It's fatiguing to hear from commentators living in the far-left bubble that January 6th was an actual insurrection, master-planned by Trump, and that the far right - not the far left - is who is driving the country's divisiveness. These things are simply not true, and repeating them will never change that. January 6th was a riot, and a sad chapter in our shared experiences, but no amount of gaslighting and hyperbolic diatribe from congressional activists and their media depots will convince the general public that it was anything more than just that. I'm a two-time Trump voter, a former Clinton-Democrat and current moderate Republican from a family of mid-west union members and educators. I have personal experience with both the far left and the far right, and I can promise you that it is the far left in this country that is the problem, not the far right. It amazes me that 25 people were killed by far left mobs in the summer of 2020 riots, with millions of dollars of damage to federal buildings and private businesses done, yet the left continues to dog-whistle about the "proud boys" being the problem and denying that anything severely wrong on their side happened that summer, or since. I used to think the left's inability to see truth was a symptom of zeal, oftentimes rooted in idealism, but more and more I am convinced the left is able to see the truth, and yet choose to fight - oftentimes bitterly and savagely - for a vision of America that is based on one false narrative after another.
The "far left" is driving the country in a more extreme and violent future. They are the ones who continue to threaten actual violence -- and yet, no one seems to notice. Strange.
I'm a pretty middle-of-the-road moderate independent voter, and I don't like any of our parties. That said, this piece is rather blinkered to only recognize political violence coming from the right. It's coming from both sides. You can't gaslight everyone into forgetting the riots of 2020 or the recent threats to SCOTUS justices. The rhetoric is overheated all around, and disaffected people on all sides are responding to that.
We all know that it is only the “right” that is truly violent. They’re for the right to own guns, for crying out loud! We see the “right” constantly threatening and shooting innocences as they go about intimidating free-thinking citizens.
These people have the audacity to deny proven elections facts. For example, they still deny the fact that Putin and Russia stole the 2016 election for Trump. Worse, they also deny that the 2020 election of Joe Biden was the safest and most secure election in World History. These Trumpers continue to claim that even though election integrity laws across the US were dropped or disregarded citing Covid that somehow that means Biden didn’t win. How ridiculous!
Everyone with eyes and a brain can see that it is only the “right” that is prone to violence. Antifa is dedicated to non-violent civil disobedience. Antifa is purely a necessary and appropriate civilian response to all these fascist, Knuckle-dragging Trumpers that are polluting the planet’s only air supply.
As this article suggests, all Trumpers need to be liquidated!!!! They are violent extremist people calling for nothing less than Civil War.
Lest we forget our battle cry: No Justice, No Peace! Again: No Justice! No Peace! Yah!! Trumpers, put down your guns! We have the government coming for you and all your scummy kind!
(P.S. - this post is satire for those dense leftists who are cheering. You can’t even see the hypocrisy of your own accusations - decrying the violence of the right while advocating for government violence against them. The article was a complete political rant and a waste of time to read. Must be a slow news day. I hope the author feels better. She should smoke some more weed. I understand that it can take the edge off things.)
I'm interested that so many want to engage in a "far left" "far right" bubble argument. In fact, desires for political violence are similar on the left and right, and property violence incidents from BLM cost about 2 billion in insurance payouts - so it is serious on that side. However, those on the left who engage in violence are disconnected from the Democratic Party - they are disaffected members of the far-left who are hard to control in our democracy. On the right, those who justify violence strongly identify as Republican - making their violence mobilizable for political purposes. That is precisely what we are seeing in the data, which shows vastly higher rates of violence on the right against human beings: https://journalofdemocracy.com/articles/the-rise-of-political-violence-in-the-united-states/
It's feels better to point fingers. But it's not useful. This is a serious problem infecting our democracy, and if leading politicians on the right continue to justify it, and cultural leaders on the left to excuse it, we are going to end up in a very deadly situation that I doubt any of the people calmly writing their comments here actually want to live through.
There is no material "far-right" anything that poses any threat to this country. And there is no "far-left" as the rank and file Democrats have completely adopted a platform and agenda that does not differ at all from what we used to label as the radical left.
To see what a coming civil war would look like, just check out Sri Lanka. The protests that caused the government to flee were done by the masses of regular people from the full political spectrum. The only group lacking from the protest was the powerful elites that own all the responsibility for destroying Sri Lanka's economy.
It has always been said that the US would never defeated except from within. We are seeing the enemy clearly today... the Democrat party and the elites that control it.
The last thing this country needs at a time like this is more simplistic demonizers. More people deluding themselves that the side they hate the other side as pure capital-E Evil, we'd never do that and if we did the other side made us. Who swallow the most implausible conspiracy theories about Them without question, while any inconvenient facts about their own is quickly shoved down the memory hole. Persuasion was founded as an alternative to that way of thinking, a voice of sanity in a time that badly needs one. And yet somehow we've ended up with a comment section dominated by the simplistic demonizers.
I can only hope that, just like it's turned out that the very "people of color" the woke claim to speak for don't agree with them, there's a, dare I say, silent majority of Persuasion readers who still believe in Yascha's vision and are willing to be louder about standing up for it.
A centrist third party with strong, dynamic leadership is the only way out of this. By centrist I mean reasonable, not conciliatory. This party would take the two major parties head on. It could also do deals with each, depending who was more reasonable on a particular issue. The partisan media dynamic feeding these beasts would be disrupted.
There Won’t Be a “Civil War”...
It's fatiguing to hear from commentators living in the far-left bubble that January 6th was an actual insurrection, master-planned by Trump, and that the far right - not the far left - is who is driving the country's divisiveness. These things are simply not true, and repeating them will never change that. January 6th was a riot, and a sad chapter in our shared experiences, but no amount of gaslighting and hyperbolic diatribe from congressional activists and their media depots will convince the general public that it was anything more than just that. I'm a two-time Trump voter, a former Clinton-Democrat and current moderate Republican from a family of mid-west union members and educators. I have personal experience with both the far left and the far right, and I can promise you that it is the far left in this country that is the problem, not the far right. It amazes me that 25 people were killed by far left mobs in the summer of 2020 riots, with millions of dollars of damage to federal buildings and private businesses done, yet the left continues to dog-whistle about the "proud boys" being the problem and denying that anything severely wrong on their side happened that summer, or since. I used to think the left's inability to see truth was a symptom of zeal, oftentimes rooted in idealism, but more and more I am convinced the left is able to see the truth, and yet choose to fight - oftentimes bitterly and savagely - for a vision of America that is based on one false narrative after another.
The "far left" is driving the country in a more extreme and violent future. They are the ones who continue to threaten actual violence -- and yet, no one seems to notice. Strange.
I'm a pretty middle-of-the-road moderate independent voter, and I don't like any of our parties. That said, this piece is rather blinkered to only recognize political violence coming from the right. It's coming from both sides. You can't gaslight everyone into forgetting the riots of 2020 or the recent threats to SCOTUS justices. The rhetoric is overheated all around, and disaffected people on all sides are responding to that.
Yes, yes, yes!
We all know that it is only the “right” that is truly violent. They’re for the right to own guns, for crying out loud! We see the “right” constantly threatening and shooting innocences as they go about intimidating free-thinking citizens.
These people have the audacity to deny proven elections facts. For example, they still deny the fact that Putin and Russia stole the 2016 election for Trump. Worse, they also deny that the 2020 election of Joe Biden was the safest and most secure election in World History. These Trumpers continue to claim that even though election integrity laws across the US were dropped or disregarded citing Covid that somehow that means Biden didn’t win. How ridiculous!
Everyone with eyes and a brain can see that it is only the “right” that is prone to violence. Antifa is dedicated to non-violent civil disobedience. Antifa is purely a necessary and appropriate civilian response to all these fascist, Knuckle-dragging Trumpers that are polluting the planet’s only air supply.
As this article suggests, all Trumpers need to be liquidated!!!! They are violent extremist people calling for nothing less than Civil War.
Lest we forget our battle cry: No Justice, No Peace! Again: No Justice! No Peace! Yah!! Trumpers, put down your guns! We have the government coming for you and all your scummy kind!
(P.S. - this post is satire for those dense leftists who are cheering. You can’t even see the hypocrisy of your own accusations - decrying the violence of the right while advocating for government violence against them. The article was a complete political rant and a waste of time to read. Must be a slow news day. I hope the author feels better. She should smoke some more weed. I understand that it can take the edge off things.)
We are Good, and They are Bad. Helpful. Thanks.
I'm interested that so many want to engage in a "far left" "far right" bubble argument. In fact, desires for political violence are similar on the left and right, and property violence incidents from BLM cost about 2 billion in insurance payouts - so it is serious on that side. However, those on the left who engage in violence are disconnected from the Democratic Party - they are disaffected members of the far-left who are hard to control in our democracy. On the right, those who justify violence strongly identify as Republican - making their violence mobilizable for political purposes. That is precisely what we are seeing in the data, which shows vastly higher rates of violence on the right against human beings: https://journalofdemocracy.com/articles/the-rise-of-political-violence-in-the-united-states/
As for the ways the anti-democratic faction of the Republican Party are mobilizing violence, this should particularly concern those on the right who are democratic, because it is first targeting fellow Republicans. For some sense of that: https://www.justsecurity.org/81898/the-gops-militia-problem-proud-boys-oath-keepers-and-lessons-from-abroad/
It's feels better to point fingers. But it's not useful. This is a serious problem infecting our democracy, and if leading politicians on the right continue to justify it, and cultural leaders on the left to excuse it, we are going to end up in a very deadly situation that I doubt any of the people calmly writing their comments here actually want to live through.
There is no material "far-right" anything that poses any threat to this country. And there is no "far-left" as the rank and file Democrats have completely adopted a platform and agenda that does not differ at all from what we used to label as the radical left.
To see what a coming civil war would look like, just check out Sri Lanka. The protests that caused the government to flee were done by the masses of regular people from the full political spectrum. The only group lacking from the protest was the powerful elites that own all the responsibility for destroying Sri Lanka's economy.
It has always been said that the US would never defeated except from within. We are seeing the enemy clearly today... the Democrat party and the elites that control it.
The last thing this country needs at a time like this is more simplistic demonizers. More people deluding themselves that the side they hate the other side as pure capital-E Evil, we'd never do that and if we did the other side made us. Who swallow the most implausible conspiracy theories about Them without question, while any inconvenient facts about their own is quickly shoved down the memory hole. Persuasion was founded as an alternative to that way of thinking, a voice of sanity in a time that badly needs one. And yet somehow we've ended up with a comment section dominated by the simplistic demonizers.
I can only hope that, just like it's turned out that the very "people of color" the woke claim to speak for don't agree with them, there's a, dare I say, silent majority of Persuasion readers who still believe in Yascha's vision and are willing to be louder about standing up for it.
A centrist third party with strong, dynamic leadership is the only way out of this. By centrist I mean reasonable, not conciliatory. This party would take the two major parties head on. It could also do deals with each, depending who was more reasonable on a particular issue. The partisan media dynamic feeding these beasts would be disrupted.