It’s like what Michael Cohen said about how Trump would give you criminal instructions by dropping some prima facie innocuous keywords and a couple significant looks.
It’s a mob tactic, designed in part to maintain plausible deniability when they start arresting people.
For years now the right has been demonstrating over and over that when they use violent discourse, they don’t intend for it to remain confined to discourse, and all the evidence you should need of that is how many people hear violent right wing discourse and then go out and kill.
They’re not “crazy”. They’re good students and they’ve been paying attention.
As with many things, there is no equivalent to this on the left. There is no nudge-nudge-wink-wink “when we say fight we literally mean beat some people to death” language.
And this is why all the both-sidesism about the political violence on the left is at best foolish nonsense and at worst dangerously disingenuous.
On the left, lethal political violence is highly sporadic. On the right it’s *endemic*. It is ideologically baked-in.
But it requires more than two seconds of thinking about it at a third grader’s level of analysis to see that, so people don’t see it. Because they’re lazy, because it’s uncomfortable, because it’s inconvenient.
And because, as I said last week, there is an overwhelming human bias toward pretending things aren’t as bad as they are and those people over there really aren’t actually *that* much worse than these other people and in fact they’re both basically the same.
The Republican Party is a party of violent white supremacist seditionist cult members, if there was any remaining shred of an excuse for not seeing that it’s gone now, and yet there are so, so very many people who will be continuing to pretend they didn’t see what they saw.
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Apparently other members were just pushing through and they eventually let her onto the floor without searching her bag so I feel like maybe the Capitol police still don’t have the plot
...or they do have the plot and the plot is “security theater to which we BARELY commit unless it’s inconvenient to do so”
I’m sorry, y’all, the fact that Pelosi doesn’t have Capitol police escorting people who refuse to wear masks and haven’t submitted to searches OFF THE FLOOR AT GUNPOINT tells me that she still doesn’t totally understand what she’s dealing with, you cannot convince me otherwise.
If you think the answer to this problem is a new anti-domestic terrorism law and/or giving law enforcement more power please allow me to refer to you the entire history of those things
If you think they’ll be used only against actual violent white supremacists, again: basically all of US history including just now
The FBI already has the ability to go after extremists and there were analysts that were sounding the alarm about white supremacists like over a decade ago. Republicans freaked out and shouted them down and suppressed their reports and nothing came of it.
I’m really hoping that at some point soon some Dems will get up on the House and Senate floors and ask their Republican colleagues straight-up why they’re trying to kill people.
Nothing more confrontational than that, just: “Hey, so out of curiosity, why? What’s going on? Do you guys need to talk to someone or something?”
These are not your “colleagues”. They are not your coworkers. They are not your friends. They have established themselves as your enemies and they are literally trying to kill you.