Or, pertinent to the subject at hand, how the Oklahoma City bombing was tied to the right wing militia movement and they’re still mostly seen as, well, a bunch of white dudes blowing off steam like you said. In that case, it seems like people saw that they got the perpetrators and that’s that, not considering what sort of circumstances produced them and where it might go in the future.

And WTC and OKC were (at least somewhat) successful attacks! J6 caused damage but failed. We’re really bad at taking failed attempts seriously.

A big factor in the OKC, J6, and militia movement and White nationalist violence more generally is that the law enforcement community in the US has very significant overlap with the militia and White nationalist movements, impacting how seriously they are treated by law enforcement, and how seriously they are treated by journalists who rely on experts from within the law enforcement community (both current officers and private experts that are the same people relied on as outside experts by law enforcement and are usually ex-law enforcement) for their understanding of the issues.

If BLM had attempted what J6 actually did, it would have made Kent State look like a Simpson's episode.

Seattle allowed BLM protesters to establish their own “autonomous zone” and ignored it until enough kids were killed.

You should have included a link to be unambiguous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest

It was quite a spectacle.

> ignored it until enough kids were killed

From overdoses, right? Sort of different from terrorism in many meaningful ways.

No, shooting. I don’t think it was a meaningfully different rate than other weeks in Capitol Hill, but firefighters failing to render first aid certainly didn’t help that one kid who was dying a couple hundred yards from a fire station. (The crowd wouldn’t let a police car through, and it turns out the firefighters wouldn’t approach until the police were there and said it was safe).

> firefighters failing to render first aid certainly didn’t help that one kid who was dying a couple hundred yards from a fire station

Still not terrorism. Left-wing militias are certainly a problem in some parts of the world. They aren’t in America. Our domestic terrorism comes almost exclusively from radical Islam and right-wing nutjobs. (Who, somewhat hilariously, see eye to eye on more than they realise.)

I suspect you're classifying the Trump assassins as right-wing nutjobs though (they weren't Islamists), which dilutes the position somewhat. What does right-wing even mean to you if it covers people trying to gun Trump down?

> What does right-wing even mean to you if it covers people trying to gun Trump down?

Is your impression that “right-wing” should designate a hive mind within which there is no conflict?

Because that's not what right-wing (or left-wing) has ever meant. The political universe isn't divided into two teams that conflict with each other but lack internal conflict.

Alternatively, I guess you might accept divisions within the Right but think that the term right-wing is defined in terms of proximity to Trump's cult of personality, but, no, while Trump is a right-wing figure (or perhaps an opportunist leveraging a right-wing base) loyalty to Trump is not what defines someone as being ”right-wing”. In either case, being violently opposed to Trump is not inconsistent with being right-wing.

My impression is that "right" and "left" wing are fairly vague terms that don't really mean much.

But in this case jumpcrisscross is identifying political violence as an almost exclusively religious (technically muslim which seems a bit off to me, but whatever) or right-wing phenomenon - presumably including political violence against leftists and rightists as perpetrated under the banner of the right wing (although note in another comment he has clarified his position somewhat). If leftists declaring autonomy and militantly seizing a chunk of Seattle isn't terrorism to him then there are some interesting meaning-of-words questions to resolve here - like what he think "right wing" means. It might be that political violence is by definition right-wing to him.

Extremism isn't something that has been accepted as a right-wing position, historically speaking. The right wingers - like everyone - prefer to enact policy from government. Anti-government vigilantism is one of those highly ineffective strategies that nobody really lays claim to.

> leftists declaring autonomy and militantly seizing a chunk of Seattle isn't terrorism

It’s really not. It may be extremism, but it’s not threatening or using violence against civilians for political means.

> political violence is by definition right-wing

Wat? Left-wing guerillas are all over the Americas, Africa and Asia. We just don’t have a lot of them right now in America.

> ...some small business owners were intimidated by demonstrators with baseball bats, asked to pledge loyalty to the movement and choose between CHOP and the police...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest#...

Call me old school, but it sounds like there were threats of violence for political purposes. I'm not sure how an armed and ideological group can seize an area and block the police for any interesting length of time without being a terrorist group. If not political purposes, why are they doing it? If not violence, why do they need guns (there were a few shootings) and how are they holding the police off?

And you aren't really addressing the point I was challenging you on - how are you identifying 'right wing' and 'left-wing' here?

> it sounds like there were threats of violence for political purposes. I'm not sure how an armed and ideological group can seize an area and block the police for any interesting length of time without being a terrorist group.

Then every bridge protest, any strike that gets contentious and/or gang activity is terrorism. They’re not. What you describe is an attempt to consolidate power; not sow terror.

The definition of terrorism is famously ambiguous. But if we expand its definition to include Seattle then must also include armed marches and counter-protests. That still leaves us with a domestic terrorism problem that is overly concentrated amidst right-wing extremists.

> how are you identifying 'right wing' and 'left-wing' here?

Broadly, by partisan orientation. More loosely: by authoritarian and individualist manifestos versus collectivist and anti-capitalist ones. The closest we’ve had to left-wing terrorism since the ecoterrorism era is Luigi, and that’s partly because he’s almost impossible to fit on a one-dimensional metric.

you have an interesting ability to ignore things you complain about coming from your own party. did you already forget about the BLM riots? how much damage was caused there? what about antifa?

as an independent i have a different perspective, the left are the violent ones and consistently push us towards a civil war with their bigotry and inability to stop attempting forced “progress”.

Are you sure you’re responding to the right comment?

If you meant to respond to me, and not roenxi, nobody is forgetting the riots. They were a menace. But they weren’t terrorism and wouldn’t respond to antiterrorism tactics; they’re mass lawlessness. Same as Seattle. The solution is enforcing the laws on the books against flagrant rulebreakinh. That doesn’t work for terrorists.

Haha, yeah you are a real independent all right. I swear I've never heard anyone say that and then follow it with something in their own voice, it's f*cling hilarious to me - I've never met an independent, just idiots tbh.

For the record, and this is true for all humans, speaking words that you've INDEPENDENTLY thought of and come up with all on your own - they leave your mouth differently than words you've heard another say and now your just repeating... it's instantly and immediately identifiable - it's like an advertisement came on, totally different tone, incantation and inflection.

Your comment was the text version of that.

His views aren’t particularly clear, but the would-be Trump assassin does seem to have been a right-wing nutjob. I don’t see why being a right-wing nutjob would require being a Trump supporter, it just happens that most of them are at the moment.

it’s interesting to me the tactics the left employs to make themselves feel better. the entire nation near about said they dislike the lefts policies and yet some still act confused and resort to childish tactics to resolve their inner conflict.

> suspect you're classifying the Trump assassins as right-wing nutjobs

No. Of course we've had left-wing terrorism. It's just not been as prevalent, organised or present as the right-wing form. (And I'm aware of zero currently-operating left-wing militias anyone considers a threat in America.)

Well, that's the official story given by the police. According to the protest medics who treated the shooting victim on the scene, the cops took so much time getting ready to respond - and this was independently verified by a local journalist, using hospital intake records and police scanner timestamps - that the medics gave up on the ambulance and drove the man to the ER themselves. When the police finally showed up, they were in fact told to leave, but it was not out of some political objection to emergency services: they were simply far too late to be of any use to someone who was already in the hospital at that point.

(I live just up the street from the police station at the center of the whole thing, so I paid close attention to all this stuff while it was happening.)

There were 5 shootings resulting in 3 deaths over a period of 9 days (20-29 June). CHAZ/CHOP existed for a period of 23 days (8 June - 1 July). There were 33 homicides in the entire city of Seattle in 2019. No matter how you slice it, there was definitely an increase in the murder rate around the protests, potentially much higher.

And a piece with the increase in homicides, Mayor Durkan reported that SPD had received a 525% increase in reported crimes in the area when compared to the previous June. Obviously not all of the crime was committed by protestors, but the protestors were the ones that drove out the police presence and the city tolerated the situation created by the protestors for nearly a month. Regardless of whether the situation is best described as domestic terrorism or not, it's clear that public officials were willing to tolerate violence enabled by left wing protestors "letting off steam" too.

> Seattle allowed BLM protesters to establish their own “autonomous zone” and ignored it until enough kids were killed.

I do feel like "reclaiming a public street" is slightly different from "attempted coup d'état" though.

“Some of those that work forces…” indeed.

After OKC, the FBI turned the eye of sauron upon the militias. Then 9/11 happened, and white guys in the woods were suddenly less scary than non-white guy and the eye of sauron was no longer looking at the white guys in the woods.

> We’re really bad at taking failed attempts seriously.

To that point, Osama bin Laden had multiple attempts attacking the WTC. They realized that it was going to take a lot more than a car bomb to take down those buildings and made improved plans from a car bomb. Which is just some of the data pointed to by those that are unbelieving that a truck bomb was the sole cause of OKC.

They were also well planned and intentional. J6 seemed much more like spur-of-the-moment mob action, at least from my armchair.

But it wasn't, I remember seeing people on Facebook talking about J6 before it happened. It's kind of weird to see the minimization of J6 in real time.

I think your comment is a direct reflection of the lack of popular coverage and discussion of January 6th. It was planned for prior to the election as a contingency. There's clear and direct evidence of that fact and there's very little awareness of that fact.

I think that your comment is a direct reflection of your desire to paint the opposing political side as dangerous in order to gain political favor and power.

It’s still not going to work. When will the left learn that changing peoples mind by lying will not work?

What’s the lie? Groups like Oath Keepers planned it. It was not spontaneous.

The only reason anyone thinks otherwise is because they were completely incompetent. But being bad at overthrowing the government doesn’t mean you didn’t try.

There were groups with guns and boats ready to resupply an insurgency.

Do you have a credible source that I could read about that? Thank you.

I see another person posted a credible source, so I won’t he redundant, but I do want to respond to ask why you elected to comment asking for a source - this story is very easily googlable.

It sounds like an incredible claim. You are correct, I did not search before asking, but I should have.

There were several organized groups of people among the mob who went prepared for it to go much differently and stoked the flames. I shudder to think what would have happened if they made it to the chamber before the Representatives and Senators got out.

that's what they wanted it to look like. plenty of evidence aired at the congressional hearings showing this was a highly planned act

J6 was organized months in advance. The J6 committee went over this in depth.

The various right-wing groups had been escalating their rhetoric and actions by that time for more than a decade without any meaningful action against it.

Even if it was a spur-of-the-moment mob action, something like that was always coming due to inaction in addressing the increased violence from the different right-wing groups.

didn't timothy mcveigh also say that it was specifically a retaliation for waco?

And Ruby Ridge too, IIRC.

This is in no way a statement support of terrorism but if you simply look at the facts the government showed up at these people’s homes and started shooting. In Waco they killed children by burning them alive and their defense was they didn’t know filling the building with flammable gas would set it on fire. Yes the branch Davidians were stockpiling weapons but at that point they were, to my understanding, legally allowed to own and sell guns. These were tragedies created by the US government on their own citizens.

I don't think these right wing militias are that much of a threat. They're mostly LARPers and have enough attachment to their groups to not do the radical violence. Historically the right wingers that have actually committed violence are the ones that can't even find belonging in the right wing militias.

They're essentially the US' guerilla forces that we see in other countries that cause foreign forces operating in their land to get stuck in a quagmire. They may not be undefeatable, but they'll be able to put up a helluva show enough to make the opfor to question their commitment. Probably long enough to sway public opinion as well.

Dismiss them at your own peril. The FBI did

> As evidence, look at the election we just had.

The amazing thing is how the right was able to essentially rewrite the history of Jan 6 over the last 4 years. Right after the incident even many Republican politicians in DC were calling for Trump's resignation and impeachment (or at least some resolution that would not allow him to run again). There was a huge amount of alarm in the immediate aftermath. But then the narrative about the events of that day slowly started to turn into "it was just a peaceful protest where a few bad apples got a bit out of hand" (that came right after the "it was antifa" stage which didn't last too long when it was clear that these folks were Trump supporters). Trump certainly minimized Jan 6 (to his benefit) and the rest of the GOP began to go along just as they've gone along with the idea that the 2020 election was "stolen" from Trump (and if they actually believe it was stolen then they can come to the conclusion that Jan 6 was justified as some of them do).

You’re mistaking genuine concern with political hay making.

Of course the Democrats call it an insurrection - that’s what their base wants to hear and benefits them at the polls.

But look at what they do in totality - after calling him Hitler the Democratic leadership was wishing Trump a speedy recovery after the assignation attempt.

You don’t wish Hitler a “speedy recovery”.

It’s mostly political theatre. J6 was a riot, but the republic was not able to topple.

>Of course the Democrats call it an insurrection

They might have incentive, but that's irrelevant to whether it was an insurrection. And it was, it was textbook.

https://acoup.blog/2021/01/15/miscellanea-insurrections-anci...

>No ancient Greek would have had any trouble in understanding what happened on the 6th or that it was a serious attempt (albeit an incompetent one) to seize power. Having a leader or a political faction move with a mob (often armed, but not always so) to try to disperse the normal civic assemblies of a Greek polis and occupy their normal meeting place was a standard maneuver to try to seize power during stasis. As Dr. Roel Konijnendijk, an ancient Greek history specialist, noted in this excellent discussion on the r/AskHistorians reddit (where he posts as Iphikrates), “In the Greek world, most attempts to seize power by force tended to take the same form: the seditious party would contrive an opportunity to gather in arms while their opponents were unarmed and off-guard, and seize control of all public spaces.”

(The link author has a PhD in ancient history)

(the "acoup" name is incidental, it stands for A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantries)

And while yes, the Dems have flip-flopped between calling Trump Hitler and wishing him a speedy recovery, that's because they're spineless slaves to proceduralism who won't break decorum if the fate of US's democracy depends on it.

When someone has to use arguments based on Greek history about what is or isn’t an insurrection you know there is some serious hand waving going on.

The crowd was unarmed. Its actions were mostly wondering around (respecting the ropes!) and taking funny pictures.

At no point was the republic at risk of falling.

> the right was able to essentially rewrite the history of Jan 6 over the last 4 years.

so when the left literally changed wikipedia entries, what was that? not rewriting history?

to put it bluntly, it’s hard to have sympathy for your case when the left does the same. when will the left stop complaining that the right is doing things they are also doing?

when will the rest of you figure out that parties are the problem?

> when the left does the same.

Thank you for saying something that has me opening my mouth and getting in trouble.

Given that I am a Lockean liberal at heart, I object to describing the entire left as doing the same thing as the right. There is still a portion of the left (admittedly shrinking) whose foundation is based on science, math, logic, and history.

However, that said, I see a lot of similarities between progressives and MAGAs in their denial of facts, shouting down others who disagree with them, and preferring conspiracies and truthiness because it feels better. Magas do carry it one step further in making up case law, inventing legal theories out of whole cloth (textualism), and making choices that degrade the function of socicity that make things better for everyone except stockholders

> When will the left stop complaining that the right is doing things they are also doing?

progressives, not the left. when the right stops being a bunch of snowflakes.

They won't as long as they get a molecule of attention.