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Denise Cote's avatar

This is an important conversation. Political violence does not advance a cause. My personal feeling is if Antifa types had not hijacked the BLM protests over the murder of George Floyd, Biden's margin of victory would have been even larger and perhaps the democrats would not have lost seats in the house.

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sascha benjamin cohen's avatar

For the first time, I find myself deeply disappointed by one of these posts. The author in his effort to identify the (real) issue of disorganized violence on the left - as opposed to mass organized and condoned violence on the right - both overstates his thesis, and muddily misrepresents it. He seems to be conflating "random assholes" with the thing we call antifa; then acknowledges that antifa isn't actually an organization or entity, but is "more than an idea"...

If we want to have an honest discussion about leftwing tendencies to violence, let's at least put it in perspective. We can go back to 1999 for an inflection point, and consider "The Battle of Seattle" and the WTO riots, for instance. Has the level of violent action (or the percent of fringe who support it) increased? Decreased? Stayed level?

You can't talk about the current situation on the left without at least some longer view of how we got here. I hope this community and this author are ready for more rigorous thinking on this topic, and a more honest investigation of what is a concerning, but relatively minor and reactionary cultural challenge.

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