If you're worried about having your opinions dismissed prima facie as WhiteLiberalism.txt, you might also want to watch out for offering all encompassing yet reductive explanations for political violence that not only have no material basis to them, but no basis in actual politics whatsoever.
As to your point, a very dim light over the past year has been people combing through interbellum era primary source material and sharing it. One of the truly astounding things I've noticed in some of these items is how people were so unwilling to believe that things were actually that bad, even after a world war and an economic collapse. The quasi-religious beliefs that all people are the same, evil is extraordinary and only extraordinary, and that everyone abides by the same Panglossian calculus are not merely endemic to this benighted age.
If (pejorative) you hold liberal values dear, which to be blunt I don't think most of the posters itt do, you should not think that things are fine on the near horizon, or that the causes of things are just folks being crazy.
What I'm saying is based on the justifications that are openly vocalized in discussions of political violence. Obviously it is simplistic when comes to explaining deeper/subconscious motivations, more so when I'm making fun of the appearances of those who go out seeking physical altercations in a therapeutic rant after being disgusted.
I don't really care if I'm dismissed or the "other side" is dismissed (for one, it's inevitable), but it's worth pointing out the knee-jerk reaction to anything resembling a "both sides" statement has become a shield against self-reflection. People are not all the same, but all humans have human nature. Evil may not be extraordinary, but its ordinariness also applies to you. The moment you begin to justify your violence and organize the correct forms of violence and the correct targets, you open the potential of widespread, normalized psychopathic violence (and this includes the very same kind of violence being used against you either as a reaction or an excuse). It's in these instances where even banal forms of criticism become more valid and useful, yet can be more readily dismissed. This is what I see when people warp the definition of self-defense in an intellectually dishonest fashion to the point where if it they agreed it also applied to their enemies it would completely self-destructive. The bright side of this is that people seem to agree you shouldn't go as far as kill your enemies, just hurt them, but the potential for escalation is obvious, at least obvious to everyone except those who were shocked and dismayed people will defend themselves by punching people who want to punch them.
I think there is merit to what you are saying about people assuming things will turn out correct no matter what (whig history, right side of history, etc.), but I don't find leftist apocalypticism meaningful in itself, at least no more than cyclical history theories. A one to one comparison to the interbellum period (or the fall of Rome, etc.) fits until it doesn't and if you look at it from a biased perspective and dismiss all the huge differences (especially in terms of human rights and progressive beliefs), you'll only find the parts that fit. It's even more presumptuous to use that to justify specific actions.
On another note, it seems like the woman who was punched was wielding a bottle in a weapon-like fashion shortly before what happened in the clip.
