By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Alison Porchnik in Manhattan
Recently a man was convicted by a jury of his peers of 34 felonies in a New York State criminal court. His high priced lawyers ruthlessly attacked the prosecution's witnesses, but the man for whatever reason chose not to testify in his own defense after stating out of court that he was innocent.
He was convicted, as so many people are in New York State.
Normally this is not even news in New York (or anyone else), except there was one difference: the man is the Republican nominee for President.
The reaction of his partisans to the verdict was grisly:
Supporters of former President Donald Trump, enraged by his conviction on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, flooded pro-Trump websites with calls for riots, revolution and violent retribution.
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| Convictions of criminals are not unusual |
After Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, his supporters responded with dozens of violent online posts, according to a Reuters review of comments on three Trump-aligned websites: the former president's own Truth Social platform, Patriots.Win and the Gateway Pundit.
Some called for attacks on jurors, the execution of the judge, Justice Juan Merchan, or outright civil war and armed insurrection.
“Someone in NY with nothing to lose needs to take care of Merchan,” wrote one commentator on Patriots.Win. “Hopefully he gets met with illegals with a machete,” the post said in reference to illegal immigrants.
On Gateway Pundit, one poster suggested shooting liberals after the verdict. “Time to start capping some leftys,” said the post. “This cannot be fixed by voting."
Threats of violence and intimidating rhetoric soared after Trump lost the 2020 election and falsely claimed the vote was stolen. As he campaigns for a second White House term, Trump has baselessly cast the judges and prosecutors in his trials as corrupt tools of the Biden administration, intent on sabotaging his White House bid. His loyalists have responded with a campaign of threats and intimidation targeting judges and court officials.
Quite the response from the party of law and order, although in the aftermath of wide Republican approval of the violent January 6 insurrection against the United States perhaps not surprising.
What was more surprising however was that the media was surprised by threats of violence and subversion from Republicans.
Here's former National Review gasbag and forced-birth extremist mouthpiece David French shocked to discover that his beloved Republican Party is violent and intolerant:
Two things happened that changed our lives, however, and in hindsight they’re related. First, in 2010, we adopted a 2-year-old girl from Ethiopia. Second, in 2015, Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign.
There was no way I could support Trump. It wasn’t just his obvious lack of character that troubled me; he was opening the door to a level of extremism and malice in Republican politics that I’d never encountered before. Trump’s rise coincided with the rise of the alt-right.
I was a senior writer for National Review at the time, and when I wrote pieces critical of Trump, members of the alt-right pounced, and they attacked us through our daughter. They pulled pictures of her from social media and photoshopped her into gas chambers and lynchings. Trolls found my wife’s blog on a religious website called Patheos and filled the comments section with gruesome pictures of dead and dying Black victims of crime and war. We also received direct threats.
Ah yes, the good old days before the Republicans became suddenly and unaccountably violent and extremist.
To be clear, there's no excuse for these vile attacks and threat of violence against someone who writes stuff (or even argues in court to force 12-year-old rape victims to bear their rapist's child, speaking of violence).
But why in the name of Clio was he surprised? What did he think was going to happen? Didn't he ever see Blazing Saddles?
The forces of white supremacy constitute the base of the Republican Party. Although their partisan preferences shifted about half a century ago, their love of violence and vengeance goes back a lot longer.
They were just as cute about it back then as the Tangerine-Faced Felon is today addressing heatstroke victims in Phoenix and Las Vegas.
In 1964, when an integrated crew of young people had the temerity to venture into the heart of white supremacist power to help Black citizen register to vote (a right they had been denied for 80 years or so), the white power structure welcomed them like this, according to the June 7, 1964 New York Times:
Two weeks later, three of those civil rights workers – James Cheney, 21, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24 – found out what happens when you push white supremacists too damn far:
Nor was this an isolated incident. As recounted in the Spy recently, in 1970, the Republican Party endorsed the deliberate slaughter of unarmed antiwar protesters at Kent State to the general approbation of Republican voters. The following week, white construction workers attacked peaceful antiwar protesters while the NYPD did nothing. The mob riot was lionized by white Republicans as a patriotic response to hippie scum.
Prof. Penny Lewis argued that
the Hard Hat Riot was more than just the straightforward narrative of ‘construction worker versus longhair.’ It was a convergence of genuine pro-Nixon sentiment, an administration eager to capitalize on a nation in crisis, and the dawn of a political realignment that would shape the nation's direction for generations.
That would be the realignment of angry violent white supremacists as the foundation of the Republican Party, with the results we see today.
As Republicans took control of the White House for 20 of the 24 years between 1968 and 1992 the threat of white violence subsided somewhat, because they held the levers of government power.
When Bill Clinton had the nerve to win the Presidency in1992, the white goons came back:
The militia movement in the United States is a right-wing extremist movement with an anti-government ideology and a strong emphasis on paramilitary activity. It emerged in 1993-1994, quickly engaging in criminal activity—often centered around illegal weapons and explosives—and violence, including some murders and numerous terrorist plots. After a significant slump in the early 2000s, the militia movement experienced a second major growth spurt starting in 2008 that has resulted in continuous activity since then, including more crime and violence.
The origins of the militia movement are rooted in longstanding traditions within the American far right as well as the reactions of anti-government extremists to certain specific events and controversies of the 1990s.
That assessment was made by that well known tool of woke Democrats, the Anti-Defamation League.
Which brings us to the Tangerine-Faced Felon and the violent insurrection of January 6, 2021, which the Republican nominee now claims was a justified action by freedom fighters. And hardly a Republican says otherwise.
Which is why the media's shocking discovery of the violent streak of Republican white supremacy sounds so odd to us:
Some startling beliefs in the United States were revealed in a study last fall by the University of California, Davis: Nearly one in three respondents said violence was justified to advance political objectives, like stopping an election from being stolen, or to “preserve an American way of life I believe in.”
Startling, really?
The threat of violent white extremism has been real and obvious for decades. If more evidence of that reality were needed, take a look at what The New York Times found fit to print on June 7, 1964.
The Times featured a front-page report on the 20th anniversary commemoration of D-Day. One surprise was that General Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander for the invasion, wasn't there, like Rishi Sunak, but for different reasons.
The hero of D-Day and last honorable Republican to sit in the Oval Office had other more important things on his mind, as explained by the lead story on the front page of the Times that Sunday:
Gen. Eisenhower had to skip the commemorations in Normandy because he realized that he was needed to fight a battle at home: the gallant but ultimately unsuccessful effort to save the Republican Party from the clutches of extremist white supremacy. Unlike D-Day, he failed, but not due to his lack of effort.
On the 80th anniversary of D-Day, our beloved mainstream media, unlike Eisenhower, is unable or unwilling to focus on the strategic imperative of our time: the defense of democracy against the current assault on it by the violent forces of insurrection and white supremacy.
We are, like England in 1940 and Eisenhower in 1964, on our own.
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