Politically Inspired Violence
From Politico:Fears in Washington
If you talk to members of Congress and their aides these days — especially off the record — you will often hear them mention their fears of violence being committed against them.
Some Republican members of Congress have said that they were reluctant to vote for Trump’s impeachment or conviction partly because of the threats against other members who had already denounced him. House Republicans who voted for President Biden’s infrastructure bill also received threats. Democrats say their offices receive a spike in phone calls and online messages threatening violence after they are criticized on conservative social media or cable television shows.
People who oversee elections report similar problems. “One in six election officials have experienced threats because of their job,” the Brennan Center, a research group, reported this year. “Ranging from death threats that name officials’ young children to racist and gendered harassment, these attacks have forced election officials across the country to take steps like hiring personal security, fleeing their homes, and putting their children into counseling.”
There is often overlap between these violent threats and white supremacist beliefs. White supremacy tends to treat people of color as un-American or even less than fully human, views that can make violence seem justifiable. The suspect in the Buffalo massacre evidently posted an online manifesto that discussed replacement theory, a racial conspiracy theory that Tucker Carlson promotes on his Fox News show.
“History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse,” Representative Liz Cheney, one of the few Republicans who have repeatedly and consistently denounced violence and talk of violence from the right, wrote on Twitter yesterday. “The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and antisemitism,” Cheney wrote, and called on Republican leaders to “renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.”
A few other Republicans, like Senator Mitt Romney, have taken a similar stance. But many other prominent Republicans have taken a more neutral stance or even embraced talk of violence.
Obviously, I hope all this hatred and these calls to violence dissipate on their own, though I have to think that’s an unreasonable expectation. America is growing more ignorant by the day, and even if that weren’t the case, these are not reasonable people who respond to rational discourse. If you’ve ever tried to have a sane discussion with a Let’s Go Brandon supporter/anti-vaxxer/Fox News acolyte, you know exactly what I mean.
It is possible, however, that as more of the January 6th rioters go to prison, followed by the architects of the insurrection, that many of the garden variety MAGA people will realize that they were conned into endorsing the most heinous criminal in U.S. history, and will quietly go away.
