Listen, it's not like these people burned and looted small businesses like acceptable rioters. They scared politicians!
Scared (for their safety) politicians is a societal failure mode. It should be more urgent and pressing than almost anything else.
When the government fears the people, it's an institutional failure mode, just like allowing people burn and loot small business with near-impunity, which, broadly, it was.
Governments and politicians should always fear the people. Not in terms of violence (although I do understand why BLM felt the need to resort to violence, given that police has undeniably committed grave acts of violence specifically against people of color for generations), but at the very least they should always fear not being re-elected so that they have an incentive to work for the people.
If the people don't hold their politicians accountable and keep voting only because of the party letter (and not voting in primaries...), the end result is Qanon believers like Greene in Congress.
Why are people so myopic in their blame for police, when its politicians who are ultimately responsible for creating the drug war, mass incarceration, and police militarization?
The current POTUS has a long history of being a major champion of the drug war, the military police state, and voting for wars resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent "people of color", and yet he is seen as a hero by many people who hate the police and claim to care about "people of color". How is that not deeply ironic?
I fully agree that the issue goes deeper than police, but still: it was a conscious choice that led to George Floyd's death. It was and is a conscious choice of a police officer to conduct racial profiling.
Politicians must be held responsible, and yes that includes the current Presidency, but that does not absolve individual actors at the bottom of the ladder.
It seems like some people are consciously or unconsciously using the police as a scapegoat, though, as a means of avoiding genuinely addressing the root causes of police militarization and mass incarceration which are politically taboo to discuss: the war on drugs, and to a lesser extent, the war on terror.
Do we now elevate the political class above regular citizens?
If politicians can be coerced with violence, the only politicians left will be corrupt ones, and democracy and the rule of law will be lost. Then regular citizens will no longer have any say over the situation anyway.
If a regular citizen can be coerced with violence, they still have recourse to the polling booth.
Again, I don't believe the protesters were correct, but they believed that widespread election fraud was being ignored by their representatives and state and federal courts. In their minds, resorting to force --- fairly mild force, in all honesty --- was not an unreasonable step.
OK you're going to say only a minority of the Capitol invaders had such thoughts, but that's the same with BLM "rioters" as well (what you're obviously refering to).
When the protestors were outside hearing the president speak it was a protest. When they tried to storm the capitol it was an insurrection.
There are clear, easy lines to be drawn. People don't draw these lines though because they want to further their political agenda.
I don’t think what happened at the Capitol was a monolith either. There were 10,000s of people in DC that day and only 100s (?) entered the Capitol illegally.
So, it’s entirely similar to what happened over the summer with BLM where there were 10,000s of peaceful protestors and 100s of violent rioters.
While there have been a few assassinations of police since the BLM riots started years ago, I'm not aware of any overt attacks on the persons in politics by the right. Obviously this is fairly fresh, so we'll see, but my point is there's talk and then there's action.
This is just a point of curiosity, not affirmations of the actions at the capitol. The plot against the Michigan governor by the right-wing anarchists strikes me as a much more credible threat than what occurred at the capitol, even though the latter is spoken about with some sort of future-telling confidence.
Then again, most of the Q-Anon Capitol invasion force is probably like that too.
My thought is, they were a huge mob goading each other. I do remember noticing some people trying to stop others who were breaking stuff, so surely some of them thought they were going there to just be heard, but others went in seemingly ready to kidnap people. But the mob mentality could've lead to someone getting beaten to death.
I think both are bad, but the difference between a “competent coup” that kills the scared politicians and the stupid incompetence that was the capitol riot can only be known afterwards.
I think this fits into the concept that political violence is worse than regular violence.