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The Appetite for Political Violence Is Growing on the American Right
However much crazy you think is percolating in American society right now, you are very likely underestimating the situation. Parts of this country seem to have filled the void left by the guy who departed the presidency a few months back—having served as a vector for various strains of national madness for half a decade—with an absolute deluge of unhinged nonsense. The Frankenstein's monster of the conservative movement has ceded the scene to what basically amounts to a gigantic pool of ectoplasmic paranoia. Much of it seems devoted to the proposition that Donald J. Trump was unjustly driven from office, but it's also, like his political rise, clearly rooted in far deeper anxieties about a changing American nation.
"Critical Race Theory" has gone from an obscure legalistic doctrine to a singular threat to our innocent children—and, dare I say, the very fabric of our society itself—in the space of about a week. CRT is anything you want it to be, or at least anything that scares you, a list that now includes...Oedipal fantasies? The town-hall screamfests of the Tea Party era have returned in the form of school-board meetings where white parents yell at administrators about things they saw on the television until the meeting is shut down, at which point they start chanting the national anthem. The subtext is not complicated: America is unequivocally great, everything is going great, and also the nation will collapse if we talk about its actual history and how that might inform unjust structures of the present from which some of us may benefit. It is in these contexts, as Colin Kaepernick could well tell you, that the anthem becomes a blunt instrument for asserting power. The power to tell the story of the nation's past, after all, is integral to determining who holds power in the present.
And then there is the notion the last election was "stolen" from the guy who got 7 million fewer votes than the other guy, which is beginning to morph into a kind of revolutionary blood oath. QAnon has long served as a vanguard of the proto-violent far right, spinning up fairy tales that all end with the conclusion that opponents of The Movement can justifiably be killed. After all, they're pedophilic human traffickers who drink the blood of children! Any measures to stop them are justified. But the election-fraud mythology, in which a massive campaign to steal the election was carried out by hundreds (thousands?) of people across a bunch of states—even if its proponents have, months later, still failed to produce a shred of evidence thereof—is now developing as a somewhat more secular theory for political violence, as an unnerving segment from the One America News Network demonstrated on Wednesday night.
Don't let the terrible production values or the alien delivery distract: this sicko is calling for mass killings of his fellow citizens. Granted, Pearson Sharp calls them "executions," which has the veneer of legalese, but the guys who planned to kidnap the governor of Michigan also planned to put Gretchen Whitmer on "trial." What will the trials look like for people accused in this massive election fraud, which seamlessly morphed into a "coup against the presidency" and "treason" as Mr. Sharp ran through the same tired nonsense we've been hearing for months? Will Cillian Murphy be there? And why are we talking about the punishment before the rule-breakers have even been identified, much less charged with a crime and tried before a jury of their peers? None of this inspires confidence that, if this guy or his fellow travelers were making the decisions, constitutional rights would be at the forefront of the considerations. It kinda sounds like they just want to kill people!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-appetite-for-political-violence-is-growing-on-the-american-right/ar-AALoMUb?li=BBnb7Kz
"Critical Race Theory" has gone from an obscure legalistic doctrine to a singular threat to our innocent children—and, dare I say, the very fabric of our society itself—in the space of about a week. CRT is anything you want it to be, or at least anything that scares you, a list that now includes...Oedipal fantasies? The town-hall screamfests of the Tea Party era have returned in the form of school-board meetings where white parents yell at administrators about things they saw on the television until the meeting is shut down, at which point they start chanting the national anthem. The subtext is not complicated: America is unequivocally great, everything is going great, and also the nation will collapse if we talk about its actual history and how that might inform unjust structures of the present from which some of us may benefit. It is in these contexts, as Colin Kaepernick could well tell you, that the anthem becomes a blunt instrument for asserting power. The power to tell the story of the nation's past, after all, is integral to determining who holds power in the present.
And then there is the notion the last election was "stolen" from the guy who got 7 million fewer votes than the other guy, which is beginning to morph into a kind of revolutionary blood oath. QAnon has long served as a vanguard of the proto-violent far right, spinning up fairy tales that all end with the conclusion that opponents of The Movement can justifiably be killed. After all, they're pedophilic human traffickers who drink the blood of children! Any measures to stop them are justified. But the election-fraud mythology, in which a massive campaign to steal the election was carried out by hundreds (thousands?) of people across a bunch of states—even if its proponents have, months later, still failed to produce a shred of evidence thereof—is now developing as a somewhat more secular theory for political violence, as an unnerving segment from the One America News Network demonstrated on Wednesday night.
Don't let the terrible production values or the alien delivery distract: this sicko is calling for mass killings of his fellow citizens. Granted, Pearson Sharp calls them "executions," which has the veneer of legalese, but the guys who planned to kidnap the governor of Michigan also planned to put Gretchen Whitmer on "trial." What will the trials look like for people accused in this massive election fraud, which seamlessly morphed into a "coup against the presidency" and "treason" as Mr. Sharp ran through the same tired nonsense we've been hearing for months? Will Cillian Murphy be there? And why are we talking about the punishment before the rule-breakers have even been identified, much less charged with a crime and tried before a jury of their peers? None of this inspires confidence that, if this guy or his fellow travelers were making the decisions, constitutional rights would be at the forefront of the considerations. It kinda sounds like they just want to kill people!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-appetite-for-political-violence-is-growing-on-the-american-right/ar-AALoMUb?li=BBnb7Kz
There's crazy, and then there's Republican, right-wing, Anus-Mouth, bat-shit crazy.
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