Before you dismiss yesterday's crowd. Before you mock their class or intelligence.

The US has long used local militias and volunteers to carry out its genocides. And dismissing them this way, because they will too, you absolve the state and it's associations of responsibility

They are encouraged by newspaper headlines and politicians. Absolved by the courts. And permitted to see themselves as extensions of the police and the military.

They were given weapons. Called heroes. Rewarded with land.

From colonization of the Atlantic littoral across the great plains and into Texas and California local militias, volunteers, ranchers, and farmers have been responsible for enormous casualties. The word extermination was used in political speeches and editorials.

It was seen as inevitable.

It was seen as desirable.

Laws were passed restricting our movement just as with those who were enslaved. If we were out at night, or somewhere they thought we wouldn't be our murder was not only justified, it was called for.

A rancher can only take so much, said California's first governor, before he "resolves on a war of extermination" The second governor said much the same thing. The San Francisco paper wrote that extermination was the quickest and cheapest remedy.

So before you dismiss the far right as disorganized and ineffectual, remember that they are the expendable foot soldiers of a far right that organized itself into policing and governance. Into media empires and corporations

We can't take those things "back"

They were never ours

Dismissing them doesn't just absolve the state. It ignores how dangerous they truly are. They might be disorganized and mobbish but they are also angry and armed and have 400 years of the state endorsing their violence as a way to clear the land.

Here's the entire speech that the first governor of California gave in 1851. It's a fascinating justification of genocide even while it laments our inevitable vanishing.

https://governors.library.ca.gov/addresses/s_01-Burnett2.html