Thread by @dynamicsymmetry

I’ve been struggling to articulate this thread to myself and yes, this is it.

He’s been teaching them a language, and in fact if anything he’s just piggybacking on an existing right wing thing that’s been around for a while.

https://twitter.com/alexandraerin/status/1349688841897201664

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.