NRA tweet; An image accompanying the linked article, captioned
'This is where the survivors of the Democrat rebellion will meet their end.'
The National Rifle Association
is a radical far-right militia group.
The National Rifle Association is promoting an article that suggested "radical" Democrats will attempt to confiscate firearms in the United States and trigger a civil war where "the survivors of the Democrat rebellion" are ultimately hanged. [...]
Owens began his October 17 article with an image of gallows and the caption, "This is where the survivors of the Democrat rebellion will meet their end." His article was promoted by the NRA on social media.
In general, sportsman-oriented lobbying groups do not direct their followers to articles describing how "survivors of the Democrat rebellion" will be hanged; historically, such rants are confined to especially insane corners of the internet. But the NRA is not a lobbying group. The NRA is a frequent broadcaster of the notion that their members may, in this case perhaps before "we get to the 2016 elections", have to join with each other to murder members of the government. The reasons are always kept simple: at some point, a gun law may be passed that requires armed insurrection by gun-movement members. Those that wish to engage in that armed movement to murder government officials, which may or may not conclude with the eventual hanging of the "survivors of the Democrat rebellion", are painted in glowing, heroic terms, and are regularly told that they can expect the backing of America's military in the resulting civil war. It is usually presented in prose that suggests the author was not, at the time, wearing pants.
Soldiers, Marines and sheriffs may even defect to actively resist any federal officers from a pool of just over 100,000 who would take on the suicidal task of taking on the military, local police, and a hundred righteously-angry million gun owners, led by over a thousand angry Green Berets that warned President Obama in 2013 not push his luck.
Who is left to carrying out these confiscatory fantasies but the radicals themselves? [...]
We do not want a civil war against the radical left wing of the Democrat Party, but let it be made abundantly clear that if they start one, they will be utterly destroyed by armed free citizens, as the Founders intended.
The National Rifle Association is a far-right militia group. A central tenet of their rhetoric is the now often-repeated theory that their members will likely, at some point, be called upon to assassinate members or employees or mere supporters of the United States government, thus "liberating" the nation from "Democrat" rule. Perhaps it will happen, as they suggest in their magazine articles, after a societal collapse brought about by America's dangerous, prone-to-violence minority groups. Perhaps it will happen, as they suggest in the angry essays they tweet to their members, when the "left" passes some unnamed but forever just-around-the-corner law that violence-minded shut-ins consider to be
the law that makes murdering government representatives the now-patriotic thing to do.
They are a far-right militia group peddling the right and duty of their members to murder people who they may at some point feel need murdering and, as the unhinged pile of flesh up there so readily demonstrates, have no compunctions against forever warning the vast, wide sweep of other far-right radicals that the political trigger that will permit and justify those waves of murder is imminent—perhaps not even one election away.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—Bush Authoritarianism: Blackwater+Amway=GOP, Pt. 3:
The administration of George W. Bush has pursued an agenda and engaged in a governance style that breaks radically from any previous administration.
Some of the characteristics of what I’m calling Bush Authoritarianism are variants of previous ideological beliefs or forms of governance. Many others are the realization of decades of marketing and propaganda by the interlinked network of rightwing donors, foundations, think tanks, marketing and media operations, opinion leaders, political operatives, and allies within the Republican party.
One of the main hallmarks of Bush Authoritarianism is a variant of privatization, in which public goods or services supplied directly by government employees are "outsourced" to a private company, which takes tax dollars, but over which the government has much less control than public employees performing the same task. Privatization has been happening at all levels of government for a couple of decades. In some cases it’s warranted and in the best interests of citizens and taxpayers. But often, privatization results in inferior good or services, higher costs to taxpayers, and diminished accountability to the government and the public.
An extreme version of privatization has accelerated during the Bush administration: the privatization of warfare. Privatizing war is at the cutting edge of Bush Authoritarianism, and Blackwater, whose business practices and niche I discussed last week, is an archetypal "winner" in the new authoritarian system emerging under the Bush administration.
Tweet of the Day
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show:
Greg Dworkin is busy at work,
Joan McCarter is busy on vacation, so
David Waldman gives us something different - devoting his entire show to one specific issue, Paul Ryan's "conditional" announcement for Gop House Speaker, and the opposition from the House Freedom Caucus. David creates a running commentary and annotation of the Vox.com article entitled, "The House Freedom Caucus has some good ideas on how the US House should operate." What other program would take the time to explain the HFC, their demands for reform and the cyclical nature of those demands so you can understand it? No one.
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