By now I’m far beyond being surprised, shocked or outraged by something ridiculous or hateful stated by a Republican. In Semi-Post-TFG America — that’s become their brand.
But I had to pause a moment when I read this.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) said over the weekend that the "radical left" presents a danger to the country like the "evils" of Nazi Germany and slavery.
Jordan made the comments during a Saturday interview with Newsmax host Sebastian Gorka.
"Every third generation in this country has had to do something big," Jordan opined. "You think about the Founders and what they did when they declared why we're going to be an independent country, what they had to overcome, the greatest military in the world. They did it."
"Three generations later, Lincoln and the Americans then held the country together, got rid of the evil of slavery," he continued. "Three generations later, we defeated imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, the evils that those two countries represented and the greatest generation won that war."
According to Jordan, today's Democrats are similar to those historical challenges.
"Here we are three generations later and the assault is from the radical left," he insisted. "We have to step forward and do our part like previous generations of Americans have done. I think we're up to the task."
So, this guy is saying that we’re like Nazis and somehow like Slavery when we're the party that literally supports Civil Rights, supports the Black Lives Matter movement against Police Racial Violence and is constantly accused of being in-cohoots with “Anti-Fascists.” Literally, the people who fight fascists.
Meanwhile his party is filled with people who think flying the Confederate Traitor Flag is “cool,” people who literally are Nazis like the Proud Boys, Patriot Front, League of the South, KKK, Identity Evropa, Oath Keepers and the Boogaloo Bois who want to start a second Civil War because they apparently think the wrong side won last time. Today, there isn’t a single Republican in Congress who would vote to restore the Voting Rights Act which was written to end Jim Crow, the greatest remnant of Slavery.
Project much?
On one level it’s easy to dismiss this as nonsense and bullshit. On the other hand we may need to hear what he’s saying because I've repeatedly seen his train of thought among some visitors to my Anti-Facebook Group Army of Truth. It’s all about using big (terrible) metaphors to accuse your opponents not simply of being, wrong, misguided or ill-informed — no — you have to present them as an existential threat, of being deranged and dangerous. Evil. Depraved. Completely dehumanized. Not worthy of sympathy, empathy or mercy.
You can see this with Lauren Boebert who doesn’t just say that Ilhan Omar and the Squad are “antisemitic”, it’s not just that she suggest Omar would be carrying a suicide bomb — she says “They’re Evil.”
In a video that went viral, Boebert told a story suggesting Omar, who is Muslim, should be considered a potential suicide-bombing terrorist. She said Omar belonged to the "Jihad Squad."
On Tuesday, CNN broadcast new video showing that Boebert told a similar story — with enough differences to draw the credibility of both of her accounts into question.
"More just-see-it-for-yourself evidence today of the hate and bigotry in the Republican ranks," CNN's John King reported. "This new video is from a September Republican fundraiser, Boebert not only tells her elevator story, she also calls Omar and another Muslim of Congress black-hearted and evil."
King described why he found the video to be so powerful, noting that, "our eyes and ears don't lie. We see her for what she is and what she believes."
Once your enemies are no longer human beings like yourself, no quarter need to be granted. No holds barred. All tactics of resistance, or attack, are on the table.
And franky it’s not just an opinion by the Representatives themselves. Louie Gohmert argues that people like Jordan, Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene make these claims because it’s pretty much
what their constituents already believe.
The first-term GOP lawmakers have publicly smeared Omar for her Muslim faith by suggesting she's a terrorist, and Greene attacked Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) for calling on Boebert to apologize, but Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) suggested the right-wing pair were just representing the interest of their deeply conservative constituents, reported the Washington Post.
“We get told all the time by Republican elected leadership that we have got to let much more moderate Republicans vote their district,” Gohmert said. “But we don’t hear that from our Republican leadership about people that are from conservative districts. The push is always to have conservatives give up on what their constituents believe, rather than pushing more moderates to support the party, the big majority.”
It’s that attitude that produces a case where an estimated 21 millions Americans are comfortable with advocating for violence to remedy the situation.
Nearly 70 percent of all Republicans believe the election was stolen from Trump, according to recent polls, but researchers found that 4 percent of Americans, or about 10 million adults, agreed that violent protest was worth the risk -- but that number doubled when they were asked whether violence was justified to return Trump to the presidency, reported The Atlantic.
“This really is a new, politically violent mass movement,” said researcher Robert Pape, who studies political violence. “This is collective political violence.
Poll respondents are usually reluctant to explicitly endorse violence, but Pape's team found that Trump supporters seemed to prefer harsher language -- and the researchers found 8 percent, or 21 million adults, who they called "committed insurrectionists" who believed violence was justified to remove Joe Biden from the presidency.
“It’s the community’s support that is creating a mantle of legitimacy — a mandate, if you would, that justifies the violence," Pape said. “I’m very concerned it could happen again, because what we’re seeing in our surveys … is 21 million people in the United States who are essentially a mass of kindling or a mass of dry wood that, if married to a spark, could in fact ignite.”
There is a sad natural progression from what we saw 3 years ago with the Unite the Right protests rationale and justifications for their violence — complaining that they were really only “defending” themselves from Antifa - to the violence we saw during the Capitol Riot where they were merely “defending” themselves from an allegedly stolen election.
Cantwell signaled to the jury that he will employ a starkly different strategy from his codefendants, who attempted to convey sympathy for the victims. In contrast, Cantwell criticized plaintiff the Rev. Seth Wispelwey, accusing him of blocking a roadway, and peppered his opening statement with derisive commentary about Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
In the runup to the trial, Cantwell has continued to promote a discredited conspiracy theory in an attempt to shift blame for the violence onto antifascist counter-protesters. In a handwritten brief filed three days before the start of the trial, he claimed that "the defendants were the victims, not the perpetrators, of the planned criminal conspiracy."
That strategy failed. Just as the dozens of lawsuits filed by the Trump lawyers have not only failed, they have resulted in sanctions against the lawyers who filed them.
A federal judge in Michigan on Thursday ordered former president Donald Trump's "Kraken" lawyers — including Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood — to pay more than $175,000 in sanctions for filing a conspiracy theory-laden lawsuit seeking to overturn the state's 2020 election results.
"This lawsuit represents a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process," U.S. District Judge Linda V. Parker wrote when she initially approved the sanctions in August.
There is in fact little to no evidence that Antifa was massively involved in the violence and looting we saw happening during the Floyd riots last year. Not one single member of Antifa was arrested during the protests last year.
Attorney General William Barr has urged his prosecutors to bring federal charges on protesters who cause violence and has suggested that rarely used sedition charges could apply. And the Department of Justice has pushed for detention even as prisons across the U.S. were releasing high-risk inmates because of COVID-19 and prosecutors had been told to consider the risks of incarceration during a pandemic when seeking detention.
[...]
Of more than 300 arrested, there are about 286 defendants, others had charges dropped. Some live in cities like Portland and Seattle where local prosecutors declined to bring some protest-related charges.
Some of those facing charges undoubtedly share far-left and anti-government views. Far-right protesters also have been arrested and charged. Some defendants have driven to protests from out of state. Some have criminal records and were illegally carrying weapons. Others are accused of using the protests as an opportunity to steal or create havoc.
But many have had no previous run-ins with the law and no apparent ties to antifa, the umbrella term for leftist militant groups that Trump has said he wants to declare a terrorist organization.
If Kevin McCarthy had his way, Jim Jordon would be part of the January 6th commission during which rather than examining what happened on that fateful day he would instead be trying to investigate the Floyd Riots and Antifa involvement in them. From what the FBI documents, they had little or no involvement in them.
This would be the boondoggle that the GOP would have us chasing. This is their boogey man. Antifa Violence.
I’ve had detailed discussions with MAGA supporters contrasting the violence of January 6 with the supposed violence of Antifa/BLM — which they always seem to conflate as being basically the same thing, when in reality Antifa fight against White Supremacists, Nazis and Fascist while BLM addresses unjustified police violence.
I don’t even see why they would be at the same event at the same time but the right views them as inseparable partners. Attached at the hip. Somehow.
They provided me several video intended to show the “dangers” of Antifa/BLM who they argue are “Democrat funded”, “Commies” who “Hate America” and go out and randomly attack Americans. This one is intended to be such a video- you must watch this on Youtube directly because things get violent.
[Just as an aside “Democrat Funded?” Does BLM have a bank account? Do they take Paypal or Go Fund Me? Are they a 501c(3) and do they report their donors? Do Democratic members of congress use their campaign funds for them, or is it just personal cash? Asking for a friend who’d like a slice of that sweet sweet BLM protest cash.]
This is a video of a Portland protest for the death of Patrick Kimmons who was shot nine times in the back by police in 2018. Now, he allegedly also fired shot at a third party while running past the officers so that mitigating factor resulted in no charges being filed against the officers. People are unhappy about it since he was clearly fleeing from them when it happened.
The protest is interrupted by a irate man in a red Ford truck who is blocking the street going the opposite direction. Angry words are exchanged. Both the truck driver and several of the protestors are armed. Guns are waved and aimed. Eventually the crowd moves out of the street and the driver proceeds through and past them.
Then he slams on the breaks and jumps out of is truck with his gun behind his back, there’s more harsh words, some pushing and shoving, and the driver brings his weapon up to fire on a protestor. The other protestors jump him, slamming him to the ground and knocking away the weapon. He complains for them to let him up so he can go — they say “You’re not going anywhere until the police get here.”
So this was presented to me as “Violent Antifa attacks a poor American motorist” — as it Antifa or BLM, take your pic, are not “American” — but it’s nothing of the kind. This is an armed threat being taken down without killing him.
This is what we’re up against. This truck driver thought he was in the right, he probably thought he was defending himself just like Kyle Rittenhouse. He wasn’t.
Like this truck driver, 21 million of our fellow Americans have been proselytized into believe that we are, frankly, a crazed pack of murderous killers who have to be opposed and fought with all due force.
In reality, we’re more like this protest group. We want to fix the residual racial and corrupt problems that America has always had and still continues. We don’t want to do that using genocide like the Nazis or torture and Slavery as the Southern States previously did.
We want to end the violence, end the war. We won’t let you hurt us, and we won’t hurt you if we can avoid it.
But we’ll do what we have to do, no matter what names you call us.