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But they weren't, and that fact has consequences. One of those consequences is that you don't get to claim a norm against mob violence any more, because that norm very clearly doesn't exist, and in fact hasn't existed for decades. 2020 was not the first time Blue Tribe used organized, widespread lawless violence to advance their political values, profited mightily thereby, and got away with it. Pretending otherwise is foolish in the extreme.
It doesn't matter if it's nonsense. It's what actually happened. The police actually stood down. Individuals exercising self-defense were in fact viciously persecuted. The violence worked, the people committing it secured many of their immediate political and social goals and paid no significant penalty. You cannot operate off a theoretical model of what should have happened. You need to engage with what actually happened, and where that leaves us.
And where that leaves us is that large-scale political violence is legitimate for blue tribe, has been for decades, and will continue to be into the foreseeable future. You can't fix this. You don't seem to be in any great hurry to acknowledge the scope of the problem. Nonetheless, you think Reds should refrain from rioting, and should cooperate with severe punishments for Red rioters.
Why? Why should Reds cooperate with punishing Red rioters, when we know that Blues have no intention of reciprocating, and will in fact simply continue to abuse us? If we coordinate defection, this at least imposes a cost on their abuses. If we cooperate, they have no reason to ever change.
No, I do not. The BLM riots were an explicitly political movement, with serious political, social and financial consequences for our society at large. The violence they organized and committed was explicitly intended to usurp political power from our system of government, to coerce a wide array of significant policy changes and social outcomes in everything from corporate HR to the police and justice system to the subsequent national elections. Those riots had extremely serious impacts on the structure and nature of our society, and the effects of those riots will continue to reverberate for decades to come if previous history is to be trusted. In meaningful and significant ways, the BLM rioters did in fact use violence to rule over the rest of us. They were in fact an explicit attack on our power and a threat to our rights, and not just criminality.
And it worked. They secured dozens of billions of dollars in funding for their political causes. They secured greatly increased control over our work environment, over municipal policies, policing policies, prosecution policies. They greatly advanced their capacity for censorship and the hard enforcement of their social consensus. They carved out long-term, well-paid sinecures for their activist cadre I think it probable that they gained a significant advantage in the 2020 elections as a result of these successes. They greatly damaged the concept of a right to lawful self-defense. They caused the largest single-year increase in violent crime rates ever recorded, and they then used that increase in violence to successfully push for gun control through legislation and the aggressive reinterpretation of bureaucratic standards.
None of the above is fairly summed up as "I am angry, I want to destroy stuff, I'd like free stuff". Sure, that was the attitude of some of the actual rioters. Likewise, many of the Jan 6th rioters probably didn't think much past "I'm angry, and I want to express it." Your claim is that the Jan 6th rioters had a motive beyond that. Well, BLM and Blue Tribe likewise had a motive beyond that, and that motive paid off for them in spades.
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