Violence Is Mainstream Republican Politics Now

[marmar]

Violence Is Mainstream Republican Politics Now
The party spent these four years increasingly accepting, then celebrating, right-wing threats and attacks.

By SETH MAXON
JAN 24, 2021


(Slate) “We condemn the violence that took place here in the strongest possible terms,” Vice President Mike Pence intoned in the House chamber the night of Jan. 6, after his boss’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol and laid waste to it in a siege that left five people dead. “We grieve the loss of life in these hallowed halls, as well as the injuries suffered by those who defended our Capitol today,” Pence continued. “Violence never wins. Freedom wins, and this is still the people’s house.”

It sounded like a consensus. “The violence must end,” Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley wrote in his official statement on the insurrection, despite having given the crowd a fist pump of encouragement before the assault. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who had joined Hawley in supporting President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s November victory, wrote on the same theme: “The Department of Justice should vigorously prosecute everyone who was involved in these brazen acts of violence.”

But it wasn’t until brazen violence left blood on the floor of the Capitol that the Republicans settled on that particular anti-violence message. For more than five years, from the moment Donald Trump entered the presidential race, the party had ever more strongly committed itself to a different position on the morality—and political value—of violence: It was useful, and they would use it.

More than “winning,” more than prosperity, violence was the rhetorical heart of the Trump movement. Ordinary Republicans were told, over and over, that the people who loved Trump were literally under attack by their political opponents, and that history and patriotism called for them to literally fight back. Coming their way was a sinister array of cultural Marxists, migrant caravans, Muslim “snakes,” Black Lives Matter rioters, and a global antifa conspiracy. They were passengers storming the cockpit in the Flight 93 election, witnesses to American carnage, champions of the Angel Moms mourning their slain children. ............(more)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/violence-republicans-trump-right-wing-threats.html

[Iliyah]

1. They are the modern day mobsters . . .