I have the feeling that Republican violence is going to be increasing, so I’m starting this thread as a place holder for future breaking news.
What inspired me to start this thread?
Elite Republicans are now openly encouraging political violence
Paul Waldman, June 20, 2022
At this moment in history, Republican radicalism comes in so many forms — election subversion, draconian abortion restrictions, gun fetishism, anti-LGBTQ scapegoating — that some argue the party is moving toward a new kind of fascism. That raises complicated questions, but one of fascism’s key features is the glorification of violence as a domestic political tool.
Keep that idea in mind as you watch this new ad from Eric Greitens, a Missouri Republican running for U.S. Senate: link
With a shotgun in his hand and a pistol on his belt, Greitens accompanies soldiers busting into what appears to be a suburban home. Then he says to the camera: “Join the MAGA crew. Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”
For the uninitiated, “RINO” is short for “Republican In Name Only,” a term that originally referred to Republicans who were too ideologically moderate for someone’s taste. Now it is used to refer to those who, no matter how ideologically conservative, are insufficiently worshipful of Donald Trump or question the more radical beliefs and tactics of the extreme wing of the party. …
DECEMBER 3, 2021
Death threats, gerrymandering and voter suppression are being normalised by America’s right to keep Trumpism alive
But Trumpism endures too in the party he remade in his own image. He has left behind a Republican party no longer committed to democracy. That sounds hyperbolic but, if anything, it understates the case. Republicans are breaking from the principle that precedes the idea of democracy and is even more fundamental: the belief that arguments between citizens should be resolved by peaceful means. Today’s Republican party is normalising the notion of violence as a means of securing a political outcome. …
**Start with the case of Paul Gosar, the Republican member of Congress for Arizona. He retweeted an anime-style video that depicted him murdering his Democratic colleague, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as swinging a sword at Joe Biden. Appalling though that was, especially at a time when AOC and others face constant threats of violence, more telling was the response of Gosar’s party. When Democrats moved to censure him, only two Republicans voted with them. The 200-odd others [gave Gosar their blessing]
(https://thehill.com/homenews/house/582031-house-votes-to-censure-gosar-and-boot-him-from-committees).**
Earlier, Republicans had had to make a similar decision. Before her election to Congress in 2020, Marjorie Taylor Greene had posted on Facebook a photograph of herself holding a gun next to an image of AOC and two other members of the so-called Squad, made up of left-leaning Democratic women of colour.Taylor Greene also all but called for the execution of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. Yet when Democrats voted to kick the Georgia Republican off the various congressional committees she sat on, only 11 members of her party voted with them. The rest stood with her. …
NOVEMBER 29, 2021
On November 12, while promoting his new book, Betrayal, ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl released an audio recording of a conversation with Donald Trump. Responding to a question about the Capitol rioters who’d chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” Trump said those words were just “common sense,” given the fraudulence of the 2020 election. Two days later, Wyoming Republican Senator John Barrasso, who ran as a moderate but has since swung to the right, was asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about Trump’s comment. Despite repeated prodding, Barrasso kept dodging the issue, emphasizing the need to move on and suggesting that there had been voting irregularities in the 2020 election that merited further investigation.
Barrasso’s dismal performance was even more ominous than Trump’s initial comments.
Trump is Trump, a known quantity. But Barrasso’s cowardly inability to condemn him shows, once again, how thoroughly the Republican Party has been conquered by Trump, whose promotion of political violence now has the tacit approval of almost the entire party apparatus (with the few exceptions, like Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, increasingly pushed to the margins—if not driven out of public office completely). …
June 20, 2022
Chris Hayes: This violent, thuggish intimidation and menace is one of the tools that the Trump faction of right-wing American politics uses for control. And they are now deploying that same thirst for violence as a means of exerting control in the broader Republican Party.
