An unidentified man with a backpack walked into the Teamsters Building in Spokane shortly after 10 a.m. local time Wednesday. He told Pamela Brown, a worker in the building housing the Spokane County Democrats office, he had a bomb. He also wanted Brown to “get ahold of the social media… and all the media… and I want you to put out this manifesto… ‘Here, you take this manifesto,'” Brown said. She called 911 and police told her to evacuate the building.
By evening, local police reported no bomb was found, although the suspect set a small fire in the building that went out after police discovered it, the Seattle Times reports. The suspect is in custody and no injuries were reported.
There are few other details at this time, and no report on the contents of the “politically toned” manifesto to indicate the man’s motives or political leanings.
As the Spokane incident unfolded, The Plum Line (Washington Post) warned readers the threat of right-wing terrorism is on the rise. Paul Waldman noted that Kim Ward, the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate, said she had received a call from the outgoing president about supposed fraud in the election. But she had not seen a letter 64 of her colleagues signed before it was issued. It urged the state’s congressional delegation to reject state’s Electoral College votes awarded to Joe Biden.
Asked if she would have signed the letter, Ward conceded, “If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it’ … I’d get my house bombed tonight.”
Waldman reminded readers of other recent incidents that are cause for worry:
- Heavily armed protesters surrounded the home of the Michigan secretary of state, after a plot to kidnap the state’s governor was thwarted.
- Other secretaries of state who refused to steal the election for Trump have found themselves and their families threatened.
- A prominent supporter of the president went on TV and said that a federal official who countered Trump’s false claims about voter fraud should be “taken out and shot.”
- In Idaho, anti-mask protesters terrorized local officials’ families.
- Public health officials all over the country have been threatened and harassed.
- The American right made a hero out of a teenager who went to a protest and allegedly killed two people.
QAnon believes the world is secretly run by a satanic cabal of cannibal-pedophile Democrats and celebrity elites. Donald Trump was going to destroy the conspiracy, all according to Q’s divine plan. What might believers do after Joe Biden takes office in January instead?
Waldman continues:
You can apply the same logic to the only slightly less-deranged worldview propagated every day not just on fringe outlets like OAN and Newsmax, but much of the time on Fox News as well. If you actually believed the lie they’re telling their audiences — that our democracy has been destroyed by a sinister conspiracy bent on dismantling America, outlawing religion and rounding up anyone who dissents — then violence would seem completely appropriate.
It would not be much of a leap to imagine yourself the equivalent of a resistance fighter in a Nazi-occupied country in World War II, taking up arms in the noblest of causes.
The Republican Party in Arizona has ratified #StopTheSteal’s call for believers to give their lives for their god in makeup and hairspray. If past Republican defeats are any indication, expect runs on gun stores and extended shortages of ammunition. Past hoarding amounted mostly to security-blanket clutching. But as they say in investing, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Dave Neiwert tweeted Wednesday a February 2019 Daily Kos post on the American right’s fantasies about winning a second Civil War, noting the hashtag #CivilWar is trending. His response was what you would expect.
“Nothing secedes like secession,” Charlie Pierce wrote in commenting on 17 states of the New Confederacy that joined Texas in asking the Supreme Court to overturn the election. Their appeal may appear a joke to legal experts. But it is no joke that over a third of states are on board with voiding the U.S. Constitution.
“The Republican Party is now a seditious, subversive organization, a Fifth Column of organized authoritarian yahoos,” Pierce writes. “Where’s Joe McCarthy when you need him?”
McCarthy’s party is busy doing nothing to alleviate the suffering of Americans in red states and blue states that were once the United States.
(h/t ER)