will not do it again, and worse. Sooner or later there will be serious resistance, and all their previous actions show them to be absolutely incapable of restraint. They will continue to escalate long past the point of no return.
The previous "equilibrium" led straight here. There is no point in attempting to restore it, and the common knowledge we now possess makes such a rollback impossible in any case. The social cohesion is gone. The trust is gone. There is no way to get them back. The remaining options appear to be militant separation or fratricide.
If by "caved in", you mean that things have already collapsed, then by no means. Say rather that the US is ~250 years old, and it seems fairly unlikely it will make it to 300 in anything approaching its current form. If it makes it another decade without serious problems, I'll be quite surprised.
The economy is still mostly functional. Coordinated meanness is still limited to somewhat constrained channels; the riots did in fact end. But the existing order rots a little more each day, that rot is accelerating, and most evidence points to it being irreversible. Major portions of our social system no longer perform their intended function to any appreciable degree; prominent examples include the press and our educational institutions. Those that still function, often do so by burning credibility with one or both tribes, and when that credibility is exhausted they will break down or be torn down. I do not believe that either of us will see a properly functioning Presidential election in what remains of our lifetimes, that is to say, a presidential election that actually confers a supermajority perception of legitimacy to the "winner". I think we likely will see the Supreme Court packed within the decade.
You are correct that the amount we still stand to lose is enormous. I believe you are wrong that such loss is avoidable, regardless of what you or I or anyone else does. If it is avoidable, it will be because we managed to stall the problem out long enough for some out-of-context development to reshuffle the political situation sufficiently to defuse it. Asteroid mining or abrupt strong automation leading to post-scarcity could maybe do it. Otherwise this place is fucked.
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