Who's "we" in that sentence? The people most in danger of actually having their lives destroyed right now are those whose opinions conflict with those being enforced by men in camo. How many supporters of the government have been sent to the hospital or disappeared into vans lately?
Categorically though, you are conflating two issues. Any violent riot (yes, that is what it is) will end up in hospitalizations and arrests. Spinning it as a secret state action against people just doing their thing is not genuine.
Imagine a scenario where 2A supporters violently protested outside of the ATF headquarters in Washington DC, brandishing firearms and attempting to attack the building and people in it. Imagine yourself as you are now with your present opinion, would you be supportive of or against the protesters?
I’m speaking more generally in the benign everyday sharing of innocuous opinions online that spiral wildly out of control.
> Imagine a scenario ... would you be supportive of or against the protesters?
I would be supportive of their expression of rights, but not of brandishing weapons and attacking the building. You see, I'm not the one conflating issues here. There are both peaceful and non-peaceful protesters out there right now. I don't lump them all together. There's no excuse for forcible detention, without due process or accountability, of people who were personally unarmed, doing no wrong, and far from the scene of anyone else doing wrong. When that's happening, it's a legitimate reason for people to be careful of what they say even if there are other scenarios in play as well.
It's wrong, a massive federal overreach, and I hope people are prosecuted for it, I but to equate it with the KGB killing people in government facilities or the Nazis shipping people off to camps displays a shocking lack of empathy or even the most basic understanding of history.
But that's not where we are today, and the distinction is important. Because once the latter happens, that justifies a completely different response from the populace than what we're facing today.
What do you mean by that? Surely people indisputably do disappear from time to time, and we may not know who to blame. Surely we all agree that "secret police" who work for the federal government are doing secret things which sometimes includes grabbing people and releasing them, because the grabbees have been describing it publicly.
So what's the sense in asserting the secret police are not disappearing people; how could you possibly rule it out? Conversely if they are disappearing people, without records or badges, it seems unlikely to be easily proven.