Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Once again, the open threat of Trump's stochastic violence cannot be allowed to dissuade his prosecution. But we have to have that national conversation about the fact that innocent people are almost certainly going to get hurt or killed as those prosecutions move forward.

As the prosecutions of Mr. Trump have accelerated, so too have threats against law enforcement authorities, judges, elected officials and others. The threats, in turn, are prompting protective measures, a legal effort to curb his angry and sometimes incendiary public statements, and renewed concern about the potential for an election campaign in which Mr. Trump has promised “retribution” to produce violence.

Given the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, scholars, security experts, law enforcement officials and others are increasingly warning about the potential for lone-wolf attacks or riots by angry or troubled Americans who have taken in the heated rhetoric.

In April, before federal prosecutors indicted Mr. Trump, one survey showed that 4.5 percent of American adults agreed with the idea that the use of force was “justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.” Just two months later, after the first federal indictment of Mr. Trump, that figure surged to 7 percent.

 

Seven percent of US adults is about 15 million people. The number is higher now, and will increase.

 

The indictments of Mr. Trump “are the most important current drivers of political violence we now have,” said the author of the study, Robert Pape, a political scientist who studies political violence at the University of Chicago.

Other studies have found that any effects from the indictments dissipated quickly, and that there is little evidence of any increase in the numbers of Americans supportive of a violent response. And the leaders of the far-right groups that helped spur the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 are now serving long prison terms.

But the threats have been steady and credible enough to prompt intense concern among law enforcement officials. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland addressed the climate in testimony to Congress on Wednesday, saying that while he recognized that the department’s work came with scrutiny, the demonization of career prosecutors and F.B.I. agents was menacing not only his employees but also the rule of law.

“Singling out individual career public servants who are just doing their jobs is dangerous — particularly at a time of increased threats to the safety of public servants and their families,” Mr. Garland said.

“We will not be intimidated,” he added. “We will do our jobs free from outside influence. And we will not back down from defending our democracy.”

Security details have been added for several high-profile law enforcement officials across the country, including career prosecutors running the day-to-day investigations.

The F.B.I., which has seen the number of threats against its personnel and facilities surge since its agents carried out the court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, in August 2022, subsequently created a special unit to deal with the threats. A U.S. official said threats since then have risen more than 300 percent, in part because the identities of employees, and information about them, are being spread online.

“We’re seeing that all too often,” Christopher A. Wray, the bureau’s director, said in congressional testimony this summer.

The threats are sometimes too vague to rise to the level of pursuing a criminal investigation, and hate speech enjoys some First Amendment protections, often making prosecutions difficult. But the Justice Department has charged more than a half dozen people with making threats.

This has had its own consequences: In the past 13 months, F.B.I. agents confronting individuals suspected of making threats have shot and fatally wounded two people, including one in Utah who was armed and had threatened, before President Biden’s planned visit to the area, to kill him.

 

It's good to see protection for prosecutors, judges, and other court officers and investigators. But we need to talk about the fact that these assholes have a number of softer targets to choose from and the increase in violence will include more schools, synagogues, supermarkets, community centers, abortion clinics, LGBTQ+ centers,  malls, and more.

These folks won't have federal protection, just sayin'.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Because it does.

Author and essayist A.R. Moxon reminds us of the stakes going forward in American politics by answering the "Are Republicans really fascists?" question with a definitive "Yes, and they put that on display whenever possible." 

This is nothing new these days, really. Republican office-holders and aspiring office-holders have been burning and shooting all sorts of effigies for years now, indicating the types of things and people they would like to see eliminated in one way or another.

A lot of people are alarmed by this, because they understand that burning and shooting things meant to signify certain people is always the precursor to burning and shooting the signified people.

However, I’m told the difference between burning books meant to signify certain types of people and burning cardboard meant to signify books meant to signify people is a very important distinction.

I agree, actually.

It tells us where the permission levels are right now for our national gang of genocidal bullies, by which I mean the Republican Party.

So the thing about the [Missouri] state senator who is running for governor and his other buddy who is also a state senator but is not running for governor, is that besides being aficionados of flamethrowers and of fantasizing about burning “woke” books on the lawn of the governor’s mansion, they are also Republicans, which is a political party in the United States of America.

And one interesting thing about the Republican party is, it is entirely captured by fascism, that is to say it is a popular political movement organized around a cult of personality, and mediated through an open and explicit reverence for violence as a redeeming force, and by a nationalist myth of purification.

Another interesting thing about the Republican Party is that it is entirely driven by its country’s dominant founding spirit of supremacy. Supremacy, in case you didn’t know, is the belief that some people matter and others don’t, and that those who don’t matter should be forced to conform to the comfort of those who dot matter, and if they won’t conform then they should be punished and terrorized and eliminated, and if they do conform then they should be maintained at minimum possible expense and used for profit for as long as they are profitable, and then abandoned if they are not.

And the United States was founded by people who believed in a very popular and fairly recent invention called “white.” This invention allowed them to believed that Black people were subordinate to people who were “white,” which allowed them to own Black people, and to rape them, and torture them and kill them, too, in case you didn’t know.

When I say things like this, I’m often admonished for being divisive or polarized. There is often a bit of blowback about how by framing our current situation as a fight against fascism and supremacy in the same spirit that created an entrenched permission structure for chattel slavery and other genocides, I’m casting myself as a superior moral authority who refuses to find common ground; or how by framing my opponents as supremacists I’m demonizing them, which makes me just as bad as them; or that I’m just preaching to the choir in an echo chamber because I’m not getting to really know them and understand their points and appeal to their better angels; or that I’m casting them as irredeemable, leaving them no exit ramps from radicalization and even driving them toward resentful radicalization; or that by refusing to engage them on their terms and debate them I’m passing up a real opportunity to persuade them, which is what’s necessary to drive real change.

I’ve been working my way, point-through point, through these critiques based in a belief that persuasion of supremacists is all-important in dealing with supremacy, and talking about the assumptions and flaws I see in each one. Go search the archives for all that amazing content if you like.

But now it also occurs to me that, for those who think that the most important thing in the world is persuasion, I have good news: persuasion has been happening all along.

Lovers of persuasion: rejoice!

I didn’t used to believe that the conservative spirit was irreducible from supremacy, or that supremacy was the dominant spirit of my country. I would have considered that ridiculous. I believed very firmly in the popular modern supremacist myth that supremacy had been defeated forever, mostly by white people who fixed a handful of significant flaws to the otherwise perfect system they had inherited, and that we were now as a result the Greatest Country In the World.

And I didn’t used to believe that the Republican Party was a fascist party. I really didn’t.

I do believe those things now, though.

I was persuaded.

You might wonder, who persuaded me?

Well, there were a lot of people who have been harmed their whole lives by conservative fascism and the spirit of supremacy that drives our political life, and some years ago I started listening to their voices as a primary source to understand the shape of the country I’d failed to see. These were voices positioned not in some middle ground between me and the conservatives with whom I’d debated my whole life up until that point, but voices previously unconsidered by either of us, further out, with perspectives based on their lived experience that gave me a view of the terrain I still cannot achieve by myself.

This week I realized, these voices aren’t what persuaded me. They’ve taught me, but I came to them because I was already persuaded.

So who persuaded me? You’ll never guess.

The people who persuaded me that Republicans are fascist are Republicans.

 

As I keep saying, the two-thirds of American non-college white people siding with Trump and GOP aren't voting against their vested interests. They're voting to strengthen white supremacy -- the system America was built on -- so that they get screwed over slightly less often and slightly less badly than their Black, brown, queer and Jewish neighbors, co-workers and acquaintances.

That's it.

That's the whole explanation. Maybe they benefit from the scraps more if the Republican fascists are in charge. They certainly won't eat my face, say the people voting for the Face-Eating Leopards Party.

So yeah, they are voting for their self-interests and that of their families. It's nothing new. It's the "white moderate" that Dr. King wrote about sixty years ago: the absence of tension is easier than the presence of justice. The moment that equality and fairness and justice becomes inconvenient, we go right back down the road.

The end of the Civil Rights era is coming because eggs were $5 per dozen nine months ago.

Big Bob's Bribery Blowout, Con't

New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez continues to face a concerted effort to oust him in the wake of last week's federal bribery indictments, and Democrats in the Garden State are ready to take out the trash.

 

Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) announced Saturday that he will primary Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) after the senator was indicted on corruption charges Friday.

“After calls to resign, Senator Menendez said ‘I am not going anywhere.’ As a result, I feel compelled to run against him,” Kim said on X, formerly Twitter. “Not something I expected to do, but NJ deserves better.”

Kim was the second member of Congress and first from New Jersey to call on Menendez to resign Friday. A growing list of Democrats, headlined by Gov. Phil Murphy (D-N.J.), have asked Menendez to step down.

“I believe more than ever that New Jersey needs hard working, trustworthy leaders focused on the common good and injecting some integrity and civility back into our politics,” Kim wrote in his announcement, sharing a link to his donations page. “We cannot jeopardize the Senate or compromise our integrity any longer.

“Help me build a movement to restore faith in our democracy,” he added.

Prosecutors allege that Menendez and his wife accepted over $600,000 in bribes from a group of New Jersey businessmen to help them and interests in Egypt.

“These allegations are serious and alarming. It doesn’t matter what your job title is or your politics — no one in America is above the law,” Kim said in a statement to The Hill on Friday. “The people of New Jersey absolutely need to know the truth of what happened, and I hope the judicial system works thoroughly and quickly to bring this truth to light.”

 

I don't even think we'll get that far, I think Menendez will be told in no uncertain terms that he's out if NJ Dem Gov. Phil Murphy has anything to say about it.  Hell, even Sen. John Fetterman says Menendez needs to step aside and "focus on the trial".

But for now Menendez is holding firm, implying that Democratic critics are racist against Latinos.

"It is not lost on me how quickly some are rushing to judge a Latino and push him out of his seat," he wrote in a statement in response to Democratic officials who have publicly broken with him. "I am not going anywhere."

Menendez was appointed to the Senate in January 2006 by then-Gov. Jon Corzine, who previously held the seat and had just taken office in Trenton. The senator was elected to a full term later that year and reelected in 2012 and 2018.

And Menendez is up for reelection next year, creating a politically-perilous situation where he could stand trial while also campaigning for a fourth full term in office — a scenario many Democrats would prefer not to see unfold.

 

It's not brown, it's green cash and gold bars, my man.

 

Time to go.