#Whitmer plot

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jennifer Bendery at HuffPost:

In a Sunday night Oval Office address to the nation, President Joe Biden called on Americans to come together and “lower the temperature in our politics,” a day after a man shot at former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. “While we may disagree, we are not enemies,” Biden said in his televised address. “We’re neighbors. We’re friends, co-workers, citizens. Most importantly, we’re fellow Americans. We must stand together.”

The president ticked off cases of politically motivated violence in recent years, including members of Congress being the targets of an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; the attack on the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.); and the kidnapping plot in 2020 against Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. And of course, he said, the attempted assassination of Trump. “There’s no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence ever. Period. No exceptions,” he said. “We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.” The president said Saturday’s shooting at Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania “calls on all of us to take a step back” and think about “how we go forward from here.” Biden noted that he called Trump on Saturday night and is “grateful” he is doing well. He also offered his condolences to the family of Corey Comperatore, who was shot and killed at the rally while sheltering his family from the bullets.

Sunday night’s Oval Office from President Joe Biden laid home what America is about.

Biden’s line is golden for this time in need: “While we may disagree, we are not enemies. We’re neighbors. We’re friends, co-workers, citizens. Most importantly, we’re fellow Americans. We must stand together.”

Another solid Biden quote: “There’s no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence ever. Period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”

See Also:

The Guardian: Biden urges US to reject ‘extremism and fury’ after Trump assassination attempt

Daily Kos: Watch: Biden gives Oval Office address on attempted assassination of Trump

The Dean's Report: Dear corporate media: Biden has denounced violence while Trump has incited and celebrated it

[triviareads]

In other news there are insurrection themed romances on NetGalley now.

[batboyblog]

Now we need to get even more people out to vote for biden because the most recent thing that happened to trump is absolutely going to radicalize right-wingers and some people who were on the fence, regardless of what the outcome is. I'm so terrified.

sadly we live in age of political violence, just off the top of my head someone shooting up the Congressional Republican baseball team and nearly killing Steve Scalise in 2017, the guy who mailed pipe bombs to Obama, Biden, Hillary Clinton and George Soros in 2018, the plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, the guy who nearly beat Paul Pelosi to death with a hammer when he tried to kidnap Nancy Pelosi in 2022, and the attempt to stab Republican Congressman and candidate for governor Lee Zeldin on stage at a rally also in 2022.

So sadly our political system has a cancer of violence, we don't know why right now this person took a shot at Trump, if it was political or someone wanted to be famous or he thought Trump was an alien we do not know why.

whatever the reason I don't think it'll change the race very much, I do worry what Trump will say, Republican Congressmen have already said wild and insane things about this being Biden's orders, so thats unlikely to make our problem of political violence better.

oh and it was, yet again, an AR-15 style weapon, so you know, I guess thoughts and prayers?

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 14, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 15, 2024

Shortly after 6:00 yesterday evening at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a shooter on the roof of a building about 400 feet from the stage appears to have shot eight bullets at the former president and into the crowd. Trump appeared to flinch and reach for his right ear as Secret Service agents crouched over the former president. When the agents got word the shooter was “down,” they lifted Trump to move him out. He asked to get his shoes and then to put them on.

With that apparently accomplished, Trump stood up with blood on his face, exposed to the crowd, and told the agents to wait. He raised his fist in the air in front of an American flag in what instantly became an iconic image. He appeared to yell, “Fight, fight, fight!” to the crowd before being ushered offstage.

Pennsylvania firefighter Corey Comperatore, 50, was killed. David Dutch, 57, was injured and is hospitalized in stable condition. James Copenhaver, 74, was also injured and is in stable condition. 

The FBI has identified the shooter as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by a Secret Service agent. Crooks used an AR-type semiautomatic rifle that apparently belonged to his father. Crooks was wearing a gray Demolition Ranch tee shirt advertising a YouTube channel for gun enthusiasts and people interested in explosive devices. The channel has more than 11 million followers. Crooks appears to have been a registered Republican.   

Trump said he had been “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear.” So far, no doctors have briefed the public. 

In the confusion immediately after the shooting, MAGA Republicans blamed the Democrats for the violence. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who is in the running to be Trump’s vice presidential pick, posted on social media. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Representative Mike Collins of Georgia called for a Republican district attorney to “immediately file charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination.” Indeed, he said, “Joe Biden sent the orders.”  

Edward Luce of the Financial Times noted, “Almost any criticism of Trump is already being spun by Maga as an incitement to assassinate him. This is an Orwellian attempt to silence what remains of the effort to stop him from regaining power.” Indeed, MAGA Republicans appear to be trying to stop discussion of their extremist plans— which are enormously unpopular— by claiming that such a discussion is polarizing. 

The idea that Democratic opposition to authoritarian plans like those outlined in Project 2025 caused violence might convince MAGA Republicans, but it will likely be a hard sell for Americans who remember things like: 

•Trump’s own suggestion in 2016 that “Second Amendment people” could solve the problem of Hillary Clinton picking judges; or his 2020 attacks on Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, who became the target of a kidnapping plot; or election workers bombarded with death threats as Trump lied that the 2020 election was stolen;

•the October 2022 tweet by Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. mocking then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul after a home intruder hit him in the head with a hammer; or Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s 2022 campaign video in which she promised to “blow away the Democrats’ socialist agenda” as she took aim with a rifle; 

•in 2023, House Republicans wearing AR-15 lapel pins on the floor of Congress; Representative Don Bacon (R-NE) saying his wife slept with a loaded gun after he voted against Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) for House speaker; or Republican representatives sending Christmas cards showing the whole family toting guns;

•in 2024, the Kansas Republican Party’s March fundraiser where attendees could donate to kick and punch an effigy of President Biden; or Don Jr.’s reposting an image of Biden bound and gagged in the back of a pickup truck;

•or Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson of North Carolina, who is running for the governorship and who is scheduled to speak at the Republican National Convention starting tomorrow, saying just two weeks ago: “Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it.”

Indeed, in March 2024, in Vance’s home state, Trump said: if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole…country,” and a 2022 campaign ad by Representative Collins himself showed him shooting a rifle at Nancy Pelosi’s “agenda” and at a cardboard rhinoceros he says is a “RINO,” a Republican in Name Only. 

Republicans under Trump have increasingly advocated violence as a way to gain power because they know their unpopular positions cannot lead their candidates to victory in free and fair elections. In this moment, when there is still little evidence about yesterday’s tragedy, it appears they are projecting their own behavior onto Biden and the Democrats, blaming them for advocating violence when in fact, Biden and the Democrats have tried hard to enact commonsense gun safety laws and have consistently condemned the violent language and normalizing of political violence by Republicans. 

Republicans’ embrace of violence is a hallmark of authoritarian leaders; by definition it  undermines democracy. In Nashville, Tennessee, today, neo-Nazis shouting “Hitler was right!” were involved in fights in the streets. Ending that resort to violence, which never advances society and always injures it, is key to restoring the guardrails of democracy.

Biden spoke to the nation tonight, warning that Americans need to “lower the temperature in our politics and to remember, while we may disagree, we are not enemies. We’re neighbors. We’re friends, coworkers, citizens. And, most importantly, we are fellow Americans. And we must stand together.” He condemned yesterday’s violence, noting that “[a] former president was shot” and “an American citizen killed while simply exercising his freedom to support the candidate of his choosing…. There is no place in America for this kind of violence or for any violence ever. Period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.” 

The framers of the Constitution, he said, “created a democracy that gave reason and balance a chance to prevail over brute force. That’s the America we must be, an American democracy where arguments are made in good faith, an American democracy where the rule of law is respected, an American democracy where decency, dignity, fair play aren’t just quaint notions, but living, breathing realities.”

Biden rejected the idea that criticizing the Republicans’ extremism was polarizing. While they can “criticize my record and offer their own vision for this country,” he said, “I’ll continue to speak out strongly for our democracy, stand up for our Constitution and the rule of law, to call for action at the ballot box, no violence on our streets. That’s how democracy should work.” 

Biden paused all campaign ads and events after the shooting and told staffers to “refrain from issuing any comments on social media or in public.” Trump is fundraising off the attempt on his life, but he spent the day golfing rather than campaigning. 

The Secret Service has launched an investigation of how a shooter could get so close to Trump; Biden has ordered an independent investigation as well. Biden said he has also directed the Secret Service to review the security measures in place for the Republican National Convention, which starts tomorrow in Milwaukee.

Within hours of the shooting, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced that “THE HOUSE WILL CONDUCT A FULL INVESTIGATION OF THE TRAGIC EVENTS TODAY,” saying, “The American people deserve to know the truth.” Although the FBI investigation has barely gotten underway and Congress has no law enforcement power, Johnson promised to have officials from the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI “appear for a hearing before our committees ASAP.” 

Observers noted that it sounded like MAGA plans to have yet another investigation designed to spread a narrative, in this case, that the “Deep State” was involved in the shooting. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[basedhighsenberg]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

FBI EAT MY ASS 1000 YEARS

[mariacallous]

On Saturday, former U.S. President Donald Trump became the latest major political figure worldwide to face an assassination attempt, in an incident that experts say may reflect a broader global pattern of increasing threats and violence against politicians.

In recent years, for example, both Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico and former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan have survived being shot (Fico in May this year and Khan in November 2022), while then-Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner narrowly escaped a shooting attempt in 2022 when the gunman’s pistol jammed. South Korean opposition leader Lee Jae-myung was stabbed in January, and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed in 2018. And assassinations claimed the lives of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (in 2022) and British politicians Jo Cox (in 2016) and David Amess (in 2021). 

“We seem to be seeing that assassinations are on the rise now,” said Jacob Ware, a terrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and the co-author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, although he noted that he was drawing on anecdotal evidence. 

“Politicians and political figures are finding themselves in the crosshairs, and the people are determining that the ballot box and elections are no longer the best way to exercise political grievances,” Ware said. 

The United States is no stranger to high-profile assassinations and attempts, both on the lives of sitting U.S. presidents and presidential candidates. Four former U.S. presidents—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy—were killed during their presidential terms. A handful more survived failed attempts, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, the latter of whom had a hand grenade thrown at him while in Tbilisi, Georgia. In 1968, U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was assassinated. 

In recent years, the number of threats issued against U.S. public officials has grown, according to a 2024 study conducted by the researchers at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center. The study, which examined federal charges over the past decade, found that threats have “steadily risen” over that time period, coinciding with a surge in political polarization across the country. 

“In the last six years, the number of individuals who have been arrested at the federal level for making threats has nearly doubled from the previous four years,” the study’s authors wrote, while the number of federal prosecutions for such threats is “on pace to hit new record highs” in 2023 and 2024. 

“The mistrust and distrust of government is so great that it leads to almost the dehumanization of political figures,” said Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and the other co-author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America. “That’s also contributed to this demonization of individuals that can, in the minds of certainly a minority of Americans, incite violence.”

Two recent examples are incidents involving former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who were the targets of failed abduction and assassination plots, respectively; in the Pelosi case, though the former speaker avoided the attack, her husband was brutally assaulted with a hammer. And in 2020, the FBI announced that it had arrested more than a dozen people in connection with a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial for treason; nine people were ultimately convicted or pleaded guilty in the plot, and five were acquitted.

“It certainly feels like we’re in a different era. There’s a lack of civility that I think permeates our political discourse, and it’s frequently peppered with references to violence and extreme violence” said Colin P. Clarke, the director of research at the Soufan Group. That includes Trump himself, Clarke said, who “has been a big purveyor of this.”

That may not be a uniquely American phenomenon, either. While assassinations of high-profile leaders in the world’s most-developed nations may be relatively rare today, the outlook may be different for other government figures around the world.

One key example is Mexico, which recently reached a bleak new political milestone in holding its deadliest election season ever. During the country’s 2024 election cycle, 37 political candidates were assassinated, many of whom were vying for local office. In the country’s 2021 midterm election, 36 candidates were assassinated, according to Integralia, a security consultancy. 

Beyond the issue of assassinations, other violence against candidates was also more pervasive in Mexico this year. Integralia logged 828 nonlethal violent incidents during the 2024 election season, eclipsing the 389 attacks recorded in 2018 during the country’s previous presidential election. 

Pakistan has also experienced a rise in such threats in recent years. According to the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database, whose data only goes as far as 2020, Pakistan experienced a marked uptick in assassinations and attempts against government officials from 2012 to 2016, peaking at 36 in 2013 and 2015. 

While variations in laws and data collection make it difficult for researchers to measure whether there’s been a broad global uptick in violence, these examples indicate that they’re hardly uncommon. Now, the attempted assassination of Trump may serve as an alarm bell for other officials around the world. On Sunday, John Woodcock, a member of the U.K. House of Lords and a former government advisor on political violence, said in an interview with the Guardian that the attempted assassination is “a vivid reminder of the vulnerability of all politicians” and warned of the possibility of similar attacks in the United Kingdom. 

“We have seen the growth in the UK of US-style politics of aggressive confrontation and intimidation which is unfortunately, exactly the toxic environment that could lead to another assassination attempt on a UK politician, of which we have already tragically seen a number in recent years,” he said. 

Ware, the Council on Foreign Relations expert, said that the attempted assassination of Trump, a former U.S. president, presents an “opportunity for Americans to come together and decide: ‘Is this really the kind of country that we want to build for the next generation?’”

[alphaman99]

Vivek Ramaswamey - "If you’d have told me nearly 3 years ago when I was just a CEO that Jan. 6 was an inside job, I would’ve said that’s crazy talk. It’s not. There is now clear evidence that there was at the very least entrapment of peaceful protestors, similar to the fake Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot & countless other cases. The FBI won’t admit how many undercover officers were in the field on Jan 6, Capitol police on one hand fired rubber bullets & explosives into a peaceful crowd who they then willingly later allowed to enter the Capitol. That doesn’t add up & the actual evidence turns the prior narrative upside down: if the deep state is willing to manufacture an “insurrection” to take down its political opponents, they can do anything. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it."

[bighermie]

HERE WE GO AGAIN: The Same FBI That Plotted Whitmer Kidnapping Psyop Charges Man for Allegedly Plotting a Mass Shooting With Undercover Informants to "Incite a Race War" Before Election (VIDEO) | The Gateway Pundit | by Jordan Conradson

[your-krazy-uncle-bob]

Dear Liberals, How Many Of These MSM Hoaxes Did You Fall For?

BY TYLER DURDEN

FRIDAY, NOV 04, 2022 - 09:00 PM

How many recent mainstream media hoaxes did you fall for? ... and/or still believe?

Russian collusion

Trump called neo-nazis "fine people"

Jussie Smollett

Bubba Wallace garage pull

Covington kids

Governor Whitmer kidnapping plot

Kavanaugh rape

Trump pee tape

COVID lab leak was a conspiracy theory

Border agents whipped migrants

Trump saved nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago

Steele Dossier

Russian bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan

Trump said drinking bleach would fight COVID

Muslim travel ban

Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation

Andrew Cuomo best COVID leadership

Trump built cages for migrant kids

"Austere religious scholar"

Trump overfed Koi fish in Japan

Build Back Better will pay for itself

Trump tax cuts benefited only the rich

Cloth masks prevent COVID

If you get vaccinated you won't catch COVID

SUV killed parade marchers

Trump used teargas to clear a crowd for a bible photo

"Don't Say Gay" was in a bill

Putin price hike

Ivermectin is a horse dewormer and not for humans

"Mostly peaceful" protests

Trump overpowered secret service for wheel of "The Beast"

Officer Sicknick was murdered by protesters

January 6th was an insurrection

BYU students hurled racist insults at Duke volleyball player

And don't forget "democracy is under threat..."

[virgoanmaenad]

Remember all the jokes and memes made about Whitmer’s kidnapping plot or when Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer?

Don’t let the right wing act like making uncouth jokes about Trump getting shot is any different.

[offender42085]

Post 1151

Paul Edward Bellar, Michigan inmate 735434, Federal inmate 02759-122, born 1998, incarceration intake December 2022 at age 25, earliest release date September 2029, full release September 2044

Gang Membersbip, Providing Material Support in a Terrorist Act, Use of a Weapon to Commit a Felony

In December 2023, a trio of men were sentenced to spend several years behind bars on charges stemming from a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Paul Bellar, along with Joseph Morrison (Michigan inmate 735421), Pete Musico (Michigan inmate 735428), were each sentenced to spend at least seven years in prison by Jackson County Circuit Judge Thomas Wilson in a lengthy sentencing hearing Thursday, Dec. 15.

Musico was the first man to be sentenced, with Wilson passing down a minimum prison term of 12 years.

Musico pleaded with Wilson to show him mercy before he was sentenced, claiming both he and his wife suffer from health issues that could possibly endanger them if he were to receive a harsh sentence.

“The time in my life that this all took place in, there was a lot of emotions going on throughout the entire country, on both political sides,” Musico said. “I had a lapse in judgement; I’ve been a good citizen, I’ve been a family man -- I’ve taken care of my family for a very long time.”

Wilson did not show sympathy in sentencing Musico, saying previous testimony depicting the defendant berating and threatening to kill a Michigan State Police trooper he encountered at a protest provided an insightful look into his thought process and character.

A woman sitting in the back of the crowded courtroom began to cry as soon as Wilson read Musico’s sentence. Musico himself cried as he was led out of the room in chains.

Morrison was sentenced second. Wilson sentenced the 28-year-old to spend at least 10 years in prison.

Speaking before the court, Morrison renounced his affiliation with the “boogaloo” -- the term used to identify a far-right, domestic terrorist movement centered on plans for a second American Civil War -- and all other similar extremist ideologies he once believed in.

“I sincerely regret ever allowing myself to have any affiliation with people that had those kind of ideas,” Morrison said. “I regret that I ever let hate, fear and anger into my heart the way I did.”

Before he was sentenced, Bellar apologized to Whitmer for his “highly inappropriate” past comments, claiming they don’t represent his true character. Bellar also addressed his family and friends that had filled the courtroom behind him, apologizing and thanking them for their support.

“I love all of you -- I’m so sorry, I wish I would have grown up faster,” Bellar said, his voice beginning to waver as he held back tears. “I’ll see you guys when this is all over.”

“You’re always welcome home,” a man in the audience said to Bellar as the defendant turned back around to face hear his sentence.

Bellar received the most lenient sentence of the three men. Wilson sentenced the 24-year-old to spend 7-20 years in prison. His sentences are to be served concurrently, while Musico and Morrison are to serve their sentences consecutively.

Bellar embraced his attorney Andrew Kirkpatrick after his sentence was delivered, with Bellar fighting back sobs as court officers began to take him away.

4f

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

I highly recommend reading this article from The Atlantic in full.

However here is its thesis in a nutshell:

“Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.” (David Frum)

+

THE GUNMAN AND THE WOULD-BE DICTATOR

Violence stalks the president who has rejoiced in violence to others.

By David Frum

“When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.

After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”

Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening harm to Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on television.

Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well. The attempted murder of Trump—and the killing of a person nearby—is a horror and an outrage. More will be learned about the man who committed this appalling act, and who was killed by the Secret Service. Whatever his mania or motive, the only important thing about him is the law-enforcement mistake that allowed him to bring a deadly weapon so close to a campaign event and gain a sight line of the presidential candidate. His name should otherwise be erased and forgotten.

It is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence “has no place” in American society. Assassinations, lynchings, riots, and pogroms have stained every page of American political history. That has remained true to the present day. In 2016, and even more in 2020, Trump supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote-counters. Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election.

Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer martyrs as their proof of truth. The Mussolini movement in Italy built imposing monumentsto its fallen comrades. The Trump movement now improves on that: The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance.

The 2024 election was already shaping up as a symbolic contest between an elderly and weakening liberalism too frail and uncertain to protect itself and an authoritarian, reactionary movement ready to burst every barrier and trash every institution. To date, Trump has led only a minority of U.S. voters, but that minority’s passion and audacity have offset what it lacks in numbers. After the shooting, Trump and his backers hope to use the iconography of a bloody ear and face, raised fist, and call to “Fight!” to summon waverers to their cause of installing Trump as an anti-constitutional ruler, exempted from ordinary law by his allies on the Supreme Court.

Other societies have backslid to authoritarianism because of some extraordinary crisis: economic depression, hyperinflation, military defeat, civil strife. In 2024, U.S. troops are nowhere at war. The American economy is booming, providing spectacular and widely shared prosperity. A brief spasm of mild post-pandemic inflation has been overcome. Indicators of social health have abruptly turned positive since Trump left office after years of deterioration during his term. Crime and fatal drug overdoses are declining in 2024; marriages and births are rising. Even the country’s problems indirectly confirm the country’s success: Migrants are crossing the border in the hundreds of thousands, because they know, even if Americans don’t, that the U.S. job market is among the hottest on Earth.

Yet despite all of this success, Americans are considering a form of self-harm that in other countries has typically followed the darkest national failures: letting the author of a failed coup d’état return to office to try again.

One reason this self-harm is nearing consummation is that American society is poorly prepared to understand and respond to radical challenges, once those challenges gain a certain mass. For nearly a century, “radical” in U.S. politics has usually meant “fringe”: Communists, Ku Kluxers, Black Panthers, Branch Davidians, Islamist jihadists. Radicals could be marginalized by the weight of the great American consensus that stretches from social democrats to business conservatives. Sometimes, a Joe McCarthy or a George Wallace would throw a scare into that mighty consensus, but in the past such challengers rarely formed stable coalitions with accepted stakeholders in society. Never gaining an enduring grip on the institutions of state, they flared up and burned out.

Trump is different. His abuses have been ratified by powerful constituencies. He has conquered and colonized one of the two major parties. He has defeated—or is on the way to defeating—every impeachment and prosecution to hold him to account for his frauds and crimes. He has assembled a mass following that is larger, more permanent, and more national in reach than any previous American demagogue. He has dominated the scene for nine years already, and he and his supporters hope they can use yesterday’s appalling event to extend the Trump era to the end of his life and beyond.

The American political and social system cannot treat such a person as an alien. It inevitably accommodates and naturalizes him. His counselors, even the thugs and felons, join the point-counterpoint dialogue at the summit of the American elite. President Joe Biden nearly wrecked his campaign because he felt obliged to meet Trump in debate. How could Biden have done otherwise? Trump is the three-time nominee of the Republican Party; it’s awkward and strange to treat him as an insurrectionist against the American state—though that’s what Trump was and is.

The despicable shooting at Trump, which also caused death and injury to others, now secures his undeserved position as a partner in the protective rituals of the democracy he despises. The appropriate expressions of dismay and condemnation from every prominent voice in American life have the additional effect of habituating Americans to Trump’s legitimacy. In the face of such an outrage, the familiar and proper practice is to stress unity, to proclaim that Americans have more things in common than that divide them. Those soothing words, true in the past, are less true now.

Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.

The Republican National Convention, which opens this week, will welcome to its stage apologists for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its aggression against U.S. allies. Trump’s own infatuation with Russia and other dictatorships has not dimmed even slightly with age or experience. Yet all of these urgent and necessary truths must now be subdued to the ritual invocation of “thoughts and prayers” for someone who never gave a thought or uttered a prayer for any of the victims of his own many incitements to bloodshed. The president who used his officeto champion the rights of dangerous people to own military-type weapons says he was grazed by a bullet from one such assault rifle.

Conventional phrases and polite hypocrisy fill a useful function in social life. We say “Thank you for your service” both to the decorated hero and to the veteran who barely escaped dishonorable discharge. It’s easier than deciphering which was which. We wish “Happy New Year!” even when we dread the months ahead.

But conventional phrases don’t go unheard. They carry meanings, meanings no less powerful for being rote and reflexive. In rightly denouncing violence, we are extending an implicit pardon to the most violent person in contemporary U.S. politics. In asserting unity, we are absolving a man who seeks power through the humiliation and subordination of disdained others.

Those conventional phrases are inscribing Trump into a place in American life that he should have forfeited beyond redemption on January 6, 2021. All decent people welcome the sparing of his life. Trump’s reckoning should be with the orderly process of law, not with the bloodshed he rejoiced in when it befell others. He and his allies will exploit a gunman’s vicious criminality as their path to exonerate past crimes and empower new ones. Those who stand against Trump and his allies must find the will and the language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all intolerable—and how the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.”

(David Frum)

[UNOFFICIAL Heather Cox Richardson Resource and Discussion Room]

[tahoedirt]

TRUNT N COVID

Four years ago this week, COVID-19 was declared a national emergency, the lockdown began, and our lives changed forever.1

And within just days of the declaration, Donald Trump was already pushing wild and dangerous conspiracy theories about the virus and its treatment. Inject yourself with bleach.2 Use high-powered UV lights.3 Eat horse deworming paste.4

And it didn't stop there.

He raged against public health policies and mask mandates, even fanning the flames of a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer over her efforts to protect the citizens of the state.5,6

In the four years since, more than 1.1 million Americans have died from COVID, millions more are struggling with the long-term effects of the disease, and Trump's anti-science conspiracies have only grown.7

[hook-line-and-anarchy]

I know it's a long article but this is a deeply insane story about the incompetence and corruption of the FBI and sting operations