The threat of violence now infuses GOP politics. We should all be afraid.

[Nevilledog]

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Tweet text:
Michael Gerson
@MJGerson
“This is not a joke. This is not a myth. This is not a drill. According to a survey last year, a majority of Republicans agreed with the statement: ‘The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.’”

Opinion | The threat of violence now infuses GOP politics. We should all be afraid.
Trump Republicans wielding lies and intimidation aim to take the election in 2024, no matter the vote count.
washingtonpost.com
3:41 AM · May 21, 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/20/trump-republicans-violent-threats-election-2024/


Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who has a talent for constructive bluntness, describes a political atmosphere within the GOP heavy with fear. “If you look at the vote to impeach,” she said recently, “there were members who told me that they were afraid for their own security — afraid, in some instances, for their lives.” The events of Jan. 6 have only intensified the alarm. When Donald Trump insists he is “still the rightful president,” Cheney wrote in an op-ed for The Post, he “repeats these words now with full knowledge that exactly this type of language provoked violence on Jan. 6.” And there’s good reason, Cheney argued, “to believe that Trump’s language can provoke violence again.”

Sometimes political events force us to step back in awe, or horror, or both. The (former) third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives has accused a former president of her party of employing the threat of violence as a tool of intimidation. And election officials around the country — Republican and Democratic — can attest to the results: Death threats. Racist harassment. Armed protesters at their homes.

From one perspective, this is not new. Trump has made a point of encouraging violence against protesters at his rallies (“knock the crap out of them”), excusing violence by his supporters (people "with tremendous passion and love for their country”) and generally acting like a two-bit mob boss. He publicly supported Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager charged with homicide in the killing of two people in Kenosha, Wis. (Rittenhouse has pleaded not guilty.) He embraced Mark and Patricia McCloskey for brandishing guns at peaceful marchers in St. Louis. He deployed federal security forces to break heads in Lafayette Square.

If Trump has a political philosophy, one of its main tenets is toxic masculinity — the use of menace and swagger to cover his mental and moral impotence. And the mini-Trumps have taken their master’s lead. When Trump operative Stephen K. Bannon proposed that Anthony S. Fauci should be beheaded, when Trump ally Joseph diGenova said a federal cybersecurity official should be “taken out at dawn and shot,” when Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani urged Trump supporters to engage in “trial by combat,” all of this was more than paunchy, pathetic, aging White men talking smack they could never back up. It exemplified a type of politics where cruelty is the evidence of commitment, brutality is the measure of loyalty and violence is equated with power.

*snip*

[Lovie777]

1. Traditional way of life? . . .

WTF

Yeah right, it just proves their way of life is death, violence, threats, bulling, taking away civil rights, et. because you do not believe in democracy and I do.

[ananda]

2. "Traditional" being code for the jim crow fifties.

...

[CrackityJones75]

3. Afraid? Fuck that! Prepared? absolutely!

[sop]

4. The NRA has been using this same language as a marketing tool to sell more guns for years.

[MerryHolidays]

5. Not afraid one bit

I have life insurance, and I will instruct the executor of my estate to sue everyone involved in my demise for every penny they are worth (after the criminal trial)!

[-misanthroptimist]

6. I guess they're kinda right. *Sarcasm alert*

‘The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.’”

It's hard to find any Native American land that individuals can steal anymore. Only corporations and government can get away with it.

[dalton99a]

7. Political violence was key to Hitler's rise to power

It was a critical ingredient

[SoonerPride]

8. I'm not afraid.

If they want a fight they will get one.