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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> Do you spend much time with people not in the tech world?

Most of it. Across the political spectrum.

> even if not to such an extreme

That’s precisely the point. There is a massive difference between doing or aiding and abetting such behavior, cheering it on, and giving into the impulse of “couldn’t have happened to a worse person” before self correcting. There are a few saints who reject the violence at first glance. But most people are in that self correcting phase, and the correction happens the more they learn about the specifics of the assault.

> even the president regularly calls for and promotes violence

To what numerical end?

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I mean, he literally just posted a video on his account of a woman being violently beaten to death with a hammer as a call for people to do something about immigrants.

> he literally just posted a video on his account of a woman being violently beaten to death with a hammer as a call for people to do something about immigrants

Zero dispute. I’m challenging the notion that Americans are rising to that call. (Or cheering on specific attacks, versus general notions of violence.)

In a weird way, maybe social media helps in this one instance. We can’t let the enemy be faceless. There is no glory in shooting a specific mother or nurse.

You're missing that the Americans rising to the call are employed by the state itself. ICE over Trump's tenure with a burgeoning budget has become filled with folks that were part of known white supremacist groups. The most violent believers have been state sanctioned and paid to inflict his agenda.

> Americans rising to the call are employed by the state itself

This is a problem. But it’s categorically different from vigilantism. That sort of grassroots violence is basically impossible to stop once it gets started without major abrogations of rights, at least temporarily. And we have not seen organized grassroots vigilantes taking up arms to pot Trump’s enemies. Not systematically or at any scale that doesn’t just scream gun-control problems.

It's not categorically different and it requires you to really dig your head deep in the sand. The 'unite the right' rally in 2018 was filled with the sort of vigilante violence you say is a problem. The reason why these rallies dwindled is not because of any sort of advancement or government attempt to squash out the problem; it's because they've become embedded within the government.

You're attempting to find step 1 when we're already passed that and into step 2. The vigilantes are coming from inside the house, and the murders committed in Minneapolis combined with the government working overtime to shield them should be the primary signal.

> To what numerical end?

How many people live in Iran, who he just threatened to genocide? How many people hold views that Trump thinks make them his enemy, including being critical of ICE? How many immigrants are in the country? It's going to be a very large number, no matter how you slice it.

I mean to what numerical end do Trump’s supporters pick up arms when he calls them to violence.

This is getting more and more specific - I was talking about him encouraging violence.

But some examples: Jan 6, the attack on Paul Pelosi, every ICE agent.

Personally, I've also received multiple death threats from his supporters.

Those are real examples, and we should be vigilant about them. My point is they’re still numerically rare compared with population and societies that enter periods of civil strife. (I’m sorry about your own experiences. People say things that are abhorrent. It’s no comfort to know most of them wouldn’t act out on them.)

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