It's Not Both Sides: Political violence is now part of conservative/Republican ideology, from the gr
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A supporter of US President Donald Trump keeps a hand on his gun during a "Stop the Steal rally" in front of the residence of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz in St Paul, Minnesota, on November 7, 2020 (Photo by Kerem Yucel / AFP) (Photo by KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images)
It's Not Both Sides
Political violence is now part of conservative/Republican ideology, from the grassroots, to the intellectual elites, to the elected politicians.
https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/its-not-both-sides?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Jonathan V. Last 3 hr ago
1. Political Violence
Last week Charlie wrote about the right’s fascination with political violence and today he unpacked more of it, with Trump talking about Mitch McConnell having a “death wish” and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claim that Democrats have “started killing” Republicans.
I want to keep hammering this subject, though, because the infatuation with violence truly does extend throughout the entire Republican/conservative vertical.
Grassroots
At the grassroots level we have the Michigan militia guys storming the state capitol with long guns. Remember that? And then the Michigan guys plotting to kidnap the governor. And it wasn’t just Michigan. Here’s the AP:
In Wisconsin, about a dozen men, several wearing camouflage, carried what appeared to be assault rifles and other long guns and stood around a makeshift guillotine at a protest attended by about 1,500 people. In Arizona, a group of men armed with rifles were among hundreds of protesters who demonstrated at the Capitol last month demanding Republican Gov. Doug Ducey lift his stay-home order. Many in the crowd also carried holstered pistols............................................
= new reply since forum marked as read
Rightwing armed gangs = OK
Anyone else, send in the SWAT team and national guard.
Same as the difference between the response ( or lack thereof) to tRump's insurrectionist traitors swarming the Capitol compared to this
which was waiting for peaceful BLM protestors.
and in Austria and elsewhere, in which violent mobs attacked Jews on the streets and broke into their homes to get them. They ravaged their neighborhoods, destroying thousands of synagogues, schools, hospitals, and of course homes, while police and firefighters stood by. Of course they claimed they were protecting people from the Jews.
None of this seems in the slightest beyond the MAGAs themselves any more, many of whom claim to await only the signal from Der Leader to save their country from us.
Germany's government arrested over 30,000 Jewish men over those 48 hours and put them in concentration camps. (Many suffered dreadfully and died in those, but those were not the infamous death camps established later for the purpose of exterminating an entire minority group.)
Change Jews to undocumented immigrants, and 300,000 sounds more in line with what a MAGA state would start out with (and in fact had already started in tRump's first year in office when we stopped them). Of course they'd be eager to go after Jews, Muslims, and others in groups small enough to make them very vulnerable to what amounted to persecution, but the "illegals" are both an intense target of MAGA hostility and especially vulnerable and immediately available for persecution.
How AA would fare, I'm not sure. Targets of abuse for sure. But at 13% of the American population, they might be too many and too needed by and integrated into society for the worst treatment. Besides, up to 15 million undocumented immigrants, many of them black and all surrogates for non-white non-Christian American citizens, would keep the MAGAs occupied for a while.
It's not that there will be widespread rioting in the streets, they'll be stopped before then, but...tRump's MAGA Republicans have already become the "it" many once thought couldn't happen here.
On a positive note, a poll immediately following President Biden's "soul of America" speech, says a quarter of Republicans think MAGAs are a threat to democracy. (!)
