For example, 2020, we had the capitol riots, there are definitely people being tried and found guilty and insurrectionism, and a year later, 2/3 of people say those riots were definitely violent. Yet, conservative people I know are saying that the news surrounding those riots were fake, and that the people who went in were on a tour. (See NBC’s news on this: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republican-loyal-trump-claims-capitol-riot-looked-more-normal-tourist-n1267163 )
Now, in 2024, we have a number of liberals rioting against Trump, and some of them are being violent or wearing the all-black “I would do violence” T-shirts, and these same conservatives are using this as a pretext for saying that liberals are violent, and that anyone who supports the liberals is crazy, and asking why we can support/defend them. (see Asmongold’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2NYxWZLJjY )
Hopefully this doesn’t count as a rant, but I would like to know what is a realistic explanation for this duality, is it because they distrust mainstream media, and trust alternative media like Asmongold? Or is it a double standard thing?
Edit 1: It’s good to see so many reasons for why the conservatives are wrong. I’m center left, so I also believe it’s wrong, but I have to play devil’s advocate here and act as a conservative. I would very much appreciate if any response is well-thought out, with at least a name or 2 of things I can research on to use as talking points to explain that the title idea is wrong.
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For example, 2020, we had the capitol riots, there are definitely people being tried and found guilty and insurrectionism, and a year later, 2/3 of people say those riots were definitely violent. Yet, conservative people I know are saying that the news surrounding those riots were fake, and that the people who went in were on a tour. (See NBC’s news on this: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republican-loyal-trump-claims-capitol-riot-looked-more-normal-tourist-n1267163 )
Now, in 2024, we have a number of liberals rioting against Trump, and some of them are being violent or wearing the all-black “I would do violence” T-shirts, and these same conservatives are using this as a pretext for saying that liberals are violent, and that anyone who supports the liberals is crazy, and asking why we can support/defend them. (see Asmongold’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2NYxWZLJjY )
Hopefully this doesn’t count as a rant, but I would like to know what is a realistic explanation for this duality, is it because they distrust mainstream media, and trust alternative media like Asmongold? Or is it a double standard thing?
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every accusation is a confession
I think its fair to say the left has a long history of rioting and protesting, so theres a level of familiarity to it.
Conservatives for the last 50 years have been the party of business leaders. They dont riot, they just buy elections behind the cover. Having regular folk in the party is a relatively modern thing.
Right wing commits political acts in other ways, like terrorism or bombings.
I think its more about “outburst frequency.” Pointing to one event, then comparing that single event to every evolving event, you could possibly see that after taking a moment to actually recognize you’re comparing 20 things to 1 things, and you say something like “oh yeah there’s 20 of these, thats probably why there’s a difference.”
No.
Violence exists on both sides of the political spectrum in fairly equal amounts as far as I am concerned. What conservatives do very well is apply uneven standards, Jan 6th – patriots, BLM – rioters.
Since 1980, the right has been WAY more violent in America.
What you’re witnessing is the power of propaganda.
No. Liberals typically have empathy, Conservatives typically have much less empathy. Having empathy leads to being less violent.
This is also why Conservatives are so much more pro-gun and aren’t bothered by school shootings, etc. Liberals tend to do less harmful violence since they aren’t heavily armed; Conservatives are more likely to have safes full of weapons in the garage.
Somehow we’re both weak and more violent at the same time in their eyes.
“The enemy is both weak and strong.”
So… blm protests were from a disposed group acting on correct information that they were the target of structural racism that denied jobs, healthcare, housing, etc. in particular it was a protest about police violence against minorities. This is all part of the history of the U.S. you can read up on it.
The January 6 protests were part of an observably untrue idea that the left had “stolen” the election. This claim was laughable at the time, and since then even those who espoused the idea at the time have come out to say it was basically hogwash. Yet, those people stormed the capital and one (some?) literally pooped on the floor of our capital. Look at the footage and pretend you’re watching news from another country.
The two sides are not the same.
No. They aren’t.
Tim Mcveigh. Next question…
Do we need to post all the articles again? The ones where the FBI, and DHS agree that white supremacy is the greatest domestic threat? The one that shows nearly all political violence is carried out by right wingers. It’s getting exhausting.
Literally every statistic shows this as false.
Well it is very important to acknowledge how they are being bad faith and making these bad faith arguments to defend their traitorous, unconstitutional, and violent rhetoric that causes conservatives to kill, bomb, and shoot human beings.
During the BLM protests for police to be less racist and respect the constitutional rights of Americans, conservatives didn’t want this. So this is when they went out of their way to mischaracterize the protests as being anti white, burning down cities, communism, violent, and anti police. None of these things were true, there were a handful of incidents across the country that were cherry picked and used to paint the whole movement as being those fringe cases.
People don’t fathom how big and widespread these peaceful protests were, but conservative media painted them as violent using fringe outliers. Many of those handful of incidents, the inciting incident was law enforcement initiating contact and creating a riot. Many other cases it was an alt right counter protester starting aggression.
But yeah, conservative media 24/7, pushed these false narratives to advance their cause to have police continue to be allowed to violate our rights, racially profile, and kill us with impunity. They didn’t want cops to be less racist against blacks and they didn’t want POTENTIAL criminals to get away, no matter if the rights of innocent people have to be violated. At the core of their criticisms is that they have literally no respect for the constitution or rule of law, as police violate both habitually snd many times not even corruption, many times it is just ignorance of the law.
Conservatives media, in order to advance these dastardly causes, would equate every criminal act that happened in the surrounding areas of protests as being BLM protesters, as opposed to just criminals doing what they do. BLM, during the George Floyd protests, didn’t kill anyone yet all of conservative media repeats the lie that 20+ people were killed by BLM. This is complete bad faith nonsense and racist disinformation from conservative media.
These things are important to acknowledge. 1. That every time a right wing terrorist attack happens, clearly motivated by mainstream conservative talking points, all of conservative media and Twitter will just start lying about the person being a registered Democrat/left wing or just a mentally ill person. 2. Conservative media and conservatives in general have no respect for statistics. Fox News will play the same clip of a riot for two months and then since the audience has been exposed to that one riot for two months, they believe that these fringe and rare events happen m more than they do, Fox News also lies and tells them this is happening everywhere. They have zero concept of the cherry picking fallacy.
Ultimately, statistics are all that matter when making quantitative claims and your friend has simply been conditioned to believe nonsense for these specific reasons I detailed. As others point out, the left will commit vandalism, but they rarely ever kill. Right wing terrorists commit more terrorism than any other demographic domestically by leagues. I will provide two sources that contain important statistics.
https://archive.ph/JV2sR
https://www.csis.org/analysis/pushed-extremes-domestic-terrorism-amid-polarization-and-protest
https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/
It is disgusting how conservative are more outraged by the damage caused to cars than they are the lives lost due to their racist rhetoric and conspiracy theories. Bondi and the DOJ said they were disbanding their right wing terrorism task force to focus on “real crime”.
https://elpasomatters.org/2025/03/30/patrick-crusius-donald-trump-aug-3-2019-walmart-mass-shooting/
Conservative media will defend any terrorist act and sweep it under the rug under the banner of partisanship and tribalism.
It should also be noted liberals/Democrats weren’t rioting, those are leftists(communists, anarchists, etc), who hate Democrats more than Republicans.
I stopped four words into your question.
The answer is no.
It’s always no.
Liberals or the left? The left has been, historically, more violent. Liberals, historically, have been less violent.
No
If you were interested in good faith discussion and not just a rant, please provide specific time stamps or better yet, the original videos that have the surround context. You should very well know that fake news can twist videos by not showing all the context, and hopefully you understand that it’s not good faith discussion to say “here is a 12 minute video for you to go through to find the few instances I am referring to.”
Neither Liberals nor conservatives are inherently more violent. People who attach moral principles to policy making are more violent than those who don’t. On one hand, if you’re constantly talking about how certain classes of people are oppressed and you’re not seeing any progress in a way that is antithetical to oppression, would you or would you not be wrong to get violent about it?
Alternatively, if you’re convinced there are a growing number of people who hate this country and want to destroy it, sell it out to foreign adversaries, or erase its fundamentals would you or would you not be wrong to get violent about it?
Just food for thought. This is actually my biggest criticism of democracy and how difficult it is to sustain.
No.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/escalating-terrorism-problem-united-states
> This section analyzes the data in two parts: terrorist incidents and fatalities. The data show three notable trends. First, right-wing attacks and plots accounted for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994. In particular, they made up a large percentage of incidents in the 1990s and 2010s. Second, the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown substantially during the past six years. In 2019, for example, right-wing extremists perpetrated nearly two-thirds of the terrorist attacks and plots in the United States, and they committed over 90 percent of the attacks and plots between January 1 and May 8, 2020. Third, although religious extremists were responsible for the most fatalities because of the 9/11 attacks, right-wing perpetrators were responsible for more than half of all annual fatalities in 14 of the 21 years during which fatal attacks occurred.
I mean… leftists literally blew up bombs at the capitol building AND the pentagon. 😆
So, that’s why I don’t really buy the leftist outrage about 1/6.
I think we’re a country filled with political nut jobs.
Before the current political purges happened, FBI and other law enforcement were quite explicit that right wing extremists were the biggest danger of domestic terrorism or similar.
Left wing terrorism hasn’t been a thing in the US since the 70s.
Sure, there’s some dipshits that thing smashing store windows is somehow bringing a worker’s revolution, but that’s nothing like the stuff the far right is steeping in, where you have militia groups eagerly hoping for a moment they can become a 5th column to a fascist revolution with their guns directly.
I think it’s a double standard thing.
Liberals/the left is not immune to violence, but objectively right wing violence is more common than all other forms of political violence combined in America, and our violence tends to be property damage vs killing/injuring people.
It sure doesn’t seem like it.
Lol no. No, they are not.