“Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole – that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it.”
Trump Rally in Vandalia, Ohio, March 16th.
"My first acts as your next President will be to Close the Border, DRILL, BABY, DRILL, and Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!"
Trump on his social media platform Truth Social, March 11th.
“We fight like Hell and if you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Trump at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021
January 6th Capitol attackers were “ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.” Official GOP description, February 4, 2022 “Accelerationism” — the apocalyptic belief that modern society is irredeemable and that its end must be hastened, so that a new order can be brought into being.
Trump followers have many militias to choose from should they wish to mount a powerful, violent attack across the land, the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, the Bugaloo Boys, Proud Boys, Texas Freedom Fighters, etc. Each with many chapters, training facilities and exceptionally well-armed. With significantly more firearms among our civilian population than there are people, including tens of millions of military grade assault weapons, there is an abundance of Trump partisans more than happy to use such weapons against “radical liberals,” immigrants whom they dismiss as sub-human, and racial/religious/ethnic/gender minorities. Several red state governors are more than willing to deploy their national guard units to support extreme rightwing vectors, even in defiance of court orders to the contrary.
And if you read the above Trump quotes, he appears more than ready to rely on violent insurrection, with a powerful backing of MAGA GOP elected representatives, who have dismissed the death, destruction and violence in the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021 as American “patriots” visiting their Capitol as an act of “tourism.” At this point, one would have to be naïve to believe that the MAGA GOP is anything but a white Christian nationalist political movement that views representational democracy as an obstacle to their retaining control of the country. As Democrats are aghast at reports from Trump insiders that the former President was an admirer of Hitler’s Nazi platform, MAGAns openly agree with his position. To make blue staters more uncomfortable are the constant reports of the embrace of Trump’s white Christian nationalism by so many police officers and members of the US military.
Writing an OpEd for CNN.com, March16th, Bruce Hoffman, senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council of Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University and Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and DeSales University, ask the question: Is the US on the brink of another civil war? “Three months into 2024, it seems dire predictions of political violence are now commonly issued both by the country’s extreme fringes as well as from the mainstream. Former President Donald Trump has been perhaps the most vociferous prognosticator, warning that there would be ‘bedlam in the country’ should the criminal charges against him lead to a 2024 election loss. Nowadays, even seemingly mundane political procedures can also result in promises of violence. When the US Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration in January, allowing federal border agents to remove concertina wire put in place by the state of Texas, some in elected office said it was a sign of civil war. In its threat assessment for 2024, the Department of Homeland Security forecast that, among other threats, the 2024 election cycle would be a ‘key event for possible violence…’
“In her 2022 book, ‘How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,’ renowned political scientist Barbara F. Walter argues that “we are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe” because of a toxic mix of political extremism and polarization, social and cultural tribalism, the popular embrace of conspiracy theories, proliferation of guns and well-armed militias and the erosion of faith in government and the liberal, Western democratic state. Among the key factors she cites is accelerationism…
“Accelerationism is embraced by a spectrum of white supremacists, white nationalists, racists, antisemites, xenophobes and anti-government militants as a clarion call to revolution. They fervently believe that the modern Western, liberal state is so corrupt and inept that it is beyond redemption and must be destroyed in order to create a new society and way of governance.
“With the West supposedly on the precipice of collapse, accelerationism’s adherents maintain that violent insurrection is required to push democracy over the edge and into oblivion. Only by hastening its destruction can a White-dominated society and new order emerge, the thinking goes. Fomenting divisiveness and polarization through violent attacks on racial minorities, Jews, liberals, foreign interlopers and power elites, and thus producing a cataclysmic collapse of the existing order and provoking a second civil war, accordingly, is accelerationism’s stock-in-trade.
“But this terrorist strategy is in fact part of a long tradition of extreme, destabilizing far-right violence. To understand why, and to put those events in broader context, one has to view January 6, 2021, as another milestone in a trajectory that commenced in the late 1970s and gathered momentum throughout the 1980s. Its evolution slowed following the nationwide law enforcement crackdown after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, but was infused with new purpose after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and the Great Recession stunned the country that same year. And, it was subsequently weaponized in the 2010s by social media and further empowered by the febrile rhetoric and polarization of politics that continued to divide America.”
In short, after a period of expanded liberalism in the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, the United States has witnessed the steady growth of rightwing radicalism, where people no longer accept the definition of being American without a blue or red qualification. Donald Trump did not create this movement; he capitalized on it by giving rightwing radicals a voice and legitimizing their cause. Where communities were not already congealed around white Christian nationalism, mass and social media gave a new rallying point for those disaffected segments in our society. Like it or not, there are no longer any “lone wolves”; the Internet has connected them in new and powerful ways. Terrorist disruption and defiance has replaced the traditional blue vs gray civil war with two clearly defined militaries facing each other.
I’m Peter Dekom, and I believe that we do in fact face a 50/50 chance of de facto civil war within the next two or three years.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment