Our Constitutional Republic faces a clear and present danger more deadly than that of the Civil War. The danger is the Republican Party, a "political party" that has sold out to white supremacy, autocracy, misogyny, and hatred of everything our Nation stands for. Republicans dismiss any sense of a common American narrative. The "Republican Party" is an outlier in our history – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of social and economic policies that have sustained us for a century; unwilling to compromise; dismissive of evidence, fact, and science; dismissive of the legitimacy of any viewpoint except their own. America needs to face the simple, frightening fact that the Republican Party is a clear and present danger to our Constitutional Republic.
The 2nd American Civil War already started years ago
The 2nd American Civil War won’t be fought between opposing armies on a grand battlefield. It will be fought in the streets, in the theaters, churches, synagogues, Walmarts and grocery stores. It won’t be a battle between uniformed combatants, it will be a series of loner attacks by mostly individual or small groups of terrorist insurgents targeting vulnerable unprotected targets for their own political reasons who will be completely unsuspecting and caught completely by surprise like an IED left hidden in the streets of Falluja or Gaza city.
They’ll arrive wearing flag hats, flag shirts, flag pants, and flag underwear, claiming to be “patriots” fighting for “freedom” against the “vermin” hoards. It will seem to come completely out of nowhere, and it’s already been happening.
Here’s an article by David Newiert from the Southern Poverty Law Center discussing the issue of Right-Wing spree killings and Stochastic Terrorism.
4 years ago while Trump was still in the White House we had already suffered from Terrorist attacks in many parts of the country, but the violence and attacks actually started long before that. As the video points out there was James David Adkissan in 2008 who attacked a Unitarian Church in Knoxville killing 2 people because he felt it was “too Liberal.”
On July 27, 2008, a politically motivated fatal shooting took place at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. Motivated by a desire to kill liberals and Democrats, gunman Jim David Adkisson fired a shotgun at members of the congregation during a youth performance of a musical, killing two people and wounding seven others.
Keith Luke — the 22-year-old white supremacist accused of carrying out a racially motivated rape and murder spree in Brockton, Mass., the day after Barack Obama was inaugurated as the nation’s first black president — appeared in court last week with a jagged swastika freshly carved into his forehead.
Authorities said Luke somehow managed to carve the swastika himself within a special unit at Plymouth County Jail, where he’s locked down for 23 hours a day and monitored by camera in his cell. As the Brockton daily newspaper The Enterprisereported: “It was not known exactly how he was able to etch the swastika into his flesh, but Luke is given a disposable razor to use for 20 minutes, three times a week.”
Dannie Roy Baker, Miramar Beach, FL: Baker, a former GOP volunteer angry about immigration, opens fire on a roomful of Chilean students, killing two and injuring three. He pleads no contest to murder.
At approximately 7:11 a.m. EDT, 22-year-old Richard Poplawski opened fire on two Pittsburgh Police officers responding to a 9-1-1 call from Poplawski’s mother, who was attempting to get the police officers to remove her son from the home. Three police officers were ultimately confirmed dead, and another two were seriously injured.
According to Pittsburgh Police Chief, Nathan Harper, Poplawski was armed with a semi-automatic AK-47-style rifle, a shotgun and three handguns (a .357 Magnum revolver, a .380-caliber handgun and a .45-caliber handgun), protected by a bulletproof vest, and had been lying in wait for the officers. According to police and witnesses, he held police at bay for four hours as the fallen officers were left bleeding nearby, their colleagues unable to reach them. More than 600 rounds were fired by the SWAT teams and Poplawski.
[…]
Edward Perkovic, a friend of Poplawski, said the gunman feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on the way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon”. Perkovic also stated that Poplawski “didn’t like the Zionists controlling the media and controlling, you know, our freedom of speech” and that “He didn’t like the control of the guns that was about to happen. He believed everything our forefathers put before us and thought that it was being distorted.” Another longtime friend, Aaron Vire, said that Poplawski feared President Obama was going to take away his rights.
WASHINGTON An 88-year-old white supremacist with a rifle walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the capital’s most visited sites, on Wednesday afternoon and began shooting, fatally wounding a security guard and sending tourists scrambling before he himself was shot, the authorities said.
The gunman was identified by law enforcement officials as James W. von Brunn, who embraces various conspiracy theories involving Jews, blacks and other minority groups and at one point waged a personal war with the federal government.
The white supremacist charged with the deadly shooting at the national Holocaust museum last year originally wanted to kill White House senior adviser David Axelrod, Time magazine reported Thursday.
James von Brunn, who died in January in a prison hospital awaiting trial, reportedly viewed Axelrod as a priority target who was easier to reach than President Obama”Obama was created by Jews,” he wrote, according to Time. “Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do.”
WICHITA FALLS, Texas – A 22-year-old man with a violent history shot up a crowded bookstore cafe, wounding four women, then walked down the street and killed a bar worker before holing up in a home where he killed himself, authorities said Wednesday.
Ross William Muehlberger’s rampage, which ended early Wednesday after he shot himself in the head, may have been motivated by racial hatred, police Sgt. Joe Snyder said.
“A recurring theme from witness statements was that the suspect was yelling racial epithets,” Snyder said.
Witness Harmony Langford told the Wichita Falls Times Record News that the gunman shouted “White power!” before fatally shooting 23-year-old bar doorman Tim Donley.
PORTLAND, Ore. – David Joseph “Joey” Pedersen, 34, of Portland, was sentenced today to life in prison, without possibility of release, for carjackings resulting in the death of Cody Faye Myers, of Lafayette, Oregon, and Reginald Alan Clark, of Eureka, California in October 2011. U.S. District Judge Ancer L. Haggerty imposed two life sentences, to be served concurrently. Pedersen was previously convicted and sentenced to life in prison in Snohomish County, Washington for the related murders of his father, David Jones “Red” Pedersen, and stepmother, Leslie Mae “Dee Dee” Pedersen in September 2011.
But while his motive may never be known, the details of his life suggest that the path toward his final act began at a U.S Army base that was home to a thriving neo-Nazi underworld during the time Page was stationed there in the mid-1990s.
Page’s journey down that path took him deep into the world of hate music and, more recently, into the “patched” membership ranks of a violent skinhead crew. It ended on Aug. 5 in the Milwaukee suburb of Oak Creek, where he murdered six Sikhs, including the temple’s president and three priests, and wounded four other people. Lt. Brian Murphy, the first police officer to confront Page at the scene, survived the encounter but was shot in the throat and hit by eight more bullets when he came to the aid of Page’s victims. Page was finally felled by an officer’s rifle shot to the stomach as he stood firing in the temple’s parking lot; Page then put his pistol to his own head and fired.
“White men have become the biggest cowards ever to walk the earth. The world has never witnessed such yellow cowards. We’ve sat back and allowed the Jews to take over our government, our banks, and our media. We’ve allowed tens of millions of mud people to invade our country, steal our jobs and our women, and destroy our children’s futures. America is no longer ours. America belongs to the Jews who rule it and to the mud people who multiply in it.” –Radio ad in U.S. Senate campaign, 2010
“Today, true statistics be told, we’re less than half. And we’re dropping fast, while the dark peoples multiply like rats all around us, and as more tens-of-millions of them invade our country from all over the world. Our race is drowning literally in seas of colored mongrels. Our people buy almost twice as many caskets as cradles. Your race is dying before your eyes.” –“Attention White Youth!” Miller’s website, March 12, 2010
Elliot Rodger killed six people in a stabbing and shooting spree in Isla Vista, California, in May 2014.
Before he turned the gun on himself, the 22-year-old posted a “retribution” video to YouTube and emailed a lengthy autobiographical document to almost two dozen people he knew. Son of a Hollywood filmmaker, he grew up in a life of privilege and relative affluence. The 141-page document he distributed in his final hours explores that upbringing, his mental health and his deep-rooted loathing of women, fuelled by an intense frustration over his virginity.
In the document Rodger proclaimed: “I am the closest thing there is to a living God”
On the video he posted to YouTube, Rodger sat in a BMW car his family had given him and complained about being a virgin at 22, saying he had “never even kissed a girl”.
Jerad and Amanda Miller had a reputation for spouting racist, anti-government views, bragging about their gun collection and boasting that they’d spent time at Cliven Bundy’s ranch during a recent standoff there between armed militia members and federal government agents, according to residents at an apartment complex where it appeared the couple lived. […] Miller’s online presence over the last year includes dozens of Facebook posts and 20 YouTube videos posted under the username USATruePatriot.
The posts and videos depict Miller as a man frustrated with the government to the point where he considered violence.
“To stop this oppression, I fear, can only be accomplished with bloodshed,” Miller wrote in a lengthy rant posted on June 2.
One video posted on Oct. 15, 2012 shows Miller dressed up in full face make-up as the Joker, Batman’s comic book nemesis. The video, titled “joker for president” shows a costumed Miller ranting in front of an American flag.
“Year after year I’ve watched you Americans, my fellow citizens, vote for tyranny,” Miller said. “His other online posts mention having visited the Bundy ranch during Cliven Bundy’s showdown with the federal government in April. They also touch on topics ranging from Benghazi to gun rights to the militia movement.
And again in 2014 white supremacist Dylann Roof radicalized to believe that black people pose a violent threat to white people goes to the Emmanuel AME Church and kills 9 people.
Before killing nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Roof learned to hate in a classroom of his own making. A classroom entirely online, its climate angry, its claims inaccurate at best, inflammatory at worst.
His final thesis: a manifesto cloaking white nationalism as a martyr’s cause. Roof believed the white race was in danger and complained there was “no one doing anything but talking on the internet.” In his mind, the logical next step was to take the culture war offline—and turn hateful words into one of modern history’s most extreme acts of hate. But the initial step that led Roof to murder nine people was not extreme: He took a curiosity and turned it into a Google search.
Roof’s curiosity was first piqued by the trial of Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. He searched for the case he kept hearing about on the news and, after reading a Wikipedia article, determined that Zimmerman was “in the right” to see Martin as a threat.
Roof then typed “black on White crime” into the search engine, hit enter and fell into a wormhole. Top results sent him to the website for the Council of Conservative Citizens, which offered page after page featuring what Roof referred to as “brutal black on White murders.”
In 2015, John Russell Houser – inspired directly by the shootings committed by Roof and his manifesto, stages his own murder spree going into a movie theater with a gun killing 2 people and wounding 9.
John Russell “Rusty” Houser – the gunman in Thursday’s movie theater shooting – quietly arrived in Lafayette, Louisiana, this month, a 59-year-old man with a string of arrests and a record of “extreme erratic behavior,” according to court documents. He’d been evicted from his house the previous year.
He also left an online record of far-right, anti-government ideas that alarmed the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Houser praised Hitler for his “pragmatism” and lauded former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and the Westboro Baptist Church, among others, the SPLC website said.
SAN FRANCISCO — A former U.S. Air Force staff sergeant and alleged member of the “boogaloo” extremist movement pleaded guilty Friday in the fatal shooting of a federal security officer in the San Francisco Bay Area amid large 2020 protests against police brutality. Steven Carrillo, 33, changed his plea to guilty to a federal murder charge in the killing of David Patrick Underwood and to the attempted murder of Underwood’s colleague after federal prosecutors last month agreed not to seek the death penalty. The men were shot on May 29, 2020, while they stood in front of a federal building in Oakland as hundreds marched on the streets.
[…]
“I aligned myself with the anti-government movement and wanted to carry out violent acts against federal law enforcement officers in particular,” Carrillo said.
On top of all that, various far-right groups have been staging terrorist attacks on the power grid, using guns to destroy transformers and knock out power to thousands of customers.
Sarah Clendaniel
Far-right groups are increasingly talking about attacking the US power grid to cause chaos and advance their cause, terrorism experts say.
The warnings come as the founder of a neo-Nazi group and a woman appeared in court on Friday charged with plotting to attack power installations around Baltimore.
Brandon Russell, 27, and Sarah Clendaniel, 34, both pleaded not guilty. They face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
In messages revealed in court filings, Ms Clendaniel described their alleged plot as “legendary” and hoped it “would completely destroy the whole city”.
The pair were arrested before the alleged attack was carried out. Prosecutors said thousands would have been left without power if it had gone ahead.
Attacks against infrastructure are a long-standing obsession of far-right and white nationalist groups, and they are increasingly being discussed in extremist spaces online.
[…] In addition to the alleged Baltimore plot, investigators are looking into several recent attacks on power installations, including incidents in North Carolina, Oregon and Washington state.
The North Carolina attack, in Moore County in early December, knocked out power to 35,000 people for several days. Nobody has been arrested and the investigation is ongoing.
Authorities say there’s no known connection between the alleged Baltimore plot and the North Carolina attack, and the motive for most of the other attacks is unknown.
Mr Russell is the founder of Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group that has been linked to murders, bombings and plots in the United States and other countries. It is banned in the UK and Canada. He spent time in prison on explosive charges, and while locked up met Ms Clendaniel, who was convicted of armed robbery, according to an indictment.
Once they were released, the pair allegedly began planning to attack electricity substations in the Baltimore area, looking at openly available material about power stations and attempting to obtain a gun. But – prosecutors claim – a person who they thought was a potential co-conspirator was actually an FBI source.
In 2020, five men, including three former US Marines, were indicted on weapons and conspiracy charges. Authorities said they had plotted to attack the power grid during a meeting in Ohio. The following year, three white nationalists pleaded guilty to plotting to attack power installations.
All of these men and women were motivated directly by Right-Wing hate. It may have varied from hating the government, hating Jews, hating black people, hating immigrants or women, but all of it was hate. Hate which has been stoked to greater and greater heights online, on right-wing media and directly by politicians such as Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Mike Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert.
Most of these killings happened before Trump entered the White House and made hate and anger the main central tenant of the Republican party. Since then the “Great Replacement Theory” has become one of the key rallying cries of the party.
Like the rambling manifestos of Elliot Rodger and Dylann Roof this theory has been used at least 5 times to sponsor mass killings around the nation and world.
It was used in Christchurch New Zealand in a shooting that killed 51 Muslims, the shooter leaving a manifesto of his own that praised Donald Trump as the “savior of the white race.”
On March 15, 2019, at approximately 1:40 PM local time, Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian gym trainer with no previous criminal history1 who was active on extreme-right internet forums, entered the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he allegedly shot dead 42 people. Exiting the mosque, he allegedly shot another person on the pavement before driving the short distance to Linwood mosque where he allegedly continued his killing spree. In the space of 36 minutes, Tarrant allegedly killed 49 people. Two more subsequently died of their wounds, bringing the death toll to 51.2 New Zealand, which until this point had experienced terrorism as a “latent” threat rather than a “lived reality,”3 suffered the single largest loss of life to terrorism in its history.
“The horrific attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue on October 27, 2018, stole the lives of 11 innocent victims, shattered their families, gutted their congregation and the Pittsburgh community, and struck fear in the lives of Jewish people across the country,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “Hate crimes like this one inflict irreparable pain on individual victims and their loved ones and lead entire communities to question their very belonging. All Americans deserve to live free from the fear of hate-fueled violence and the Justice Department will hold accountable those who perpetrate such acts.”
EL PASO, Texas (AP) — A white Texas gunman who killed 23 people at a Walmart in 2019 returned to court Wednesday for sentencing in a mass shooting that targeted Hispanic shoppers in the border city of El Paso.
Patrick Crusius, 24, is set to receive multiple life sentences after pleading guilty to federal hate crime and weapons charges in one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history. Although the federal government did not seek the death penalty, Texas prosecutors have not taken lethal injection off the table under a separate case in state court.
Ten people were gunned down at a Buffalo supermarket May 14 in a horrifying mass shooting that officials were quick to label as “pure evil” and racially motivated.
The shooting stunned a community basking in a warm May afternoon, with shoppers filling the Tops in a predominantly Black neighborhood at 1275 Jefferson Ave.
Of the 13 people shot, 11 were Black and two were white, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said. All 10 of the victims who were killed were Black, said Erie County District Attorney John J. Flynn Jr. The suspect is white. The killings are being investigated as a racist hate crime.
It was out of this world that the thirty-two-year-old Anders Behring Breivik stepped when, on the afternoon of July 22, 2011, he set out from his mother’s flat in Oslo’s West End, changed into a police uniform, parked a van containing a bomb, which he had spent the spring and summer making, outside Regjeringskvartalet, lit the fuse, and left the scene. While the catastrophic images of the attack, which killed eight people, were being broadcast across the world, Breivik headed to Utøya. That was where the Workers’ Youth League had its annual summer camp. There Breivik shot and killed sixty-nine people, in a massacre that lasted for more than an hour, right until the police arrived, when he immediately surrendered.
He wanted to save Norway. Just a few hours before detonating the bomb, Breivik e-mailed a fifteen-hundred-page manifesto to a thousand recipients, in which he said that we were at war with Muslims and multiculturalism and that the slaughter of the campers was meant to be a wake-up call. He also uploaded to YouTube a twelve-minute video that revealed, with propagandistic simplicity, what was about to happen in Europe: the Muslim invasion.
Over and over again, this virulent tribal hatred has been driving people to commit mass murder. It’s hatred for Muslims, it’s hatred for Jews, for Black people, for Latinos, for Asians, for LGBTQ people, and for Women.
And just this week there have been a steady series of hundreds of bomb threats issued against Airports and synagogues across the south.
There has also been an uptick of violence and murders against the gay and trans community where 33 of them have been killed during the last year.
All of this is stoked and fired up by the right wing. Just in this past week, we had Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy ranting in public and on camera about the “Great Replacement Theory.”
And he doesn’t get any push-back or even comment about it from the other candidates or the moderators. He gets celebrated.
CNN analyst Van Jones went after Ramaswamy for his dangerous comments, but then Ramaswamy told him to “Just shut the fuck up, man” to laughs by a MAGA crowd. He then posted a video of Jones talking about accepting demographic changes which will mean that eventually, the nation will no longer have a white majority. That’s just factually true, but it won’t happen for decades. He wasn’t saying it was Democratic policy to replace white people, Jones was just admitting that the demographics will change over time, it’s not a “plan” it’s accepting reality. But that change doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be a simultaneous political shift from Right to Left, particularly since the undocumented migrants they complain about can’t legally vote, so that remains to be seen. Only their children, born in the U.S. will be able to vote in 18 years. Even migrants who come legally can’t become citizens and gain the ability to vote for at least a decade. So the “plan” is to wait for 10-18 years for it to all go into effect? Really?
Instead of admitting this reality, people on the right claim that the Trump base is “out for more blood” as Reince Priebus stated this weekend.
“Not particularly, because I think you’re all misreading the electorate,” Priebus insisted. “I think that the electorate is not looking for less blood. I think they’re looking for more blood.”
“I think, as I’ve said before, people are looking for a bigger middle finger this time than they were in 2016,” he added.
Or they try to claim that Trump’s comments about “poisoning the blood” of the nation were really just a criticism of Democratic policies.
[Abby] Phillip asked Malliotakis directly: “Is Trump right that immigrants are poisoning the blood of this country?”
But the congresswoman tried to deflect.
“I don’t think that’s what he was saying,” she said. “When he said ‘they are poisoning,’ I think he was talking about the Democratic policies. I think he was talking about the open border policy.”
“You know, what’s actually poisoning America is the amount of fentanyl that’s coming over the open border,” she added, trying to steer the conversation.
But Phillip wasn’t standing for that, blasting Trump’s “rhetoric of Hitler and Mussolini.”
“Congresswoman,” she said, “You’re saying that’s what you think he is saying. But he was pretty clear, he was saying that the immigrants that are coming in, he says that they are poisoning the blood of the nation.”
“He never said immigrants are poisoning, though,” Malliotakis said. “He didn’t say the words immigrants, I think he was talking about Democratic policies.
Clearly frustrated, Phillip hit back: ”He was talking about people.”
Malliotakis then tried to explain that Trump really loves immigrants.
“He was married to immigrants,” she said. “He’s hired immigrants.”
Yes, Trump has been married to immigrants – but both of them have been White-skinned Slavic European immigrants. He would never claim that they’ve “poisoned his blood” because he’s a eugenicist and white supremacist.
And actually what Trump said was this:
“You know, when they let — I think the real number is like 15, 16 million people into our country — when they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said.
He was very definitely talking about immigrants.
But as I’ve stated many times, the border is not “open”, 65-70% of those encountered at the border — which means literally over 4 million people — have been arrested and expelled by Biden’s Homeland Security. That’s not at all “open.”
And lastly, instead of getting GOPers to condemn this dangerous rhetoric, or even ask for Trump to apologize, we have people like Malliotakis rationalizing and excusing it, Ramaswamy repeating it, and Tommy Tuberville doubling down on it.
“I’m mad he wasn’t tougher than that because if you’re seeing what happens at the border.,, we’re being overrun,” he told the reporter.
The worst part however, is the deluded denial these people live in. Trump has now said he’s “never read Mein Kampf” as if being a plagiarist is the worst part of what he’s said lately.
The January 6 attack on the Capitol was the largest single terrorist event in history — but Trump, the GOP and their supporters can’t bring themselves to admit that. They can’t even admit that what happened was a coordinated terrorist event implemented by thousands of people all at once. They repeatedly say it was “just a peaceful protest.”
Yeah, right.
It doesn’t matter that Trump himself set the time, date and place. It doesn’t matter that Rudy Giuliani called for “Trial by Combat.” It doesn’t matter that Trump said “Fight”, “Fighting” and “Fight like Hell” 20 times because he also said “Peacefully” once. [How exactly do you “Fight like Hell – peacefully?”] It doesn’t matter that he personally sent a crowd he knew was armed to march on the Capitol – even though they didn’t have a permit for that march because they didn’t take security precautions – as if he didn’t know exactly what they would do once they got there. It doesn’t even matter that he watched the entire thing on television while sitting on his hands for almost 3 hours instead of calling the Capital Police, the Secretary of Defense, the National Guard, Homeland Security, the Secret Service or the FBI. He called no one, he did nothing. There’s no better evidence than his inaction that he wanted the attack to happen.
Yeah, but what we saw right in front of our own eyes didn’t happen. It was undercover FBI, secret informants and magical Antifa — not actual Trump supporters implementing the attack and the violence on police and threatening to “Hang Mike Pence.” It’s like it was all a Jedi Mind Trick.
“These are not the MAGAs you’re looking for.”
We’re constantly told by those same MAGAs that if Trump is convicted criminally for this, trying to steal the 2020 election with fake electors or he loses again in 2024 the “country will explode’ — as if they’re trying to hold the entire country hostage to their whims, but I’m here to tell you it already has been exploding. All of this rhetoric has led to hundreds of death threats, dozens hate-fueled attacks and political mass murders that have already been going on. They’ve been happening for years.
They’ve already been primed for violence as former FBI counter-intelligence Frank Figliuzzi explained this week on MSNBC. All they need is for Trump to say “Go.”
Donald Trump could be a guy who faces conviction on a number of charges in which a number of his followers, possibly a majority of his followers, maybe an overwhelming majority of them, think that these are unfair prosecutions… in one way or the other. What do you think about that because we, do, as a country need to think about that?” asked MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.
“It really makes the challenge of countering the threat of violence, the threat of domestic terrorism perhaps greater than we have seen in modern history because we have a candidate whose bread-and-butter approach is to attack institutions,” explained the national security expert.
He cited some of Trump’s language about not being from Washington or being an “outsider” who opposes bureaucrats and career civil servants.
“Now, lo and behold, Exhibit A, the very people I have been attacking and we don’t trust anymore because I’ve told you not to trust them, they’re going to put me in prison,” Figliuzzi continued, characterizing Trump’s thoughts.
It’s why if Trump is put in jail for breaking the gag orders it will add “wind to his sails,” he explained.
“It is going to convince his hard-core followers that he was right, that the institutions are wrong, and that we do need to break the mold,” Figliuzzi closed. “Sadly, breaking the mold may be literally violence for some of those followers, and law enforcement’s challenge is to get out ahead of this. And it is almost impossible to do every single time.”
And frankly, this fascist plan is broader than Trump himself as Jeff Sharlet, author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War has discussed on Democracy Now.
JEFF SHARLET: But in terms of not taking it seriously, I’m glad a lot of the press is still covering this race like it’s a horse race, as opposed to a last gasp of the closest thing we could — you know, let’s hold on to what we have of American democracy. We’re starting to look at something called Project 2025. This is a 900-page blueprint put together by Trump’s allies, the Heritage Foundation, funded by Koch money. Press has made a lot of Koch — about the Kochs endorsing Nikki Haley, but they’re covering their bets. A 900-page blueprint for day one. Remember, Trump says, from day one — “On day one, I’m going to be a dictator,” which is another bit of language that I think he’s kind of rope-a-doping the press. “I’m going to be a dictator. I’m just joking. No, no, on day one, I’m going to be a dictator. Just joking. What was that word I kept saying? Dictator.” Again, even more important than the substance is the spectacle, the drama, that makes him the exciting and, in fascist terms, the man of action. Then you’ve got this 900-page document that lays out, agency by agency, with every right-wing think tank on board, with the personnel, 20,000 personnel, already figured out, recruiting 5,000 lawyers to fight for this, with — talking about concentration camps, domestic surveillance, all the facets of a full-sized fascist government. He doesn’t have to have read that, just like he doesn’t have to have read Mein Kampf, to hit those notes.
AMY GOODMAN: So, in the 2025 document that people should understand, this 30-chapter, as you said, 920-page document funded by the Heritage Foundation, the Koch brothers, talking about defunding the Department of Justice, dismantling the FBI, breaking up the Department of Homeland Security, Departments of Education and Commerce — and your title of your book, the subtitle of The Undertow, Scenes from a Slow Civil War, can you tease that out as we move into 2024, what you mean by a “slow civil war”?
JEFF SHARLET: I think the slow civil war — I mean, first of all, we look at the casualties of — that are already happening, people, pregnant people, forced to have children or suffering physically, even dying, the epidemic of trans and queer suicide, all these facets of a growing concentration of fascist policy. But the slow civil war also takes place through lawfare, through the laws that prevent people from getting the things they need. They are casualties of that.
What we see in that document is the blueprint for a massive acceleration of it. It’s an eight — the plan is based around 180 days. And they go back to — Heritage Foundation made its name by making a similar document for Ronald Reagan in 1980, 60% of which was implemented within the first six months of his administration. They cite that, and they say, “OK, but that was for Reagan. Now we’re in the age of Trump. We need to go much further.” That’s the term that they actually use, “much further.”
It won’t just be the MAGA loaners who will be a danger, under any future GOP President the entire federal government will be turned into a weapon against the people. Public services and healthcare for the vulnerable will be cut, police and federal forces will become an occupying army against the people, media outlets that dare to criticize the regime will face prosecution and defamation charges.
If, and likely when, Trump is convicted and he again loses his bid for the White House, his base will likely again erupt in outrage and anger. They will again point fingers, concoct excuses and conspiracy theories and they will lash out violently.
They will attack.
Their targets will be Jews (who they see as “globalists” implementing the Great Replacement and Great Reset theories), Muslims (who they blame for Terrorism), Asians (who they feel are responsible for Covid-19), African Americans (who they blame for rampant crime and the theft of the 2020 election), LGBTQ persons (who they blame for “tricking” their children into falsely believing that their gay or trans) and Women (who frequently vote for Democrats and in favor of emasculating man-hating feminism and reproductive rights.) They’re also likely to target the “corrupt” FBI, and perhaps the ATF as did Timothy McVeigh so many years ago in retaliation for the siege of Waco as he peddled copies of the Neo-Nazi The Turner Diaries around the country.
They will be the same targets that they’ve had for over two decades. Most of the attacks will probably be by more and more “Lone Wolves.” Most of them will be using guns. Some will use bombs as Super-Trumper Cesar Seyoc attempted when he sent faulty pipe bombs to Democrats and members of the media. Heaven help us if they pool their resources and gather yet again for a giant mass attack of dozens or thousands as they did on January 6th.
This will be worse, more chaotic and violent than ever.
But it won’t be new – it’ll just be more and more of what we’re already going through.
