Kexholm Karelia wrote:Neutraligon wrote:Considering that the storming of the capitol seems to have been planned including the pipe bombs and the planning of the kidnapping of various liberal politicians in various parts of the country by Trump supporters...some of them yes.
Senkaku wrote:Given that there are heavily armed militia organizations across the country that support the president and have been identified by intelligence and law enforcement as posing serious violent threats... yes, if they’re given the chance, which they nearly were on the Capitol if Congress hadn’t escaped. Have you missed all the guys in flak jackets with assault rifles who show up to these things, or all the people talking openly about killing liberals?
You’re taking a fringe and generalizing it to 70 million+ Trump supporters. I can do the same with BLM rioters and antifa and generalize that to everyone on the left
You can’t dismiss this as a fringe movement any more. Polls show a majority of Republicans are still behind everything that’s happened and the “fringe movement” you’ve made excuses for for so long has nearly murdered Congress.
As for the tiresome both-sides shit, a few things:
One— “BLM rioters and antifa” have not attempted to overthrow the American government by massacring Congressional leaders and illegally installing an illegitimate executive, as the Trump movement now has. Their violent actions over the summer did not gain the support of many members of Congress, nor did members of Congress assist anyone in planning such acts days in advance, or provide them with intelligence about their targets while such acts were in progress. In short, you cannot “do the same” with violent “leftist” agitators, because those people simply have not done the same things or enjoyed the same support. Equations between the two are simply nonsensical and I’m not going to entertain them further.
Two— even if you could make such an equation, and claim that the Trump putsch wing is only a fringe movement comparable to “BLM and antifa” (which, to be clear, you can’t), let’s circle back to the start of this post, where there is an additional flaw in your argument. You say that it isn’t reasonable to generalize fears of violence from a fringe group onto a large body of millions of people. However, were large-scale violence to break out across the country, wouldn’t you agree that it would be reasonable to expect many more people to be mobilized to commit violent acts by each side— people who currently don’t espouse such actions, but who might come to if pushed hard enough? Therefore, it’d be entirely reasonable to worry that a significant percentage of continuing Trump supporters would come to behave like the people you currently dismiss as a “fringe.”
Incidentally, this mobilization appears to be occurring on the right
anyways, without comparable responses from the left, driven by forces other than an existing war pushing people across moral boundaries— another hint that your comparison of “BLM/antifa” to the Trump movement is a completely unfounded one.