Such things have always been a part of law enforcement repertoire.
When the FBI was engaging in such "entrapment" against Muslim Americans after 9/11, you would never hear the right-wing complaining, but now of course that their own are turning out to be the perps and the targets, suddenly they want to act like they are against law enforcement over-reach and malfeasance. Except of course when the victim is Black, and then they switch back to not caring.
At the end of the day, a good person can't be convinced to engage in terrorism or violence of any kind, whether politically or religiously motivated. The notion that people who wanted to kidnap someone--for the stupidest and most ignoble of reasons--are "victims" here is lacks any moral credibility or seriousness.
And what's more, it's whiny, weak, and hypocritical. If you ask those criminals (that's all they are) or their supporters whether they think masculinity is in decline and under attack in America, they'd probably launch into a whole spiel of grievances, yet when it push comes to shove, those guys wanted to be absolved for responsibility for their actions and for the corruption of their own hearts and minds. Not manly at all. No integrity.
> At the end of the day, a good person can't be convinced to engage in terrorism or violence of any kind
This implies that only full pacifists can be good persons. Because for everyone else, there is a situation in which they will engage in violence, and all you have to do is fool them into thinking they're in that situation.
Instead of morally corrupting someone, all you have to do is fool them about what the facts are.
And that is a lot easier, and it's what the FBI in fact does. From police work, they know exactly the type who can be convinced to not only confess whatever you like, but come to believe it too. The world is full of people with little faith in their own perception, memory or understanding of reality, and they are not any more likely to be principled pacifists than anyone else.
Wait, this is a right vs left wing issue in USA? Explains the very low quality and very tribal discussions here. I thought this was about privacy and government overreach and in those threads the discussions are much better, but apparently all of that goes out the window when you add tribal conflicts...
Republicans endorse political violence when it’s targeted against their political opponents - the plot to kidnap and execute the Michigan governor was “just a joke” (the perpetrators have been convicted and are currently incarcerated).
And seems like Democrats endorse police overreach when it is targeted against their political opponents, since it is them who are all over this thread saying basically "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". I wonder where all of those are in the typical police threads? ACAB except when cops did something I like, then it is "trust the cops to interpret this correctly!"?
Politics is tiring for that reason, most people lose their rational thinking ability when that gets involved, and to an outsider all of it just looks like insanity.
Maybe the real world is a complex place where you have bad actors that need stopped, and in some cases those bad actors are also the police.
If you're trying to reduce any real world situation to a binary set of choices, you're almost always going to be incorrect. When I was a teenager I was working in a shop and a number of people around there had more radical views on the government. A few of them commonly got together and did what we'd consider LARPing now (this was 90s). One of them seems to have more a more violent anti-government take over the others. Wasn't long before the FBI was down there arresting him and he eventually served a healthy sentence over his actions.
Unfortunately Google has become a memory hole on older news like this, and I can no longer remember his name to find any articles on this.
Yeah, I don't see a clear case for either party having more privilege. Democrats have more control over academia, news media, and tech companies. Republicans are the typical party of the 1%, win elections without the popular vote, and often have status quo bias on their side. This makes sense; we should expect both sides to have equal power because, well, duh. That's what lets them be 'both sides' instead of the libertarians and socialists.
