Debates died

[willie23]

I don’t see Trump followers as a pathway to physical harm in and of themselves. While the President says a lot of things that he shouldn’t say, he doesn’t purposefully propagate violence nor do the majority of his supporters. Of course there are bad apples on both sides of the isle, but in reality your preference of political candidate doesn’t dictate how willing you are to be violent to someone. Think back to when a Bernie Sanders supporter attacked congressmen at their baseball game. We certainly wouldn’t lay the blame for that attack on Mr. Sanders. And the recent riots in the streets leading up to the election, these were very violent displays of force from supporters of the President-Elect or at least the Democrats/Progressives. So unless your argument is that righteous violence is great, I don’t see how a conservative echo chamber is a problem.

[schocker]

Conservatives don't riot. At least I can not think of an example. It would be civil disobedience against the very institutions they support.

[Keirador]

Conservatives don't riot. At least I can not think of an example. It would be civil disobedience against the very institutions they support.

This is the best post ever.

Even before the January 6th insurrection proved this post hilariously wrong, far-right domestic terrorists have killed at least 150 people in the last twenty years.

[Keirador]

I don’t see Trump followers as a pathway to physical harm in and of themselves. While the President says a lot of things that he shouldn’t say, he doesn’t purposefully propagate violence nor do the majority of his supporters. Of course there are bad apples on both sides of the isle, but in reality your preference of political candidate doesn’t dictate how willing you are to be violent to someone. Think back to when a Bernie Sanders supporter attacked congressmen at their baseball game. We certainly wouldn’t lay the blame for that attack on Mr. Sanders. And the recent riots in the streets leading up to the election, these were very violent displays of force from supporters of the President-Elect or at least the Democrats/Progressives. So unless your argument is that righteous violence is great, I don’t see how a conservative echo chamber is a problem.

This post too.

And again, even before the insurrection, Trump has said things like "knock the hell out of em," pined for days when people would be carried out on a stretcher, and offered to pay the legal fees of anybody who assaulted a protestor.

[willie23]

I don’t see Trump followers as a pathway to physical harm in and of themselves. While the President says a lot of things that he shouldn’t say, he doesn’t purposefully propagate violence nor do the majority of his supporters. Of course there are bad apples on both sides of the isle, but in reality your preference of political candidate doesn’t dictate how willing you are to be violent to someone. Think back to when a Bernie Sanders supporter attacked congressmen at their baseball game. We certainly wouldn’t lay the blame for that attack on Mr. Sanders. And the recent riots in the streets leading up to the election, these were very violent displays of force from supporters of the President-Elect or at least the Democrats/Progressives. So unless your argument is that righteous violence is great, I don’t see how a conservative echo chamber is a problem.

This post too.

And again, even before the insurrection, Trump has said things like "knock the hell out of em," pined for days when people would be carried out on a stretcher, and offered to pay the legal fees of anybody who assaulted a protestor.

My post did not age well. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad and disheartening.

However, my point still stands. Both sides have committed violence. I believe that the majority of Americans, both Trump supporters and everyone else, do not support what happened in the capital on the 6th. I’ve heard a lot of people argue that every person who supported President Trump at any point in time is responsible for the violence at the capital. I agree that President Trump did not help matters by falsely claiming massive voter fraud against him and I agree that he did not respond quickly enough or harshly enough once the assault began. But he didn’t call for the attack on the capital. Read what he said and look at a time line of events.

The original point actually had to do with Parler, which has now been taken down. The argument I’ve heard in support of de-platforming Parler is that it was used to plan the events of Jan 6th. Under that argument, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest should be taken down(they were used to plan as well). And everyone who has ever called for violence on these platforms should be banned permanently. But that hasn’t happened for some reason. We should just let the government monitor every media and block posts that call for violence and that are not in support of democracy and President Biden, and any post that questions election security should be immediately taken down, because 2020’s election is the “most secure in history.” And any platform that allows people to promote violence should be taken down. And books that call for violence should not be printed(existing copies burned of course). And videos that glorify violence should not be allowed to have a streaming service. We just need some moderators to keep watch over media so that nobody gets hurt and everyone stays safe. This website should be taken down, a war game is played on here.

[Keirador]

However, my point still stands. Both sides have committed violence. I believe that the majority of Americans, both Trump supporters and everyone else, do not support what happened in the capital on the 6th. I’ve heard a lot of people argue that every person who supported President Trump at any point in time is responsible for the violence at the capital. I agree that President Trump did not help matters by falsely claiming massive voter fraud against him and I agree that he did not respond quickly enough or harshly enough once the assault began. But he didn’t call for the attack on the capital. Read what he said and look at a time line of events.

Collective responsibility is a sticky wicket in the field of ethics, to be sure, and there's a lot of room for intelligent debate on the extent to which supporters of an ideology are responsible for violence committed in the name of that ideology. The kind of debate we once might have had around here.

But a core part of collective responsibility is certainly the extent and effectiveness of a group's ability to self-police, and a major part of self-policing is rhetoric and public statements. Leaders and rank-and-file set the tone for what is considered acceptable and what is not. To be effective, standards of behavior need to be clearly and consistently communicated, both well before a violation of those standards, as well as swiftly, unequivocally, and universally condemned and disowned thereafter. If a defector 1) both knows in advance that a group will not support his actions and 2) is disowned from the group after his actions, I think it's extremely fair to say that the group bears relatively little collective responsibility for these actions.

Take BLM protests. The movement itself is torn on the extent to which vandalism against government or law enforcement property is justified. As such, leaders and rank-and-file have not been able to articulate a clear line on whether those who light cop cars on fire speak for the movement or not. So, it would be reasonable to assign blame to the entire movement for facilitating a pattern of defacing government property, and in endangering lives in so doing. Some folks actively justify this behavior as necessary to a vital cause; folks who condemn this behavior but remain within the movement have communicated by their passivity that it's not a deal-breaker for them. By inaction, they enable bad actors within their own ranks, and by enabling that behavior they share guilt for it.

Other lines are much more clear. If you've been to a BLM protest, you will see seasoned organizers and activists engaging in self-policing, often almost literally. Take the Minneapolis incident where somebody was smashing up stores of a private business. Organizers are directly asking him not to do it, and then to stop, and when he ignores them, they begin filming him and chase him out of the area. I think it's reasonable to say that at that point, he has sufficiently removed himself from the group that the group no longer bears collective responsibility for his actions. (And indeed, he later turned out to be a White supremacist agitator.) Of course, in many BLM protests, leaders have not been successful in enforcing behavioral standards, and the extent to which these failures constitute guilt on the movement's part could be an interesting ethical debate.

But as a whole the movement has been pretty good in self-policing group standards on, say, assassination and murder. The attempted murders of Republican elected officials by James Hodgkinson in 2017 and the actual murder of far-right activist Aaron Danielson by a self-identified member of antifa were met with swift, unequivocal, universal condemnation. In general, the left seems to be pretty good about setting expectations on murdering your political opponents: the death of Aaron Danielson is the only reported politically-motivated murder committed by a supporter of antifa in decades.

People on the right are given far more mixed messages on killing your political opponents. For many years now, there's been rhetoric around dealing with Democrats via "Second Amendment remedies," and that's only intensified under Donald Trump and his most vocal advocates, who are neither swift, nor unequivocal, nor universal when they talk about politically-motivated violence. The far-right rally in Charlottesville which resulted in the murder of a left-wing protestor had "very fine people on both sides." The shooter responsible for two deaths in Kenosha, WI was actively supported by Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter, prominent Trump surrogates with vast platforms, and eventually by the President himself.

As with property destruction at BLM matters, the entire group is either supportive of the behavior or at least considers the behavior to not be a deal-breaker for them. There are people who participated in the rally leading up to the riot and left when they saw what was happening. Having self-selected out of the group due to objections over the group's behavior, they significantly reduce or eliminate their burden of collective responsibility (while remaining responsible for any individual actions they had previously taken to encourage this outcome, even unwittingly). Anybody who knew what was happening and maintained support is broadcasting that political violence isn't a dealbreaker for them, and that tacit acceptance bears significant collective responsibility.

Those offering tacit acceptance certainly includes the President himself, who told the violent rioters "we love you, you're very special" during the actual violent riot itself. Yes, he also told them to go home, but he did not condemn or disavow them. His response didn't just fail to be quick enough or harsh enough, importantly, it did not communicate that this behavior was unacceptable for the group. No, instead it reinforced that the President saw the rioters as his own in-group: again, "we love you, you're very special." In that moment, the insurrectionists and the President were still part of the same collective polity, and yeah, they share collective responsibility.

Even in the following days and weeks when the President has tried to put more distance between himself and the coup plotters, as legal pressure mounts, he doesn't able to set unequivocal standards for what he expects of his own supporters. He tried to tell Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy that it was "antifa people" that stormed the Capitol, a baseless conspiracy theory peddled by several other prominent Trump advocates like Rudy Giuliani, Lin Wood, several sitting members of Congress including Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar, and others. Other figures in the MAGA firmament go the other direction, and simply happily take credit for the deadly riot: in one poll, as many as 45% of Republican respondents say that they actively support the storming of the Capitol.

So if the MAGA crowd or the Republican Party more generally doesn't want to be held ethically responsible for the actions of their own collective in-group, we have to look at their efforts at self-policing: are they swift, unequivocal, and universal in condemning political violence coming from their own ranks? Have they consistently and effectively communicated that politically-motivated killings are unacceptable for group members? I don't think any reasonable person could answer those questions with a "yes."

If that's the case, then remaining part of these groups means that you either actively support violence against your political opponents, or through inaction and tacit acceptance you are willing to continue to enable those who do. Just enabling and facilitating murder instead of committing it yourself is not morally neutral.

The original point actually had to do with Parler, which has now been taken down. The argument I’ve heard in support of de-platforming Parler is that it was used to plan the events of Jan 6th. Under that argument, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest should be taken down(they were used to plan as well).

There's so much in this "de-platforming" argument that could make for an interesting debate. To start with, the fact that a very large private company was responsible for "de-platforming" Parler, not the government, which has massive implications both for free speech and for the rise of unfettered, unregulated corporate power, something the left has been warning about for generations.

It could be an interesting debate. . . but:

And everyone who has ever called for violence on these platforms should be banned permanently. But that hasn’t happened for some reason. We should just let the government monitor every media and block posts that call for violence and that are not in support of democracy and President Biden, and any post that questions election security should be immediately taken down, because 2020’s election is the “most secure in history.” And any platform that allows people to promote violence should be taken down. And books that call for violence should not be printed(existing copies burned of course). And videos that glorify violence should not be allowed to have a streaming service. We just need some moderators to keep watch over media so that nobody gets hurt and everyone stays safe. This website should be taken down, a war game is played on here.

This is why Debates died. This is neither an assertion nor a rebuttal. Just a paragraph of sarcastic vitriol that somehow manages to be boring and needlessly aggressive, written to vent the author's spleen, not address any point that anybody, including the author, has made here.

And it became the norm. There's no engaging with a "Debate" "argument" that can be summarized as "I am very angry and want you to know about it!"

[willie23]

Collective responsibility is a sticky wicket in the field of ethics, to be sure, and there's a lot of room for intelligent debate on the extent to which supporters of an ideology are responsible for violence committed in the name of that ideology. The kind of debate we once might have had around here.

But a core part of collective responsibility is certainly the extent and effectiveness of a group's ability to self-police, and a major part of self-policing is rhetoric and public statements. Leaders and rank-and-file set the tone for what is considered acceptable and what is not. To be effective, standards of behavior need to be clearly and consistently communicated, both well before a violation of those standards, as well as swiftly, unequivocally, and universally condemned and disowned thereafter. If a defector 1) both knows in advance that a group will not support his actions and 2) is disowned from the group after his actions, I think it's extremely fair to say that the group bears relatively little collective responsibility for these actions.

Your reply is well articulated and it is clear to me that you are more educated than I. This explanation of collective responsibility makes sense to me and I do agree with it.

Take BLM protests. The movement itself is torn on the extent to which vandalism against government or law enforcement property is justified. As such, leaders and rank-and-file have not been able to articulate a clear line on whether those who light cop cars on fire speak for the movement or not. So, it would be reasonable to assign blame to the entire movement for facilitating a pattern of defacing government property, and in endangering lives in so doing. Some folks actively justify this behavior as necessary to a vital cause; folks who condemn this behavior but remain within the movement have communicated by their passivity that it's not a deal-breaker for them. By inaction, they enable bad actors within their own ranks, and by enabling that behavior they share guilt for it.

Other lines are much more clear. If you've been to a BLM protest, you will see seasoned organizers and activists engaging in self-policing, often almost literally. Take the Minneapolis incident where somebody was smashing up stores of a private business. Organizers are directly asking him not to do it, and then to stop, and when he ignores them, they begin filming him and chase him out of the area. I think it's reasonable to say that at that point, he has sufficiently removed himself from the group that the group no longer bears collective responsibility for his actions. (And indeed, he later turned out to be a White supremacist agitator.) Of course, in many BLM protests, leaders have not been successful in enforcing behavioral standards, and the extent to which these failures constitute guilt on the movement's part could be an interesting ethical debate.

But as a whole the movement has been pretty good in self-policing group standards on, say, assassination and murder. The attempted murders of Republican elected officials by James Hodgkinson in 2017 and the actual murder of far-right activist Aaron Danielson by a self-identified member of antifa were met with swift, unequivocal, universal condemnation. In general, the left seems to be pretty good about setting expectations on murdering your political opponents: the death of Aaron Danielson is the only reported politically-motivated murder committed by a supporter of antifa in decades.

I think that you are somewhat downplaying "leftist" or BLM violence/riots and making more of "right wing extremists" violence. If I remember correctly at least 7 percent of BLM protests this summer turned violent in some manner, and more than 25 deaths were the result.

People on the right are given far more mixed messages on killing your political opponents. For many years now, there's been rhetoric around dealing with Democrats via "Second Amendment remedies," and that's only intensified under Donald Trump and his most vocal advocates, who are neither swift, nor unequivocal, nor universal when they talk about politically-motivated violence. The far-right rally in Charlottesville which resulted in the murder of a left-wing protestor had "very fine people on both sides." The shooter responsible for two deaths in Kenosha, WI was actively supported by Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter, prominent Trump surrogates with vast platforms, and eventually by the President himself.

President Trump is not articulate. He does not often say what should be said correctly. With that said, it is ridiculous to say that President Trump is an advocate of "second amendment remedies" or that he has ever called for killing his political opponents. Yes, he was incorrect as far as his Charlottesville quote, but if I recall correctly he walked that back. President Trump talks without thinking and without knowing all of the facts. He is not presidential. But he is not an advocate for killing or violence.
Also, as far as I know Kyle Rittenhouse was justified in his shooting in Kenosha. The video I've seen and the story I've read makes it seem fairly clear that he was acting in self defense. That said, I can't imagine why he thought it was a good idea to load up a rifle and head into a volatile zone.

Those offering tacit acceptance certainly includes the President himself, who told the violent rioters "we love you, you're very special" during the actual violent riot itself. Yes, he also told them to go home, but he did not condemn or disavow them. His response didn't just fail to be quick enough or harsh enough, importantly, it did not communicate that this behavior was unacceptable for the group. No, instead it reinforced that the President saw the rioters as his own in-group: again, "we love you, you're very special." In that moment, the insurrectionists and the President were still part of the same collective polity, and yeah, they share collective responsibility.

Even in the following days and weeks when the President has tried to put more distance between himself and the coup plotters, as legal pressure mounts, he doesn't able to set unequivocal standards for what he expects of his own supporters. He tried to tell Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy that it was "antifa people" that stormed the Capitol, a baseless conspiracy theory peddled by several other prominent Trump advocates like Rudy Giuliani, Lin Wood, several sitting members of Congress including Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar, and others. Other figures in the MAGA firmament go the other direction, and simply happily take credit for the deadly riot: in one poll, as many as 45% of Republican respondents say that they actively support the storming of the Capitol.

So if the MAGA crowd or the Republican Party more generally doesn't want to be held ethically responsible for the actions of their own collective in-group, we have to look at their efforts at self-policing: are they swift, unequivocal, and universal in condemning political violence coming from their own ranks? Have they consistently and effectively communicated that politically-motivated killings are unacceptable for group members? I don't think any reasonable person could answer those questions with a "yes."

If that's the case, then remaining part of these groups means that you either actively support violence against your political opponents, or through inaction and tacit acceptance you are willing to continue to enable those who do. Just enabling and facilitating murder instead of committing it yourself is not morally neutral.

I would say that the Republican Party and President Trump are just as good at "self-policing" as BLM is. Just in the way that supporting or even being a member BLM doesn't mean that you support rioting and destruction of property and government, supporting the many good things accomplished by the Trump admin and supporting the Republican Party doesn't mean that you actively support the insurrection. I may have misunderstood your point.

And it became the norm. There's no engaging with a "Debate" "argument" that can be summarized as "I am very angry and want you to know about it!"

I apologize if my somewhat clunky attempt at rhetoric was taken as "the norm." I meant to show the dangers of shutting down free speech and the direction I see us going. I do want to have a conversation about this.

It worries me that "big tech" has so much power over the United States and free speech. This is something I am very passionate about.

[mat.gopack]

I think that you are somewhat downplaying "leftist" or BLM violence/riots and making more of "right wing extremists" violence. If I remember correctly at least 7 percent of BLM protests this summer turned violent in some manner, and more than 25 deaths were the result.

This is a very disingenuous argument, I hope you realize. Violence at BLM protests is not as simple as your attempt to reduce it to 'leftist' violence - it was heavily sparked by militarized, state violence (which was deployed against BLM protests at a rate far higher than normal protests, and of course at a much higher rate than against right wing protests).

If you want to take a look at the report that came up with the 7% figure, it's here. Notably, quoting from it

Despite the fact that demonstrations associated with the BLM movement have been overwhelmingly peaceful, more than 9% — or nearly one in 10 — have been met with government intervention, compared to 3% of all other demonstrations. This also marks a general increase in intervention rates relative to this time last year. In July 2019, authorities intervened in under 2% of all demonstrations — fewer than 30 events — relative to July 2020, when they intervened in 9% of all demonstrations — or over 170 events.

Authorities have used force — such as firing less-lethal weapons like tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray or beating demonstrators with batons — in over 54% of the demonstrations in which they have engaged. This too is a significant increase relative to one year ago. In July 2019, government personnel used force in just three documented demonstrations, compared to July 2020, when they used force against demonstrators in at least 65 events. Over 5% of all events linked to the BLM movement have been met with force by authorities, compared to under 1% of all other demonstrations. In some contexts, like Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon (see below), the heavy-handed police response appears to have inflamed tensions and increased the risk of violent escalation

In addition, you are (deliberately or not) attributing the deaths to the protests - when, for instance, that'd include the multiple murders by Rittenhouse. It includes deaths caused by police, by Boogaloo boys, what seems to be an extrajudicial execution by federal agents, and likely unrelated ones. The Guardian has an article using that 25 deaths you mention (also from the same group that did the earlier report, though I wasn't able to find the information directly on their site). I'd recommend reading it - it's not at all like what you were suggesting.

Furthermore, it is extremely clear that right wing violence and extremism is a much larger violent problem than left wing one - making the majority of terrorist attacks in the last 26 years, and with more than 10x the death count of left wing ones. See this report.

In analyzing fatalities from terrorist attacks, religious terrorism has killed the largest number of individuals—3,086 people—primarily due to the attacks on September 11, 2001, which caused 2,977 deaths.10 The magnitude of this death toll fundamentally shaped U.S. counterterrorism policy over the past two decades. In comparison, right-wing terrorist attacks caused 335 deaths, left-wing attacks caused 22 deaths, and ethnonationalist terrorists caused 5 deaths.

To evaluate the ongoing threat from different types of terrorists, however, it is useful to consider the proportion of fatalities attributed to each type of perpetrator annually. In 14 of the 21 years between 1994 and 2019 in which fatal terrorist attacks occurred, the majority of deaths resulted from right-wing attacks. In eight of these years, right-wing attackers caused all of the fatalities, and in three more—including 2018 and 2019—they were responsible for more than 90 percent of annual fatalities.11 Therefore, while religious terrorists caused the largest number of total fatalities, right-wing attackers were most likely to cause more deaths in a given year.

It's one of the faults of our media environment, that right wing violence usually goes unreported or less reported on the whole - such that perception like yours come around, that the scale of it is comparable/equal.

President Trump is not articulate. He does not often say what should be said correctly. With that said, it is ridiculous to say that President Trump is an advocate of "second amendment remedies" or that he has ever called for killing his political opponents. Yes, he was incorrect as far as his Charlottesville quote, but if I recall correctly he walked that back. President Trump talks without thinking and without knowing all of the facts. He is not presidential. But he is not an advocate for killing or violence.
Also, as far as I know Kyle Rittenhouse was justified in his shooting in Kenosha. The video I've seen and the story I've read makes it seem fairly clear that he was acting in self defense. That said, I can't imagine why he thought it was a good idea to load up a rifle and head into a volatile zone.

This is the same President Trump who suggested that 'Second Amendment people' could stop Clinton if she'd won in 2016, who described a killing by US Rangers (of the one Antifa killer that I know of) as 'retribution' ("“Now we sent in the US marshals for the killer, the man that killed the young man in the street,” Trump told Judge Jeanine. “Two and a half days went by, and I put out [on Twitter], ‘When are you going to go get him?’ And the US marshals went in to get in, and in a short period of time, they ended in a gunfight. This guy was a violent criminal, and the US marshals killed him. And I’ll tell you something — that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.”), and repeatedly threatened and employed violence against BLM protests?

His rhetoric is undeniably fostering and threatening violence - it's been clear for years at this point that this is just who he is, not something that is 'inarticulate' or just acting without knowledge of the facts.

[Keirador]

I think that you are somewhat downplaying "leftist" or BLM violence/riots and making more of "right wing extremists" violence. If I remember correctly at least 7 percent of BLM protests this summer turned violent in some manner, and more than 25 deaths were the result.

This matters, a lot. People killed by politically-motivated violence should be largely a matter of agreeable, demonstrable fact. There are certainly some edge cases where reasonable people could disagree about the extent to which politics motivated an act of violence. I'm thinking, for instance, of the case of Jared Lee Loughner, who murdered several people during his attempt to assassinate the Democratic member of Congress Gabrielle Giffords. There was a lot of right-wing writing and propaganda found among his belongings, but frankly there was also a lot of apolitical insanity. Right-wing radicalization may have played some role in his attack, but it seems very clear that his untreated schizophrenia was both a necessary and a sufficient condition for his violence. So, I won't count his attempt to murder a Democratic member of Congress as "right-wing political violence." But I could understand if somebody else did consider it an act of right-wing political violence, since his schizophrenia was aggravated and given a specific target by right-wing propaganda.

So I think reasonable people could fairly debate exactly how to define specific instances of violence. But, anybody using a consistent metric would have to come to the same conclusion: far-right extremists have been proven responsible for many, many more killings than far-left extremists. For instance, in 2017 the Government Accountability Office reported that 73% of deaths at the hands of extremists or terrorists since the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by far-right actors.

All of which is to say, it's not good enough to say "if I remember correctly" and offer a guess that comports with your pre-existing politics. I can, and will, provide specific details of over a hundred politically-motivated killings perpetrated by far-right extremists over the last 20 years. I really don't think you can offer the specifics of 25 politically-motivated killings perpetrated by BLM, or leftists generally. In fact, I think that if you look into your own claims, you will find that at least a third of that number were BLM protestors murdered by far-right extremists. And two were cops murdered by far-right extremists. If you're at all interested in an honest debate, you should start with facts, and the specific and factual pattern of violence should interest you.

President Trump is not articulate. He does not often say what should be said correctly. With that said, it is ridiculous to say that President Trump is an advocate of "second amendment remedies" or that he has ever called for killing his political opponents. Yes, he was incorrect as far as his Charlottesville quote, but if I recall correctly he walked that back. President Trump talks without thinking and without knowing all of the facts. He is not presidential. But he is not an advocate for killing or violence.

"Swift, unequivocal, and universal." That is the standard for setting up group norms. It simply isn't good enough for Trump to eventually walk back his tacit, or in some cases explicit, endorsements of violence against his political enemies.

It is not ridiculous to say that Trump is an advocate of "Second Amendment remedies," because he said so himself during the 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. The quotation is "If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.” The best you can say here is that he wasn't suggesting that gun owners kill Hillary Clinton if she won the election, he was either just joking, or that he just doesn't speak good and his brain's all broken and we can't take any of his statements to mean what they obviously mean.

Quite apart from the "Second Amendment" quotation, Trump is very obviously an advocate for violence, and he is very much on the record as such. Cameras were rolling for many of his exhortations for violence. Vox has a nice round-up, but some of the standouts include:
* "I don’t know if I’ll do the fighting myself or if other people will."
* "See, the first group, I was nice. ‘Oh, take your time.’ The second group, I was pretty nice. The third group, I’ll be a little more violent."
* "If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Just knock the hell out of them. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise."
* "I’d like to punch him in the face."
* "I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks."

And that's all just from his campaign. As actual President, he didn't just fail to denounce political violence, he frequently encouraged it, albeit in veiled language.

There's a broader point here, though. Regardless of Trump specifically, an element of collective responsibility in any group, in any time period, isn't just the intentions of leaders in setting and establishing norms, but their effectiveness in establishing those norms. A failure to establish norms is a failure in leadership, and if a failure in leadership results in immoral acts, the leader is in part morally responsible.

Trump's best defense against the accusation that he directly incited violence is to claim incompetence: he was just joking and didn't understand how far the joke would go, or he's so inarticulate that he can't be trusted to speak for the group. If this is true, then the true moral fault is on all his enablers, all of his voters, who elevated a man to the highest office of leadership who was too incompetent to keep his own supporters from committing murder and insurrection on his behalf.

Also, as far as I know Kyle Rittenhouse was justified in his shooting in Kenosha. The video I've seen and the story I've read makes it seem fairly clear that he was acting in self defense. That said, I can't imagine why he thought it was a good idea to load up a rifle and head into a volatile zone.

Don't forget that the kid illegally crossed state lines with a weapon. "Self defense" smells a bit wrong to me when you have purposefully traveled and armed to be in a place where you can kill people in "self defense."

Doesn't matter though, that's a different "debate." For our purposes here, what matters is how thought leaders responded to this politically-motivated killing. (Certainly we can agree that Rittenhouse armed himself and traveled to Kenosha for political motivations?) And. . . they supported him. The idea was publicly upheld by MAGA and Republican voices that it is totally defensible, good, even heroic, to travel to an area where something you opposed was happening, bring weapons, and use those weapons if it came down to it.

That is the same attitude the Capitol insurrectionists had. And they got it from their leaders, which means their leaders bear collective responsibility.

I would say that the Republican Party and President Trump are just as good at "self-policing" as BLM is. Just in the way that supporting or even being a member BLM doesn't mean that you support rioting and destruction of property and government, supporting the many good things accomplished by the Trump admin and supporting the Republican Party doesn't mean that you actively support the insurrection. I may have misunderstood your point.

Except that you yourself have argued that President Trump is not "just as good at self-policing." You've said that he is not articulate, that he doesn't say what he should have said correctly, and that his plea for the rioters to go home wasn't quick enough or harsh enough. These aren't morally neutral excuses. Many people opposed Trump so much because they feared he would fail as a leader in exactly the ways he ultimately did. You are simply explaining what makes Trump a failed leader, not making an argument that his failure of leadership didn't result in violence and death for which he, and ultimately his supporters, are responsible.

And on being "good at self-policing," again, facts matter, not just perceptions. What is the reality of how many people are killed by far-left extremists vs. far-right extremists? What can be proven, what can reasonable people know? I have it on good authority that the Trump crowd believes in "fuck your feelings," so shouldn't we rely on demonstrable facts rather than what we feel should be true? If you're looking at demonstrable facts, which side seems to have a harder time with self-policing?

[Keirador]

Hoo boy, really got scooped by mat.gopack on that response.