“[M]ost arrested in protests aren’t leftist radicals,” headlined an Associated Press analysis published Oct. 20. Of those arrested this summer during the nation’s largest outbreak of riots in 30 years, “Very few of those charged appear to be affiliated with highly organized extremist groups, and many are young suburban adults from the very neighborhoods Trump vows to protect from the violence in his reelection push to win support from the suburbs,” the article’s second paragraph says.
They've been portrayed by the president as violent left-wing radicals and used to scare suburban voters. But an @AP review found most of those arrested in U.S. protests look like regular citizens caught up in the moment — many are young suburban adults. https://t.co/TP3LyuFLme
— The Associated Press (@AP) October 20, 2020
These nice young people throwing Molotov cocktails and setting police cars on fire are basically the kids next door, the article implies. It is clear from the article’s framing the AP intends it to be another entry into the “move along, nothing to see here” genre employed against facts that make the left look bad and are impossible to ignore. In reality, however, the article makes things look even worse than the reality it is meant to counter.
The AP doesn’t show or explain how it came to the conclusion that most of the 286 people being federally prosecuted for crimes in connection with this summer’s Black Lives Matter riots are the young, suburban, “not leftist radicals” its article claims. If this is true, however, it suggests violence has become uncomfortably normalized among those who identify on the political left.
If the AP characterization is accurate, tolerance for violence in the service of political ends is not just concentrated in fringe outliers like Antifa cells. It is attracting middle-class people who grew up in comfortable suburbia. People whose parents are aware that their children are politically intoxicated to the point of arson and still bail them out of jail and hire them lawyers. This is not comforting at all.
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