I won't share that Massie gun fetish tweet, but I will say that the right is trying not only to normalize, but to glorify violence as a political tool. Tweeting "Santa, please bring ammo" immediately after a would-be school shooter gets identified EXPRESSLY because he was...
caught searching for ammo on his phone in class isn't an accident, it's an intentional strategy to bombard us with violence until it's no longer shocking-- until it's normalized. Republicans applaud the insurrectionists as freedom warriors, they applaud Rittenhouse as a hero...
they applaud Ashli Babbitt as a martyr, they applaud Lauren Boebert's open Islamophobia even though it puts @IlhanMN's life at risk. This is a strategy to convince their supporters that violence is acceptable. And just like they resorted to violence after the Big Lie of 2020,
this is clearly part of a coordinated campaign to do it again in 2022 & 2024 if they lose. That's why ALL of this is coupled with more bogus election "audits," more stolen election rhetoric, more "voter integrity" laws, more purging of nonpartisan officials. It goes hand in hand.
Pretending like this is no big deal or burying our heads in the sand won't do anything to lower the temperature; it'll only leave us unprepared when more violence is inevitably born out of this. Willful ignorance is doing nothing to curb a trend that is boiling over on the right.
The media needs to stop pretending this is politics as usual, and the non-lunatic Republicans need to start putting the future of this country above their fear of a mean Trump press release. Or we'll look back at this moment wondering why we didn't step up when we had the chance.
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