WHAT "BLOODLESS IF THE LEFT ALLOWS IT TO BE" MEANS

On a podcast Tuesday, the president of the Heritage Foundation said his movement is prepared to shed the blood of its enemies:

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts made the comments Tuesday on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast....

Democrats are “apoplectic right now” because the right is winning, Roberts told former U.S. Rep. Dave Brat, one of the podcast’s guest hosts as Bannon is serving a four-month prison term. “And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Joyce Vance wonders what Roberts means by that:

Is Roberts threatening people who speak out with violence? What if they protest? What if they vote?

... he seems shockingly unconcerned with abandoning the peaceful transfer of power and ignoring the will of the voters, because that’s what he’s talking about. He’s talking about using violence if the majority of American voters don’t agree with his vision for our country. He’s endorsing another January 6, a bloodletting if liberals won’t cave into his view of how the country should be run. If the left won’t “allow” him to have his way, he’s going to make us give in. That’s the man behind Project 2025.

Roberts would be fine with a second January 6, as long as this one succeeds, but I don't think that's primarily what he's referring to. I think he expects Donald Trump to win the election legitimately and to follow the Project 2025 blueprint as president. That's when he expects the "Look what leftists made us do" moment.

Rank-and-file Republicans believe that left-wing protesters burned several cities to the ground in 2020 -- Minneapolis, New York, Portland. They believe this because clips of violence and (more often) property damage in those cities were cued up and looped endlessly on Fox News that year, and often since. Residents of those cities know that some bad thing happened during the George Floyd protests, but the cities are very much intact. Only small portions were affected by the mayhem.

But Roberts knows that Trump is itching to send troops to suppress left-wing demonstrations. Roberts also knows that it only takes a little bit of violence to seemingly justify violent repression, if you greatly exaggerate how violent demonstrators are. That's what Roberts wants. He wants some violence -- it doesn't have to be much -- to justify an American Tiananmen or new Kent State, or several Kent States. (Presumably he knows that the majority of respondents to a Gallup poll conducted just after the Kent State massacre approved of the deadly National Guard response.)

Like Trump and like many other right-wingers, Roberts wants to use physical violence on liberals and the left, and wants to be able to say he and his allies were justified in doing so. This is a fantasy about acting violently with impunity because you have absolute dictatorial power and a fantasy about being acclaimed by the public as a hero and protector. Roberts and his allies are sick, twisted people. This is what they want.