It’s been barely a month since I began my hiatus from the blog, and I feel like Rip Van Winkle. You know that story—Rip sleeps twenty years through the American Revolution and wakes to find everything changed. I took time off in hopes of getting a handle on the daily mutations enacted by our delusional President. Now my metaphorical twenty years have passed, and every day brings forth a new monstrosity. I may go back to sleep.
The horrific murder of Charlie Kirk on Wednesday was followed by the President’s endorsing of right wing extremism and open war on the left. The suspect hadn’t even been caught yet. Never has a president endorsed political violence like this. Vengeance is what moves him, and he just gave the green light to his demented troops.
Quickly and noisily the dingbats like Stephen Miller and Laura Loomer took up the cause of bashing the left. Miller called it a “wicked ideology, steadily growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved.” Violence begets violence. Vengeance beats justice.
- Trump promised swift action to take down the perpetrators of such violence as well as “organizations” that fund and promote it. Trump’s remarkable threat somehow did not get much attention. It should have. Not only was the President not even trying to unite the country but he seemed to be blaming the large chunk of the nation that reviles his racially divisive policies and those promoted by Kirk as surely as if they had pulled the trigger.―Susan B. Glasser
- “I think it’s worth [it] to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” Kirk said.―NY Times
- Piously expressing respect for Kirk’s work and incanting the importance of “debate” are capitulations to Republicans’ invoking standards to which the right no longer pretends to adhere. Actually, it’s worse: There are no Republicans asking or demanding that their Democratic counterparts play the part of sympathetic colleague.―Ana Marie Cox
- Trump and many leaders on the right are vowing to use this tragedy to do what they’ve always wanted to do anyway: to make this a more authoritarian society in which blunt criticism of the regime becomes redefined as incitement to violence and even terrorism. On Thursday, the State Department warned immigrants not to mock Kirk’s death. In Trump’s America, we can be sure it’s not going to stop there.―Michael Tomasky
- “We’re watching grief, anger, blame and calls for retribution all occurring in parallel and all occurring in the public sphere,” said Sean Westwood, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College and the director of the Polarization Research Lab.
He added: “In that kind of environment, the loudest voice is going to prevail, and in the moment, that loudest voice is calling for further division. So unlike the past, where we’ve had leaders pushing us together, we now have leaders who are pushing us apart, and that could lead to more violence.”―NY Times
welcome back. find this focus on reaction to the act by allies of the victim rather than the act itself rather unsettling.
For me, the unprecedented reaction to the act by allies of the victim is much more of a threat to what is left of democracy in America than the terrible act of one man.
John, are these reactions waking you up or making you want to go back to sleep?