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Comment by abernard1 | Hacker News Reader

This is extraordinarily tame in the scheme of American history.

And as someone who lives in one of those areas of the country constantly scorned, belittled, and caricatured, I can say with confidence that you do not want those people to act in kind to Antifa.

There's been a lot of living vicariously through Antifa/BLM lately with portions of society that want to "stand for something." It's the same mentality as people who wear Che Guevara t-shirts but complain when the wifi on their plane isn't available.

On the other side of that is a enormous, peaceful, patriotic section of U.S. society that is heavily armed and competent with those armaments.

If you make this segment of society feel as if they are the enemy of the country they love, it will be a disaster. If there is ever armed conflict between urban areas vs everyone else, "everyone else" in the U.S. will win overwhelmingly.

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> “If there is ever armed conflict between urban areas vs everyone else, "everyone else" in the U.S. will win overwhelmingly.”

I remember back in third grade when kids would argue about how their dad would beat the others’. As I grew up, I realized that that’s not how conflicts work, and certainly not how they’re won.

> I realized that that’s not how conflicts work, and certainly not how they’re won.

Please tell that to the Afghanis.

This isn't about some civil war, it's about what would happen if Red State America decided it wanted to behave like Blue City America has been for the last year. People talk about "Proud Boys" as if that's equivalent and I just have to roll my eyes.

There is an immense reservoir of anger within America in people who feel overlooked and the system is stacked against them. If they receive the downsides of civil strife even though they haven't participated in violence, they might decide they want the upsides of civil strife as well. This culture, unlike the sadly tolerated insurrections of Antifa, has the ability to have real power through violence if it ever came to it.

Despite the often exaggerated claims of singular victimhood, I actually do realize that the current right-wing rage does come from real suffering, and sympathize to an extent. What makes me wonder is that extent to which this rage is directed at the new wave of black civil rights movement; they both have roots in economic or cultural marginalization of certain populations, and from what I can tell, they’re not competing for some common resource. Which, in my mind (and many others similarly puzzled), leaves racist hate as a likely candidate.

Point being, if your goal was genuinely to bring awareness to and address some real suffering in your community, you’d just do that; get out on the street, break a few windows, punch a cop, petition for legislation, like BLM does. That’s called civil disobedience. “Insurrection” starts when you try to override and overrule the very fabric of the system, like the federal legislature.

There is nothing at all patriotic about what these people did. There is nothing peaceful about what happened this week.

These people demand Constitutional rights while trampling all over that very document.

They are not “patriots,” they are traitors.

I'm not saying these people who stormed the Capitol did the right thing. Far from it.

What we're seeing is this being used as a blunt instrument to suppress the non-extremist components of that disagreement.

That "non-extremist" component is patriotic. It is extremely large and also very angry. Treating them as if they are the same as the people who did this is ill-advised.

Man, are you bad at math. The urban areas account for over half of the population.

And of the 400 million firearms in the United States, what portion of them belong to Blue Cities?

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