"Ultimately, our Second Amendment rights protect [us from] Democrats"
Readiness for civil war trumps kids lives
Washington DC 25 May 2022
In 2021 almost 100 million Americans openly admitted to strangers that they believed political violence is justified to protect the “traditional American way of life”. These results were reconfirmed this year by different polling when the same numbers agreed that "violence against the government can at times be justified". The view is partisan, “40% of Republicans, 41% of independents and 23% of Democrats saying violence is sometimes justified.” Those that have faith that the next presidential election will result in a peaceful transfer of power is a correspondingly low 38%. These numbers are not normal. They are far outside the norm. This points to the fact that in a few short years as many as 100 million Americans have been radicalized, and that radicalization itself has been normalized. This radical change in the outlook of the population did not occur in a vacuum. It was cultivated for a purpose.
Just this week a former President of the United States signaled “Civil War” to his political and militia followers. A warning or a calling? It does not matter. Radicalized Americans know how to interpret the code. When he told extremist groups that openly supported him to “stand back and stand by” they exulted calling the president’s comments “historic” and “an endorsement of their violent tactics”. Just as his people interpreted “will be wild” as a call to go to Washington to ‘protest’ the certification of the election. He told the massed protesters that “you’re not going to have a country anymore” unless you “fight like hell”. In case the code was too opaque he riled up the crowd shouting “You’ll never take back our country with weakness… you have to show strength, and you have to be strong.” He used the word “fight” more than 20 times in the speech. They clearly understood his speech as an order from their commander in chief to storm the capitol. In the aftermath, many defended their actions with the Nuremberg defense “I answered the call of my president.” It was only later discovered that several armed militia groups with close ties to members of the President’s inner circle had premeditated plans to use the event as cover to engage in an attempt to violently “prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States” (18 U.S. Code § 2384).
The political wing of the radical pro-violence movement has been just as active. They have issued a steady drumbeat of warnings followed by calls to action. Using the same code, they signal to their followers that democrats are not fellow citizens with an equal right to hold opposing political views. They do not believe that differences in approach to governance can be mediated through negotiations, within established political institutions, according to agreed processes. No. All democrats are child molesting communists who thrive on destroying the American way of life. Those that do not think the same as them are not ‘real Americans’. The Claremont Institute published a warning that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They are ‘traitors’. In fact, they are not human. They are ‘pure evil’ - the devil incarnate. And they must be stopped. At all costs.
When the late Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.) was chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee his committee investigated the former President. The latter responded by labelling Rep Cummings ’s district (and not so subtly by inference the man himself) a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” Immigrants are “animals” who “pour into and infest our Country”. A dismissed black female aide as a “dog”. When the former President and an entire media eco-system conduct a mass propaganda onslaught on those who do not agree with them by labeling them as vermin, subhuman, and the worst label of them all: traitors; there will be consequences. It should come as no surprise that mass shootings and hate crimes are soaring. In a 1927 Supreme Court opinion, Justice Louis Brandeis cautioned that: “Those who won our independence believed … that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government.”
Seeing follow citizens as unAmerican is not some fringe viewpoint. This is completely mainstream. It started in 2016. During the election Donald Trump said that it would be “a horrible day” if Clinton were elected and called upon ‘Second Amendment People’ to fix that ‘problem’ should he fail to be elected. Having got away with hardly any condemnation, the bar was set for all the rest to follow. Most people don’t know the name of their local member of congress. But everyone knows Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and everything she represents. Constantly in the media pushing norms further and further away from the center, Greene’s code for civil war is “national divorce” where differences between ‘Americans’ and ‘democrats’ have become “irreconcilable". In her world, there is only one thing that is standing between ‘christian’ decency and the complete destruction of America: “I hate to use this language but, ultimately the truth is it's our Second Amendment rights that give us the ability to defend ourselves from Democrats”.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) dispensed with old justifications for the second amendment. He admitted that it is "not about hunting, it's not about recreation, it's not about sports." Instead, he said, the Second Amendment protects "the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government”. Gaetz believes the time is fast approaching when “we [will] have an obligation to use it".
Lauren Boebert (R-Co.) concurred with the gentleman from Florida. “The Second Amendment isn’t about hunting, except hunting tyrants”. She continued “I am the militia. #2A #WeThePeople.”
Here she is with a warning that all guns are being taken away right now and using the line that the 2nd amendment is to protect the people from their government.
Rep. Madison Cawthorn, (R-NC.), warned last summer that “If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s gonna lead to one place, and that’s bloodshed.” His advice? "Be armed, be dangerous”. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., who has been linked to the planning of the Trump rally that preceded the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, said one day after the attack that the only options in response to "lost faith in the ballot box" is either to "submit" or "you can resist, often through violence". Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King said in 2018 that “America is heading in the direction of another Harpers Ferry” and shared a meme saying that if civil war comes, the right has “8 trillion bullets” and would win. Memes are an excellent technique because they can be passed off as harmless fun, as when Rep Gosar (R-AZ) represented himself killing fellow member of congress Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and flying through the air about to kill the President. What fun!
After yesterday’s mass shooting of children in TX, Florida Rep. Randy Fine issued a death threat against the President of the United States. "I have news for the embarrassment that claims to be our President — try to take our guns and you’ll learn why the Second Amendment was written in the first place," he wrote.
What is surprising is how normal all of this talk has become in a terrifyingly short time frame. This is due to right wing media outlets creating, repeating and amplifying torrents of hate speech normalizing and justifying the idea that "traitors” are deserving of violence.
Alice Marwick, a University of North Carolina professor and researcher at the Center for Information, Technology Public Life observes that "the general messaging that the Democrats are evil, that children are under threat, that people may need to take extreme acts, even political violence to protect their children and their values, I think is consistent across the (far-right) spectrum," she said, adding that much of the rhetoric is about how "these evil people will get their comeuppance."
The most incredible example got the least amount of attention. The One America News Network is broadcast to 35 million homes. Following the lead of high profile and popular political figures such as those above, one of its presenters blithely called for mass executions of democrats for ‘stealing’ the 2020 election. This barely received any coverage at all.
And the problem is on the right. According to Rep. Boebert herself the worst thing democrats have said is “I want you to argue with them and get in their face”. There is no comparison to the quality or quantity of the hate speech and thinly veiled incitement coming from the right. This has been brewing for a long time. Establishmentarian political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein published a piece in 2012 with the headline “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.” This was remarkable at the time for the two moderate political scientists.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
The stage is now set for a violent response to the outcome of the next election. Having stacked local election offices with apparatchiks, the right will throw results into question where one does not exist. Q based state legislatures will override the results of the election. The winning party will take to the streets to protest the open corruption of a legitimate exercise of popular will. They will be painted as hostile terrorists by the losing side and it's propaganda apparatus. The propaganda will escalate to dehumanizing them as a satanic evil. The leader will demand protestors be shot, and this time, not just in the legs.
Want to know more 👉 https://contexr.com/civil-war-ii-book
Update 20 July 2022
Rep Jamie Raskin responds to the Gaetz theory addressed above, that the second amendment is all about the right to attack the government.
Thanks for that excellent post that is a deep dive into how Republicans are now regularly promoting or threatening violence and are essentially dysfunctional.