1. Targeted bombing attacks (like the one the nation is currently facing) are criminal acts, but they are also political acts intended to intimidate and silence. We should think of them as speech acts as well as acts of violence.
2. Such acts of targeted silencing have a long history in the US. They were a major weapon which white people used to protect and extend white supremacy after slavery ended.
3. It began in 1865 when a white supremacist assassinated Abraham Lincoln and several of his Confederate associates targeted other members of Lincoln's Administration. pbs.org/wgbh/americane…
4. It continued with the creation of the KKK in 1865, which was a terrorist organization designed to silence newly freed people who tried to claim their political, legal, and economic rights during Reconstruction. pbs.org/wgbh/americane…
5. The Klan's influence went nationwide in the 1920s, expanding its mandate to silence not just African-Americans but also Catholics, Jews, and immigrants considered "not white." The cross burning was the KKK's unsubtle way of saying STFU. wnycstudios.org/story/rise-ku-…
6. During the Civil Rights movement, white supremacists used targeted killings (think Medgar Evers) and bombings (think "Bomingham" and those 4 girls killed in a church) to silence those working to integrate schools and end black disenfranchisement. naacp.org/naacp-history-…
7. Trump and most conservatives (even the Never Trumpers) continue to frame the current spate of bombings as a criminal matter. It certainly is that. But it's also more than that.
8. These bombings are a logical extension of Trump's political project--which involves seeking to dehumanize, intimidate, and silence one's political opponents rather than engage with and persuade them.
9. Democracy depends upon nonviolent contestation. The resort to violence is the end of democratic engagement. This applies in the realm of rhetoric as well as in the realm of action.
10. When Trump uses his position of power to threaten to imprison his political opponents, when he calls his fellow citizens who work in the media "enemies of the people," when he fantasizes about what "2nd Amendment people" might do to Hillary, he is inciting violence.
11. Innumerable times across the Jim Crow south, black people would be subtly reminded by powerful white people (mayors, police officers, business owners) what "a shame it would be if something happened" to a local civil rights leader.
12. For every one targeted bombing or assassination, there were thousands of such low key conversations, "peaceful" conversations designed to urge someone to be silent, conversations backed up with an implicit threat of violence. The iron fist inside the velvet glove.
13. This is why this current wave of targeted bombing is distinct from what McVeigh or the Unabomber did. Neither had a President or a political party which instigated their actions and suggested their behavior was a reasonable (if misguided) response to real grievances. 
14. Neither McVeigh or the Unabomber had a massive media apparatus like Fox News prepared to obfuscate the meaning of their actions and suggest that maybe the targets of their violence bore some responsibility for it.
15. That is why the appropriate historical analogue for this wave of targeted bombing is not 9/11 or McVeigh or the Unabomber or the Weather Underground, but rather the ubiquitous white supremacist violence of the Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Era.
16. Donald Trump doesn't just want to defeat Democrats at the polls, he wants to completely delegitimize and destroy them. The @gop is using voter suppression to do that work at the state level, and Trump is using rhetoric on Twitter and elsewhere to do the same.
17. The Trumpist @gop has committed itself to a fundamentally illiberal form of political engagement, because it refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the opposition and those who vote for them.
18. Targeted bombings are just a more extreme (and explicitly illegal) manifestation of the @gop's increasingly illiberal form of political engagement. Terrorism is illiberalism. Terrorism carried out on behalf of political leaders (and implicitly condoned by them) is fascism.
19. Such illiberal fascism is arguably one way to describe what slavery was, and then what Jim Crow was...an utter refusal to acknowledge the political and legal legitimacy of a portion of the population, backed up by threats of violence should someone get "too uppity."
