You’re right, there absolutely is a level of coordination. Whenever people historically have stormed the capital building, everyone coordinates to ban them from their platforms.
But I agree, this is not the way forward to a healthy, united country
But I agree, this is not the way forward to a healthy, united country
One of the group's leaders, Bill Ayers, lives unremorsefully in a tony neighborhood in Chicago where he went on to have an influential academic career, dedicating books to political assassins, and mentoring future presidents. This caused a minor kerfluffle when the details resurfaced to public light in 2008, but it was clearly, in the end, no obstacle to Obama's election.
One might raise a similar point about a figure like Oscar Lopez Rivera who, while he never bombed the Capitol, definitely did bomb about 100 other locations around the country and was rewarded for his efforts by an NYC ticker tape parade once he was released from prison. Lin Manuel Miranda's admiration for Rivera has hardly proved a stumbling block for his wildly successful career.
And that's just one end of the frequency-severity spectrum. Mobs break into the Capitol and interrupt proceedings with perhaps surprising regularity, as with the Kavanaugh hearings for example.
In any case, it seems that bombing the Capitol or doing widespread domestic terrorism is only selectively an impediment to a later life of comfort in the US.
Did this discredit the cause of Puerto Rican nationalism and drive its supporters from public life? It would appear not: you can still be a celebrity with a successful career while voicing your support and admiration.
I'm not asking you to say that what happened yesterday was good, because of course it wasn't. I'm asking you why you think that such events are so rare and universally condemned. In fact they seem to happen on a timescale of decades at most, probably less, and the public judgment of the perpetrators seems to correlate less with the objective severity of the act as with elite consensus opinion of the cause it promotes.