Frightening would-be terrorists talking about civil war
by digby
Expert on right wing violence, Dave Neiwert, reports at Crooks and Liars on this “civil war” talk being pushed by our president. It will send a chill down your spine. An excerpt:
Civil war has become an endemic talking point and source of speculation among right-wing pundits. Only this week, longtime Republican operative Joseph diGenova went on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show and warned:
We are in a civil war in this country. There’s two standards of justice, one for Democrats, one for Republicans. The press is all Democrat, all liberal, all progressive, all left—they hate Republicans, they hate Trump. So the suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future in this country is over. It’s not going to be. It’s going to be total war. And as I say to my friends, I do two things—I vote and I buy guns.
This seemingly hysterical pronouncement, in fact, is fast becoming a commonplace among right-wing pundits. (Watch for it to become a permanent talking point at Fox.) That’s because it has been circulating on the right for a good long while now, and is now being whipped up to new heights—notably, well into the mainstream of conservative-movement discourse.
[…]
Even before Trump’s election, talk of civil war was bubbling up with great frequency among far-right militiamen who believed a Hillary Clinton presidency would bring about a fresh kind of “tyranny,” many of whom prepared for armed resistance in the event she won. Indeed, the talk has cropped up in other recent domestic-terrorism incidents: Three Kansas militiamen arrested in October 2016 for plotting the truck bombing of a rural community of Somali refugees were acting under the assumption that Clinton would win, and were planning to act the day after the November election as an opening act of resistance to her administration.And like so many components of right-wing Republicanism in the age of Trump, the idea of civil war—indeed, the agitation and outright fantasizing in hopes of one—has its origins in the racist radical Right of the 1980s and ‘90s. Those roots remain embedded in the violent reactionarism fueling the militias and hate groups that sprang to life during the Obama years as a backlash to the election of America’s first black president. And they are very much alive in the pro-Trump authoritarianism of the president’s most rabid and violent defenders, people such as Cesar Sayoc and Christopher Hasson.
I’ve been following the strands of right-wing civil war rhetoric since those 1980s origins, having been involved in coverage of the Aryan Nations and The Order in northern Idaho at the time. I’ve written whole books on the subject. However, rather than explaining the dynamics in text alone, I thought it might be better to show people this history rather than simply to tell it. After all, so much of the spread of the radical Right—and particularly the post-Obama alt-right—has occurred in the video realm.
Most, if not all, of the conspiracy theories that fuel the radical Right today have been spread in videos viewed online, by increasingly younger audiences. The progenitors of these videos have successfully created an epistemological bubble, a kind of alternative universe that has taken on a life of its own. (I call that bubble Alt-America.)
He goes on to show four videos which trace the rise of violent right wing rhetoric and provides context and historical data for all of it. It’s unsettling to say the least. Well worth clicking over to read and watch all of it.
I’ll just put these two videos up to whet your appetite:
Maybe in a more innocent time we might chalk this up to a bunch of blowhards playing soldier. I don’t know about you, but I feel as if something has shifted. I think we should be aware of this and understand that tens of millions of our fellow Americans watch and absorb this stuff every day. The vast majority will not be violent. But it only takes a few to start the fire.
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