How death threats get Republicans to fall in line behind Trump | The insidious way violence is changing American politics — and shaping the 2024 election.
How death threats get Republicans to fall in line behind Trump | The insidious way violence is changing American politics — and shaping the 2024 election.
The insidious way violence is changing American politics — and shaping the 2024 election.
It's not that hard to figure out why. They use violence because it works.
Here's a list of what Trump has available to him in order to intimidate people into submission, up to and including judges and members of Congress:
- A following of literally millions of people, a significant percentage of which are willing to commit acts of violence and other crimes in order to get their way.
- An entire social media company literally dictated to drawing attention to his every word, populated by people who take that word as gospel.
- Unlimited coverage of every word he says and every action he takes from every media outlet in the country, including many of which that revere him as essentially a cult leader who's words should not be questioned.
- An entire team of people who can and will focus their efforts on any random person who he even feels deserves his wrath, and the ability to spend far more money ruining their lives than they could even ever hope to earn in their lifetimes.
- A list of examples of people who have already had their lives ruined, ranging from Michael Cohen to Shaye Moss to show that his threats of life-ruining retaliation are legitimate and credible.
- A team of lawyers with virtually unlimited resources to ensure that (a) Trump never sees consequences for his actions, and (b) you will be forced to expend what few resources you do have just to stay afloat until you're worn into submission
- An entire court system, much of which appointed by Trump himself, that is increasingly reluctant to rule against him
- An entire security detail to ensure he's never even remotely threatened by physical violence
The average citizen can't afford their own security 24/7, but would still have to worry about some random MAGA nutjob showing up at 3 AM with a shotgun and a Molotov or something. The average citizen does not have a team of lawyers, nor could they afford one, to take on Trump and his legal team. The average citizen doesn't have an entire PR team ready to help them discredit Trump's endless firehose of lies. The average citizen can't go judge-shopping until they find a judge sympathetic to their case. The average citizen can't just cry to the US Supreme Court for every little ruling they don't like. The average citizen doesn't have an entire political party backing them up. Heck, never mind your average citizen......there are plenty of examples of government officials who don't have those resources either, and have literally gone on record saying they won't because they won't put themselves or their families at risk. If members of Congress are saying they won't stand up to Trump due to fears of violence, what the fuck is your average citizen expected to do?
This is why it works. Because the battle is so lopsided. Trump has been using it successfully for decades. And the GOP are only now really beginning to understand how lopsided the battle is, and how easy it is to weaponize it especially when you know that the person or people you target don't have the ability to fight back.
Why do you think that the GOP are targetting school board members, libraries, teachers? Because these are your average, everyday citizens, with few to no real resources, and everything to lose. These are people most likely to walk away because doing so would be infinitely easier than trying to fight a battle that they're likely destined to lose anyway. These are people who wouldn't know what to do every time some fuckhole walks up to them and makes threats. These are the low-hanging fruits. And once they control that, gaining and consolidating power becomes much, much easier.
The Dems hammered the GOP to the point of desperation when they elected a black man as president. In their desperation, they turned to a conman/Russian intelligence asset they didn't understand.
Seriously though, this is a culmination of a sickness that has infected the GOP going back to Reagan and Nixon's Southern Strategy before that. They decided to wrap tax cuts for the wealthy and broad deregulation around cultural issues that mattered to rural voters. Now, they've created a monster. Their willingness to appeal to the baser instincts of the populace has been their undoing and may ultimately be the undoing of American democracy.
It's not just their willingness to appeal to extremism, it's their core belief against compromise that they inherited from religious preachers during the implementation of the southern strategy. Religion seeks to dominate outside groups and they are willing to invoke the second amendment but ignore the first the same way they talk about judeo-christian values while ignoring scripture that is politically inconvenient for their own lives.
They invoke the second amendment but only for themselves too
e; I'm adding an edit message at the top of this comment - don't make death threats against Republican lawmakers. They're not actually being intimidated into doing things, they're just using these death threats as an excuse, and the cops and prosecutors are going to go way harder on anyone left leaning, so it won't accomplish anything besides putting you in a prison cell.
If this is what works on these shitbags then clearly the problem here is that they aren't getting enough death threats from people who want to keep their democracy in this country
Republicans fall in line because they're amoral dirt bags who never had any interest in serving this country and just got elected to help themselves, the fact that they can be intimidated into serving Donald Trump is just further proof of this painfully obvious state of affairs
Don't even be fooled by this. They want these things and so they allow themselves to be cowed by these threats, but if they started receiving threats from the left you'd be seeing a call to arms.
Yeah, totally agreed, the "they want these things and allow themselves to be cowed by threats" thing was exactly my point, I should probably edit that to be more clear
Also, beyond the call to arms for vigilantes, you would also see a much much more aggressive response from law enforcement (like, compare their response to the Bundys occupying some territory vs the cop city protesters)
If the political left and/or minorities engaged in the levels of political violence that the right does, the reaction would be swift and severe.
Recall that American conservatives were supportive, if not outright pushing for, firearms restrictions when it was the Panthers bearing arms.
Exactly. You can't use the same kind of threats to stop this. It takes doing something like enforcing the laws against threats
Trump is just using social media to provoke random acts of political violence that are statistically predictable even if they are individually unpredictable. Republicans don't see this as a problem because much of their ideology is predicated on the idea that anything that falls under "statistically predictable yet individually unpredictable" is a myth invented by the libs to turn the frogs trans.
Basically, stochastic terrorism.
Violence and oppression are the very foundations of conservatism. Always have been.
Brave Republicans at all levels of government, from local officials like Richer to Sen. Mitt Romney (UT), have been warning us of the dangers going into 2024. They have seen the recent rise in right-wing political violence, most notably on January 6, and seen how comfortable Trump is with openly directing his supporters to hurt people.
So brave to stand up to the monster they created.
I think America needs a dose of liberation and democracy their government always bangs on about.
Quite sad to see that this is happening over there. Is this a failure of capitalism or democracy? As those respective systems have not taken into account the invariable devolution into a violent unstable system.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In his later years as a Congress member, after making a more moderate turn, he recalled receiving some real vitriol from the base — even facing a crowd in his hometown that seemed so volatile that he refused to introduce his family on stage.
Political scientists have repeatedly found that ethnic violence is particularly likely when a privileged portion of society sees power slipping into the hands of a group that hadn’t previously held it — as has been happening in the United States for years.
A backlash to social change is probably the single biggest reason behind both Trump’s political rise and the rash of white supremacist terrorism starting in the late 2010s, like the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018, the attack on an El Paso Walmart frequented by Latinos in 2019, or the 2022 massacre of supermarket shoppers in a Black area of Buffalo.
And, at the fateful rally on January 6, 2021, he told his assembled supporters that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” That day, and ones immediately to follow, dramatize just how profoundly threats of violence have come to shape Republican politics.
By contrast, individual Republicans who dissent from the Trumpist line immediately get singled out in conservative and far-right media — attracting the sort of attention reserved for a handful of “most hated” Democrats such as Reps. Nancy Pelosi (CA) or Ilhan Omar (MN).
TREASONOUS SCHMIDTS.” The family left their home for safety reasons after the election, and Schmidt did not run for reelection in 2023 (he was recently appointed to serve as secretary of state under Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro).
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