And a spreading darkness
Victims of political violence may be found among both major U.S. political parties, David Frum noted last week (The Atlantic):
But if both Republicans and Democrats, left and right, suffer political violence, the same cannot be said of those who celebrate political violence. That’s not a “both sides” affair in 2020s America.
No, it isn’t, is it?
Deny it as conservatives do, prominent figures among the Republican Party have made threats of violence against political opponents intergral to messages they send their supporters in speeches, political ads, and on social media. Republicans suggesting that if they don’t get their way democratically they’ll go guns and water the tree of liberty with the blood of their opponents has become Messaging 101 on the right.
Frum continued:
You don’t see Democratic House members wielding weapons in videos and threatening to shoot candidates who want to cut capital-gains taxes or slow the growth of Medicare. Democratic candidates for Senate do not post video fantasies of hunting and executing political rivals, or of using a firearm to discipline their children’s romantic partners. It’s not because of Democratic members that Speaker Nancy Pelosi installed metal detectors to bar firearms from the floor of the House. No Democratic equivalent exists of Donald Trump, who regularly praises and encourages violence as a normal tool of politics, most recently against his own party’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. As the formerly Trump-leaning Wall Street Journal editorialized on October 2: “It’s all too easy to imagine some fanatic taking Mr. Trump seriously and literally, and attempting to kill Mr. McConnell. Many supporters took Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about former Vice President Mike Pence all too seriously on Jan. 6.”
Right-wing figures will blame suspect David DePape’s hammer attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband last week in their home on mental illness. Yet….
“This was not a random act of violence. This was not a random residential burglary. This is something that was specifically targeted,” said San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins on Tuesday.
Tom Nichols writes in The Atlantic that the snickering responses to the attack that landed Paul Pelosi in the ICU “marks a new level of depravity” for Republicans:
One might think that it would be easy for America, as one nation, to condemn an attempt to kidnap the woman second in line to the presidency that resulted in the beating of her husband with a hammer. As Ernest Hemingway would say: Pretty to think so. Instead, we have seen the dark heart of the Republican Party, with a reaction so callous, so flippantly sadistic, so hateful, that it all feels irredeemable.
The morning news broke of the Pelosi home invasion, I wrote that we are living through a period history will record as another mass insanity. That may depend on the numbers killed. History views the mass murder of demonized foes in Armenia, Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda, Boznia, and Burma quite differently. (The last four occurred in my lifetime.) In Friday’s post, I cited the case of 55-year-old Scott Brian Haven, a Utah health-insurance salesman convicted of sending nearly 4,000 threatening messages to Democrats in Congress.
In “Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind,” Robert Draper explains that Haven specifcally targeted Maxine Waters, Dick Durbin, and Jerry Nadler:
He focused his attention on them because Limbaugh and Hannity had themselves done so—even going so far as to supply their Washington office numbers while on the air. Haven dutifully jotted them down. Then he began calling, sharing sentiments like the following:
“Tell the son of a bitch we are coming to hang the fucker!”
What we see today, Nichols warns, is sadistic glee among many conservatives in seeing violence done to their political enemies. “But it is also a social cancer, a rot that can spread quickly and kill the spirit of democracy.”
“The darkness is spreading,” Nichols warns.
Tomorrow belongs to them.
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Please go vote and take family and friends.