Sunday, March 17, 2019

The Racist War Ratchets Up a Notch

I posted just last month how the more violently unhinged of trump's truest believers are ready to pull the trigger in his honor.

Just this weekend, the white supremacist violence went global when an angry White Man from Australia went on a mass shooting rampage across two Muslim mosques in Christchurch New Zealand, killing 50 (so far) and leaving tens more wounded some in critical condition.

I will not name the SOB here because the murdering bastard livestreamed his shooting to social media, submitted his racist manifesto to news outlets before he opened fire, and wants recognition as a goddamned hero to 'his people' hoping to become the spark to start the wingnut riots against The Dreaded Other.

Still, we know what he did. We know about the lives he took. Because he bought into the rhetoric that Muslims and non-Whites are conspiring to "replace" us all. Because he followed in the footsteps of the Norway mass shooter (I am not naming him either).

Because the bastard took his cues from donald trump (link to Yahoo News UK):

The suspected gunman who killed dozens of people in New Zealand is an Australian ‘racist eco-fascist’ who posted a 74-page manifesto online before the shootings and described Donald Trump as a “symbol of white supremacy.”
The man, who identified himself in a livestream of the massacre as (redacted), said he was motivated by far-right extremism he saw in the United States to carry out the attack at Al Noor Mosque...
He also goes on to rail against mass immigration and said he views Donald Trump as a “symbol of renewed white identity...”
The manifesto said he carried out the attack “to show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homeland are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people...”

There is no other word for this but terrorism.

And there are no words for how trump responded to the reports... where he dismissed the rise of racist violence and then echoed the exact messages that the goddamned shooter believed in (via The Week):

Hours later, a shockingly similar phrase came from the president. Trump, after vetoing a bill that would've blocked his national emergency declaration to access border wall funding, briefly condemned the shooting before pivoting back to border talk. There are "crimes of all kinds coming through our southern border," Trump said, adding that "people hate the word 'invasion,' but that's what it is..."

trump knows. the hate-filled bastard knows his words are triggering the fearful among his fanbase.

And he knows his fanbase is ready to go on a warpath on his command (via Chait at New York):

...The specifics of the riff don’t vary much. Trump laments that his opponents are treating him unfairly, praises the toughness and strength of his supporters — a category that combines the police, military, and Bikers for Trump, which he apparently views as a Brownshirt-like militia — and a prediction that his supporters will at some point end their restraint.
He does it again in a new interview with Breitbart:
I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad...

You can argue just how far into our legal systems trump's corruption has gotten, and you can look at the demographics to see just how many trumpshirts will rise up should he face indictment or impeachment (despite Pelosi's comments, that's still on the table). trump may have gotten 62 million voters, but how many of them are actively armed and ready to go on any warpath?

Most Americans, despite our passions or politics, are not easily stirred into protest or violence. Most Americans just want to do their thing, raise their kids, find a good vacation spot, and not get bothered.

trump may be a sitting President Loser of the Popular Vote, but he still doesn't carry the direct power to control/order State, County or City law enforcement to his whims. He may think he has support of the police (at least their politically biased unions) and the military (at least some bomb-em-all generals) but current reporting suggests the hater White Nationalists types are one out of four among the troops. Yes, that still sounds scary - one-in-four - but there's three-in-four in our military who aren't assholes. If the armed forces split, the non-racists will outnumber (and swarm quickly over) the racists.

The wingnuts always assume their numbers are greater than they really are: When those jerks took over the national park in Oregon they sent out a call for support likely hoping for mass uprisings... and got joke supplies mailed to them instead (about three or four other militias in small numbers ever showed). We're talking about the same White Pride people who keep turning on each other out of greed and stupidity.

If trump does call for an uprising among the White Supremacists, the likely turnout will be mostly the neo-Nazi pro-Confederate militias dotted across the landscape... of about 20-30 wingnuts apiece who'll run into actual police and National Guard deployed by Governors of even Red States who'll realize this Second Civil War will end badly for themselves.

That's the good news if trump ever tries to go this far.

Here's the bad news: Far Right violence has still increased over the last three years, showing the willingness of how destructive the racists can get.

And we've seen how much violence just even one person can commit when dedicated to their cause. One wingnut carrying an AR-15 and enough ammo can wipe out entire city blocks before the cops can respond and stop him.

All it takes is just one gunman to throw a city - a nation - into chaos and pain.

And we're already seeing it here in the U.S. The mass shooter at Squirrel Hill just last year. The would-be mass shooter working at the Coast Guard HQ. The mad bomber of Broward County. There are more. Gods help us, too many more.

And all it takes is one. All it takes is one wingnut hanging on trump's every tweet.

And trump knows it.

I doubt trump will win this fight: he and his have proven they can't win on their own (he needed help from Russia to cheat his way to victory in 2016 damn them). The wingnuts following his every lead can easily turn on each other as much as they'll turn on regular Americans.

But this is going to get bloody. It's too late to say otherwise. The wingnuts have been chomping at the bit for decades waiting for their goddamned race war. And trump's the last one in high enough political office to let them unleash their hell on the rest of us.

Stay safe. Stay alert.

The calls for violence are coming from within the White House.

1 comment:

dinthebeast said...

On the other hand, the PM of New Zealand has promised to change the gun laws there in the next ten days.

They just caught some bozo in Antioch (a few miles from here) with an arms cache and charged him with manufacturing illegal fully automatic weapons.

Fergus is terrified, and that's a very dangerous state for any narcissist to be in, let alone the goddamn POTUS.

I'm not really worried for my own safety, but I do think there will be some violent fits thrown by some desperate people when this administration comes crashing down, however that specifically happens, because these folks see Fergus as their last chance, whether they will admit that or not, and feel like if he goes down, so do they.

They both will, it's just a matter of when and how.

Fergus bet his campaign that people would rather be entertained by "exciting" transgressive stuff thrown at them at reality-TV speeds, and maybe for a while a lot of them did, but the reality of living in this country is pushing them back to wishing for a normal, boring, government that can actually deal with the myriad problems we all face every day.

Sooner or later they'll realize that they just can't afford all of this chaos and their fervor will wane as it subsides.

But we must get rid of him for that to happen. As long as he's there, they'll still be able to be whipped up into violence by his stupid, stupid, rhetoric.

-Doug in Oakland