Left wing activists did a July fourth noise protest outside an ICE detention center where they shot off fireworks. One of them went rogue and left the main group and vandalized the facility with spray paint. Police were called, and this man and the officer had a shootout. The officer was shot, but not killed.
The Trump administration successfully charged the activist group with terrorism and gave them lengthy prison sentences.
The group’s ideology was used to claim that they were all terrorists, even though it looks like one guy got into a shootout and there wasn’t an actual plan to shoot anyone.
Most of the group is guilty of trespassing and illegally shooting off fireworks. Some harbored the shooter on the run. One guy was convicted of terrorism charges and he wasn’t even there; he was convicted of terrorism because he had left wing material in his vehicle. Lengthy terrorism convictions in response to these actions are acts of tyranny. I’ve advocated prosecuting protestors who regularly cross the line into illegal activity, but, they should be prosecuted for what they have actually done, not Trumped up terrorism charges.
The prosecutors overcharged under directives from the Trump administration.
Some of the left break the world into oppressors and the oppressed, and when they see a group as a member of the oppressed, members of that group can rape, burn, steal, and kill…and neither punishment nor concern is warranted.
Nostalgia is manufactured as easily as plastic trinkets, and it distracts adults who should know better. The 1950s, mythologized by the New Right in its push for a more traditional social and economic order, were not an idyll.
Instead it was an era of shorter life expectancy, of higher poverty by today’s standards, of legal and de facto discrimination, of limited economic opportunity for women and minorities, of gay Americans often being persecuted, and of far fewer consumer goods, technologies, and comforts. Implying that it was a golden age overlooks economic facts and the individuals whose rights and opportunities were sharply constrained.
The left’s narrative—that America remains fundamentally unjust and economically stacked against working families—is equally disconnected from empirical reality. As Michael Strain and Clifford Asness recently detailed in The Free Press, we live in the wealthiest mass-affluent society in human history. Typical workers’ real wages are dramatically higher than they were two generations ago. Post-tax incomes for the bottom fifth of the scale have more than doubled since 1990. Wealth for the poorest quarter of U.S. households has tripled. Consumption, the best measure of a lived-in well-being, is hitting record highs.
These data do not deny that some people struggle, but they show that the dominant narrative of national economic decline is false.”
The guy who killed Kirk was less a hardened leftist and more a young guy with psychological problems who was radicalized by memes wafting in his direction. The guys who tried to kill Trump were nutcases. People with psychological problems are motivated by stupid shit to do something crazy. Toning down the rhetoric may help, but that’s hard when the president is abusing his power and breaking the Constitution left and right. Accurately describing what the president is doing sounds like heated rhetoric when it is not.
“An archived version of the study is still available online, and states that “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides” than the left”
Political violence has been going on for decades, including recent history. Kirk’s murder is an outrage and we need to preach peace, love, and free speech, but it’s not unique.