Menace, as a Political Tool, Enters the Republican Mainstream

[Bootstrap]

Menace, as a Political Tool, Enters the Republican Mainstream

Threats of violence have become commonplace among a significant part of the party, as historians and those who study democracy warn of a dark shift in American politics.

At a conservative rally in western Idaho last month, a young man stepped up to a microphone to ask when he could start killing Democrats.

“When do we get to use the guns?” he said as the audience applauded. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” The local state representative, a Republican, later called it a “fair” question.

In Ohio, the leading candidate in the Republican primary for Senate blasted out a video urging Republicans to resist the “tyranny” of a federal government that pushed them to wear masks and take F.D.A.-authorized vaccines.

“When the Gestapo show up at your front door,” the candidate, Josh Mandel, a grandson of Holocaust survivors, said in the video in September, “you know what to do.”

And in Congress, violent threats against lawmakers are on track to double this year. Republicans who break party ranks and defy former President Donald J. Trump have come to expect insults, invective and death threats — often stoked by their own colleagues and conservative activists, who have denounced them as traitors.

From congressional offices to community meeting rooms, threats of violence are becoming commonplace among a significant segment of the Republican Party. Ten months after rioters attacked the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, and after four years of a president who often spoke in violent terms about his adversaries, right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the use of force as justifiable in opposition to those who dislodged him from power.

In Washington, where decorum and civility are still given lip service, violent or threatening language still remains uncommon, if not unheard-of, among lawmakers who spend a great deal of time in the same building. But among the most fervent conservatives, who play an outsize role in primary contests and provide the party with its activist energy, the belief that the country is at a crossroads that could require armed confrontation is no longer limited to the fringe.

[HondurasKeiser]

Are any of us Republicans here?

[mike]

The people concerned are all Democrats, but I noticed that BLM is threatening violence in NYC as the new mayor-elect talks about upcoming reforms.

https://connecticut.news12.com/blm-memb ... rime-units

Seems like they are using menace as a political tool.

[mike]

Are any of us Republicans here?

[Bootstrap]

Are any of us Republicans here?

The CRT thread is what prompted this. I don't think that the people who founded CRT promote violence.

I think that some branches of right-wing media cited here and some leaders who are extolled here have been promoting this kind of threat. There have also been people who simply will not believe anyone who says they are getting death threats from people on the political right.

[ragpicker]

LOL…

[Bootstrap]

The people concerned are all Democrats, but I noticed that BLM is threatening violence in NYC as the new mayor-elect talks about upcoming reforms.

https://connecticut.news12.com/blm-memb ... rime-units

Seems like they are using menace as a political tool.

Yes, the people mentioned in that article are using menace as a political tool.

Any comments on the people mentioned in the OP? Here are a few things that, to me at least, make this really different from most other threats of violence:

“What’s different about almost all those other events is that now, there’s a partisan divide around the legitimacy of our political system,” he said. “The elite endorsement of political violence from factions of the Republican Party is distinct for me from what we saw in the 1960s. Then, you didn’t have — from a president on down — politicians calling citizens to engage in violent resistance.”

From his earliest campaigning to the final moments of his presidency, Mr. Trump’s political image has incorporated the possibility of violence. He encouraged attendees at his rallies to “knock the hell” out of protesters, praised a lawmaker who body-slammed a reporter, and in a recent interview defended rioters who clamored to “hang Mike Pence.”

Yet even with the former president largely out of the public eye and after a deadly attack on the Capitol where rioters tried to overturn the presidential election, the Republican acceptance of violence has only spread. Polling indicates that 30 percent of Republicans, and 40 percent of people who “most trust” far-right news sources, believe that “true patriots” may have to resort to violence to “save” the country — a statement that gets far less support among Democrats and independents.

Such views, routinely expressed in warlike or revolutionary terms, are often intertwined with white racial resentments and evangelical Christian religious fervor — two potent sources of fuel for the G.O.P. during the Trump era — as the most animated Republican voters increasingly see themselves as participants in a struggle, if not a kind of holy war, to preserve their idea of American culture and their place in society.

Notably few Republican leaders have spoken out against violent language or behavior since Jan. 6, suggesting with their silent acquiescence that doing so would put them at odds with a significant share of their party’s voters.

I think both parties are becoming more extreme. But I think this kind of menace is more prominent on the right, more accepted by the leadership, and promoted in largish portions of right-wing media.

[mike]

Yes, those comments from Trump were stupid, and probably part of what cost him the election. As to whether the right is more apt to embrace menace as a political tool, I don't know whether I would agree or not.

[Bootstrap]

Yes, those comments from Trump were stupid, and probably part of what cost him the election.

I agree.

As to whether the right is more apt to embrace menace as a political tool, I don't know whether I would agree or not.

There's good polling on this. For instance:

[PeterG]

There's good polling on this. For instance:

I'm skeptical about whether this polling is actually any good. I think there's a term for this that I'm not remembering, but to me the poll question seems slanted in a certain direction. "True American patriots" and "save our country" are phrases that I'd associate with the right. It'd be interesting to see what the poll results would be for a statement such as, "Oppressed minorities might have to resort to violence to establish a just and equal society."