The issue is the left tries to intellectualize Antifa. They're just punching the people who deserve to be punched. They're just silencing the people who deserve to be silenced.
"No Organization is perfect."
Here's the reality on left wing vs right wing violence in the last two years:
At Trump's inauguration Antifa is smashing in windows and causing mayhem.
Multiple mobs of Antifa and other Democrat activists were tearing down public property consisting of statues of historical figures they don't like.
In Charlottesville Antifa shows up with clubs to intimidate and threaten the remaining 1000 white supremacists in America that had all gathered with their tiki torches. One of the white supremacists panicked in the battle, got into a car and ran someone over. If Antifa hadn't showed up hiding behind their masks,
weapons in hand Heather Heyer would probably be alive today.
Rand Paul's ribs were broken by a disgruntled neighbor because of his political differences.
A Bernie Bro shot up a congressional baseball game and nearly killed Republican House Majority Whip Steve Scalise.
Countless incidents of Antifa violence occur on a regular basis. Every time they show up they pick a fight with the city police department because they are on the "cops are pigs" and "law enforcement is racist front to back (A gem from my Senator, Elizabeth Warren)" trains.
At least 4 Republican officials are harassed in restaurants with the tacit endorsement of this tactic from Maxine Waters.
During and after all of this, Hillary Clinton and Eric Holder call for"not when they go low, we go high. When they go low we kick them." and "you can't be civil with people who oppose what you stand for politically." After Rand Paul's ribs were broken. After members of Congress were
literally shot over politics. At no point in any of these incidents does the press say that Democrats really ought to tone down the "get in their face" and "don't let them eat in peace" style rhetoric. There were no editorials from major newspapers condemning Hillary Clinton for calling for incivility after Republicans were nearly murdered in the last year,
though some Democrats facing re-election told her to can it (to their credit.)
Then this one wackjob with an arrest record stretching back decades starts sending crudely made pipe bombs, none of which detonated, all of which were intercepted.
Suddenly, stoking violence wasn't background political discourse anymore for the left. But of course everything was the fault of Bad Orange Man, not two years of nonstop apologia for "Bash the Fash." A quick internet search will find a pro-violence quote from Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump in short order. I care more about apologia for actual instances of specific violence than dumb statements.
The right does have it's own problem in this:
They truck way too easily in conspiracy theories because our media shows every single indicator that it has an explicit political bias willing to suppress anything that counters the preferred Democrat narrative. That's why Donald Trump's "The Fake News media are the enemy of the American people" resonates so much. The media have been manifestly awful and one-sided since Bill Clinton was President and his routine roughing up of women and other abuses of status / privilege needed cover.
Because now every single time a Republican says something untoward or overheated, this wackjob is going to be brought up.
But every time a Democrat amped up the volume on political violence after Bernie Bro actually shot Congressmen up, the media decided not to mention it. At no point did major media say something like "against a backdrop of intimidation, shootings, and political violence directed against Republicans, Hillary Clinton made a statement that you cannot be civil with people who oppose what you stand for. Clinton stated Democrats could be civil after they were handed back political power."
Even I was willing to jump of the false flag train if this guy - who was so obviously incompetent and whose targets explicitly included nearly all the Democrats most vocally supporting violence over the last 4 weeks - wasn't caught in a short period of time. Fortunately he was. We found out he was a nutjob whose record of threats, intimidation, and violence long predate Barack Obama's election.
I wonder how many press outlets are still calling him the "MAGABomber." They didn't call the guy who shot up Steve Scalise and all those other Congressmen the "BernieGunner." And the "BernieGunner" actually had victims that were physically harmed.
Finally, on Trump and dumb things he says to parlay this back to the original topic: A lot of those were in the context of people coming to
his rallies and roughing up
his supporters. In other words a lot of it was
justified self-defense. His suggestion he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue wasn't, it was a distasteful joke, but it wasn't a call for someone else to shoot up 5th Avenue. The Gianforte body slam comments were just dumb. Reporters can be obnoxious, entitled, invasive, and dishonest - but it's wrong to body slam them in the moment even if you know they're just going to lie about you back at the press office.
My take on the broader topic of justifiable violence:
As a person, you can use violence in self defense of an escalating or presently mortal threat. I don't think your life needs to be in danger before you respond with violence, but if escalation could lead there you have sufficient grounds to exceed proportional force if it would end the escalation more peaceably.
Police and Military instances of violence are a more complicated matter. Inherent in any policing is the threat to use force. The objective of the police force is to minimize the possibility of individuals with malevolent intent exercising unjustifiable acts of violence. Military force justification is even murkier as militaries have the additional justification of acting in long term national interests and have no realistic options for proportional vs overwhelming force on the individual level. A single MOAB can cause a proportional impact politically, but it's overwhelming if you're in the blast radius. "You will lose a war if you attack our country" is the bottom-line message of a competent military.
