The 3 one-term presidents who preceded the Civil War-- Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan-- are rated by historians among the worst this country has ever been cursed with. Before Trump, Buchanan was considered the worst president in history, Pierce the 3rd worst and Fillmore the 7th worst. Perhaps if they hadn't wound up in the White House, the Civil War would never have happened, especially Buchanan. None of them did anything to diffuse the growing problem when it could have been diffused. Their inactivity reminds me of how Biden is dealing with the MAGA movement now.
As expected, the new Elon Musk Twitter is already a hot zone of racism, hatred, anti-Semitism and Trumpism. Reporting for Bloomberg Friday evening, Davey Alba wrote that “Dr. Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University, said as soon as Musk took control of Twitter, online trolls began encouraging each other to push the boundaries on Twitter. ‘Unfortunately, this spike in hateful language is entirely predictable,’ said Tromble, who has studied Twitter for years. ‘For most of these trolls, it’s a game. But for others, including certain political influencers, saying hateful, outlandish things helps them increase their audience and make money. And they see this as a golden opportunity to gain even more attention.’… [O]n Friday, some conservative politicians and pundits saw the platform coming into his ownership as a symbolic win. ‘FREEDOM OF SPEECH!!!!’ posted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, from her official Twitter account on Thursday evening, minutes after news of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter broke. Greene’s personal account was permanently banned by Twitter earlier this year for repeated violations of its Covid-19 misinformation policies. ‘Just wait until tomorrow,’ she said in another tweet one minute later. On Friday, Greene tweeted, simply: ‘We are winning.’ The congresswoman gained at least 40,492 new followers in the hours since Musk took over Twitter, according to a Bloomberg analysis. Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican of Ohio, also cheered Musk’s takeover of Twitter with a post on Friday morning: ‘Free speech. Liberal tears.’ He gained at least 40,419 followers in the same timeframe, according to Bloomberg’s analysis. Other partisan accounts with records of repeatedly spreading false claims that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen tested the limits of speech under Twitter’s Musk regime. Robby Starbuck, a former congressional candidate in Tennessee and a pro-Trump activist, published a transphobic and misinformation-laden tweet on Thursday night, prefacing the post with: ‘Just testing the new Twitter out.’ The post collected 80,870 likes and shares on the platform."
Dozens of anonymous trolls signed up for Twitter in the past day according to an analysis by Bloomberg, broaching topics that had been heavily moderated by Twitter in the past— such as levying hate speech against protected groups and promoting falsehoods about Covid-19 and its vaccines.
Overnight and into Friday, racist slurs, anti-Semitic speech and offensive memes surged on the platform, with users egging each other on in far-right message boards such as The Donald, and on messaging apps like Telegram and on internet forums like 4chan.
For hours on Thursday afternoon, a racist slur remained at a low volume on Twitter, with less than a dozen or so mentions every five minutes across the entire platform, according to data from Dataminr, a social media analysis platform. After the news broke that Musk had closed the deal on Twitter, there was a 1,300% increase in the word appearing on the platform in various languages, including Spanish, Arabic and Portuguese. At its peak, the word appeared 170 times every five minutes, according to the data.
…On Friday, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism said it had identified a coordinated effort to spread anti-Semitic content on Twitter, “explicitly drawing inspiration from Elon Musk’s takeover.” Over the past day, the group said, it identified over 1,200 tweets and retweets on the platform that spread anti-Semitic memes.
Yesterday we saw how a profound American sickness has collapsed American politics. The assassination attempt against Nancy Pelosi was another demonstration of how the extreme right and extreme right-wing politicians— from Marjorie Traitor Greene (Q-GA), Lauren Boebert (Q-CO) and Mary Miller (Q-IL) to Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Randy Jackson (R-TX)— have captured the imaginations of mentally deranged and unstable simpleminds who have been drawn to radical politics and conspiracy theories. Yesterday, reporting for the NY Times, Katie Edmondson, wrote that “Members of Congress have watched warily in recent years as threats and harassment against them have crescendoed, privately worrying that the brutal language and deranged misinformation creeping into political discourse would lead to actual violence… Nearly two years after supporters of Trump stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, inspired by his lies of a stolen election, sending members of Congress and the vice president fleeing for their lives, the toxic stew of violent language, conspiracy theory and misinformation that thrives in digital spaces continues to pose a grave threat… The impact of conspiracy-laden forums that helped fuel the Jan. 6 riot can be seen at congressional town halls across the country, where Republican lawmakers often field questions based on disinformation from angry constituents convinced that they are facing not just political opponents with whom they disagree, but evil actors who must be destroyed.”
That Trump hasn’t be tried— let alone executed— has encouraged his followers to imagine that they can get away with anything. Friday evening Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) blew the whistle on his right-wing colleagues during an interview with Wolf Blitzer. “This is what happens,” Kinzinger said, “when you convince a third of the country that the election was stolen and that the other side is an enemy, You other-ize people. You convince folks that your political opposition is out to get you and your family. This is the kind of stuff that every Republican used to speak out on, just like every Democrat and Republican should speak when Steve Scalise was shot but the Republicans are not speaking out now…” He told Blitzer that some right-wingers are already calling the attack a false flag operation… We’ve lost our humanity.” He was describing a situation that sounds:
1- Trumpian
2- Satanic
3- Republican
This morning, Ashley Parker and her team wrote that “In 2010, Republicans launched a ‘Fire Pelosi’ project— complete with a bus tour, a #FIREPELOSI hashtag and images of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) engulfed in Hades-style flames— devoted to retaking the House and demoting Pelosi from her perch as speaker. Eleven years later, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) joked that if he becomes the next leader of the House, ‘it will be hard not to hit’ Pelosi with the speaker’s gavel. And this year, Pelosi— who Republicans have long demonized as the face of progressive policies and who was a target of rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol— emerged as the top member of Congress maligned in political ads, with Republicans spending nearly $40 million on ads that mention Pelosi in the final stretch of the campaign, according to AdImpact, which tracks television and digital ad spending… For many Democrats, the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband represents the all-but-inevitable conclusion of Republicans’ increasingly violent and threatening rhetoric toward their political opponents— a phenomenon that escalated under former president Donald Trump, who prided himself on his inflammatory oratory and who was often reluctant to denounce white nationalists and others spewing hate speech… McConnell and McCarthy declined to respond to Democratic accusations that GOP rhetoric has crossed the line into fomenting violence.”
And yesterday, Dave Frum pointed out that only his former party celebrates, extols and revels in political violence. Colorado crackpot Ken Buck is not just the member of Congress from the 4th district, he’s also the head of the Colorado Republican Party. He posted a video threatening (presumably performatively) to kill Biden and Beto if they moved to pass a law prohibiting AR-15s.
You don’t see Democratic House members wielding weapons in videos and threatening to shoot candidates who want to cut capital-gains taxes or slow the growth of Medicare. Democratic candidates for Senate do not post video fantasies of hunting and executing political rivals, or of using a firearm to discipline their children’s romantic partners. It’s not because of Democratic members that Speaker Nancy Pelosi installed metal detectors to bar firearms from the floor of the House. No Democratic equivalent exists of Donald Trump, who regularly praises and encourages violence as a normal tool of politics, most recently against his own party’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. As the formerly Trump-leaning Wall Street Journal editorialized on October 2: “It’s all too easy to imagine some fanatic taking Trump seriously and literally, and attempting to kill McConnell. Many supporters took Trump’s rhetoric about former Vice President Mike Pence all too seriously on Jan. 6.”
The January 6 insurrection is the overhanging fact above all this rhetoric of political violence. That was the day when Trump’s ally Rudy Giuliani urged, “Let’s have trial by combat”— and thousands heeded and complied. That terrible day, incited by President Trump and organized by Trump supporters, should have chastened American politics for a generation. It did not. Armed and masked vigilantes are intimidating voters right now in Arizona and other states, inspired by Trump’s continued election lies, as amplified by his supporters to this very day.
Paul Pelosi is the latest to pay a blood price for the cult of violence. Thankfully, he is expected to make a full recovery, but he won’t be the last victim of the cult. It won’t stop, but it must stop. As Abraham Lincoln wrote to a friend in 1863: “Among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and… they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.”