Or take the 1954 attack on the Capitol, in which Puerto Rican separatists opened fire from a balcony, wounding five members of Congress. That seems to me at le

Or take the 1954 attack on the Capitol, in which Puerto Rican separatists opened fire from a balcony, wounding five members of Congress. That seems to me at least as bad as what happened yesterday. 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.