From sublime to the openly ridiculous, we have an apparent agreement between New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow and far-right PTL Club Televangelist Jim Bakker — he who is famous for serving five years in prison for embezzlement and was accused of rape as well as betraying his vows of marriage with his late ex-wife of Tammy Faye — who now threatens that if Trump is impeached there will be a “Christian uprising” leading leading to Civil War.
According to The Hill, Bakker told audiences of his “Prophecy & End Time News” show that “if [impeachment] happens, there will be a civil war in the United States of America.”
“The Christians will finally come out of the shadows,” Bakker continued, “because we are going to be shut up permanently if we’re not careful.”
One could be excused for doubting what Bakker says as hyperbole. But then again he’s not alone.
Many of us have wondered how exactly is it that Trump still retains the strength and intensity of support that he does among certain regions of America. Charles Blow breaks this down.
Establishment Republicans see him as a path to reversing the New Deal.
Steve Bannon-ists see him as a path to the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” All Republicans, but particularly the religious right, see him as a securer of conservative Supreme Court justices. The blue-collar Trump voters view him as a last chance to breathe life into the dying dream that waning industries and government-supported white cultural assurances can be revived. And the white nationalists, white supremacists, racists and Nazis — to the degree that they can be separated from the others — see him as a tool of vengeance and as an instrument of their defense.
All of these people see “the left’ as their enemy. They view the New Deal and the Great Society as misguided efforts that need to be deconstructed. That the gains of the Civil Rights Era against racial, gender and religious discrimination need to be peeled back and shut down. They see all of these as obstacles to their rise, progress and freedom. The militarists, militia men, Oath Keepers and III percenters see him as the “tough guy” that America needs to keep it safe from dirty muslims abroad and even more dirty Jews and their enablers domestically. And as Bakker alludes they all see Trump as their one-and-only savior, their one-and-only benefactor in the government. They believe that “Russia” is a hoax, “fake news”, merely a pretext and an excuse to bring Trump down and if that actually happens — they’re going to be mightily vexxed. Are their numbers are legion, including those who are already in law enforcement.
How do you raise an army?
You do that by dividing America into tribes and, as “president,” aligning yourself with the most extreme tribe, all the while promoting militarization among people who support you.
You do it by worshiping military figures and talking in militaristic terms.
You reverse Barack Obama’s executive order on gun control. As PolitiFact put it: “Obama’s order made it mandatory for the Social Security Administration to release information about mentally ill recipients of Social Security benefits. This information would then be included in background checks, essentially prohibiting people with mental illnesses to buy guns.”
You cozy up to police unions and encourage police brutality.
You do this by rescinding Obama-era limits on the militarization of police departments; a move that, according to The New York Times, allows these departments “access to military surplus equipment typically used in warfare, including grenade launchers, armored vehicles and bayonets.”
You do this by defending armed white nationalists and Nazis in Charlottesville.
Now that you’ve pandered and effectively marketed to these people the hate, fear and loathing that they crave and slowly, quite deliberately, brought them to a fever pitch of outrage and umbrage — what happens next when Trump’s own mendacity finally brings him low?
If these people should come to believe — as Trump would have them believe — that establishment systems have unfairly and conspiratorially acted to remove from office their last and only champion — another thing Trump would have them believe — what will they do?
What would Trump’s army do if he were compelled to leave but refused to graciously comply?
I believe some of them would take up arms and aim their wrath at the object of scorn that Trump has lined up for them to attack. That would of course mean the media as we’ve seen many vicious death threats issued against members of CNN’s staff and their families after their personal contact information was dumped on the web. Even the Daily Caller has noticed.
Several anchors and reporters at CNN have had their home addresses published and have received threats of rape and other violence in the wake of a story published by Andrew Kaczynski, who heads up the network’s investigative K-FILE team. Anti-network trolls are encouraging viewers to wrongly accuse CNN staffers of pedophilia and child pornography. There is also “tons of anti-Semitism.”
“Frustration” is the predominant feeling inside CNN, The Mirror has learned.
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Trump has long accused CNN of being “fake news” and “very fake news.”
The network seems to be fulfilling Trump’s need for a public enemy. In other words, CNN fills the void for “Low energy Jeb,” “Little Marco,” “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary.” In recent months, CNN has become a virtual punching bag for Trump supporters. The reason doesn’t often matter. Be it White House correspondent Jim Acosta bitching about press access or “New Day” host Chris Cuomo deleting a tweet, they’re drunk on hate and their perception that the network is not giving Trump a fair shake. They delight in clobbering the network as much and as often as possible.
That’s called stoking a power keg.
Now, I have my doubts that this will be quite as bad as they proclaim. Mostly because of what we’ve recently seen in Charlottesville with the martyring of Heather Heyer and the vicious bloody ambush attack on Deandre Harris — which has caused many to recoil in shock and horror — and more recently in Houston with Hurricane Harvey that at the moment has some people thinking twice about the “vengeance” trail, putting their differences aside and risking their own life and health to save others no matter who they might be.
I believe there will be isolated incidents which we have been seeing for decades of individual or small group acts of violence and terror among which the Right-Wing is vastly in the lead even over domestic Islamic terrorism as I’ve previously noted.
- From January 2008 to the end of 2016, we identified 63 cases of Islamist domestic terrorism, meaning incidents motivated by a theocratic political ideology espoused by such groups as the Islamic State. The vast majority of these (76 percent) were foiled plots, meaning no attack took place.
- During the same period, we found that right-wing extremists were behind nearly twice as many incidents: 115. Just over a third of these incidents (35 percent) were foiled plots. The majority were acts of terrorist violence that involved deaths, injuries or damaged property.
- Right-wing extremist terrorism was more often deadly: Nearly a third of incidents involved fatalities, for a total of 79 deaths, while 13 percent of Islamist cases caused fatalities. (The total deaths associated with Islamist incidents were higher, however, reaching 90, largely due to the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas.)
This of course doesn’t mean that many in the right-wing won’t go out of their way to gin up a “great Left-WIng” violent threat be it BLM, AntifA or BlackBloc. And they’re not entirely wrong.
Their faces hidden behind black bandannas and hoodies, about 100 anarchists and antifa— “anti-fascist” — members barreled into a protest Sunday afternoon in Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park.
Jumping over plastic and concrete barriers, the group melted into a larger crowd of around 2,000 that had marched peacefully throughout the sunny afternoon for a “Rally Against Hate” gathering.
Shortly after, violence began to flare. A pepper-spray-wielding Trump supporter was smacked to the ground with homemade shields. Another was attacked by five black-clad antifa members, each windmilling kicks and punches into a man desperately trying to protect himself. A conservative group leader retreated for safety behind a line of riot police as marchers chucked water bottles, shot off pepper spray and screamed, “Fascist go home!”
But it is interesting to note that not only does right-wing media heavily push the “Left Wing Violent Anarchist” meme — there are Pro-Russian Cyberbots pushing it too.
Bloomberg reports that Hamilton 68, an online dashboard designed by researchers at the Alliance for Securing Democracy to track the influence of Russian propaganda bots on social media, has found that the bots have been working to hype up the threat posted by Antifa, the anti-fascism group that endorses the use of violence to directly confront neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and other white supremacist organizations.
“A top theme users boosted the week after the Charlottesville clashes was ‘alt-right alarmism’ about the left-wing anti-fascist movement, known as Antifa, according to the dashboard findings,” writes Bloomberg. “The most-tweeted link in the Russian-linked network followed by the researchers was a petition to declare Antifa a terrorist group.”
However violent these protest based incidents may be, “on both sides”, you are not seeing AntifA or Black Bloc individuals go out and attack someone like Christian Prosperity Televangelist Joel Osteen the way that Right-Wing Terrorist Wade Michael-Page attacked a Sikh Temple killing six people.
Wade Michael Page, 40, was shot to death by police responding to the Sunday morning attack in the Milwaukee suburb of Oak Creek, the community's chief of police told reporters.
Sunday's attack occurred 16 days after a gunman killed 12 people and wounded scores in a Colorado movie theater, reigniting the gun-control debate in the United States.
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According to a man who described himself as an old Army buddy of Page's, the attacker talked about "racial holy war" when they served together in the 1990s. Christopher Robillard of Oregon, who said he lost contact with Page more than a decade ago, added that when Page would rant, "it would be about mostly any non-white person."
"He didn't seem like the type of person to go out and hurt people," Robillard said. "He would talk about it all the time, but it was more like he was waiting for the ... revolution to start."
No-one from AntifA or a confirmed member of BLM — even including the police shootings in Dallas which was done by a BLM critic who thought they were too passive — has gone out and done anything like that and no one in their right mind reasonably expects that they will. Let alone do it dozens of times as the noted by David Neiwert and the Investigative Fund.
Despite law enforcement concerns about lethal attacks against police sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement – captured in the slogan “Blue Lives Matter,” along with dozens of bills extending hate crimes protections to police – only two incidents of domestic terrorism in the database can plausibly be attributed to a perpetrator with such sympathies. They are the December 2014 killings of two police officers in their patrol car in New York City and the July 2016 sniper shooting in Dallas, which left five officers dead and nine wounded.
Adherents of sovereign citizen ideology – whose animus against what they see as an illegitimate police state can be so extreme that they have been known to open fire on officers at traffic stops – pose a far more extensive threat to law enforcement officers. The FBI, in a 2011 report, had said the sovereign citizen threat “likely will grow.” Sovereign citizens alone, according to the database, have been responsible for 14 attacks on law enforcement from 2008 to 2016, which led to the deaths of nine officers and injuries to 12. Of the 40 total plots and attacks targeting police, 83 percent involved right-wing anti-government extremists, resulting in 23 fatalities.
Though I think Blow and Bakker’s observations are both legitimate, I think they fail to realize how much the Civil War they fear has in fact already been raging under the radar as dozens of terrorist events by Right-Wingers which have been swept under the rug and simply treated as “single event” incidents or the act of someone who has simply “gone off.” But it’s more than that, much more.
Certainly there will be a backlash if Trump’s administration collapses into an ugly heap. Some of that will definitely be violent, but again one of the disadvantages of having the bogeymen of AntifA and BLM as “violent and dangerous” has an unintended side effect. The Right-Wingers are more prone to backing down when they know they face direct opposition as we saw recently in San Francisco.
A planned rightwing rally in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge that was downgraded to a news conference at a small park fizzled out further on Saturday, after San Francisco police swarmed the park and city workers erected a fence around it.
An organizer for the group Patriot Prayer later spoke in suburban Pacifica with a handful of supporters, after city leaders and police repeatedly voiced concerns that they would draw angry counter-protesters and spark violence.
Organizer Joey Gibson denied his group was looking for trouble. He said members had received anonymous threats on social media and feared civic leaders and law enforcement would fail to protect them.
Sometimes simply standing up to them, not necessarily with violence but with courage, is all it takes to shut these people down because at their heart many of them simply one thing: cowards.
Winning this “War” will not be a matter of physical fights, but of rhetorical ones. Philosophical and ideological battles and having the courage of our convictions to stand behind the ideology of peace, rather than the ideology of hate.
This is a war we can win, as long as we fully understand just who and what we’re up against.