Disagree. Every state will characterize the violence it receives differently than the violence it enacts. Even a well-intended egalitarian state can never equivocate acts of violence against its officers with those done by its officers, because if the state fails to produce an immune response against one attack, it will soon find itself overwhelmed by more. The state has to treat vigilante justice and especially attacks against its officers as illegitimate on principle, or else it will cease to be.

States claim a monopoly on legitimate violence, and I’d even say that’s what makes a state a state. If a given geographic region has a hundred different entities that can enact violence without each others’ permission, you don’t have a state, you have a hundred states.

You cannot ask officers of the state to equivocate violence by and against the state. That’s not their job. That judgement is our job.

(You can also argue that the state shouldn’t exist, but that’s a different and far more interesting discussion than the one the article poses.)

Not gonna lie, that was my first thought when seeing the news. The only legitimate course for absolute power is to destroy itself.

Gotta do the same for the senate and state legislatures (including governors). Redrawing state lines is not simple.

Maybe THIS will get the Dems to ditch the filibuster and pack the court. Of course, that would require the Democratic party as a whole to show some fight, something they refuse to do for some reason.

To pack the court, Democrats need to secure:

• A House + Senate majority (something they haven’t had since 2009-2011)
• A wide enough majority in both that no small caucus could hold the vote hostage for a personal agenda (something they haven’t had since Jimmy Carter)
• A president with a platform built on disruptive change rather than stability (which they haven’t had since FDR)
• A plan to keep Republicans out of office permanently so that they can never wield this new power in retaliation (even Lincoln messed up on that one)

They need more than just a git-r-dun attitude. Remaking the SCOTUS (rather than waiting it out) means throwing the old government away and starting over.

You know, it’s always bothered me that we put so much stock in debates.

The ability to verbally humiliate your opponents is not a good indicator of the ability to recognize good policy.

Biden and Trump are not equivalent.

To convince us that Democrats and Republicans are equivalent, you must first explain why LGBT+ equality, workers’ rights, freedom of religion, the ability to vote, and the actual existence of science are all insignificant.

Anderson v Griswold (this case) is a civil lawsuit that started Oct 30 in CO district court under judge Sarah B. Wallace. This case involved opposing arguments over whether or not Trump engaged 8n insurrection. There was no jury.

Judge Wallace ruled (and CO supreme court later upheld) that Trump engaged in insurrection. The standard for burden of proof in this ruling was “clear and convincing,” (see supreme court ruling) which is somewhere between “beyond a reasonable doubt” (the standard for criminal cases) and a “preponderance of the evidence” (>50% chance of the accused being responsible). Clear and convincing evidence is typically used in discrimination and fraud lawsuits.

just imagine how this precedent could be used by the right against a left-leaning candidate.

This is what worries me. If all you need to ban a candidate is the low bar of preponderance of evidence, then I don’t understand what prevents Republicans from using this precedent and wielding their 27 (!) state supreme court majorities to bar all candidates except Trump.

Trump factually engaged in insurrection, but this case sets the bar for proving it so low that Republicans are going use this precedent to push lawsuits in every state and ban every candidate they don’t like in any office they want over spurious claims of disloyalty.

EDIT: The standard followed in the district court wasn’t a “preponderance of the evidence,” (>50% chance of being true, or >50% share of responsibility) as it typically is for civil lawsuits. The judge actually followed a “clear and convincing” standard (see the ruling page 14). That’s a significantly higher bar, typically used in discrimination and fraud lawsuits. So while bad actors will still try to abuse this precedent, it’ll be a lot harder for them to succeed.

Trump’s latest comments about “vermin,” “retribution,” “day-one dictator,” and “poisoning the blood” have hit Associated Press, NPR, Reuters, and BBC, who have responded matter-of-factly by comparing to it to the rhetoric of Nazis and Mussolini. Mein Kampf got name-dropped more than once.

I am also seeing coverage from CNN, ABC, USNews, USAToday, and NBCNews.

Now, which media you consider mainstream, and what kind of coverage you consider adequate can change the answer. I don’t know what they’re saying on TV, for example. But when even Forbes runs a front-page article which compares Trump’s rhetoric to Hitler’s in the first paragraph, I’d say there’s no lack of mainstream coverage, and they’re not dancing around the issue anymore.