I really don't understand this board sometimes. Most of you are nominally libertarian, which means the state should be as restrained as possible. Yet here you are wishing for the state to exert it's power on protestors. There's something weird about Trump where people seem to talk about him like he's not really part of the state or he's "our guy" who's somehow captured state power and is keeping "them" (whoever it is) from ruining America. That may have been true 3 years ago and maybe even in his first months in office, but now he is in every way the state. He owns much of the apparatus. He's replaced most entrenched bureaucrats with his own people. He's appointed loyalist judges. He's got a staff and cabinet of yes men after Stephen Miller helped purge all the people GOP leadership saddled them with. He's even primaried some Republican Congress members with people who follow his lead.
So whether it's Antifa, the Proud Boys, Neo-nazis or the Young Communist League, you are objectively rooting for the state to begin a campaign of crushing it's enemies and dissenters. And why? Because Antifa, a largely disorganized ad hoc group of wannabe anarchists (also against the state) gets together via discord chats, Meetup and Facebook groups and like any poorly organized protest movement have people who lack discipline and do reckless things (see Anonymous and the materials they often randomly leaked to shame institutions without protecting victims of those institutions' privacy as an example).
Any instance of this lack of discipline is being piped directly into conservative newsfeeds via bots and other paid campaigns to promote an image of a rowdy "
alt-left" being widespread and out of control, plus having
media providing cover for them.
@Wild for instance is no doubt getting these things in every social media feed he has, probably penned by the authors of Quilette or some other outlet. But I assure you, that's deliberate. And it's not because you're so shrewd and have access to true news "the MSM won't show you." It's because the instances are rare and usually under investigation by local law enforcement.
Further, it's surprising to me that any libertarian would be in favor of detention facilities of any kind. Whether you're a left or right libertarian, the unifying principles have always been opposition to the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the surveillance state. I can certainly understand opposing propaganda by the deed, but the criticism here isn't being articulated in a way to suggest it's about the tactics as much as a hatred of the enemy.
It's lipstick libertarianism, which is only being actually libertarian as long as your side is out of power then falling in line with law and order once someone says a few things you like. Cliven Bundy was using arms to oppose what he considered state violence and the same people who jacked off into their socks over his weekly news dispatches are likely clamoring for a state crackdown on whomever annoys them. The thing is Trump was never the guy. He never was genuinely sympathetic to either law and order or libertarianism. He just adopted the rhetoric to get elected, with Bannon whispering what to say to activate that base. Now he's running the state and mostly using it to advantage big capital, because he's a rich kid turned rich adult. He's already started rounding people up on the basis of where they're from. Now you guys want him to round up some other people. History tells us once you get the ball rolling on rounding people up, it usually doesn't stop.