kontextmaschine:

Now, what would the competent way be for the regime to deal with this?

• String things out, let them develop without agitating, let all the strands separate out and independently end up at different places - the Atlanta black activists, the Portland white anarchists, the NYC bluechekists, the Midwestern moms that want to end gosh-darn racism. The people who want to abolish America, abolish the police, structurally reform the police, soften them up a bit.
  
• Encourage them to come to their own demands, without a single coordinating force. Make sure they notice these are different.
• Encourage cooptable “organic” leadership in NGO-leftist type crowds
• Draw less radical elements’ attention to the unpalatability of the ultras, legitimating their suppression.
• Shave support down further with concessions compatible with regime stability.
• Keep in mind security forces, antagonists, and neutrals will all be increasingly shaved down by a plague.
• When unsatisfied crowds are whittled down enough, engage in provocation to illustrate that their desires alienate more moderate elements, justifying their suppression.
• You can island-hop and leave issues as problems for local Democratic administrations, wedging their elite liberal and street left branches. If pockets of Seattle are autonomous zones, well, that’s a problem for the city government with a Socialist on it. Lewis-McChord can protect Boeing.
  
• If insurgents claim some information channels, keep others open. Twitter might constrict, but Facebook knows it’s the conservative social media network and can shift operations to their largest market of India if under labor threat. (No one remembers tumblr still exists.) The NYT can go Pravda, but in Pittsburgh they’re purging their journalists in response. Deadspin already purged.

Now, this barely accounts for the plague, not at all for the election, it requires a coordination among local governments greater than during the Occupy movement but also with a federal government headed by Donald Trump.