I agree with you that the two pictures show more similarities than differences, and that race/ethnicity has nothing to do with it. However, most Americans would tend to see the people on the right as terrorists and the people on the left as wholesome law-abiding citizens.
You called them “people with guns.” I call them “people with guns” who share these other similarities:
—Are deeply religious;
—Are pro-traditional values;
—Are organized by a “conservative” ideology;
—Are based in rural areas and resent city-dwellers and “elitists”;
—Are anti-feminist;
—Are anti-science;
—Resent higher education;
—Are pro-“law-and-order,” and are willing to enforce their idea of law-and-order even if doing so requires them to break the law themselves;
—Are fiercely xenophobic and anti-immigrant;
—Are indifferent to human life outside of the womb;
—Are anti-democracy, in that they don’t accept any election result that they don’t win.
Worth remembering that the Taliban got its start in the 80s and 90s as a rural law-and-order vigilante organization that fought bandits in the Afghan countryside whom the central Afghan government was unable or unwilling to defeat themselves. Of course, the Taliban turned out to be far more violent and repressive than the bandits, but they gained initial political power and credibility among other Afghans by “standing up to them.”
If gun-toting MAGA countryfolk haven’t taken over the United States by force (yet), that’s simply a function of the fact that the U.S. hasn’t reached the same level of social and economic decay as Afghanistan. We have constitutional safeguards, a level of wealth, and a long-standing tradition of democracy that Afghanistan never had. But are we totally immune to that kind of an internal takeover? Not at all. Jan. 6 was a haphazard attempt at exactly that.
