David Rothkopf: Republicans are literally weaponizing their political views.

[Nevilledog]

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The Republicans are literally weaponizing their political views. At the core of their message is a call to arms. They are saying their ultimate answer to the Democratic agenda or a government that seeks to enforce laws with which they don't agree is gunfire.

We need to stop with the gun control rhetoric of decades past & recognize this sea-change in the nature of the our discussion about how we are to deal with the divisions in our society. We have already seen a violent insurrection supported by the leaders of the Republican Party.

We have Congresspeople brandishing guns and making heroes of shooters who have gunned down those they perceive as political opponents. We have disinformation being spread about the agenda of mythical radical groups like "Antifa."

We have a party that refuses to do anything to stop the tsunami of guns that has put weapons in the hands of extremists, of the mentally unbalanced, of criminals but also of political cultists who regularly use the language of warfare to describe their mission.

This is a cancer that is metastasizing throughout our body politic. It not only results in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents annually, has not only resulted in more deaths in the past sixty years than the toll of all the wars in which Americans have fought...

but it threatens something even worse. It threatens that we soon become a society in which the divisions are marked by rivers of blood. This sounds over-the-top. It is not. It is what the daily headlines show. It is a thesis supported by mountains of evidence.

The debate is not about guns. It is about embracing the right's agenda or else, rejecting the rights of people of color or women or else, of accepting an extremist theocratic agenda or else, of denying progress, of rejecting the rule of law, of gutting democracy...or else.

See it for what it is. And recognize that there is but one way to fight this. Democrats must win substantially majorities in the Senate and the House. Their leaders must then take action to end the filibuster and end our gun pathology, fix our courts, restore our democracy.

They want to take to the streets. We must take to the ballot box...and then have the vision and courage to end this grotesque existential threat we face together, the threat of a return to a society where the rules are written at the end of the barrel of a gun.
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