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FORMER community activist here:

The protestors are shock troops mixed with professionals. They are inculcated from early on via public education and media to fear conservative policies and conservatives. When conservatives succeed in spite of this, the fear escalates to anger. Since these people have also never heard the word no as children or been taught personal responsibility or intellectual integrity, they have no trouble justifying the acting out of their anger. They have internalized a fierce self image, convinced that their anger is potent, since it always succeeded in getting them their way with their parents and teachers and others in authority in their brief lives. The cadres use this acting out of internalized and self justified anger to push the cops and the conservatives to some sort of retaliation or calls for retaliation. Then the retaliation itself enters the mythology as "oppression" and "brutality". The thwarted magnify their injuries in the retelling that takes place in the aftermath, whipping themselves and their compadres into a grim state where they take on the personas of "freedom fighters" and then escalate the violence the next time. Anyone calling for rationality is accused of "selling out" and use of "conservative rhetoric". When public protest after public protest alienates the rest of society, the shock troops go underground. Once divorced from society, they become mythic, on the one hand, and are used as examples of heroism and integrity within the Left. They have no other remaining frame of reference and begin to believe the PR. At this point, you get the Weather Underground, Bader-Meinhoff, Red Brigades, Alf, Elf, etc. The media glorifies them and their exploits are the subject of books, articles and films. Call it the "Che effect". They believe their cause is just, they have admirers and an effective alternative society into which they can disappear & by which they can be assisted. It has worked for the Progressives for over 30 years in America and for much longer in Europe. It will continue until the Left loses control of academe and the media.

I have been out of any loop for over 25 years, so it may have changed, but I doubt it. They hate us. They believe that their lives, futures and the existence of the entire planet, if not the universe, are at stake. This belief is an inculcated faith. They can spend their lives isolated from critical thought. It is precisely the "cycle of violence" they go on about and is a self-fulfilling prophecy.