Hi james,
Political violence is a sign of profound societal failure. It can never be the answer to our problems and is in fact the thing that we should strive hardest to prevent with our activism. The assassination attempt on Donald Trump must be condemned wholeheartedly by our side, in no small part because one of the primary reasons so many of us are working to prevent a Trump victory in November is because we reject political violence and those who wield it. Be they January 6th insurrectionists or would-be assassins, there can be no place in our body politic for those who would spill blood to achieve their goals.
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Unsurprisingly, Republicans are exploiting the shooting to attack and smear President Biden and Democrats in general. Mike Collins, a Republican lawmaker from Georgia, actually tweeted out that “Joe Biden sent the order,” a disgustingly irresponsible lie that would be shocking if it weren’t par for the course for the modern GOP.
The reliably inflammatory Marjorie Taylor Greene rushed to decry the attack as proof that conservatives are waging a “battle between GOOD and EVIL” and asserted that Democrats are pedophiles, infant murderers, and warmongers. She also claimed that Democrats were directly behind the attack, a baldfaced lie since we now know that the shooter was a registered Republican.
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The fact that the attempted killer was by all accounts a conservative — with his voter registration and former classmates attesting to as much — is a deeply inconvenient fact for the Republican propaganda machine. They now have to pretend that his political affiliation is irrelevant, a claim they certainly wouldn’t be making if it had turned out that he was a liberal. They can’t discuss the gun itself, since they’re the ones that blocked Democrats from banning assault weapons. They have no way to construct a coherent narrative out of this attempted assassination.
Unable to scapegoat Democrats for the killer, Republicans are instead insisting that the heightened political temperature in this country is solely the fault of Democrats. They are trying to convince America that Democrats calling Trump a fascist made an attempt on his life inevitable. The problem is that Donald Trump is a fascist. He wants to be dictator and suspend the Constitution, has admitted as much, and has already attempted to overthrow our democracy once. It’s not our fault that he’s fascist. It’s his.
Thankfully, the solution to Trump’s fascism is not and never will be violence. We live in a democracy so all that it will take to crush this wannabe-autocrat is enough people showing up to vote. By peacefully defeating MAGA fascism at the ballot box we can prove to the world that America as an idea still works. We can proudly assert that political violence is not a part of our civil grammar, consign Trumpism to the dustbin of history, and usher in four more years of peaceful prosperity.
Stay focused, stay energized.
Brian
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