It was Trumpism
Most of us are not policemen. Or politicians. When January 6 joined September 11 as a day we remember where we were, for most of us the events were experienced at a remove. They did not happen to us. We were not there. Perhaps we know someone who was in a “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” way.
Mass shootings like those at Sandy Hook Elementary, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Las Vegas, a Walmart in El Paso, or a Pittsburgh synagogue somehow feel more personal. It could have been us. Our children.
In Paul Pelosi’s case, it could have been our house broken into at 2 a.m. by a stranger meaning to main or murder us for our political associations or religious beliefs (New York Times):
The assault came as threats and violence against political figures have surged in America, especially after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, which brought the Democratic speaker, other lawmakers and the Republican vice president within feet of rioters threatening their lives.
“This was not a random act,” said William Scott, San Francisco’s chief of police. “This was intentional.”
Let’s stop dismissing attacks like these and threats against public servants as products of garden-variety mental illness. This was not a boat accident, propeller, coral reef, or Jack the Ripper.
It was Trumpism.
ISIS radicalized budding terrorists online. MAGA, QAnon, Fox News, Newsmax, One America News, Infowars, Reawaken America and more — the entire conspiracy industrial complex, and now Twitter — do so in public view. And with the explicit or implicit approval of Republican politicians. Including their presumptive 2024 nominee and his likely primary challenger.
Dana Milbank’s rabbi reflected recently on what the toxic atmosphere fostered by the far right means for American Jews.
“How many people in the last few years have been at a dining room conversation where the conversation has turned to where might we move? How many of us?”
Many. Most?
Milbank observes (Washington Post):
The United States has until now been different because of our constitutional protections of minority rights: our bedrock principles of equal treatment under law, free expression and free exercise of religion. Now, the MAGA crowd is attacking the very notion of minority rights. Ascendant Christian nationalists, with a sympathetic Supreme Court, are dismantling the separation between church and state. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), for example, calls the principle “junk that’s not in the Constitution” and claims “the church is supposed to direct the government.” Red states, again with an agreeable Supreme Court, are rolling back minority voting rights and decades of civil rights protections. And leading it all is Trump, threatening violence and going to “war with the rule of law,” as Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) puts it.
The only thing American about them is their birth certificate.