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Whether or not violence is morally acceptable isn't the most interesting thing in my opinion, but rather "what strategy is most likely to win". It's not a subject I'm well versed in, but the first analysis I found showed that non violent protest movements tend to win, see https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/are-peaceful-protests-more-successful-than-violent-ones (I know I know, correlation is not causation, so digging in deeper is needed). If you read this article, you can already see that a little bit of violence is enough to help turn people against you. The more restraint, the easier it appears to be to let people join your cause (or at least not turn against you). That doesn't mean being meek, you can still be incredibly obstructionist while being non violent. In Europe, a huge amount of rhe progress we made was because elites feared the masses. Because of the potential of violence, maybe, but not because of actual violence. Most of all because of huge union movements who could grind whole industries or even the country to a halt. What works in one place doesn't necessarily work on another one, of course.

Here’s the thing about violence, the state has an absolute monopoly on it. This might be the most important defining characteristic of a state, it’s the thing that’s allowed to do violence.

There will never come a time when the state says “our monopoly is over, you can do violence now.” They would march people into gas chambers and claim it was an important victory for law and order.

The state depends upon this social contract, we all agree to not be violent, they get to wield violence in the common interest. That’s sorta the deal.

If the question is “when will the average citizen be ok with violence against the state?” The answer is that for some it’s ok now, it’s been ok for a while. For some it will never be ok.

I think we are not yet at the point where a large portion of the population thinks it’s legitimate. But I don’t know how long that holds out. A lot of people will be unhappy or outraged with ICE but if they were truly targeting gang members or taking people in prison and deporting them, people aren’t likely to take up arms.

The quotas they are pursuing now are running headlong into reality. They can’t find 3000 people a day to disappear that are sufficiently marred by criminality that people will accept it. You tell a bunch of ICE agents and local cops they gotta start finding bodies, once they run out of the small number of people accused of crime in the immigrant population, they will start just looking for anyone to meet their quota. That’s why we are now seeing them raiding fields, and Home Depot parking lots.

People are a lot less accepting of this, community defense starts sounding very reasonable when it’s the nice guy that helped you build your deck and not a person rotting away in prison already.

Fascism’s great weakness is that it does not care about solving problems. The goal is to manufacture a convenient scape goat to blame problems on, then capture power by pledging to destroy that scape goat. Fascism does often achieve its aims, it destroys the scape goat, but since that had nothing to do with the original problem the problem persists. The bluff must continue though, so new scape goats are selected in an ever widening ring of state violence. The “worst of the worst” has already become “the guy willing to pick our food at slave wages.”

The question becomes, will the population become comfortable with the violence necessary to dismantle fascism before fascism destroys enough people that they can’t mount a sufficient resistance.

There is no general hard line, as everyone's hard line differs. Rather than a hard line, the point of no return is likely defined by how many people consider their hard line crossed, and how many act on it.

It is quite simple. Proportionate responsive violence is appropriate. Key is that the escalation by the government needs to be met with escalation by the people, not for people to escalate first.

Note that civil disobedience isnt violence. Disobeying curfew? You are not harming anyone, except the governments authoritarian authority.

Government goons beat up people? Beat up the government goons.

Government goons start shooting? Shoot back.

We have been conditioned by decades of propaganda, that only they get to use violence and responding to their violence would be wrong. But it is not.

It's all good in my book. Has been for a bit. But I'm just some dude hoping this govt gets what it deserves.

Trying to differentiate between a gas chamber and a life sentence in El Salvador, is really tiptoeing the line.

Now

this is a question I often want to ask the pearl clutchers.

I think some of them don't have an answer because they actually support the regime, and they're going hard on "non violence" because they don't want people to fight back

Some probably haven't thought it through, and don't have an answer.

Some probably have an answer that's a variation of "too late". You know, after they came for the unionists, the jews, the catholics, the mexicans, and there's no one left to stand with them.

There is no clear cut point.

These sort of things have a life of their own and it only becomes clear in retrospective.

In Ukraine that point was when the government started killing protesters during Maidan (Feb 2014), that's when many people (who were generally strongly opposed to violence) started to believe that protestors fighting back was justified.

with seeing the Homeland Secretary floating using military force to overthrow the CA government and arresting a CA senator for asking questions, all in the same "news brief"

A very good question indeed, when is it truly justified to punch back? Because we look back in time and say they should have done something...why not know?

My family says not to do anything overt right now, like join the protests...so we dont get on any lists and can join a more covert resistance when it all blows up.

I'm an old guy who never thought he'd see this far... get me a few more and let's do this... one old tired and weak is just gonna be chalked up as crazy...

Imo, when the feds/police start attacking without provocation, fight back.