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The Chinese government views American corporations as vehicles for American political influence, which they clearly are. The fact that a laundry list of high-level U.S. politicians have commented on the dispute—while the U.S. is negotiating a trade deal with China—only proves that Beijing is right to see incursions by U.S. businesses into China as a threat. Seen in this light, arguments that the NBA should insist on American speech rules in China are arguments for using American corporate power to meddle in another state. This would trouble a country in any context, but it is likely especially worrying given the United States’s history of virulent and aggressive corporate imperialism.

Another distasteful and unconstructive thread running through the current debate is America’s moral superiority because of its robust speech rights. At the core of the argument that U.S. firms should not do business in China—or if they do, they should somehow not comply with Chinese rules—is an argument about China’s speech constraints and, therefore, its moral inferiority. But, as I’ve said before, evaluating China along welfare or human rights grounds is not so simple. Speech rights are much less robust than in the West, to be sure, but China has shown extraordinary concern—and done more than any other country—for its poor. The country has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, and a child born in China today has a better shot at upward social mobility than a child born in the U.S.

The point is not that the two countries are morally equivalent. Rather, it is simply hard to swallow the moral superiority that underlies so much American rhetoric about China

a larger history of American firms insisting on American speech rules for the rest of the world. Whatever one thinks about American-style free speech, it is not universally beloved; indeed, it is nearly universally rejected. Yet Americans expect domestic companies to push it around the world, and many do. This issue comes up again and again in discussions about technology policy in particular, because so many tech tools are platforms for speech

Speech rules, many Americans and American tech firms feel, should be both uniform and maximal; the American rule should predominate everywhere. And this view has U.S. government backing. That is why the U.S. is pushing platform immunity provisions in its trade deals, which would protect firms like Facebook from liability associated with speech harms. And that is why the U.S.-U.K. data-sharing agreement gives the U.S. veto power over British attempts to get criminal evidence in cases that implicate free speech concerns

American speech imperialism never made much sense—why should the rest of the world adopt the American rule on anything? But if it ever made sense, it makes less sense today, given the state of our communications platforms, which enable mass shootings, radicalization, election hacking and more. The results of American platforms’ free-speech free-for-all have not been happy in Myanmar, India and much of the rest of the world. The U.S. does not have this all figured out; we should stop pretending that we do.

Kilcullen also has observed, in the militias’ social media, a steady rise of “dehumanizing” rhetoric—the left calling the right “parasites,” the right calling the left (especially the left wing of Black Lives Matter) “rats.”

FBI background checks for gun sales hit 3.9 million in June—an all-time high. Many of them were for first-time gun buyers—by definition untrained, possibly rash in their actions. An estimated 20 million Americans carry a gun when they leave their homes. It takes just a few trigger-pullers to set off a conflagration; even in intense insurrections, such as the postwar rebellion in Iraq, only 2 percent of insurgents actually fired their weapons.

fear, not hate, drives the worst atrocities.

Today’s politics and social tensions are dominated by three fears: fear of other social groups, fear that those other groups are encroaching on one’s territory, and fear that the state no longer has the ability to protect the people.

Things do not have to get worse. “Incipient insurgency” doesn’t mean “inevitable insurgency.” We are still in the very early phase of this rampage—a “pre-McVeigh moment,” as Kilcullen puts it. And the extent of disorder has been exaggerated, usually for political motives. When violence has occurred during protests, it has been confined to just a few blocks; it hasn’t spread throughout a city.

Trump has no interest in calm. Instead, he is deliberately fanning the flames as part of a cynical election strategy

Trump’s aim is to incite fear—fear of violence, disorder, change—and to paint himself as the bastion of law and order. It’s an odd tactic for an incumbent president, and it’s unclear whether the ploy is working. But, as Kilcullen and Kalyvas point out, he’s right about the fear’s potency. And the first violent incidents can spark a self-reinforcing cycle of violence, retaliation, and retaliation for that. “It doesn’t matter what the original grievance is,” Kilcullen says. “It becomes self-sustaining.”

“The United States is in crisis.”