The Albuquerque PD did
The first few bullets fired through homes and buildings in Albuquerque, New Mexico beginning in early December appeared random. But by January 3, after multiple similar attacks, Albuquerque police Chief Harold Medina opened an investigation into what appeared to be a pattern. No one was injured in the shootings.
On Monday, SWAT officers surrounded the home of a man they allege was the “mastermind” behind a conspiracy to attack Democratic officials’ homes. Suspect Solomon Pena, reports the Albuquerque Journal, “is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for office in November, has made repeated claims that the election was rigged and appears to have attended the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in Washington, D.C.”
Police allege Pena himself fired on at least one of the homes and that he hired four other men to commit the other shooting attacks against the homes of two county commissioners and two state legislators:
Pena ran unsuccessfully in the House District 14 race and claimed on social media he should have won the election. He also visited three of the targeted officials’ homes unannounced in November complaining the election was fraudulent and should not be certified.
“APD essentially discovered what we had all feared and what we had suspected — that these shootings were indeed politically motivated,” Mayor Tim Keller said at a news conference. “They were dangerous attacks not only to these individuals … but, fundamentally, also to democracy.”
“This type of radicalism is a threat to our nation and it has made its way to our door step, right here in Albuquerque, New Mexico,” Keller said. “But I know here, we are going to push back and we will not allow this to cross the threshold.”
“State records show juries convicted Pena of 19 felonies, including burglary, larceny, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and receiving stolen property,” Milan Simonich, editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican wrote in August. “He spent almost seven years in prison.” Part of his prison time was for leading a burglary ring.
A judge ruled in September that since he’d had his voting rights restored Pena could remain on the fall ballot. Pena claimed he’d graduated from the University of New Mexico after prison and turned his life around. Given the sordid flood of lies from Rep. George Santos of New York (if that is his real name), someone might want to fact check Pena’s claim.
Perhaps as the Albuquerque PD just did, it is time to stop seeing actions committed by conservative extremists as random incidents.
In the Midwest last week:
A 56-year-old white woman was arrested after she allegedly confessed to repeatedly stabbing an Asian Indiana University student in the head in a what police said appeared to be an unprovoked, racially-motivated attack that unfolded in front of passengers on a public bus in Bloomington, Indiana.
The suspect in custody is Billy R. Davis of Bloomington.
Davis, according to a criminal complaint obtained by Indianapolis ABC affiliate WRTV, allegedly confessed to stabbing the 18-year-old victim with a folding knife, purportedly telling detectives because it would mean “one less person to blow up our country.”
Yes, there is a pattern.
There is also the little matter of a violent insurrection by Donald Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, and the alleged criminal plot by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election. Those involved who are not yet in jail are still being investigated or facing prosecution. As is Trump himself. Seditious conspiracy convictions establish that there was nothing random about Jan. 6 planning by Oath Keepers. Multiple Proud Boys are on trial right now on seditious conspiracy charges.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives pledges to crash the U.S. (and world?) economies if Democrats do not agree to cut Social Security and Medicare in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. Failing to would violate the government’s constitutional duty to meet its financial obligations. Not that Republicans care:
Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz recently articulated the party’s position using even more direct language.
“In exchange for not crashing the United States economy, you get nothing,” Schatz said in an interview with The Daily Beast. “You don’t get a cookie. … You’re just a person doing the bare minimum of not intentionally screwing over your constituents for insane reasons.”
Schatz is not being hyperbolic. One suspects that future historians will view this period of political violence as a time of mass insanity. We look back now on the violence against democracy and ethnic minorities by fascist movements of the 1930s and 1940s and wonder how people — educated, ostensibly Christian, “normal” — could have been caught up in ethnic hatreds that spawned war and mass murder. But we have been reminded since then in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in Burma that civilization is a thinner veneer than we’d rather think.
It took the GOP just 20 years to go from promoting “global democratic revolution” to exporting autocracy and calling it patriotism. Here at home, the same reactionary conservative impulses promote election denialism, nihilism, and attacks against political opponents and ethnic minorities.
See a pattern? You should.