Thread by @PatBlanchfield

have been saying this for months: it's a fucking miracle we've gotten where we these past few days without more of this or worse happening, it's not over yet, and chiding takes about justified anxiety over stochastic terror are a bad look

https://twitter.com/nbcwashington/status/1324687244016439296

the fact that there have been bad takes and much of the back and forth about a new "Civil War" has betrayed a set of blinkered assumptions both about the past and about the character of quotidian, structuring US political violence is not an excuse

the fact that many USers don't know about Dirty Wars in our own hemisphere, about the Years of Lead, or about what cops do all the time and can only think in terms of CSA vs Union 2.0 betrays exceptionalist, impoverished ideas of both civil war and what passes for civil society

one last thing: I don't think most people have ever fully processed how and why mainstream US memory and discourse has memoryholed extremist political violence and state repression in the 1970s - 1990s and we may well be due for getting a mix of the worst of both. so don't