I don’t like the article title, but I was true to the original author’s lede.

“[M]ost arrested in protests aren’t leftist radicals,” headlined an Associated Press analysis published Oct. 20. Of those arrested this summer during the nation’s largest outbreak of riots in 30 years, “Very few of those charged appear to be affiliated with highly organized extremist groups, and many are young suburban adults from the very neighborhoods Trump vows to protect from the violence in his reelection push to win support from the suburbs,” the article’s second paragraph says.

These nice young people throwing Molotov cocktails and setting police cars on fire are basically the kids next door, the article implies. It is clear from the article’s framing the AP intends it to be another entry into the “move along, nothing to see here” genre employed against facts that make the left look bad and are impossible to ignore. In reality, however, the article makes things look even worse than the reality it is meant to counter.

The AP doesn’t show or explain how it came to the conclusion that most of the 286 people being federally prosecuted for crimes in connection with this summer’s Black Lives Matter riots are the young, suburban, “not leftist radicals” its article claims. If this is true, however, it suggests violence has become uncomfortably normalized among those who identify on the political left.

If the AP characterization is accurate, tolerance for violence in the service of political ends is not just concentrated in fringe outliers like Antifa cells. It is attracting middle-class people who grew up in comfortable suburbia. People whose parents are aware that their children are politically intoxicated to the point of arson and still bail them out of jail and hire them lawyers. This is not comforting at all.

The article does give information about age, race, and sex. A plurality of those charged with federal crimes in connection with summer riot violence are white; most are men, and seven in 10 are under 30: “More than 40% of those facing federal charges are white. At least a third are Black, and about 6% Hispanic. More than two-thirds are under the age of 30 and most are men. More than a quarter have been charged with arson, which if convicted means a five-year minimum prison sentence.”

[ … ]

The article also contains nearly no evidence for its headline claim, that “most arrested aren’t leftist radicals.” Instead, it says the AP reporters were unable to find evidence in court documents that the majority of the 286 people whose cases they reviewed are part of Antifa or formally affiliated with similarly “radical” groups.

The AP article tries ever so hard to justify their character and give reason for their actions, but they remain thugs and communists nonetheless.

The point is that this represents a large portion of the kids in college today and who have been graduated from college in the last decade.  They are trained communists, and they are intent on the overthrow of the Western system and the destruction of the middle class.  They have been infected with self-hatred.

The reader who sent this points out that a non-trivial portion of them (see the link) were arrested with charges of possession of firearms illegally.  He says that will change his own ROE.

Make your own decisions about that.