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.
Thomas, I am stunned by this comment. Have you been paying attention to anything that's been going on lately?
Firstly, the "general public" *has* been convinced of this, and if you think otherwise, it's because you are the one living in a bubble. Recent polls indicate that most Americans now believe that Trump *committed a crime*. And there's good reason for that.
The January 6th committee has produced a *mountain of evidence* that has demonstrated that Trump, in fact, did helm a wide ranging effort to overturn the 2020 election. He spent most of November and December ignoring advisers who made it clear to him that he had lost the election, instead spreading baseless lies, filing frivolous lawsuits, pressuring state legislators and election workers, and inviting every single crank who would tell him what he wanted to hear into the White House.
He came within a hair's breadth of replacing his acting AG with a toadie who promised to immediately send a false memo to swing state governments claiming that they believed there were irregularities and needed to be investigated - thus preventing the verification of electoral votes. The only thing that stopped this was the threat of a mass resignation from the Justice Department. He even toyed with the idea of declaring martial law in order to seize voting machines, for God's sake.
January 6th was Trump's last resort when all of these other brazen efforts failed. In a plot cooked up by John Eastman, he did everything he could to pressure Mike Pence to refuse to "certify" the Electoral Votes - something beyond the scope of the Vice President's power. When Pence refused, Trump organized a rally intended to pressure Pence into doing his bidding.
Trump may not have been able to ensure that the rally would become violent, even though he had every reason to hope it would. But that's irrelevant. Trump organized this rally to provide as much chaos around what should have been a mere ceremonial procedure, in an attempt to overturn our constitutional order. It may have worked out better than he could have imagined, but he was quite pleased. He did nothing about it for hours, despite being pressured by everyone around him, people calling him from inside the Capitol building, and even people from right-wing media. Mike Pence had to call in the National Guard himself.
The January 6th committee may not be the politically impartial effort people would want it to be. You have Republicans to thank for that. Mitch McConnell killed the independent, bipartisan committee the Democrats easily passed through the Senate. Kevin McCarthy took his ball and went home when Pelosi told him to replace two of his five nominees - one who was himself *a potential target of the committee*, and one who'd made it clear he intended to divert the committee from its intended purpose.
But none of this matters when virtually every single person that has been featured in this committee has been a Republican. Many from Trump's inner circle. His loyal AG, Bill Barr. His campaign manager. White House lawyers and staffers, including his chief counsel. Republican lawmakers and election officials. Even a couple militia members. These are not anti-Trump partisans. These were almost all people who voted for Trump and wanted him to win.
You can say that Jan 6th wasn't an "insurrection" - that it was only a riot. But you're just playing with the definitions of words. It was a riot organized and instigated by the President, in a last ditch effort to corruptly remain in power. The "insurrection" happened over a period of two months - and the Republican party has spent the time since preparing for the next one. This was a blatant act of sedition against our democracy, with most of a major political party complicit. Anyone who can't accept that after everything we know to be true now simply doesn't want to know the truth - if the truth isn't what they want it to be.
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.
There isn't a single thing in her story that is accurate, or I should say any kind of proof violence or violent threats. It is all hysteria based on media untruths about a world they know nothing about. I actually do follow this stuff closely and have for at least two years. I listen to Steve Bannon's podcast almost every day. I watch Tucker Carlson. I listen to Ben Shapiro. I know this world. Her claims that an ad about guns is "violent" threats. Like AOC sees heckling as "violent" threats. The Democrats, for four years, denied the election results of 2016. And though there wasn't a violent riot when Trump was sworn in there were worldwide violent protests when he took office and for the next four years. Many of the acts of violence against Trump supporters go unnoticed by the media.
There was a shooting of members of congress at a baseball game by a Bernie Sanders supporter. There was a death threat against Justice Kavanaugh, and ongoing intimidation and threats by the Left against SCOTUS.
Do you really think once the GOP takes power, and it will, that you aren't going to see violent riots and attacks by the left?
This story is hyperbole and fear mongering not that different from what you see on MSNBC.
I'll research your links. The hyperbole of your tone though starting with "there isn't a single thing in her story that is accurate" doesn't rhetorically buttress your case that you are an impartial arbiter of facts. Sources matter. Tucker Carlson, for example, is not a source I would cite as impartial https://www.politifact.com/personalities/tucker-carlson/ you certainly though get a point of view, but the leveraging of sources matters, and if that source frequently lies, it's discredited, as are any statements from the former president Trump. The violent riots/protests you cite were skirmishes between partisan mobs. This sadly happens frequently across the political spectrum. There is only one party and president that encouraged a mob to march on the capital to decertify the election results, et al. I would suggest you also add to your viewing diet all the evidence being displayed and marshaled by the January 6th committee, mostly from Republican witnesses and members of the Trump administration, to understand how Trump became a unique threat to our democracy itself. Otherwise, you perhaps are missing the forest through the trees. For example, perhaps begin here, on NPR, the service partially paid for by your US tax dollars and a highly reputable source https://www.npr.org/2022/06/29/1108649726/what-weve-learned-from-a-month-of-january-6th-committee-hearings
You are actually telling me that you need to give me a politifact link to tell me Tucker Carlson is not a reliable source? What I'm telling you is that unlike most of the people that write for this site I do the work of looking at both sides -- but more importantly, looking truthfully and critically at imaginary monsters like Carlson. The media gets it wrong. And thus, we have a culture of fear and hysteria -- people hiding in the bunker. That isn't going to solve anything. And no, these were not "skirmishes" between partisan mobs. Absolutely not what those were. The media covered them that way but these were violent attacks against Trump supporters. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Granted, it's hard to find them because Google and YouTube prioritize their desired narrative, but they are there. The Left is the side that has always favored violence when it comes to political activism.
Yes there have been Timothy McVeigh's and there was Jan 6 but the left bombed the Capitol twice, for instance. You just wait. Watch what happens when the right takes power.
I think we can both agree that violence is historically endemic to American politics. For far right violence, I could cite more than just McVeigh's bombing. For example the Charlottesville murder? The entire system of segregation under the Jim Crow South was state sanctioned violence, and of course the extra-judicial vigilante violence of lynchings and the Klan, which was a reign of terror from Reconstruction through the 1970s. The nation has also been divided in many ways beyond our simplistic left/right binary historically. And yes, I know about that bombings of the capitol in 1983, and total condemn. Violence in general delegitimizes any political cause, and is perceived on my part as an act of desperation and hyperpartisanship and fanaticism. So, perhaps what we could coalesce around a center that condemns violence? Freedom of assembly shouldn't mean freedom to riot or destroy private or public property. I'm fine with non-violent civil disobedience, especially by principled actors who are willing to "pay the price" to reveal an injustice in the system. That has been a tried and true method for those who feel backed into the corner with no political redress. Work stoppages, strikes, etc., are also on the table. Would you consider these violence? One thing we can probably both expect is violence in America. With a country hyper-armed and angry, violence will be with us surely until the end of my lifetime. And I'm not looking forward to that. And I'm trying my best to make sure that the right doesn't "take power." They'll have to win it through our electoral system.
The idea that the "Left is the side that has always favored violence when it comes to political activism" hasn't been true since the 1970's.
This author isn't fear-mongering. She's studied this extensively. Here's an excerpt from an article she wrote last year on the subject (followed by the full link):
"Political violence has a long history in the United States. Since the late 1960s, it was carried out by intensely ideological groups that pulled adherents out of the mainstream into clandestine cells, such as the anti-imperialist Weather Underground Organization or the anti-abortion Operation Rescue. In the late 1960s and 1970s, these violent fringes were mostly on the far left. They committed extensive violence, largely against property (with notable exceptions), in the name of social, environmental, and animal-rights causes. Starting in the late 1970s, political violence shifted rightward with the rise of white supremacist, anti-abortion, and militia groups. The number of violent events declined, but targets shifted from property to people—minorities, abortion providers, and federal agents.
What is occurring today does not resemble this recent past. Although incidents from the left are on the rise, political violence still comes overwhelmingly from the right, whether one looks at the Global Terrorism Database, FBI statistics, or other government or independent counts. Yet people committing far-right violence—particularly planned violence rather than spontaneous hate crimes—are older and more established than typical terrorists and violent criminals. They often hold jobs, are married, and have children. Those who attend church or belong to community groups are more likely to hold violent, conspiratorial beliefs. These are not isolated “lone wolves”; they are part of a broad community that echoes their ideas.
Two subgroups appear most prone to violence. The January 2021 American Perspectives Survey found that white Christian evangelical Republicans were outsized supporters of both political violence and the Q-Anon conspiracy, which claims that Democratic politicians and Hollywood elites are pedophiles who (aided by mask mandates that hinder identification) traffic children and harvest their blood; separate polls by evangelical political scientists found that in October 2020 approximately 47 percent of white evangelical Christians believed in the tenets of Q-Anon, as did 59 percent of Republicans. Many evangelical pastors are working to turn their flocks away from this heresy. The details appear outlandish, but stripped to its core, the broad appeal becomes clearer: Democrats and cultural elites are often portrayed as Satanic forces arrayed against Christianity and seeking to harm Christian children."
Yes and I'd say the same thing as this piece. While it's true that a small faction of Q'anon folks are like this, the implication now is that it should be applied to the Right overall and especially the populist Right. A group on the Left bombed the Capitol in the 1980s. However, the violence on the Left right now is new. I'll give you that. But I think you are going to be surprised by what you see in the coming years. Or I guess we could just start throwing Trump supporters in detainment camps. Would that stop the panic happening in this country driving extreme polarization? Why didn't they protect the Capitol on Jan 6 if they were so worried about "Right Wing Extremists" anyway? Anyone have an answer to that?
And also, "you know this world"? From what - listening to podcasts and watching pundits on television?
The things pointed out in the article are things happening in the *real world*. Real violent threats being made against election workers, government officials, and their families. Real right wing militias infiltrating governments, political hierarchies, and police departments. Acts of violence committed by white supremacists and other people who subscribe to extreme right-wing ideologies. That's the world which is being discussed here.
Listening to Ben Shapiro rage about cancel culture, or Tucker Carlson shoveling anti-immigrant, pro-Russia, anti-vaccine disinformation, or Steve Bannon with his hair-on-fire lunacy from the comfort of his mansion isn't going to teach you anything real about this "world".
Um, no they aren't. They're things happening inside the heads of people who write stories. These are loose associations made, assumptions. These are not proof of violence. This kind of hysteria is destroying the Left. There are always going to be extremist groups but we're in dangerous territory when it starts with dehumanization on social media, then it spreads to kicking people off of social media, dropping them from banks and various fundraising platforms and then finally, calling them and treating them like terrorist threats. That, to me, is far more frightening of a turn for our government. It is driven by panic and fear. Nothing in her piece proves any violent intent that isn't matched and surpassed by what has happened on the left.
Why is your first reaction to be a jerk. I'm genuinely curious. Is it really that hard to humanize other people and think, I'm talking to an actual human being here. Why is that so hard now. I don't get it.
Seriously Sasha, what's wrong with you? You listen to Steve Bannon every day? No wonder your perspective is so warped.
Steve Bannon was the originator of particularly colorful term for a well known political strategy. In the past it's been called the "firehose of falsehoods". Bannon refers to it as "flood the zone with shit".
That's what the guy does. It's why he constantly has washed-up cranks and corrupt politicians on his show. Bannon himself was a key contributor to the effort to overturn the election. He's a man who has admitted that he seeks to burn down the existing establishment. He sees himself as some sort of agent of chaos from which a new order is to arise. At least - that's his schtick.
Seriously, you should read Jennifer Senior's recent piece about him. It's illuminating.
What's wrong with you ...I mean, that right there is such a wonderful explanation of who YOU are, not who I am. I am someone who is curious to be as informed as I can possibly be about the people I'm being told to hate and dehumanize. Unlike YOU I don't only trust one side of the story anymore. I used to. I lived in that bubble. You assume that my saying these things means I listen to them and believe what they say or see them as sources of information. I guess giving you the benefit of the doubt is MY mistake. I should assume you are someone who casually and easily dehumanizes people by what they read. Of course, that IS what so many on the Left now are. But unlike you I have a balanced view of what each side is saying -- from their own perspectives. That gives me a better vantage point to figure out, in these partisan times, what is true and what isn't. I listen to Steve Bannon for a lot of reasons but YOU should listen to him because that is the central hub of the America First movement, which you probably think is racist. If you listened to his show you would discover that it is not about race but about class. Unlike YOU I care about people who are not in the upper classes of this country. I am DISGUSTED on a daily basis at the intellectual superiority complex by my former side. How did you all expect people would respond? Aren't even a little bit curious as how this movement keeps growing? Why they are mobilized? What actually drives them? No, it's so much easier to fall into the "us vs. them" mentality, positioning yourself as one of the special people. It's sad. How the mighty have fallen.
Sasha, I think you and I are having two different conversations here.
Do I think the "America First" movement is racist? How I wish we were still in a place where that was the salient issue. I don't even care right now whether or not it's "racist" (a term largely stripped of its relevance and meaning, anyway). The problem is that it's a con.
Tell me, exactly what do you expect to learn about working class grievances from a man who pretends to represent the working class but is actually a well-heeled upper-class Ivy League elitist? I guarantee you I have far more experience with working class people than Steve Bannon does. I don't come from wealth. I grew up in the suburbs on the outskirts of Baltimore. We were a one-income family of three kids. I graduated from a state university. No matter how seldom he shaves or how much he dresses like someone's out-of-work dad crashing on their couch, there is nothing Steve Bannon could tell me about people who are not "in the upper classes" of America.
Unless, perhaps, if I wanted know how to scam those people out of millions of dollars with some phony "build the wall" scheme - for which Bannon was indicted two years ago. You might remember him being arrested from the deck of his Chinese billionaire friend Guo Wengui's yacht. It seems like forever ago because, while his co-conspirators have already copped to a plea deal, he was magnanimously pardoned a few months later by the very same man whose supporters he conned.
You talk about having a "balanced view" of "both perspectives". You aren't getting a "balanced view" of anything if on one side you've got legitimate journalists who have something of a progressive bias in their ethical viewpoints, and on the other side you've got con-men and propagandists.
After Trump got elected, the educated class of people on the left that you so casually disdain did plenty of soul searching. We wanted to understand what it was that we didn't see that made us believe that a President Trump just wasn't possible. There has been no lack for understanding about the cultural and economic forces that brought Trump to power.
We continue to debate over it.
Some of us are completely unsympathetic. Some of us largely disagree but can still understand, even empathize. Some of us even agree with a lot of what animates certain Trump supporters. This site was founded specifically with the intent for generally left-leaning people to hash out these issues.
But the one thing we all still agree upon is that there is a world of difference between understanding Trump's supporters and condoning Trump - and his corrupt band of acolytes and cronies. And this is the way it typically works with populist movements. They're driven by men who want power and are willing to exploit social tensions and anxieties to gain it. The legitimate reformers do so through the ballot box. The cons and crooks go around the ballot box, as Trump attempted in 2020 and was prepared to do in 2016. Bannon, having been kicked to the curb years earlier, played an active part in coordinating the 2020 scam, shortly after being pardoned by Trump.
The political impulses behind "America First" are easy to understand. As for the actual movement itself, it's a barely coherent mishmash of ethno-nationalists, theocrats, isolationists, and aristocrats - all thoroughly elitist - cobbled together in the wake of Trump's populist victory in hopes of Trojan-horsing their long-running ambitions for re-making American society. You can learn nothing about the grievances of the common man by listening to the people exploiting those grievances - except how to become one of the exploited.
My favorite part of a conversation with someone on the Left is when they drag out the personal insults. SPEAKS VOLUMES. I used to be among the crowd you're in with. I know the game pretty well by now. I have discovered far more dehumanization, cruelty and pettiness coming from my former side. I left the Democratic Party in 2020 - and nothing I've seen so far makes me want to have anything to do with them, up to and including THIS comment from you.
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.
It doesn't. It acknowledged that, for example "a survey by scholars Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe found 13 percent of Democratic respondents justified killing Republicans. It's just that the overwhelming majority of violence and violent threats are coming from the right. The right has most of the guns. They command most of the militias. And the political party who represents them are still in thrall to a would-be (and still-might-be) autocrat who attempted to overthrow our Constitutional order, with the support of right-wing militias.
A solitary throwaway that was completely ignored. The way one gets to the belief that the violence is all, or nearly all, coming from one side (whichever you choose) is through willfully overlooking the many counter-examples. January 6th was bad. The riots were bad. Charlottesville was bad. Firebombing crisis pregnancy centers is bad. The exact nature of each violent eruption may be different, but it's all bad. Each side wants to pee on us, then tell us it's raining and that any pee came from the other guys. But the truth is it was all piss the whole time.
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 just happen to see a class called: “Victimhood as Performative Art” - think that would work?
There was also one taught by this author called: “How Irrelevant Survey Data can be re-purpose to bolster a pre-determined narrative.” It said no analytical skills needed. That one also looked kinda interesting…
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.
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.
Thomas, I am stunned by this comment. Have you been paying attention to anything that's been going on lately?
Firstly, the "general public" *has* been convinced of this, and if you think otherwise, it's because you are the one living in a bubble. Recent polls indicate that most Americans now believe that Trump *committed a crime*. And there's good reason for that.
The January 6th committee has produced a *mountain of evidence* that has demonstrated that Trump, in fact, did helm a wide ranging effort to overturn the 2020 election. He spent most of November and December ignoring advisers who made it clear to him that he had lost the election, instead spreading baseless lies, filing frivolous lawsuits, pressuring state legislators and election workers, and inviting every single crank who would tell him what he wanted to hear into the White House.
He came within a hair's breadth of replacing his acting AG with a toadie who promised to immediately send a false memo to swing state governments claiming that they believed there were irregularities and needed to be investigated - thus preventing the verification of electoral votes. The only thing that stopped this was the threat of a mass resignation from the Justice Department. He even toyed with the idea of declaring martial law in order to seize voting machines, for God's sake.
January 6th was Trump's last resort when all of these other brazen efforts failed. In a plot cooked up by John Eastman, he did everything he could to pressure Mike Pence to refuse to "certify" the Electoral Votes - something beyond the scope of the Vice President's power. When Pence refused, Trump organized a rally intended to pressure Pence into doing his bidding.
Trump may not have been able to ensure that the rally would become violent, even though he had every reason to hope it would. But that's irrelevant. Trump organized this rally to provide as much chaos around what should have been a mere ceremonial procedure, in an attempt to overturn our constitutional order. It may have worked out better than he could have imagined, but he was quite pleased. He did nothing about it for hours, despite being pressured by everyone around him, people calling him from inside the Capitol building, and even people from right-wing media. Mike Pence had to call in the National Guard himself.
The January 6th committee may not be the politically impartial effort people would want it to be. You have Republicans to thank for that. Mitch McConnell killed the independent, bipartisan committee the Democrats easily passed through the Senate. Kevin McCarthy took his ball and went home when Pelosi told him to replace two of his five nominees - one who was himself *a potential target of the committee*, and one who'd made it clear he intended to divert the committee from its intended purpose.
But none of this matters when virtually every single person that has been featured in this committee has been a Republican. Many from Trump's inner circle. His loyal AG, Bill Barr. His campaign manager. White House lawyers and staffers, including his chief counsel. Republican lawmakers and election officials. Even a couple militia members. These are not anti-Trump partisans. These were almost all people who voted for Trump and wanted him to win.
You can say that Jan 6th wasn't an "insurrection" - that it was only a riot. But you're just playing with the definitions of words. It was a riot organized and instigated by the President, in a last ditch effort to corruptly remain in power. The "insurrection" happened over a period of two months - and the Republican party has spent the time since preparing for the next one. This was a blatant act of sedition against our democracy, with most of a major political party complicit. Anyone who can't accept that after everything we know to be true now simply doesn't want to know the truth - if the truth isn't what they want it to be.
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.
Can you cite your sources for such an assertion as the author has for her points?
There isn't a single thing in her story that is accurate, or I should say any kind of proof violence or violent threats. It is all hysteria based on media untruths about a world they know nothing about. I actually do follow this stuff closely and have for at least two years. I listen to Steve Bannon's podcast almost every day. I watch Tucker Carlson. I listen to Ben Shapiro. I know this world. Her claims that an ad about guns is "violent" threats. Like AOC sees heckling as "violent" threats. The Democrats, for four years, denied the election results of 2016. And though there wasn't a violent riot when Trump was sworn in there were worldwide violent protests when he took office and for the next four years. Many of the acts of violence against Trump supporters go unnoticed by the media.
Here are a few examples:
1) https://youtu.be/i7VG919ttTA
2) https://youtu.be/uWIMt9JxugQ
The media rarely reports anything that doesn't demonize the right, but this story from 2020 stuck with me:
https://youtu.be/mfMbRwV1uoU
There was a shooting of members of congress at a baseball game by a Bernie Sanders supporter. There was a death threat against Justice Kavanaugh, and ongoing intimidation and threats by the Left against SCOTUS.
Do you really think once the GOP takes power, and it will, that you aren't going to see violent riots and attacks by the left?
This story is hyperbole and fear mongering not that different from what you see on MSNBC.
I'll research your links. The hyperbole of your tone though starting with "there isn't a single thing in her story that is accurate" doesn't rhetorically buttress your case that you are an impartial arbiter of facts. Sources matter. Tucker Carlson, for example, is not a source I would cite as impartial https://www.politifact.com/personalities/tucker-carlson/ you certainly though get a point of view, but the leveraging of sources matters, and if that source frequently lies, it's discredited, as are any statements from the former president Trump. The violent riots/protests you cite were skirmishes between partisan mobs. This sadly happens frequently across the political spectrum. There is only one party and president that encouraged a mob to march on the capital to decertify the election results, et al. I would suggest you also add to your viewing diet all the evidence being displayed and marshaled by the January 6th committee, mostly from Republican witnesses and members of the Trump administration, to understand how Trump became a unique threat to our democracy itself. Otherwise, you perhaps are missing the forest through the trees. For example, perhaps begin here, on NPR, the service partially paid for by your US tax dollars and a highly reputable source https://www.npr.org/2022/06/29/1108649726/what-weve-learned-from-a-month-of-january-6th-committee-hearings
You are actually telling me that you need to give me a politifact link to tell me Tucker Carlson is not a reliable source? What I'm telling you is that unlike most of the people that write for this site I do the work of looking at both sides -- but more importantly, looking truthfully and critically at imaginary monsters like Carlson. The media gets it wrong. And thus, we have a culture of fear and hysteria -- people hiding in the bunker. That isn't going to solve anything. And no, these were not "skirmishes" between partisan mobs. Absolutely not what those were. The media covered them that way but these were violent attacks against Trump supporters. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Granted, it's hard to find them because Google and YouTube prioritize their desired narrative, but they are there. The Left is the side that has always favored violence when it comes to political activism.
Yes there have been Timothy McVeigh's and there was Jan 6 but the left bombed the Capitol twice, for instance. You just wait. Watch what happens when the right takes power.
I think we can both agree that violence is historically endemic to American politics. For far right violence, I could cite more than just McVeigh's bombing. For example the Charlottesville murder? The entire system of segregation under the Jim Crow South was state sanctioned violence, and of course the extra-judicial vigilante violence of lynchings and the Klan, which was a reign of terror from Reconstruction through the 1970s. The nation has also been divided in many ways beyond our simplistic left/right binary historically. And yes, I know about that bombings of the capitol in 1983, and total condemn. Violence in general delegitimizes any political cause, and is perceived on my part as an act of desperation and hyperpartisanship and fanaticism. So, perhaps what we could coalesce around a center that condemns violence? Freedom of assembly shouldn't mean freedom to riot or destroy private or public property. I'm fine with non-violent civil disobedience, especially by principled actors who are willing to "pay the price" to reveal an injustice in the system. That has been a tried and true method for those who feel backed into the corner with no political redress. Work stoppages, strikes, etc., are also on the table. Would you consider these violence? One thing we can probably both expect is violence in America. With a country hyper-armed and angry, violence will be with us surely until the end of my lifetime. And I'm not looking forward to that. And I'm trying my best to make sure that the right doesn't "take power." They'll have to win it through our electoral system.
The idea that the "Left is the side that has always favored violence when it comes to political activism" hasn't been true since the 1970's.
This author isn't fear-mongering. She's studied this extensively. Here's an excerpt from an article she wrote last year on the subject (followed by the full link):
"Political violence has a long history in the United States. Since the late 1960s, it was carried out by intensely ideological groups that pulled adherents out of the mainstream into clandestine cells, such as the anti-imperialist Weather Underground Organization or the anti-abortion Operation Rescue. In the late 1960s and 1970s, these violent fringes were mostly on the far left. They committed extensive violence, largely against property (with notable exceptions), in the name of social, environmental, and animal-rights causes. Starting in the late 1970s, political violence shifted rightward with the rise of white supremacist, anti-abortion, and militia groups. The number of violent events declined, but targets shifted from property to people—minorities, abortion providers, and federal agents.
What is occurring today does not resemble this recent past. Although incidents from the left are on the rise, political violence still comes overwhelmingly from the right, whether one looks at the Global Terrorism Database, FBI statistics, or other government or independent counts. Yet people committing far-right violence—particularly planned violence rather than spontaneous hate crimes—are older and more established than typical terrorists and violent criminals. They often hold jobs, are married, and have children. Those who attend church or belong to community groups are more likely to hold violent, conspiratorial beliefs. These are not isolated “lone wolves”; they are part of a broad community that echoes their ideas.
Two subgroups appear most prone to violence. The January 2021 American Perspectives Survey found that white Christian evangelical Republicans were outsized supporters of both political violence and the Q-Anon conspiracy, which claims that Democratic politicians and Hollywood elites are pedophiles who (aided by mask mandates that hinder identification) traffic children and harvest their blood; separate polls by evangelical political scientists found that in October 2020 approximately 47 percent of white evangelical Christians believed in the tenets of Q-Anon, as did 59 percent of Republicans. Many evangelical pastors are working to turn their flocks away from this heresy. The details appear outlandish, but stripped to its core, the broad appeal becomes clearer: Democrats and cultural elites are often portrayed as Satanic forces arrayed against Christianity and seeking to harm Christian children."
Full article:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-rise-of-political-violence-in-the-united-states/&ved=2ahUKEwi-46vFvfz4AhXBlIkEHXLlAl4Qt_gCKAB6BAhHEAM&usg=AOvVaw1IlxEYY7aDLKwaFi4NSxyf
Yes and I'd say the same thing as this piece. While it's true that a small faction of Q'anon folks are like this, the implication now is that it should be applied to the Right overall and especially the populist Right. A group on the Left bombed the Capitol in the 1980s. However, the violence on the Left right now is new. I'll give you that. But I think you are going to be surprised by what you see in the coming years. Or I guess we could just start throwing Trump supporters in detainment camps. Would that stop the panic happening in this country driving extreme polarization? Why didn't they protect the Capitol on Jan 6 if they were so worried about "Right Wing Extremists" anyway? Anyone have an answer to that?
And also, "you know this world"? From what - listening to podcasts and watching pundits on television?
The things pointed out in the article are things happening in the *real world*. Real violent threats being made against election workers, government officials, and their families. Real right wing militias infiltrating governments, political hierarchies, and police departments. Acts of violence committed by white supremacists and other people who subscribe to extreme right-wing ideologies. That's the world which is being discussed here.
Listening to Ben Shapiro rage about cancel culture, or Tucker Carlson shoveling anti-immigrant, pro-Russia, anti-vaccine disinformation, or Steve Bannon with his hair-on-fire lunacy from the comfort of his mansion isn't going to teach you anything real about this "world".
Um, no they aren't. They're things happening inside the heads of people who write stories. These are loose associations made, assumptions. These are not proof of violence. This kind of hysteria is destroying the Left. There are always going to be extremist groups but we're in dangerous territory when it starts with dehumanization on social media, then it spreads to kicking people off of social media, dropping them from banks and various fundraising platforms and then finally, calling them and treating them like terrorist threats. That, to me, is far more frightening of a turn for our government. It is driven by panic and fear. Nothing in her piece proves any violent intent that isn't matched and surpassed by what has happened on the left.
Why is your first reaction to be a jerk. I'm genuinely curious. Is it really that hard to humanize other people and think, I'm talking to an actual human being here. Why is that so hard now. I don't get it.
Seriously Sasha, what's wrong with you? You listen to Steve Bannon every day? No wonder your perspective is so warped.
Steve Bannon was the originator of particularly colorful term for a well known political strategy. In the past it's been called the "firehose of falsehoods". Bannon refers to it as "flood the zone with shit".
That's what the guy does. It's why he constantly has washed-up cranks and corrupt politicians on his show. Bannon himself was a key contributor to the effort to overturn the election. He's a man who has admitted that he seeks to burn down the existing establishment. He sees himself as some sort of agent of chaos from which a new order is to arise. At least - that's his schtick.
Seriously, you should read Jennifer Senior's recent piece about him. It's illuminating.
What's wrong with you ...I mean, that right there is such a wonderful explanation of who YOU are, not who I am. I am someone who is curious to be as informed as I can possibly be about the people I'm being told to hate and dehumanize. Unlike YOU I don't only trust one side of the story anymore. I used to. I lived in that bubble. You assume that my saying these things means I listen to them and believe what they say or see them as sources of information. I guess giving you the benefit of the doubt is MY mistake. I should assume you are someone who casually and easily dehumanizes people by what they read. Of course, that IS what so many on the Left now are. But unlike you I have a balanced view of what each side is saying -- from their own perspectives. That gives me a better vantage point to figure out, in these partisan times, what is true and what isn't. I listen to Steve Bannon for a lot of reasons but YOU should listen to him because that is the central hub of the America First movement, which you probably think is racist. If you listened to his show you would discover that it is not about race but about class. Unlike YOU I care about people who are not in the upper classes of this country. I am DISGUSTED on a daily basis at the intellectual superiority complex by my former side. How did you all expect people would respond? Aren't even a little bit curious as how this movement keeps growing? Why they are mobilized? What actually drives them? No, it's so much easier to fall into the "us vs. them" mentality, positioning yourself as one of the special people. It's sad. How the mighty have fallen.
Sasha, I think you and I are having two different conversations here.
Do I think the "America First" movement is racist? How I wish we were still in a place where that was the salient issue. I don't even care right now whether or not it's "racist" (a term largely stripped of its relevance and meaning, anyway). The problem is that it's a con.
Tell me, exactly what do you expect to learn about working class grievances from a man who pretends to represent the working class but is actually a well-heeled upper-class Ivy League elitist? I guarantee you I have far more experience with working class people than Steve Bannon does. I don't come from wealth. I grew up in the suburbs on the outskirts of Baltimore. We were a one-income family of three kids. I graduated from a state university. No matter how seldom he shaves or how much he dresses like someone's out-of-work dad crashing on their couch, there is nothing Steve Bannon could tell me about people who are not "in the upper classes" of America.
Unless, perhaps, if I wanted know how to scam those people out of millions of dollars with some phony "build the wall" scheme - for which Bannon was indicted two years ago. You might remember him being arrested from the deck of his Chinese billionaire friend Guo Wengui's yacht. It seems like forever ago because, while his co-conspirators have already copped to a plea deal, he was magnanimously pardoned a few months later by the very same man whose supporters he conned.
You talk about having a "balanced view" of "both perspectives". You aren't getting a "balanced view" of anything if on one side you've got legitimate journalists who have something of a progressive bias in their ethical viewpoints, and on the other side you've got con-men and propagandists.
After Trump got elected, the educated class of people on the left that you so casually disdain did plenty of soul searching. We wanted to understand what it was that we didn't see that made us believe that a President Trump just wasn't possible. There has been no lack for understanding about the cultural and economic forces that brought Trump to power.
We continue to debate over it.
Some of us are completely unsympathetic. Some of us largely disagree but can still understand, even empathize. Some of us even agree with a lot of what animates certain Trump supporters. This site was founded specifically with the intent for generally left-leaning people to hash out these issues.
But the one thing we all still agree upon is that there is a world of difference between understanding Trump's supporters and condoning Trump - and his corrupt band of acolytes and cronies. And this is the way it typically works with populist movements. They're driven by men who want power and are willing to exploit social tensions and anxieties to gain it. The legitimate reformers do so through the ballot box. The cons and crooks go around the ballot box, as Trump attempted in 2020 and was prepared to do in 2016. Bannon, having been kicked to the curb years earlier, played an active part in coordinating the 2020 scam, shortly after being pardoned by Trump.
The political impulses behind "America First" are easy to understand. As for the actual movement itself, it's a barely coherent mishmash of ethno-nationalists, theocrats, isolationists, and aristocrats - all thoroughly elitist - cobbled together in the wake of Trump's populist victory in hopes of Trojan-horsing their long-running ambitions for re-making American society. You can learn nothing about the grievances of the common man by listening to the people exploiting those grievances - except how to become one of the exploited.
My favorite part of a conversation with someone on the Left is when they drag out the personal insults. SPEAKS VOLUMES. I used to be among the crowd you're in with. I know the game pretty well by now. I have discovered far more dehumanization, cruelty and pettiness coming from my former side. I left the Democratic Party in 2020 - and nothing I've seen so far makes me want to have anything to do with them, up to and including THIS comment from you.
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.
It doesn't. It acknowledged that, for example "a survey by scholars Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe found 13 percent of Democratic respondents justified killing Republicans. It's just that the overwhelming majority of violence and violent threats are coming from the right. The right has most of the guns. They command most of the militias. And the political party who represents them are still in thrall to a would-be (and still-might-be) autocrat who attempted to overthrow our Constitutional order, with the support of right-wing militias.
A solitary throwaway that was completely ignored. The way one gets to the belief that the violence is all, or nearly all, coming from one side (whichever you choose) is through willfully overlooking the many counter-examples. January 6th was bad. The riots were bad. Charlottesville was bad. Firebombing crisis pregnancy centers is bad. The exact nature of each violent eruption may be different, but it's all bad. Each side wants to pee on us, then tell us it's raining and that any pee came from the other guys. But the truth is it was all piss the whole time.
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.)
Genius. Thank you.
Smoking more weed would certainly quell our violent natures. Unfortunately, nothing else would be accomplished.
Do you think they’d mind given our free joints as an incentive for using their electric charging station?
Maybe we can all be hooked up to a giant bong pipe while we wait to “tank up”?
Just a thought…
Doobie on bro!
Hummmm..
I’ll have to think about that…
You have to learn how to speak the language of the "morally superior."
What great idea! Thanks!
I just happen to see a class called: “Victimhood as Performative Art” - think that would work?
There was also one taught by this author called: “How Irrelevant Survey Data can be re-purpose to bolster a pre-determined narrative.” It said no analytical skills needed. That one also looked kinda interesting…
Doobie on!
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.