This week Donald Trump shared a video that included the image of Joe Biden hog tied in the bed of a pickup truck. He has also posted photographs of the daughter of the judge presiding over his criminal case in New York--a direct death threat. When Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer and nearly killed, Trump joked about it. Somehow we seem to shrug off these attacks on public order.
It's been about 2-1/2 years since I used this blog space, and I'm surprised to see that the most recent post here involved political violence in Trumpism. That post noted that violent threats against members of Congress had increased tenfold between Trump's election and the 2021 election. For his part, Trump frequently posts imagery depicting violence against his opponents.
Over the past 10-15 years, the Republican Party and its media allies have embraced political violence in ways that have brought us to this place. We already have political violence in the United States. We have always had political violence in this country. But we haven't seen a presidential candidate/former president promote domestic terrorism. The wave is surging. Just last week we had violent threats directed toward public library workers, Lancaster Pride volunteers, and newspaper employees here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. But the radicalization in the Republican ecosystem has been growing for quite a long time. And the current wave of violence has a pattern, according to Lancaster's local paper:
First, an issue straddling cultural and political divides is brought to the public’s attention, sometimes by a politician or community leader. Then, activists use social media to highlight the controversy, employing falsehoods, exaggerations and wild theories to heighten the tension. As support and opposition reach a fever pitch, protests are planned, culminating in a threat of violence.
I first noticed this pattern on the fringes of the extreme right in the wake of the 1993 raid of a Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians were heavily armed, and federal authorities had received reports of sexual abuse against minors within their compound. Four federal agents died in a protracted siege of the compound, while 82 Branch Davidians, many of them children, died as a result of the siege and the fire that broke out after authorities launched tear gas into the compound.
Although later investigations showed that the Branch Davidians themselves either started the fire or fueled it, controversy followed the disaster. The Branch Davidian events fell among a series of armed standoffs between civilians and various authorities, including the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff (3 fatalities) and one involving the Montana Freemen militia in 1996 (no fatalities). But the most telling indication of rising sentiment among the far right was the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, in which Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols killed 168 persons and wounded many more. McVeigh and Nichols intentionally executed the attack on the second anniversary of the Branch Davidian fire. Both were White supremacists who cited Ruby Ridge and Waco as justification for their anti-government activism.
Clearly something was happening in the militia friendly far right. How much that kind of activism relates to the National Rifle Association's increasing radicalization, I do not know. What had once been a marksmanship and gun safety organization morphed into a profoundly corrupt lobbying wing for the gun industry. I wonder, but don't know, how much of the NRA's transformation aimed to support antidemocratic politics on the right wing.
During the 2010s, however, we saw something new. Republican politicians, bolstered by media like Fox News, responded to Black Lives Matter protests by passing laws making it legally and physically dangerous to participate in public protests. For example, some states passed laws absolving drivers of liability for hitting and injuring protesters on public streets--and continue to do so. How does one interpret such laws as anything other than a license to hurt and kill people who protest?
But at the same time Republicans were restricting the right to assemble, they were also supporting the violent activities of Cliven Bundy, his family, and his associates. In 2014 the Nevada rancher staged an armed standoff after decades of refusing to pay grazing fees on federal land. Fox News, which was quick to label Black Lives Matter protests as criminals, made a hero out of Bundy. Bill O'Reilly described him as "probably ... a hero in many people's eyes because he's standing up against this colossus," meaning the federal government.
In other words, Republicans were making heroes out of people confront federal authorities with weapons. This process was part of a larger development on conservative radio going back to the Clinton presidency, in which hosts invoked the specter of federal agents as "jack-booted thugs." Bundy participated in another standoff in Oregon that led to one death, nearly 30 indictments, and 16 convictions. Apparently armed right wingers are heroes, while unarmed civil protesters are "militants" and "anarchists."
When Donald Trump suggests that his followers could "get tough" against Democrats, he is capitalizing precisely upon this growing embrace of violence on America's right. It was there when "good people" included racists and antisemites in Charlottesville, when "Liberate Michigan" provoked a kidnapping and likely murder plot against that state's governor, and when "will be wild" led his followers to attack police and seek to kill government leaders at the Capitol.
As ordinary citizens, we must kindly confront our Trumpist and apathetic neighbors with this violence. They either aren't alarmed, don't take it seriously, or don't really know. It won't change many minds, but it will help many people think.
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