Breaking rules and breaking down barriers
“The main scene of crime in Washington, D.C. is the White House,” argues Marcy Wheeler in a new video. Donald Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, and Pam Bondi are working hard to paint Trump opponents as violent terrorists. In part, to distract from the crimes the Trump administration is committing, and to construct a pretext for prosecuting his enemies and perhaps implementing martial law.
Wheeler insists that Americans opposed to Trump cannot sit back and let them establish that narrative without serious pushback.
Remember. Donald Trump is a criminal. He is a career criminal, a convicted criminal. He is using his office to engage in criminal acts in plain sight. He is accepting bribes to the tune of billions. He is ordering the U.S. military to murder people in small boats in international waters. He is defying the courts. Don’t forget that, advises Marcy Wheeler. The career criminal is trying desperately to paint his opponents as the real criminals.
And it’s not just Trump himself, she concludes:
What I think we really need to do is to constantly remember that Donald Trump is a felon, is to constantly remember that none of these people — not, a single Republican, certainly not anybody in the White House, certainly not Pam Bondi — every single time we talk about somebody who is complicit with the system of trying to criminalize their opposition, we need to make it clear that what is going on instead is these people are part of a criminal cover up. These people are part of a criminal conspiracy. These people are part of covering up a violent assault on their workplace (if they’re members of Congress). These people are trying to whitewash the assault of 140 cops on January 6th.
They are doing it, Wheeler argues, by charging their opponents with the same crimes for which Jan. 6 criminals were tried, convicted, and subsequently pardoned by Tump. Trump and MAGA are “fostering criminals.”‘
Trump and his crew have their own ambitions. But what we are also seeing is how their criminality dovetails into their supporters’ desire for consequence-free violence.
Consider these warnings about accelerationism from before the January 6 insurrection.
ADL (April 16, 2019):
Accelerationism is a term white supremacists have assigned to their desire to hasten the collapse of society as we know it. The term is widely used by those on the fringes of the movement, who employ it openly and enthusiastically on mainstream platforms, as well as in the shadows of private, encrypted chat rooms. We have also recently seen tragic instances of its manifestation in the real world.
David Neiwert (April 12, 2020):
Of all the radical right’s multiple permutations in the era of Donald Trump—Proud Boys, QAnon conspiracy theorists, “Patriot” militiamen, and “Boogaloo Bois” among them—the most worrisome by far is the spread of white-power “accelerationism”: a belief system predicated on the idea that modern human civilization (and especially its multicultural features) is a blight, and that the only solution is to encourage its destruction through acts of terroristic violence. Its followers explicitly embrace violence as the only viable means for change, because they see politics as a waste of time.
By painting opponents as domestic terrorists, the Trump administration is creating a permission structure for MAGA to cut loose.
Push back every chance you get.
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