"When They Fantasize About Killing You, Believe Them" Atlantic- Aug 12, 2021
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/when-they-say-they-want-kill-you-believe-them/619724/
When They Fantasize About Killing You, Believe Them
The hyperbolic posturing of Trumpist extremists, repeated often enough, will have deadly consequences.
By Hussein Ibish
AUGUST 12, 2021
About the author: Hussein Ibish is a Senior Resident Scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
Decades of living in, studying, and writing about the Middle East have taught me that whenever a political faction becomes obsessed with violent rhetoric and fantasies, brutal acts aren’t far behind.
And while there’s always been a strain of militancy on the American right and left fringes, there is something unmistakably new, and profoundly alarming, about the casual, florid, and sadistic rhetoric that is metastasizing from the Republican fringe into the party’s mainstream.
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Trump’s own sanguineous impulses and visions have been migrating into Congress and the Republican mainstream, and spurring his followers to try to outbid one another in their vicious and gruesome pronouncements.
Trump once darkly hinted about “Second Amendment people” taking some unspecified actions, implicitly murderous, to protect gun rights if he lost to Clinton.
Representative Marjorie Taylor
Greene of Georgia now warns that if the government sends health-care workers door-to-door to encourage more Americans to get vaccinated, they will find that southerners “love our Second Amendment rights, and we’re not real big on strangers showing up on our front door … they might not like the welcome they get.”
Before she was elected,
Greene once liked a Facebook comment that said to remove Nancy Pelosi from office, “a bullet to the head would be quicker.”
On tour with Greene, her Republican ally Representative
Matt Gaetz declared, “We have the Second Amendment in this country and I think we have an obligation to use it,” helpfully adding that the amendment’s purpose is “maintaining within the citizenry the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government.”
The former Trump-campaign chair and White House strategist
Steve Bannon suggested that Anthony Fauci should be beheaded.
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The cancer of political violence is not an endemic American disease.
At the moment, it is a Republican disease.
No one but Republicans themselves can cure it.
Until they do, the violence of the right is only going to keep swelling and crashing.
From a Middle Eastern perspective, this is all appallingly familiar.
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