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Saturday, September 21, 2024 9:11:30 AM
America Has a Problem With Political Violence—and It’s a Growing One
"Trump, Outrage and the Modern Era of Political Violence
[...]Within days of former President Donald J. Trump vilifying immigrants on national television with false stories about Haitian migrants eating pet dogs and cats in an Ohio town, someone began threatening to blow up schools, City Hall and other public buildings, forcing evacuations and prompting a wave of fear.
P - Days later, authorities said, a man who described himself online as a disaffected former Trump supporter made his way with a semiautomatic rifle to the former president’s Florida golf course, evidently looking to take a shot. He was thwarted only when an observant Secret Service agent spotted him and opened fire first.
[...]At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him. He has long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed.
P - While Mr. Trump insists his fiery speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, was not responsible for the subsequent ransacking of the Capitol, he resisted pleas from advisers and his own daughter that day to do more to stop the assault. He even suggested that the mob might be right to want to hang his vice president and has since embraced the attackers as patriots whom he may pardon if elected again."
Related:
To be fair, some of things this member paraphrases and makes mistakes seems to happen to people where English isn't their first language and may be foreign.
Allegedly this site is global after all.
That said, I've read where the maga attacks at voting centers are picking up all over the country, with the latest count of over 10 centers getting strange packages and envelopes of white powder as well. So the assault at our local churches, community centers operated largely by senior citizens and other volunteer adults are under siege by maga'ts who accuse the democrats of election interference.
[...]https://apnews.com/article/suspicious-packages-election-powder-iowa-nebraska-tennessee-63c85689b94f0f55cf68c64dd05bea8f
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175118831
Extremism expert Barbara F. Walter believes guns and the internet have put the US in the Goldilocks zone
for chaos and bloodshed amid the 2024 election. “The key point,” she says, is “will we be prepared for it?”
By Brian Stelter
September 19, 2024
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is shown covered by U.S. Secret Service agents after an incident during a rally on July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania.by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.
The recent rise of political violence in the United States is sobering but not surprising to the researchers who study this subject. “We know the factors that put countries at risk of political violence,” says Barbara F. Walter, an expert on violent extremism. “We also know the factors that put countries at risk of election violence, and the United States has all of them.”
Walter, a professor at the University of California, San Diego and the author of How Civil Wars Start, among several other books, told me on this week’s episode of Inside the Hive that she is worried about the coming election period—but doesn’t think the threats will abate afterward. “We’re in for a rocky few months,” Walter says. “We’re actually, I think, in for a rocky 10 years.”
That’s because the underlying risk factors are so apparent. “The countries that tend to experience violence around elections are countries that have winner-take-all elections, which the United States has; they have voters and a population who have become deeply divided, especially by race, religion, and/or ethnicity; they have weak institutions, or they have a democracy that’s not as strong as it could be and where some of the electorate questions the validity of elections; and they have a candidate that has lost in the past,” Walter explains. “These are the conditions that social scientists have figured out by looking across countries and over time.” And those conditions all exist in the US today.
Donald Trump, she adds, is “setting up his supporters to believe that if he loses again, it was stolen again. So again, this is the perfect recipe for violence. We will have violence surrounding this election. And really, the key point is, will we be prepared for it?” Thinking ahead and preparing for the possibilities, she says, is “much better than keeping our heads in the sand and pretending that everything’s fine.”
Regarding the recent threats to Trump’s life, Walter says that “the two big drivers of the rise of assassination attempts are guns, and especially the easy access to assault weapons,” and the internet as a source of radicalization. People are “doomscrolling the internet and they’re on these chat rooms and they’re getting radicalized,” she says. “They’re starting to believe the conspiracy theories that they’re hearing. And many of these people are not mentally stable to begin with.”
On the topic of civil war, Walter observes that “there is a cancer growing here in the United States” because a subset of the population doesn’t think democracy serves them anymore. She says the two best predictors of civil war are “whether a country is a partial democracy,” as opposed to a vibrant democracy or a repressive autocracy, and “whether its citizens are divided, deeply divided by race, religion, or ethnicity.”
When you have a democracy that’s in decline, that’s when you start to get into trouble, says Walter. She asserts that political science data indicates America has, in recent years, dropped into this “middle zone.” “Most violence happens in the middle zone.” The key point is preparedness: “We need to pay attention. We need to take precautions against it. We need to be prepared.”
Brian Stelter is the New York Times best-selling author of three books: Top of the Morning, Hoax, and Network of Lies. Previously, Stelter was a media reporter at The New York Times, the chief media correspondent for CNN Worldwide, and the anchor of Reliable Sources. He is currently a special... Read more
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/america-has-a-problem-with-political-violence-and-its-a-growing-one
"Trump, Outrage and the Modern Era of Political Violence
[...]Within days of former President Donald J. Trump vilifying immigrants on national television with false stories about Haitian migrants eating pet dogs and cats in an Ohio town, someone began threatening to blow up schools, City Hall and other public buildings, forcing evacuations and prompting a wave of fear.
P - Days later, authorities said, a man who described himself online as a disaffected former Trump supporter made his way with a semiautomatic rifle to the former president’s Florida golf course, evidently looking to take a shot. He was thwarted only when an observant Secret Service agent spotted him and opened fire first.
[...]At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him. He has long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed.
P - While Mr. Trump insists his fiery speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, was not responsible for the subsequent ransacking of the Capitol, he resisted pleas from advisers and his own daughter that day to do more to stop the assault. He even suggested that the mob might be right to want to hang his vice president and has since embraced the attackers as patriots whom he may pardon if elected again."
Related:
To be fair, some of things this member paraphrases and makes mistakes seems to happen to people where English isn't their first language and may be foreign.
Allegedly this site is global after all.
That said, I've read where the maga attacks at voting centers are picking up all over the country, with the latest count of over 10 centers getting strange packages and envelopes of white powder as well. So the assault at our local churches, community centers operated largely by senior citizens and other volunteer adults are under siege by maga'ts who accuse the democrats of election interference.
[...]https://apnews.com/article/suspicious-packages-election-powder-iowa-nebraska-tennessee-63c85689b94f0f55cf68c64dd05bea8f
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175118831
Extremism expert Barbara F. Walter believes guns and the internet have put the US in the Goldilocks zone
for chaos and bloodshed amid the 2024 election. “The key point,” she says, is “will we be prepared for it?”
By Brian Stelter
September 19, 2024
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is shown covered by U.S. Secret Service agents after an incident during a rally on July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania.by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.
The recent rise of political violence in the United States is sobering but not surprising to the researchers who study this subject. “We know the factors that put countries at risk of political violence,” says Barbara F. Walter, an expert on violent extremism. “We also know the factors that put countries at risk of election violence, and the United States has all of them.”
Walter, a professor at the University of California, San Diego and the author of How Civil Wars Start, among several other books, told me on this week’s episode of Inside the Hive that she is worried about the coming election period—but doesn’t think the threats will abate afterward. “We’re in for a rocky few months,” Walter says. “We’re actually, I think, in for a rocky 10 years.”
That’s because the underlying risk factors are so apparent. “The countries that tend to experience violence around elections are countries that have winner-take-all elections, which the United States has; they have voters and a population who have become deeply divided, especially by race, religion, and/or ethnicity; they have weak institutions, or they have a democracy that’s not as strong as it could be and where some of the electorate questions the validity of elections; and they have a candidate that has lost in the past,” Walter explains. “These are the conditions that social scientists have figured out by looking across countries and over time.” And those conditions all exist in the US today.
Donald Trump, she adds, is “setting up his supporters to believe that if he loses again, it was stolen again. So again, this is the perfect recipe for violence. We will have violence surrounding this election. And really, the key point is, will we be prepared for it?” Thinking ahead and preparing for the possibilities, she says, is “much better than keeping our heads in the sand and pretending that everything’s fine.”
Regarding the recent threats to Trump’s life, Walter says that “the two big drivers of the rise of assassination attempts are guns, and especially the easy access to assault weapons,” and the internet as a source of radicalization. People are “doomscrolling the internet and they’re on these chat rooms and they’re getting radicalized,” she says. “They’re starting to believe the conspiracy theories that they’re hearing. And many of these people are not mentally stable to begin with.”
On the topic of civil war, Walter observes that “there is a cancer growing here in the United States” because a subset of the population doesn’t think democracy serves them anymore. She says the two best predictors of civil war are “whether a country is a partial democracy,” as opposed to a vibrant democracy or a repressive autocracy, and “whether its citizens are divided, deeply divided by race, religion, or ethnicity.”
When you have a democracy that’s in decline, that’s when you start to get into trouble, says Walter. She asserts that political science data indicates America has, in recent years, dropped into this “middle zone.” “Most violence happens in the middle zone.” The key point is preparedness: “We need to pay attention. We need to take precautions against it. We need to be prepared.”
Brian Stelter is the New York Times best-selling author of three books: Top of the Morning, Hoax, and Network of Lies. Previously, Stelter was a media reporter at The New York Times, the chief media correspondent for CNN Worldwide, and the anchor of Reliable Sources. He is currently a special... Read more
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/america-has-a-problem-with-political-violence-and-its-a-growing-one
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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