For well over ten years now resorting to physical violence for political purposes has been more and more normalized among the American far-left.
It started in the early years of the 2010's primarily at universities and a few other places by activists blocking people, impeding their free movement and so on, although physical attacks were still relatively rare. However, rioting and vandalism started becoming more and more common even back then (for example when protesting someone they didn't like coming to their campus to give a speech.) This included things like breaking windows, arson, destroying police barricades and similar things.
Quite quickly this started escalating more and more. It didn't take many years where this kind of "obstruct but don't attack, reserve violence only for inanimate objects" to escalate to just outright physical violence and assault against people. "Punch a Nazi" became the slogan, and many far-leftists took it literally and started physically assaulting people, sometimes even resulting in very severe injury (such as the infamous case where the masked far-leftist terrorist attacked a peaceful person with a bike lock, causing severe bleeding and a head trauma.)
Fast forward a few years, and we get to the BLM protests which caused literally billions of dollars in property damage caused by rioting, vandalism and arson, with hundreds and hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people being physically assaulted, some of these assaults resulting in severe injury and even death. There were massive physical brawls using blunt weapons.
And what did the police do to all of this? Not much.
After Donald Trump was elected PotUS for the first time there were absolutely massive riots causing millions and millions of dollars in property damage and countless injuries in Washington DC alone. From the literally thousands and thousands of people involved, about 100 people were arrested. Every single one of them was eventually let go with all charges dropped. Not a single conviction. Not one.
This seemed to set a precedent. For the next 8 years the police forces would just mostly watch from the sidelines while mobs of rioters would destroy property and assault people, with the cops just watching from the distance without intervening, even when they could clearly see what was happening. There were numerous extremely egregious cases where someone was being physically assaulted by a mob of people, he would go to the cops that were just standing there watching, doing nothing, beg them to help and intervene, and the cops would do absolutely nothing. (On the contrary, in one infamous case the cops actually pushed the two guys back towards the people attacking them rather than helping them. The two guys begged the cops to help, and rather than help they just pushed the two guys back towards the angry violent mob that was pursuing them. That's how egregious it was.)
No doubt the normalization of violence was greatly helped and boosted by this almost complete inaction by law enforcement. The rioters could literally beat someone up right in front of the cops, and the cops would just stand there watching, doing nothing. And that's no exaggeration.
(Astonishingly and incomprehensibly, to my knowledge no single police officer or their higher-ups has ever been investigated for this egregious failure of duty, much less convicted. Not one. Ever.)
However, in the last few months things have changed: Now the target of the violence are the law enforcement officials themselves. And more particularly, federal agents, which is even worse.
And what do you know, suddenly the cops have started caring. Now that they are the targets of the violence, rather than private citizens, now they have started caring. Big surprise.
Anyway, the positive side of this is that now, at least at some level, the American far-leftist activists are learning that violence is actually illegal, and that they will get arrested and prosecuted for it.
Unsurprisingly, the leftist mainstream media is trying its hardest to twist and distort the situation, trying to claim that the agents are arresting completely innocent peaceful protesters.
You know, because "nobody is above the law" actually means "the people we don't like are not above the law (but we ourselves are, obviously)."
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