Anthony King was working in his garden last week in Butler County, Ohio, when his son saw their neighbour repeatedly enter the garden to confront him. All we know of those conversations is that the neighbour was accusing King of being a Democrat. On the fourth visit, he shot King dead.
“I look in the backyard and that man is walking away from my husband and my husband is on the ground,” King’s wife told dispatchers. “He has come over like four times confronting my husband because he thought he was a Democrat. Why, why? Please, I don’t understand.”
We will gain a better understanding via the forthcoming murder trial, but we can observe already the pattern of escalating politically-motivated violence since Donald Trump began his run for President in 2015 by urging his followers to assault opponents physically.
The damage
Anthony King’s death in Ohio will probably be classified as a hate crime murder as well as a gun homicide. This latter category has been steadily declining for a couple of decades until 2015. Then a sudden surge followed Trump’s arrival in mid 2015. See grey and red graph at the top here.
From 2015 to 2020, firearm homicides jumped 49%. This dipped in 2021, but it’s too soon to tell if the trend has reversed.
Violent assault incidents overall crept up slightly in 2016 and 17, then accelerated in Trump’s last two years in office. They have now soared 124% since 2015. See Green and blue graph, below.
Virtually all indicators of violence have surged since 2015, after years of steady decline. Police shot on duty increased 57%, mass shootings jumped 106%, teenagers aged 12 to 17 shot rose 111%, school shootings incidents rose 116% and FBI hate crimes climbed 175%.
Trump’s death toll, when we include lives lost to the gross mismanagement of the Covid pandemic, is in the hundreds of thousands. Life expectancy is now declining significantly in the USA, the only OECD member with this distinction.
The Turnbull thesis
Trump could not have commanded an army of angry followers without a megaphone for his conspiracy theories, malicious lies and hate speech. The outlet which offered its services was News Corporation’s Fox News which, after a hesitant start in 2015, gave Trump free access to any of its news programs at any time of day. His unhinged rants, usually by phone, usually uninterrupted, frequently lasted 50 minutes.
Of all international observers to have identified this unwritten pact between Trump and Fox News as the cause of the surge in killings since 2015, the most prominent is former conservative Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Turnbull told NPR in the USA in August that,
“Fox News has played, by far, the largest single part in the polarization of American politics, in the amplification of political hatred ... Fox News is not the only source of this madness, but it is by far the single most influential one.”
Testimonies in court
The Turnbull thesis is now bolstered by hundreds of court cases. More than 880 defendants have been charged with offences committed on 6 January 2021 when Trump’s followers stormed the Capitol. Of those, 415 have pleaded guilty and 25 have been found guilty by the court, so far.
Some have claimed they were following Trump’s orders. Dustin Thompson’s defense attorney told jurors in April that,
“It’s Donald Trump himself spewing the lies and using his position to authorize this assault.”.
Others have used the defence that Fox News has left them brainwashed and deluded and thus not responsible for their violent attacks on the Capitol.
Trump’s demise
The main take-aways from last week’s mid-term elections are that Republican candidates endorsed by Donald Trump did particularly poorly, and hence his influence may be waning. This is good.
We know also Fox News ended its blind obeisance to Trump in July. This is also good.
The sooner they both disappear forever, the sooner Americans can go about their gardening without fear of being murdered.
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This is an abbreviated version of an article published today in Independent Australia. The original article is available here in full for free:
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/americas-destructive-nightmare-may-soon-be-over,16965
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“Alan Austin is a great Australian journalist and,
I think, a pirate. I steal Alan Austin’s findings all the time.”
~ Jordan Shanks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtV-2X4BjQI
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