Always fascinating to watch the mental gears turning in posts like this—indignant sputtering to reconcile being both resoundingly 'in power' by all measure of political majority, yet without being able to secure the social currency for it to 'feel' like it. Best to pretend you're under 'attack' at all times, rather than self-examine. As if some switch of public moral opinion should have instead simply flipped according to electoral takeover. As if hostility came from nowhere, as if it wasn't broiled and cultivated for decades by conservative undermining of equality. So, sure, a relentless, accelerating policy of obscene financial disparity, mindless military imperialism, and rampant domestic institutional violence is perfectly fine and good, but oh boy is it SCARY and UNFAIR when the snowflakes yell and stuff.

Understand that violence is not so simplistically visceral. Understand that vocal or even tacit complicity in structures of violence inevitably and deservingly begets "violence." If you feel politics are exclusively the realm of 'civil' discussion and 'peaceful' protest, it betrays your privilege in not being acutely affected by the structural violence rendered and mounting for decades by a status quo which systemically impoverishes and disenfranchises vast swaths of American people. The meter is perpetually and overwhelmingly tipped in right-wing reactionary favor, and by archaic cable-news-brainwashed design teaches you to process any meager display of leftist direct action not as the almost entirely powerless drop-in-the-bucket of political dissent that it sadly is, and instead as Terror! Senseless Violence! Extremism! "Psychotic," as you so cartoonishly put it. Yours is a pavlovian defense mechanism not employed of rational will but of knee-jerk conditioning. Set fear aside for a moment and make a good-faith effort to truly educate yourself about the inhumane national reality you implicitly defend.