I am not shocked. I am not surprised.
I am angry and I am disgusted.
I will agree with Mr. Trump on one thing: If there was an armed guard at the synagogue in Pennsylvania, the result would have been different. That’s the case regardless of what you think of our gun laws. People have a basic right to defense in cases of physical danger.
But even more than guns, what we need to protect from danger are votes.
I have looked up a few conservative sites, and one of the general themes is that even the people who know better will hold their noses and vote for Trump, they will abandon all their suspicions and rally behind Brett Kavanaugh, because they think the stakes are too high. In their assessment, if Those People in the Democratic Party take over, then Good Christians like themselves will be under physical threat.
Oh, I take it that when you’re in the political minority, the majority are a threat to you?
Did we see anything like this in the eight years that Obama was president? I will say, as racist and reactionary as a lot of Obama’s opposition was, what heartened me in retrospect was that there was never a serious assassination attempt against him. As much as emotions were escalated, there was still a basic impression that we were capable of having political opinions without coming to violence.
No more. This week, at least 12 separate pipe bombs were sent to various people in politics and the media, all of whom were targeted as enemies by Trump and his people in social media. President Obama and Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were among them. And when the suspect was found – because he left fingerprints among other evidence – law enforcement found a van whose windows were completely covered in pro-Trump stickers and similar decoration, including pictures of liberals like Michael Moore in crosshairs. As one person on social media put it, “it’s like Steve Bannon if he were a Transformer.”
Now you have this character coming into a synagogue during Sabbath – apparently during a children’s naming day ceremony – and killing 11 people. According to his tags on Gab – a social media network for people who think Twitter is too politically correct – the last thing the shooter posted was: “Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
Now, why exactly is anyone concerned with optics?
Just before the Feds caught the pipe bomb suspect, Trump tweeted, “Republicans are doing so well in early voting, and at the polls, and now this “Bomb” stuff happens and the momentum greatly slows – news not talking politics. Very unfortunate, what is going on. Republicans, go out and vote!” Prior to the bomb threats, “talking politics” meant Trump and other Republicans railing against the thousands-strong caravan of refugees from Honduras and other parts of Central America coming together to migrate north towards the US-Mexico border. In their minds, this whole thing is a giant conspiracy ginned up by various people – including George Soros, another one of the bomb targets – to flood the country with non-Americans and change our way of life. The reality is more prosaic: once enough people contacted each other on social media and realized they were all coming to the same place anyway, they decided it was easier to band together and come to the border at once than sneak across with a “coyote” smuggler who could betray or abuse them. So, thanks to ingenuity and social media, the coyote business has been rendered obsolete. (Gee, thanks, Millennials!)
And while Trump can be given credit for repeatedly and specifically condemning the Squirrel Hill shooting as an anti-Semitic attack, the shooter was one of those people who attacked Jewish charities on the grounds that they were letting more refugees into the country. If anything the shooter attacked Trump as a “globalist” (which is one of the buzzwords used by reactionary movements). But if Trump is, for whatever reason (perhaps remembering how many Jewish relatives and friends he has) doing the right thing now, he and the rest of the Republican Party really need to come to grips with how things got to this point.
Trump announced his presidency specifically saying that Mexicans were “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists”. He said that an American-born judge in one of his civil cases couldn’t be trusted because he was of Mexican ancestry. Recently he name dropped George Soros in his culture-war attacks on migrants. Moreover, whatever one may think of Antifa and the various “woke” crusaders on the Left, they aren’t the ones building pipe bombs. Maybe in the Weather Underground days, but they’re not the subversives now. What you have specifically is a combination of a subversive culture that wants to destroy political norms and a dominance by one political party, and the danger is that they are the SAME entity. This is why it matters that, say, Trump praises Congressman Gianforte of Montana for doing a “body slam” on a reporter during a special election in 2017. It matters that Gianforte is a Congressman because he won his election after the assault. It matters that the president is going along with George Soros conspiracy theories and morally equating left-wing protestors at Charlottesville with right-wingers who commit assault and vehicular homicide.
These are not the same. If right-wingers want to rationalize their sellout to reactionaries and racists on the grounds that leftist dominance would put them in danger, well, “conservative” dominance has now put large sections of the country in real physical danger. Are they supposed to put up with it so that you’re not threatened? If your motivations are valid, why aren’t theirs? If there is “polarization” in this country, are you able to acknowledge how it came about?
You have a “conservative” (more anti-liberal) movement that ultimately came down to telling liberals “Fuck Your Feelings.” If liberals and other non-Trumpniks are now, without question, physically threatened by Trump’s fellow travelers, they are coming to the realization that more than guns, what they need are votes. More than laws to disarm the public, what they need is to disarm the Administration that is giving these criminals aid and comfort. The Republicans in Congress have done nothing but enable and look the other way, and things will not get any better if we let this continue.
And that is what Republicans are afraid of, because as Steve Bannon said, as long as they could phrase things in culture-war terms of “Right” vs. Left, they could win. When the reality becomes clear that it’s the Trump cult versus the rest of the country, the dynamic shifts. At this point, more and more Americans are looking at “conservative” enablers and their conspiracies and accusations of threats to their way of life, and their response to Trump fans is: “Fuck your feelings.”
Vote Republicans out.
Take your country back.