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THE REPUBLICAN ID  
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Rick Perlstein
June 4, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ Rather than visiting red-state diners, reporters ought to journey
to the venerable conservative message board where the talk after the
Trump verdict was nihilistic and bloody. _

Trump supporters protest outside Manhattan Criminal Court, May 29,
2024, in New York., MATTHEW RODIER/SIPA USA VIA AP IMAGES

 

“I hope you’re doing well! I’m writing
from _Politico _magazine,” ran an email I received two weeks ago.
“We’re planning on putting together a roundup of contributors
after the Trump verdict is announced. We’re not totally sure about
the question we’re going to ask contributors to weigh in on just
yet, but I think it will be something like: How will this verdict
affect 2024? … Let me know if you think you can contribute; if yes,
I will be in touch next week!”

They were talking about votes. The mainstream political
media _only _knows how to talk about votes. I replied, noting that
my comment was for the record and that I hoped they would use it: “I
have no idea, and neither does anyone else. The obsession of political
media with acting like Jimmy the Greek, in a time when everything is
unprecedented, is atrocious for civic health.”

Maybe my interlocutor was too young to know who Jimmy the Greek
[[link removed](sports_commentator)] was.
Either way, I never heard back. Consider this, then, my extended
response.

THE VERY LEGITIMACY OF ONE OF THE THREE allegedly coequal
constitutional branches was on trial in Judge Juan Merchan’s
courtroom, I wrote here last month
[[link removed]].
And now we have our verdict. HuffPost.com ran the headline “All the
GOP Lawmakers Telling Trump to Drop Out After His Felony Conviction
[[link removed]].”
Click on it, and you get an image of tumbleweeds. Clever, but not
funny. A jury of ordinary citizens ruled against the Republican
Party’s leader, so powerful Republicans ruled that the rule of law
itself was illegitimate. You have to reach for a German word to
describe this. That word is “Führerprinzip
[[link removed]].”

What was actually a by-the-book legal proceeding was a
“quintessential show trial,” like “what you see in communist
countries,” according to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)
[[link removed]].
Fascist-adjacent Silicon Valley plutocrats lined up
[[link removed]] to
pledge their allegiance to lawlessness. PayPal co-founder David Sacks
[[link removed]] called it a
“sham,” and Sequoia Capital’s Shaun Maguire took the occasion to
announce a $300,000 donation to Trump. The granddaddy of them all,
Elon Reeve Musk, promised the invaluable in-kind contribution of a
virtual town hall on fka Twitter
[[link removed]].

And House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) promised to “fight back …
with everything in our arsenal.” Quite the thing to say at a time
when the GOP is all in on Chief Justice John Roberts’s ahistorical
insistence that Congress has no right
[[link removed]] to
a meeting with him to discuss Supreme Court ethics in the wake of the
Sam Alito flag flap, because Separation of Powers. A venial sin,
however, compared to the winkingly violent language in which Speaker
Johnson couched it.

Talk of arsenals is everywhere on the right. Mike Solana of the
venture capital firm the Founders Fund belched out to his 275,000
followers on X a vid of Heath Ledger as the Joker about to launch a
wilding spree [[link removed]].
Whether the Joker was meant to symbolize the lawlessness of the
Democratic conspiracy to get Trump or how the outraged masses are
supposed to respond to it, naturally, unclear. Smart nihilists always
build plausible deniability into potentially inciting speech.

At the grassroots, however, the language is less ambiguous.

_cross_bearer_2: “Never forget 5/30/2024. The date the leftist
devils chose civil war for this nation. Trump WILL be my president, by
God.”_

_circlecity: “Burn it down.”_

_Boomer: “After the DA, the corrupt judge, and the corrupt jury (and
all others involved) are found guilty of treason and sentenced to
hang, I want to buy a ticket to the event.”_

_central-va: “Elections will be conducted using 5.56mm voting
machines.”_

“5.56mm” refers to one of the two kinds of bullets used in the
AR-15, America’s most popular assault weapon, including among our
most deadly mass shooters.

So how will the Trump verdict affect 2024—the year, not the
election? It is, yes, impossible to know. One possibility not to be
dismissed, however, is insurgent violence. Some people certainly seem
to be preparing for it. Though not Politico or any of our
agenda-setting journalistic institutions, it seems.

This failure, as I have been imploring
[[link removed]],
represents a deeply ingrained pattern, betokening a broader civic
problem. In the weeks following Barack Obama’s election in 2008,
America suffered an epidemic of racially motivated hate crimes: 200,
all told, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center
[[link removed]].
You may not have heard about that, because it was woefully
undercovered by the gatekeeping organs of American political
journalism. It was crowded out by their chosen narrative: that with
the election of an African American president, _we had overcome
[[link removed]]_.

In the nation’s vaunted Newspaper of Record, a record of that
portentous violence was particularly scant—even when it occurred in
New York City, on the night of Obama’s victory, when a roving mob on
Staten Island committed three separate assaults on minorities. The
last victim they thumped onto the hood of an automobile; he spent the
next month in a coma. _The_ _New York Times_ only ever mentioned
the crime two months later, tucked away in the “New York Region”
section, when the alleged perpetrators were arraigned.

If mainstream American journalistic institutions were adequate to
American reality, scouring the bushes for signs of developments like
these would be a _beat_. It wouldn’t be hard to cover; the leads
hide in plain sight.

THE CALLS TO VIOLENCE CITED ABOVE come from the venerable far-right
message board FreeRepublic.com [[link removed]].
[[link removed]] Founded in 1996, the
close-knit community is marked by conspicuous success organizing
political actions in the real world. Their 1998 Washington rally for
Bill Clinton’s impeachment drew 3,000 and coverage on C-SPAN; their
practice of “Freeping” (fixing) the online polls news
organizations used to run may have had a material effect on the 2000
Florida recount. I once tracked down right-wing pundit Robert Novak
suggesting Al Gore really ought to concede, now that a (Freeped) poll
on CNN.com showed that 80 percent of the public wanted him to. Natalie
Maines specifically singled out Free Republic for driving the
charivari that destroyed the career of her band The Dixie Chicks, the
highest-selling female act to that point, after she criticized the
Iraq War in 2003. A Republican legal operative hiding behind the
pseudonym “Buckhead
[[link removed]]”
used Free Republic in 2004 to seed the first doubts about the dubious
authenticity of memos CBS News released as proof that George W. Bush
went AWOL. Freep’s frenzied activists have a record of actually
changing history.

Back in those days, I used to go very deep on Free Republic. It was
there that I first began doing a kind of reverse trolling, earnestly
and sincerely engaging the most insane right-wing arguments directly.
Once, I even spent an entire long afternoon and evening on the site,
conducting an early version of a Reddit-style Ask Me Anything
[[link removed]], taking on all
comers. (’Round midnight, someone tallied his version of the score:
“Perlstein: minus 27. FReepers: 438 kabazillion.”) It was a big
part of how I _truly _got within the sinews of right-wing
ratiocination. I’ve visited regularly ever since. It’s one of the
ways I keep my wingnut-fu sharp.

I note this to establish that I have a feel for the place. It’s
still going very strong, with none of the fancy new alt-right memes or
QAnon “Trust the plan” woo-woo—just good old-fashioned
authoritarian populism, recognizable to anyone who studies Joe
McCarthy, George Wallace, the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, or even the 1850s
Know Nothings. There is an _us_, who are the only true Americans;
there is a _them_, out to destroy _us_, with unceasing ruthlessness.

“Republicans can no longer sit back and play by the Marquess of
Queensbury rules. It’ll have to be down in the trenches dirty
fighting from now on … or let the Democrat lust for power completely
destroy us,” as ProtectOurFreedom said the other day in a thread of
374 posts
[[link removed]] responding
to the verdict that I read in its entirety, one of at least 20 such
threads, one of them over twice as long.

There’s incredulity: “Can’t believe they’d stoop this low.”
There’s also knowingness: “What else would you expect traitors to
the United States to do?”; “A foregone conclusion from the get go.
You live in the Soviet Union … I mean that literally and in complete
sincerity.”

That last guy uses a tag from _Animal Farm_. Many Freepers style
themselves scholars, naming themselves for Roman generals
[[link removed]], obscure
19th-century theologians
[[link removed]],
and minor Founding Fathers
[[link removed]], pedantically pulling
historical references from their quivers. “In Stalin’s day,”
noted one after the Trump verdict came down, “when someone said
something that displeased Stalin, he’d find himself arrested and
brought to trial. But the charges wouldn’t be ‘speaking and
thinking differently from Stalin,’ the charges would be forming a
terrorist group with the intention of assassinating Stalin and other
communist leaders. For extra measure, they’d torture the accused
into signing a confession saying so.”

Obviously, exactly what was happening now. So it will not surprise you
that very few offered thoughtful discussion on matters of law.

One did, mildly observing that when the crime is nonviolent and the
defendant has no previous criminal record, a fine and probation are
likely. A Freeper calling himself Nervous Tick disagreed. Freepers
often include taglines in their user names; Nervous Tick’s is
“ISLAM is the problem!” He or she, but probably he, noting that
sentencing had been set for just before the Republican convention,
replied: “Confirmation that this is a total attempt at a bloodless
assassination of the rightful President by the deep state.”

MeganC disagreed with the bloodless part: “They’ll kill him if
they can get him into a jail cell.” Though not to worry: “They
will all be arrested in 2025 and all of them will die in prison,”
assures Boomer. (Tag: “If the Nazi-Rats and Rons win, everyone
loses. The uniparty can no longer claim they are American.”)

But who _is_ “they”? After the Cold War, it became harder to
dream up credible ways to name the faceless string-pullers working
behind the scenes. “The cartels” is one candidate: Judge Merchan
is a “Columbian cartel stooge,” to quote one Freeper. Or the
Democrat (never Democratic) Party: Many display a grudging respect for
its supposed ruthlessness. Or maybe just Dark Brandon, acting on his
own in his Oval Office lair: “Don’t worry,” jokes VTenigma,
“Biden’s thermonuclear war will solve everything.”

Whoever_ they_ is, they’re cruel, that’s for sure: “Rikers for
DJT, then either an ‘accident’, suicide, or a shank. Pick one.”
The brazenness of _they_ knows no bounds: “I think it’s clear
they could shoot Trump in the middle of 5th Avenue and no one would do
a thing.” And cunning. So, so very cunning: “Now you know why they
went after Alito and the USSC.” _They_ is also why Biden agreed to
a debate. Two Freepers came up with this theory independently of each
other: Biden knew the outcome of the trial in advance, and knew he
could now duck it by refusing with a flourish to debate a convicted
felon.

Also, _they_ is the reason why the jury ruled as they did: “I’d
be guessing that each and every one of them were presented with the
repercussions of what their potential not-guilty vote would be,”
someone said, answering Verginius Rufus—after the Roman
general—who marveled that “14 New Yorkers (Bragg, Marchan, and the
12 jurors) are allowed to decide who can be President of the United
States?”

Drill down on the New York part, referred to variously as “Satan’s
haven in the USA,” “Sodom,” and more. One Freeper, dpetty12163,
said succinctly of the Big Apple: “It needs to be wasted!”

I googled him. Active on Survivalist Forum and GunAuction.com, he
advised readers in a 2020 thread on how it was “pretty clear they
intend to overthrow the military in the event Trump returns as
Commander-in-chief … Remember Obama our first N****** Affirmative
Action President either fired or forced into retirement 1000’s of
Patriot officers and replaced them with Leftist garbage.”

Another terrorist attack would do the trick, said one who regretted
ever feeling sympathy for the city after the last one. The redoubtable
dpetty followed up: “I’m thinking Operation Castle Bravo.” That
was the 1954 H-bomb test on Bikini Atoll.

Pessimism that Republican elected officials and even the rank and file
would prove weak-kneed and wishy-washy was another keynote.
“Conservatives aren’t going to do a damn thing,” said one. “We
don’t riot and we’re not the thug party. Imagine if the
Republicans fought just .001% as hard as the Democrats do.”

So it was high time for some on-the-ground planning: It was finally
time to fight. Trial balloons included a tax strike (from our friend
dpetty); and the “five-point plan” of someone called
Salvavida—Spanish for “lifeguard.” It would start with a general
strike. Then, “All RED states need to call for registration of
able-bodied men for duty in the state militia; not national
guard”—and that’s only point two.

But most Freepers aren’t planners. Nihilism in the service of
God’s vengeance hardly requires any particular set of steps.

_“There is no ‘court system’. This entire government is a sham.
From the CIA, FBI, Courts, State Department, Congress … you name
it.”_

_“My respect for the entire law-enforcement/judicial edifice in
America has been eroding for years … it is now less than zero. I
hold the entire system in open contempt. Any member of it is
presumptively a ‘domestic enemy.’”_

_“LOL! COOL! We never have to pay attention to the corrupt American
courts or the corrupt American governments, ever again. They’ll have
to enforce their will at gunpoint, from now on. Let the games
begin!”_

And an accelerationist by the name of FNU LNU was thrilled by the
opportunity the conviction provided: “Better than leaving the
current politicized justice system in place, because it’ll bring
matters to a head sooner.”

PEOPLE DON’T SAY THIS KIND OF STUFF in diners to strangers. I guess
that’s why you’ll never read about it in _The_ _New York Times_.
Or _The_ _Boston Globe_.

I just got an email from the _Globe_ flogging their latest safari
[[link removed]] into
the wilds of red America, where the intrepid reporter chatted with
“the morning regulars at Sid Harvey’s Family Diner” in the town
of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. “‘It Won’t Make Any
Difference,’” ran the headline. “In

This Wisconsin Community, Trump’s Conviction Isn’t a
Game-Changer.”

Well, maybe visit other communities in the Badger State. Say, Layton
Park
[[link removed]] in
Milwaukee. The menudo at El Jimador
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share a bowl with the kid from Politico and ask around. How will this
verdict affect 2024? Some may tell you how it already has. A dear
friend of mine, Mexican American, told his Honduran foster daughter to
be extra careful when she’s out with her friends. I imagine a lot of
conversations like that are happening in America right now.

“I am genuinely frightened for our country at this moment,” a
Freeper calling themselves mudflats said. I am frightened for our
country, too. Print that, Politico. Print that.

_Rick Perlstein is the author of a four-volume series on the history
of America’s political and cultural divisions, and the rise of
conservatism, from the 1950s to the election of Ronald Reagan. He
lives in Chicago._

_Used with the permission © The American Prospect, Prospect.org
[[link removed]], 2024. All rights reserved. _

_Read the original article at
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