This is very much “careful what you wish for”, and why I wish looking at mechanisms down the road were more important than This Issue Right Now.
Whenever there is x and y and x is treated worse than y, it’s important that x be improved to y, and not degrading y until it is x. Domestic left wing political groups have been treated shitty here since forever and it’s frustrating to hear progressives of course forget all that and call for that to be applied more broadly rather than continuing the difficult work of sticking fingers in the dyke against the surveillance and incarcaral state. Go after them for their crimes but for Zod’s sake don’t insist on calling them terrorists; it just feeds the right-wing mentality.
We’ve created this unhinged category called terrorism that makes people see red and turn off their brains and it’s already codified into law that it short circuits all the things that made our country great. We should be trying to apply this less, rather than more. Rather than saying “hey, you’re calling (vaguely lefty group) terrorists but not white supremecists, so let’s be consistent and call them all terrorists” how about “none of them are terrorists. If however some of them commit crimes, the ones who do will be prosecuted”
Don’t feed the beast.
