The Killing

Respectable little murders pay/
They get more respectable every day
-- "Sunset Grill," Don Henley

With all of the drama and madness in this Darkest Timeline, with all the gun violence our nation witnesses on a daily basis, it's telling that the shooting of a single person only matters when that person was the uber-rich CEO of a healthcare corporation (via Jake Offenhartz, Michael Balsamo, and Michael R. Sisak at AP News):

New clues emerged Thursday in the hunt for the masked gunman who stalked and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, including possible leads about his travel before the shooting and a message scrawled on ammunition found at the crime scene.

The words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” were found emblazoned on the ammunition, echoing a phrase used by insurance industry critics, two law enforcement officials said Thursday.

The words were written in permanent marker, according to one of the two officials, who were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

Investigators also now believe the suspect may have traveled to New York last month on a bus that originated in Atlanta, one of the law enforcement officials said...

One of the interesting developments in this story is how quickly social media jumped on the story... by satirizing (if not brutally mocking) the victim's status as an allegedly corrupt corporate boss of a major health care insurer with a known history of massive profits at the expense of denying millions of Americans any affordable health care. As Troy Farah over at Salon notes:

Violence is a strategy that never warrants celebration because it is crude, brutal and ineffective, not to mention immoral. There’s always a better way, even if it’s not as easy or as dramatic. Nonetheless, it’s not bizarre or surprising to see that Reddit is being flooded with memes mocking the murder, or that many on social media are seemingly trying (or failing) to suppress their glee. There’s now even a rush to cash in with merch, such as a ballcap using the company’s logo next to crosshairs and the phrase “We aim to please.” A chart from valuepenguin.com displaying the percentage of claim denial rates by insurance companies, with UnitedHealthcare topping the list, has gone super viral, with one user on Threads captioning it, “To paraphrase Chris Rock ‘... but I understand.’”

The overall justification for this celebration — the New York Times described it as a “torrent of hate” — lies in the widely understood the fact that health care companies inflict violence on thousands of people in this country, if not millions, every single day. Take the announcement this week from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, which couldn’t have had better or worse timing, depending on one’s perspective. That company proposed that its health insurance plans in Connecticut, New York and Missouri would no longer cover anesthesia care if a surgery or operation extends beyond an arbitrary time limit. That seems to have outraged the American Society of Anesthesiologists, which has called on Anthem to immediately reverse this proposal.

On Thursday, Anthem did just that, but the shock remains. If that’s not violence, what is? Whether you’re in an alley or on an operating table, if someone has a knife to you and demands your money, it’s violence. Or consider the innumerable examples that aren’t just proposals but routine policy: the tidal wave of denied or delayed claims, the noose of restrictive networks, costly deductibles, prescription refusals and on and on. There is also convincing evidence this walled garden especially excludes and discriminates against people of color, queer people and women, making this systemic violence not just prevalent, but also disproportionate...

Thompson's murder is not different from the many times a wingnut gunman went storming into a Planned Parenthood clinic to shoot at "baby killers," so celebrating the act would be monstrous hypocrisy for those us angered by Far Right violence towards women and the health care providers they need. If there is any difference, it's that most of those gunmen are pumped up on lies from Far Right media, whereas this gunman can well be acting out direct vengeance. Nearly every observer's comments/viewpoints on "motive" - something the police haven't confirmed yet, because there's a good chance of misdirection - are going by the things Farah highlighted about our nation's broken health care system: This shooter could well have lost a loved one to a fatal illness that Thompson's United HealthCare corporation refused to help.

That is of course pure speculation on my - and a lot of other people's - part. For all we know, the killer could have been a hired hitman: Thompson was under investigation for insider trading, for example.

Ah, as Farah noted: "...But I understand."

This killing brought to the fore news coverage of how hundreds - if not millions - of Americans are rightly angered by how our health care companies routinely deny any affordable health care. Just to share from Selena Simmons-Duffin's report at NPR:

Yolonda Wilson is one of many people who shared painful stories about health insurance gone wrong on social media this week.

Her insurer, UnitedHealthcare, denied coverage for a surgery about two days before it was scheduled, back in January. She finally got it approved, in the nick of time, with a lot of unnecessary stress and tears. "I did not know until Wednesday afternoon whether I would be able to have surgery Thursday morning," she told NPR.

Wilson, a professor of Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University in Missouri, noted that she was telling her personal story, not speaking on behalf of the university.

The shocking, targeted killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson Wednesday struck a nerve on social media, triggering an outpouring of negative experiences with the tangled health care system in the U.S.

Many people shared searing stories of health care denials from health insurers. One person said his mom's scan to check on her stage IV lung cancer was recently denied. In another post, a dad shared the letter UHC sent him denying a wheelchair for his son with cerebral palsy.

"A lot of people are in deep pain, and maybe didn't have anywhere to put that pain," Wilson says.

UnitedHealthcare is the biggest private health insurer in the U.S., with an outsized market share in both the commercial insurance and Medicare Advantage markets. UnitedHealth Group reported $371.6 billion in revenue last year and faces an antitrust lawsuit to block its $3.3 billion acquisition of a rival home health and hospice service.

Americans generally say they're pretty happy with their health insurance, according to survey data from health policy research organization KFF — unless they're sick. Those with "fair" or "poor" health are nearly twice as likely to be displeased with their insurance compared to those with "good" health.

The sick thing about getting sick in America is that the moment you do, those insurers who'd been taking your money all those years suddenly refuse to pay any of it back to you. God forbid they cut into those billions of revenues.

Pam Herd, a professor of social policy at the University of Michigan who studies administrative burdens involved in accessing government services, says barriers to health care access are especially painful.

"It's one thing to be frustrated at the DMV because you have a ton of paperwork to fill out or you have to spend an hour in line," she says. "It's a whole other thing to face those barriers when they are the difference between whether you're going to get life-saving care or not."

Herd's research shows how barriers in the health care system can affect people's actual health — whether it's calling several times to just get an appointment or trying to find an in-network specialist or fighting to get a procedure covered...

For all the Far Right and Libertarian types out there who whine about the federal bureaucracy, the DMV ain't got shit on UnitedHealthcare or the other for-profit corporations out there that work to delay, defend, and deny any help to the people at all. Dealing with the stress of jumping through hoop after hoop and running into brick wall after brick wall is just as sickening as getting a life-threatening-yet-treatable illness.

One of the more shocking stories going public is how UHC under Thompson's reign implemented an AI-based automated process that generated 90 percent error rates while denying their clients the financial help they were supposed to get. That was originally a report from 2023, but only now are people really reading it.

Again: "...But I understand."

As of right now, the other CEOs of large corporations - not just in the insurance business - are hiring more bodyguards and clearing their names off the company websites to avoid getting on anybody's Naughty Lists. They are - obviously - not interested in responding to the growing public outrage towards their ravenous greed: They have, after all, just bought off the 2024 election cycle to guarantee trump and the Republican Party will grant them the massive tax cuts and deregulations they desire to add to the billions they already possess.

The CEOs - the true class-driven elite, the robber barons of the 21st Century - are mourning the death of one of their fellow greedheads while overlooking the body count of thousands of Americans who die because they didn't get their health care approved or covered in time, or worse the thousands who die because they can't get any insurance coverage at all.

THAT is why a lot of people suspect the assassin was acting out of vengeance. 

And yeah, we understand.

Which murders - the shooting of a CEO or the deaths of families and loved ones - get more respectable in the end?

The Cycle of Violence This Saturday Night

Christ on a bike:

Donald Trump appeared to be the target of an assassination attempt as he spoke during a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, two law enforcement officials said. The former president, his ear covered in blood from what he said was a gunshot, was quickly pulled away by Secret Service agents and his campaign said he was “fine.”

A local prosecutor said the suspected gunman and at least one attendee are dead. The Secret Service said two spectators were critically injured.

Posting on his Truth Social media site about two and a half hours after the shooting, Trump said a bullet “pierced the upper part of my right ear.”

“I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin,” he said in the post. “Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening.”

The attack, by a shooter who law enforcement officials say was then killed by the Secret Service, was the first attempt to assassinate a president or presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981. It comes amid a deeply polarized political atmosphere, just four months from the presidential elections and days before Trump is to be officially named the Republican nominee at his party’s convention... (via Jill Colvin, Julie Carr Smyth, Colleen Long, Eric Tucker, Michael Balsamo and Michelle L. Price at AP News)

This is all happening in the moment and it's always too early to speculate even though a number of Far Right agitators on social media are already accusing Biden and "the violent Left" of being behind this shooting.

If there's anything I agree with on social media right now, it's THIS sentiment:

Mom can you come pick me up history is happening and I’m scared

— samuel catlin (@lint_ax) July 13, 2024

Seriously, America. Make this goddamn partisan madness stop.

For all my hatred aimed at donald Shitgibbon trump, the most I want to see done is him facing justice in a jail cell for all the crimes - the tax fraud, business fraud, and sexual assault - he's committed (and the ones he's allegedly done that he still needs to face in trial). Killing trump doesn't solve the reality that a willing and angry MAGA voter base will remain - and become even more angry and violent - and will be eager to turn trump into a martyr. Violence aimed at a group doesn't make that faction change their tone or their minds: It tends to radicalize them further, feeding into a cycle of violence aimed at the ones they blame.

Any form of political violence - street riot, bombing, targeted assassination - becomes self-defeating. I just wrote about what happened at Kent State: because the ROTC building had been fire-bombed, a lot of Americans in the middle class across the political spectrum actually felt the protestors were to blame and deserved to get shot by a panicked National Guard. Violence begets - and excuses - the reactionary violence that follows. 

The idea that a Propaganda of the Deed would rally a silent hidden faithful into a mass movement justifying your planned utopia never happens. Assassinating Lincoln didn't win the Civil War for the South; shooting Garfield actually pushed the federal government into genuine civil service reforms; killing McKinley never sparked a Socialist uprising in America; what happened to JFK didn't end the Cold War or change U.S. policy towards Cuba (whatever the hell it was that motivated Oswald (maybe), we still don't know for certain); and shooting Reagan never impressed Jodie Foster (I'm not being flippant here, that's kind of what Hinckley was trying to do).

All that's going to happen now is a family will have to cope with the tragedy of losing a loved one - whoever it was that died at the rally - and the MAGA faithful are going to stir themselves into a frenzy over which conspiracy theories will make them the angriest and more eager to act out.

The political violence we've been trapped in since 2016 - with trump's demagoguery of immigrants and liberals - and accelerated in 2020 - "Stand Back and Stand By" anyone? - remains a downward spiral this 2024. History - chaotic, fear-driven, violent - is happening, and it's not going to stop until more innocent lives are taken.

Anniversary: The One That Started It All

Today is August 1st, and I've been reminded that today is the 50th anniversary of a major tragedy in our nation's history.

From the memorial website - Behind The Tower - that has popped up to recount the tragedy:

On August 1, 1966, a twenty-five year old University of Texas student named Charles Whitman went up to the observation deck of the UT tower armed with guns, ammunition, and canned food. For 96 minutes he held the campus in a state of terror. Whitman killed 14 people that day and wounded more than 30. One of the wounded died a week later and one died decades later of injuries connected with his bullet wounds. Austin Police officers Houston McCoy and Ramiro Martinez (and two other men) made their way to the top of the tower, without knowing who or what they would find. They cornered Whitman and then shot and killed him. Later it was discovered that Whitman had murdered his mother and his wife in the early hours of the morning before his rampage. The shooting was broadcast on the radio and on television and it became a major national and even international news story.

This isn't the first mass shooting in our nation's history. There was actually a mass shooting in Philadelphia back in 1949 that the Smithsonian points to as the first. And if one considers them, we've had massacres and lynchings throughout our history that could fall under this rubric.

But the University of Texas shootings seemed to hit our nation's psyche in the worst way. It was a harbinger of a growing trend towards violent gun deaths in our nation where a singular person could go on a shooting rampage with little reason (well, we've figured out there is a reason: a shitload of anger at the world and access to rifles to start a body count). It happened at a moment of political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s, and added to the chaos of the day.

When we count mass shootings today, 1966 is the starting point, because Whitman's rampage is so memorable and still relatively recent - even at 50 years! - for survivors to still be among us to document the horror. When you ask someone about a campus mass shooting, you may get Virginia Tech or Columbine High or Umpqua Community College if you ask in the Northwest or even Ecole Polytechnique if you ask in Canada. But the odds are pretty good you'll get someone saying "Well there was that one in Texas with the tower, was that in Austin?"

Yeah, it was. And that was 50 years ago. And we've been counting the mass shootings ever since.

Yet Another Shooting Because an Insane Gun-Worship Faction Are Killing Us One Mass Murder At a Time

Yet another shooting.

The facts are these:

Three assholes armed to the teeth and reportedly wearing masks and body armor strolled into a community center in San Bernardino California, opened fire with their guns, killing up to 14 people at the moment with more wounded, and drove off with intent to get away with it. The local police were able to locate where they tried to hide and they were caught in a shootout, with about two of the gunmen dead and one fleeing on foot. This situation is not over.

The location targeted is the Inland Regional Center, a community agency that teaches and cares for people and children with disabilities. This is akin to a school, a college campus, a church, a place of selfless activity filled with people WHO DID NOT DESERVE TO GET SHOT AT.

This is essentially the 355th mass shooting (where four or more people are shot at one time) we've had in the United States. We had another mass shooting in Savannah Georgia and the nation hasn't even paid attention to THAT because the body count's too low.

Our body count from mass shootings rivals that of nations caught in civil wars.

Mass number of guns DO NOT MAKE US SAFER. We've got the highest gun-to-resident ratio on the planet, and having all these guns have not made us safe. All these guns have made us easier targets.

The common links between all these shootings are simple to identify.

We make it too goddamned easy for assholes to buy/procure guns.

Nearly every mass shooting involved at least one man - more often than not white - with anger management issues.

To quote Rude Pundit:

The Rude Pundit has said before and he'll say again: It's never just the assailants. It's always the guns. Already, we're seeing the appalling piglets of the right tell anyone who dares to insist that it's the guns to sit down and shut up and not "politicize" this latest float in our unending parade of horrors. As if silence isn't a political act. As if the very people who called for banning Syrian refugees before the bodies were cold in Paris have any goddamned right to tell anyone to not talk politics. As if the NRA, which makes money on the corpses of the victims of mass shootings, deserves anything more than being spit on. They fear politicizing because policy may come from it...

...This country has allowed ludicrous and evil and demonstrably wrong people and ideas to be passed off as legitimate. We give people a forum to say unbelievable bullshit, like that expanded background checks will lead to tyranny and gun confiscation. At some point, we are allowed to assert that some things are not worthy of discussion and that some people and organizations deserve only contempt, derision, and isolation. We can turn people into pariahs. We are allowed to do that. The CNN anchor, reacting to the shooting a few minutes ago, kept saying, over and over, that it was sad and "ridiculous." She's right. Now, how about the next time some Republican politician talks about how we need to do more about the "mentally-ill" (which is something they won't do) and not limit gun purchases, she shuts them down and throws them off the show? What if she says that it's an unacceptable position to not do anything about guns?

We do not have to tolerate the intolerable. We have chosen to tolerate it. We have chosen to pretend as if the extremists who demand no regulation of guns have a valid point of view. We should be politicizing every shooting even more. We should be asking our politicians how they can dare not do something to help a nation afflicted with bullets.

If there will ever be a tipping point on guns, it will only happen when we say that disgusting acts are aided and abetted by disgusting people with disgusting beliefs. It will only happen when we treat the disgusting people with the disgust they deserve.

He's right.

The NRA should not be treated as a legitimate organization. They are not speaking to the facts NOR the truth. They have a financial incentive - many NRA leaders OWN companies that manufacture firearms - to promote fear-mongering and frenzied ammo stockpiling. The NRA and other gun-worship enablers have a political incentive to "win" the issue on guns otherwise they look weak to their followers.

The NRA are no longer about rifles. They haven't been responsible about firearms for 40 years. They are the National Murder Association now, and have been. Their organization is now about murder, and how THEY can profit from it. They are about the worship of metal pieces of weaponry that stand as their golden calf, which gives them millions of dollars while thousands of US die for their un-Christian sacrifice.

To hell with the NRA and their fear-mongering allies. THEY ARE AT WAR WITH THE REST OF THE UNITED STATES and we need to recognize that fact.

Insanity Is Repeating the Same Shooting Over And Over Again and Expecting a Safer Gun-Happy Result

(Update: Thank you Batocchio for the inclusion to the 2015 Jon Swift Memorial Round-Up! If you came here from another direction, I ask you to click that link to Batocchio's site and check out the other bloggers, some of them are very good reads! Good luck to all of you, and Happy New Year to you!)

Yet another shooting in a public place.  Yet another school where a classroom becomes a war zone.  Yet another week in the United States where the body count per year for our gun deaths rivals most civil wars raging in other countries.

Yet another moment for an exasperated Obama to step before the cameras just wondering when the hell Congress - and it IS the job of Congress to pass these laws - is going to do its job to make our public places ours again by enacting gun safety laws:

A visibly frustrated President Obama delivered remarks about the shooting Thursday night. Before he walked up to the podium, CNN said this speech was the president’s 15th on mass shootings since he took office.

“As I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough,” he said. “It's not enough.”

Yet another round of distractions about gun violence in the United States.  The gun-worshipers will likely argue about the need for more guns - which doesn't keep American safe - or argue for "good guys with guns" needed in our public places - ignoring evidence that it rarely helps and that the community college was a conceal-carry location.

Yet another realization that this nation has borne the pain of a mass shooting at least once a week:

Just remember, October only started this Thursday...

Are you horrified yet that the number in each colored box isn't the number of victims, it's the number of shootings across the nation...

Another realization that we are truly an insane nation, allowing the same thing to happen over and over and over again - the ease of access to guns by angry guys who can use those guns to kill far too many people - and allowing the Republican-led and NRA-owned Congress to DO NOTHING in the face of actual preventable deaths... The insanity of pretending maybe sooner or later things will improve, that maybe next time a good guy with a gun will finally save the day, or that the guns will jam, or that we'll someday run out of angry guys.

And while we're crying over the shooting in Oregon, there's been a mass shooting in Inglis Florida with three dead and one wounded... there's been other shootings across the nation in our cities and our towns...  All of which we could work to prevent if we had safety laws and better regulation of firearms.  But oh damn, we dare not say the dread phrase "well-regulated" because we'll hurt the NRA's collective feelings, and have them screaming "shall not infringe" as those words are the only ones that matter in that damned Second Amendment.

If you're calling me crazy about claiming the Second Amendment has been turned into a license to kill, you're ignoring the fact that for 180 years our nation did just fine following that amendment with harsh gun permit laws and regulations of use, with a focus on it honestly geared towards that concept of state militias.  But the NRA went batsh-t crazy in 1977 (wonder why) and their arguments about unregulated gun ownership dominates our nation and destroys basic common sense.

And now we're at the point where the Second Amendment is infringing on an even greater right: the First Amendment right to peaceably assemble.  We can't anymore: not at our schools, not at our churches, not at shopping malls or movie theaters, not at the parks, not in our own damn homes.

I may not claim to be sane, but I am not crazy when it comes to wanting our nation and our communities to be safer.  More guns doesn't make us safe.  The Second Amendment no longer makes us safe.  Common sense regulations on gun ownership and sales do make us safe.

Every other nation on the planet that allow gun ownership have common sense regulations in place.  Their streets and schools do not run red with blood.

Ours do.  Is the United States as a whole that mad, that blind about guns?

The Problems We All Live With, Because of Racism, Because of Guns

Charleston South Carolina, last night.

In one of the worst mass shootings in the state's history, a gunman opened fire during Wednesday night services at Emanuel AME Church, one of Charleston's oldest black churches in downtown Charleston.

Eight people died at the church, and a ninth person died later at MUSC hospital, Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen said during a news conference just before 1 a.m. Thursday. The number of injured people and their conditions were not known.

Charleston police chief Gregory Mullen said he will investigate the shooting as a hate crime...

Turns out it is a hate crime.  The shooter - whom I shall not name - intentionally walked into the historic Black church (he hails from Columbia, which is a good distance from Charleston, so he went out of his way here), intentionally sat in on a prayer session, intentionally pulled out a gun, intentionally shot most of the people present, intentionally reloaded, intentionally told the surviving witnesses "I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go," and intentionally fled so he could get safely captured by police in another state.

The shooter - no, the terrorist - chose a church with vast history: formed by one of the earliest anti-slavery leaders, Denmark Vesey.  A free Black who formed the first Black church south of the Mason-Dixon, he was accused in 1822 of fomenting a slave revolt and executed on secret evidence, and after his hanging his church was destroyed.  His sons eventually rebuilt the church after the Civil War, where it became the center of African-American culture and politics in the shadow of Jim Crow and in the light of the Civil Rights movement.  The terrorist just happened to select out of the hundreds of churches in South Carolina to target, and he targeted the one with the deepest racial meaning.

This is just another day in America, isn't it?

It's just another day where Blacks get shot at, just like all the other days from Sanford and Cleveland and Ferguson and Baltimore and a hundred other cities.  It doesn't matter if I or anybody else rail about this over the years - this I wrote last year for God's sake - nobody's gonna do a goddamn thing about it, are they?

It's just another day where we have a gun massacre in our communities, regardless of it being a school or a church or a movie theater or a college campus.  It's just another day where the rights of the gun-fetishists under the Second Amendment to open-carry weapons that can kill anybody they don't like take priority over the rights of the vast majority of Americans who don't own guns yet try to peaceably assemble as due their rights under the First Amendment.

It's just another day for comment from blogger Tom Levenson at Balloon Juice:

We have a problem with guns.  It isn’t going away.  You can dig through the twitter streams and comment threads as I have, but you already know what you’ll find.  For too many Americans, the solution to our gun problem is obvious:  the answer to a bad shooter in church are good ones.  If only those at prayer had been packing, Dylann Roof wouldn’t have been able to kill more than three or four before taking a couple of hundred grains of lead to the throat in return fire. If only…

The ammosexual defense of their kink is predictable and almost certainly incorrigible.  Driven (and heavily armed) that’s a view that’s managed to hold political sway over the mushy majority for whom the notion the the liberty of the gun-sniffing few outweighs the freedom of the rest of us to assemble, travel, speak without fear of suppressing fire.  What drives that is, at least in part, the normalization of gun fetishization.  Which is what you see above.  And is what must be shamed out of the public square...

It's just another day for Charles Pierce at Esquire to rage with absolute truth:

We should speak of it as an assault on the idea of a political commonwealth, which is what it was. And we should speak of it as one more example of all of these, another link in a bloody chain of events that reaches all the way back to African wharves and Southern docks. It is not an isolated incident, not if you consider history as something alive that can live and breathe and bleed. We should speak of all these things. What happened in that church was a lot of things, but unspeakable is not one of them.

Not to think about these things is to betray the dead. Not to speak of these things is to dishonor them. Let Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, look out her window at the flag of treason that is flown proudly at her state capitol and think about these things, and speak of them, before she pronounces herself so puzzled at how something like this could happen in South Carolina, the home office of American sedition...

It's just another day, isn't it, out of the 200-plus years of our nation's history where racism and violence are part of the pride and arrogance of the haters who insist on flying a flag of treason and war over our state capitols.  In South Carolina, they've lowered the official state flag to half-mast, they've lowered the national flag - our Stars and Stripes - to half-mast, and they're still flying that goddamn Stars and Bars battle flag at full-mast.

I am with Ta-Nehisi Coates: That damned Confederate Battle Flag must come down, NOW, from every Southern state flying it.

The Confederate flag’s defenders often claim it represents “heritage not hate.” I agree—the heritage of White Supremacy was not so much birthed by hate as by the impulse toward plunder. Dylann Roof plundered nine different bodies last night, plundered nine different families of an original member, plundered nine different communities of a singular member. An entire people are poorer for his action. The flag that Roof embraced, which many South Carolinians embrace, does not stand in opposition this act—it endorses it. That the Confederate flag is the symbol of of white supremacists is evidenced by the very words of those who birthed it...

...Surely the flag’s defenders will proffer other, muddier, interpretations which allow them the luxury of looking away. In this way they honor their ancestors. Cowardice, too, is heritage. When white supremacist John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago, Booth’s fellow travelers did all they could to disassociate themselves. “Our disgust for the dastardly wretch can scarcely be uttered,” fumed a former governor of South Carolina, the state where secession began. Robert E. Lee’s armies took special care to enslave free blacks during their Northern campaign. But Lee claimed the assassination of the Great Emancipator was “deplorable.” Jefferson Davis believed that “it could not be regarded otherwise than as a great misfortune to the South,” and angrily denied rumors that he had greeted the news with exultation...

Moral cowardice requires choice and action. It demands that its adherents repeatedly look away, that they favor the fanciful over the plain, myth over history, the dream over the real. Here is another choice.

Take down the flag. Take it down now.

Goddamn us, as a nation.  We are led by cowards and fear-mongers who would profit from racism by making the rest of us suffer for their rage and greed and pride.

To the leaders of Florida, if that Confederate Battleflag of Treason and Race Hatred is flying over our buildings in Tallahassee or anywhere, TAKE THOSE DAMN FLAGS DOWN NOW.  To the southern states from Texas to Virginia, if any of you are flying that damn flag, SHAME ON YOU AND TAKE IT DOWN.

Back to Pierce for his closing (but not final, because Goddamn us this is going to keep happening until we face these demons of fear and wrath) thoughts:

...There is a timidity that the country can no longer afford. This was not an unthinkable act. A man may have had a rat's nest for a mind, but it was well thought out. It was a cool, considered crime, as well planned as any bank robbery or any computer fraud. If people do not want to speak of it, or think about it, it's because they do not want to follow the story where it inevitably leads. It's because they do not want to follow this crime all the way back to the mother of all American crimes, the one that Denmark Vesey gave his life to avenge. What happened on Wednesday night was a lot of things. A massacre was only one of them.

From Ta-Nehisi, Not Just For the Lost Battalion But For Every American, Every Son

If I could repost this article in its entirety I would.  But it's better to follow the link and read it yourself.

Ta-Nehisi Coates interviews the mother of Jordan Davis.  For the interview, he brings along his own son, 13 years old and black and pretty much in the same unsettling reality that Jordan and Trayvon lived (and died).

Last Thursday, I took my son to meet Lucia McBath, because he is 13, about the age when a black boy begins to directly understand what his country thinks of him. His parents cannot save him. His parents cannot save both his person and his humanity. At 13, I learned that whole streets were prohibited to me, that ways of speaking, walking, and laughing made me a target. That is because within the relative peace of America, great violence—institutional, interpersonal, existential—marks the black experience. The progeny of the plundered were all around me in West Baltimore—were, in fact, me. No one was amused. If I were to carve out some peace myself, I could not be amused either. I think I lost some of myself out there, some of the softness that was rightfully mine, to a set of behavioral codes for addressing the block. I think these talks that we have with our sons—how to address the police, how not to be intimidating to white people, how to live among the singularly plundered—kill certain parts of them which are as wonderful as anything. I think the very tools which allow us to walk through the world, crush our wings and dash the dream of flight.

I am white.  I grew up getting The Talk on how to behave with girls and how to obey the traffic laws and how to avoid drunken fights and that was it.  I was never lectured to be afraid of being hunted by my own neighbors or other adults the way Ta-Nehisi and his son had to be lectured.

I told her that I was stunned by her grace after the verdict. I told her the verdict greatly angered me. I told her that the idea that someone on that jury thought it plausible there was a gun in the car baffled me. I told her it was appalling to consider the upshot of the verdict—had Michael Dunn simply stopped shooting and only fired the shots that killed Jordan Davis, he might be free today.

She said, "It baffles our mind too. Don’t think that we aren’t angry. Don’t think that I am not angry. Forgiving Michael Dunn doesn't negate what I’m feeling and my anger. And I am allowed to feel that way. But more than that I have a responsibility to God to walk the path He's laid. In spite of my anger, and my fear that we won’t get the verdict that we want, I am still called by the God I serve to walk this out."

What happened to Jordan Davis wasn't Jordan's fault.  It's not Jordan's fault Michael Dunn was carrying his gun, it's not Jordan's fault that Dunn couldn't control his own anger when he called on Jordan's friends to turn down that loud music, it wasn't Jordan who pulled a trigger it was an angry man with a gun and a crazy broken law giving him license to open fire.  There are kids playing loud music everywhere.  They are driving in their parents' cars up and down these roads with the windows down and laying out a bass that shakes the surrounding car windows.  Some of them are white.  I don't see anyone at the gas stations shouting at them to turn the damn music down.

She stood. It was time to go. I am not objective. I gave her a hug. I told her I wanted the world to see her, and to see Jordan. She said she thinks I want the world to see "him." She was nodding to my son. She added, "And him representing all of us." He was sitting there just as I have taught him—listening, not talking.

Now she addressed him, "You exist," she told him. "You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. And no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid of being you."

She gave my son a hug and then went upstairs to pack.

The only difference between me at 13 and Ta-Nehisi's son at 13 is the color of our skin.  That and maybe whatever geek thing he's into that I'm not.  The only difference between me and Trayvon Martin at 17 was the skin color, and that he preferred Skittles over M&Ms.  The only difference between me and Jordan Davis was the skin.  And that I had Led Zeppelin blasting at top volume instead of Beyonce.

I didn't have to live with the fear of some angry adult blasting away at me because of who I was.

What the hell is wrong with us as a nation that we let fear dictate what we do?  That we let our anger get the better of us?  That we have some people who think themselves privileged enough to sell that fear and anger to get away with it?

Why Stand Your Ground Is a Terrible Law

The weekend news has been how a Jacksonville FL jury held shooter Michael Dunn in the Jordan Davis killing guilty of three counts of attempted murder for firing at the three teen friends with Davis that cold night of November 2012... and how that same jury locked up into a mistrial over Davis' own death.

It defies logic that Dunn will be held accountable for the murder attempts he missed... and yet was pretty much let go over the murder he did succeed in committing. (the state prosecutor's office says it will retry on the murder charge)

But there's a reason logic is getting stomped on here: it's because of a poorly-designed, open-ended, free-for-all free-for-gunowners law called Stand Your Ground (SYG).

The impact this law has had on Florida and other states applying SYG is pretty shocking.  Shooting deaths have gone up in states where the shooters claim self-defense under SYG.  Worse, about a third (34 percent) of the shootings when it's white shooter/black victim are deemed justifiable, while only three percent of black shooter/white victim are deemed justifiable.  That this law exposes the raw nerve of race is hard for me to focus on at the moment, and better explained by better writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates (please follow the link to what he wrote).  I'm better off ranting instead about how stupid and destructive SYG is.

Under the old laws regarding self-defense, it relied a lot on location - your own home or workplace where you have an expectation of self-defense - and it relied on the situation where you or someone else were threatened with bodily harm and there was no other recourse (no escape route or method to contact the proper authorities).  Stand Your Ground now allows someone carrying a firearm (and an anger management problem the size of Mount Doom) to go first for their gun and open fire under a "reasonable" expectation of fearing for their life, even when there are clear alternatives to blasting away in Vigilante Mode.

It's a bad law because it's basically a license for an aggressive, angry gunowner to go after someone and shoot that other person dead.  And then that gunowner can turn around and claim self-defense because he "feared for his own safety."  Regardless of whether or not the victim was genuinely a threat.  And sadly enough, the victim was never that big a threat.

Look at Dunn's testimony.  He's the one with the gun, getting off 10 shots and killing Davis in the process.  Dunn claims he "saw" Davis with a shotgun but the police found no evidence there was any weapon in the car at all.  Yet we're supposed to trust Dunn's testimony because he's the one sitting in the courtroom booth.  Meanwhile, we'll never hear Davis' side of the matter because Davis is dead, much like Trayvon Martin is dead and we'll never really know what happened the night George Zimmerman shot him dead.

Because we can't trust a word of what Dunn or Zimmerman claim, because it's in their own interests to make themselves look the victim.  And because they've got SYG giving them clearance to admit they "feared" for their own safety regardless of the situation.  Especially when - in both Dunn and Zimmerman's cases - the shooters were the ones who escalated in their own anger those situations into shooting deaths.

Are we going to trust the word of the 71-year-old who shot a man texting his babysitter (checking on a child at home) while at the Wesley Chapel movie theater that he was afraid for his life?  Under normal circumstances, the 71-year-old or anyone else upset that a cell phone was in use during the start of the movie would have gone to an usher or theater manager to complain (I did that once.  Guess what?  IT WORKED).  Under SYG, the 71-year-old stood there, let a box of popcorn get thrown in his face, and pull out his concealed gun to shoot dead the person who angered him.

He was threatened with popcorn.  The guy with the gun was threatened with popcorn, and shot the guy who threw it at him.  And now the 71-year-old packing heat gets to go before a jury to explain how he feared for his safety because popcorn was in his face.

Meanwhile the ones with actual bullets in them - Martin, Davis, a 43-year-old man with a fatherless child waiting at home - lie there dead, and what law speaks for them when Stand Your Ground trumps logic?  When it trumps common sense?

The law needs to go.  The courts need to rule it unconstitutional because it violates the victims' - usually unarmed - rights to due process (a presumption of innocence).  They need to overturn SYG because it's become a form of legalized lynching where angry white guys are shooting blacks over questionable slights (Trayvon Martin had every right to walk through his father's own neighborhood, for God's sake).  The legislatures need to stop passing these laws that violate public safety at the expense of a gun lobby that wants to conceal-carry wherever they want and pretty much shoot anybody they (don't) like.

In the Navy Yard Shooting, These Are the Facts You Need To Know

Today was a bad day all around - even without considering the flooding disaster that is Colorado - when we found our nation handling yet another shooting spree... this time at a well-guarded Washington DC Navy Yard.

These are the facts as can be confirmed (EDIT 9/26/13, I feel the need to add a little more for those Google searchers pulling up this article, SEE BELOW):

1) Early reports of multiple shooters proved wrong, as usual: there's always confusion during these mass shooting incidents, with survivors and eyewitnesses confused about where and when the violence takes place.  There was just one guy.

2) The shooter brought with him just a shotgun, but used the fact he was shooting up a military installation to secure additional firearms - handgun and rifle - to continue the shootout.

3) The shooter had his own access card to the grounds.  Working for a private tech firm supporting the Navy Yard, he would need some form of access to get into work areas as part of his job.

4) The shooter was involved in a previous shooting incident in 2010 when he lived in Texas, when he was charged with shooting a gun he claimed he was cleaning when it accidentally went off.  Those charges were dropped.  He was also charged in 2004 shooting out a car's tires in Seattle.

5) The shooter had a background as a military reservist from 2007 to 2011 when he was discharged.

6) There are reports that the shooter had undergone - and maybe still undergoing - psychological treatment for sleep issues and anger management.

7) The shooter was African-American.
7a) The identities of the victims have not been established yet.  The authorities are most likely talking to victims' families first.
UPDATE: The identities were released to the public, Washington Post created a memorial site.  By the looks of it the shooter did not discriminate, he shot at White, Black, Hindu Indian, male, female.  Most of the victims were middle-aged or near retirement age.

8) There are currently 13 dead, with 8 wounded.

These are the speculations:

1) Would the current needs for universal background checks as supported by a broad majority of Americans stopped the shooter from getting a firearm?  Probably not in this case: since that Texas gun charge was dropped it wouldn't have shown up on the background check.  And I'm not sure if the 2004 charges would have expired otherwise, or if the psychological treatment would have been a red flag under the rules.

2) Would the shooting have been less tragic if there were more people at the workplace with firearms / conceal permits?  You have to be kidding: this was the Navy Yard.  There's supposed to be armed guards, fences, barricades, defensive systems across the place.  And yet I won't be surprised if we're gonna get gun enthusiasts arguing for conceal-carry and more gun permissiveness at a military base (again: they said this crap after the Fort Hood shootings).
UPDATE: This did not stop LaPierre of the NRA from declaring the shooting wouldn't have been as bad if there had been more "Good guys with guns," the blanket NRA excuse against sensible gun safety laws.  Never mind the fact that there were armed guards on the site, the cops responded within 2 minutes, never mind the possibility of a "good guy with a gun" getting confused at who to shoot, and then having the cops shoot at him thinking he might be a second shooter (refer back to the earlier point of the reports of multiple gunmen).

3) What motivated the shooting?  The shooter did not leave behind any obvious clue like a letter or a death threat on a website.  There is no evidence as of yet what triggered the shooting.  (any further speculation based on race would really be in poor taste until we get specifics)
UPDATE: Huff Post has an article that the shooter left a note, indicating the shooting was a twisted case of a mental breakdown.

4) The shooter is someone with a serious track record of gun ownership.  This was not an overnight impulse to buy a gun and shoot up someplace: he's had guns before.  And he's used guns before...

5) The more obvious point about the shooter is the anger management (lack of).  A huge red flag in any shooting spree.  Any kind of terror attack, really.  The patterns still all point to one thing: an angry guy lashing out at a supposed injustice and taking it out on a lot of people who had nothing to do with causing that anger.  Mostly the shooter is an angry white guy, but we've had angry black guys as shooters before, there's been angry Asian guys, there's been angry ethnic guys across the board.

But the common link is there: Anger.  There are a lot of gun owners in the United States, I will grant you that.  Most of them never pull the trigger outside of legal usage such as practice ranges and/or licensed hunting.  But you get the gun owner with the persecution complex, the rage against women/the job/next door neighbor who leaves the flood lights on.  It's the combination of rage and access to firearms that ought to be of concern.

It'd be nice to have a debate on the matter, on the problem of guns and anger.  But David Frum is right: we're never going to get a debate on guns at all anymore, are we...?
UPDATE: Still don't have a serious debate on gun safety.

This Is What Fear And a Gun Creates: Trayvon Martin Is Dead.

Trayvon Martin's intent: walk to a store and back for a bag of Skittles and a bottle of tea. George Zimmerman's intent: follow a black kid walking through a neighborhood while carrying his gun. Confrontation ensues. Zimmerman shoots Martin. 
Zimmerman gets acquitted because of "reasonable doubt". Trayvon Martin is dead.
Try to remember this: Trayvon Martin had a bag of Skittles and a bottle of tea. Martin was not committing any crime. He was walking home through his neighborhood. Zimmerman still chases after him. And Zimmerman shoots him dead.
As a teenager I spent a lot of time biking and walking through my neighborhood, but I never had some freaked-out adult chasing after me with a gun fearing for his life. Maybe because, gee I dunno, I was white. Who's to say? Certainly not Trayvon Martin. Because he's dead now.
It is now legal in Florida, and pretty much the rest of the nation, for terrified angry white guys to shoot young black kids walking through neighborhoods.
This is not justice.

How Went the Year 2012?

Well:

1) I'm still looking for full-time employment.  I have a contractual will-call job at least, which keeps me active and up-to-speed with the technological needs of my information-based profession.  I did get about six different libraries interviewing me - two of them with follow-up interviews! - which is a vast improvement to the number of interviews I had in 2011 (one) and 2010 (one).  And I still have an interview scheduled for this Friday, with one of the libraries that interviewed me with a follow-up, so I'm hopefully in good standing with them (fingers crossed for luck).

2) My guy got elected to President.  The Far Right's attempts to paint Obama as a "failure" and a "disaster" went nowhere.  And the one place at the federal level where the Far Right still holds any power - an unbalanced U.S. House - is one vote away from falling into chaos.

3) A lot of great genre movies - The Avengers, Dark Knight Rises, Wreck-It Ralph, Brave, Skyfall - this season.  I'd love to see all of them nominated like crazy for the Oscars this year... but noooooooo, it's all gonna be Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty instead.  Sigh.

4) Too many shootings.  And even now, there's reports that someone shot at firefighters responding to a New York state neighborhood fire with two firemen dead and two others wounded.

5) The Mayans did not doom us.  Which is kinda okay, because the real Mayans never wanted the apocalypse anyway: it was some crank Eurowhite guy trying to sell his books.

6) Breitbart's legacy - a website smear machine - is going through some rather public splits right about now.  Schadenfreude, thou art pretty tasty during the holidays...

How was the year for you?

What the Second Amendment Has Become: A Death Note On Everybody

Update Below

The Second Amendment has gone from being an 18th century constitutional concern for well-regulated militias to basically a license in the 20th-21st centuries for individuals to go on goddamned shooting sprees.

We had a shooting spree earlier this week in Oregon at a shopping mall, during the busiest time of the year Christmas season (here's your War on Christmas, Mr. O'Reilly), with a gunman using a military-level semiautomatic rifle that was once banned during the Clinton years but allowed back on the market during the Bush the Lesser years.

And just right now, as I'm writing this, we're getting reports of a shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut, with 20-27 deaths reported, most of them KIDS.  There's a whole school a whole COMMUNITY of survivors now, traumatized, friends they just spoke to minutes before now dead...  It's said that childhood ends when you learn what death is... and these kids just learned death in the most horrifying way...

This is after a mass shooting in Aurora Colorado at a movie theater.  This is after year upon year of yet even more shootings in public places and gatherings, where most law-abiding non-gun-owning Americans would like to gather without fear of GETTING SHOT AT.

Every year, we've got a body count of gun-related deaths in this country equivalent to a goddamn civil war in some Third World nation.  As of 2009 (for statistics, it takes awhile to tally up numbers), the United States had 15,000+ homicides with 9,000+ caused by guns/firearms.  That's roughly 60 percent of violent deaths due to guns.

People kill people, you say?  True.  But it's also true that GUNS MAKE IT TOO GODDAMNED EASY.

Dear National Rifle Association:

FUCK YOU.

We need gun control in this country.  We need laws restricting gun ownership, not making it easier.  We need to restrict ownership the same way we restrict car ownership, to make sure people are insured, licensed to use 'em, tested with exams to make sure there's no goddamn loose screws in their heads.  We need to restrict gun sales to ensure that gun sellers are NOT selling or passing on firearms to unqualified would-be buyers (Dear God, they're selling 'em online exactly BECAUSE online sales are unregulated.  NONE OF THEM CARE FOR SAFETY OF OTHERS, JUST THE GODDAMN SALE).

We need to establish ACCOUNTABILITY with guns much in the way we have accountability for car drivers, employees in high-risk industries, what have you.

We don't need civilian militias anymore.  The frontiers are closed.  The borders have guards now (even with the illegal immigrant issues, so shut up).  We have an organized permanent military (the Founders may have feared the threat of tyranny from such a thing, but for the most part the military traditions of answering to civilian rule have reduced that risk to nothing).  It doesn't take days to answer to a threat anymore, it takes minutes for law enforcement to respond.  The NEED to own guns has gone down as crime rates have gone down (violent crime in particular has dropped).  Just what the hell are you afraid of, gun nuts?  (answer: other gun nuts, usually)

It is time, it is WELL PAST TIME that we as a nation rewrite that Second Amendment, and make it damned clear that while gun ownership is possible it MUST BE REGULATED to ensure the safety and protection of ALL Americans, including the ones who DON'T OWN GUNS.

What's more important, National Rifle Association: an 8-year-old's life that could have become a doctor or a teacher or a parent or a President, or a goddamn lump of metal that has only one purpose - to kill?  Which do you worship more, you sons of bitches

Update: David Frum is angrier about it than I am:

A permissive gun regime is not the only reason that the United States suffers so many atrocities like the one in Connecticut. An inadequate mental health system is surely at least as important a part of the answer, as are half a dozen other factors arising from some of the deepest wellsprings of American culture.
Nor can anybody promise that more rational gun laws would prevent each and every mass murder in this country. Gun killings do occur even in countries that restrict guns with maximum severity.
But we can say that if the United States worked harder to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, there would be many, many fewer atrocities like the one in Connecticut.

And I'll say: I'll accept no lectures about "sensitivity" on days of tragedy like today from people who work the other 364 days of the year against any attempt to prevent such tragedies.
It's bad enough to have a gun lobby. It's the last straw when that lobby also sets up itself as the civility police. It may not be politically possible to do anything about the prevalence of weapons of mass murder. But it damn well ought to be possible to complain about them - and about the people who condone them.

Fuck you, NRA.  Fuck you.

At What Point Can We Have an Honest Debate About Guns?

There has been another mass shooting, this time at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.  Seven dead reported for now.

Can we finally, please for the Love of God, discuss the possibility that the Second Amendment - written in an era when there was no standing army, when it took days to travel from one end of a state to another, when the frontier was open and the need for immediate local responses were higher, when state-formed militias made sense - is an outdated amendment that needs revision and recognize that the need for civilian-owned firearms isn't there anymore?

We've got closed borders now.  We've got 24/7 police and law enforcement service.  If we're gonna get invaded by Aruba our military response will be in minutes, not weeks.  The need for "well-regulated militias" isn't there anymore.  The fantasy of needing civilian soldiers against some nefarious government plot of epic doom is just that: a FUCKING fantasy.  The right of an individual to own a firearm needs to be balanced with everyone else's right TO NOT GET SHOT AT.

The NRA and gun nuts out there are gonna scream and kick and throw tantrums and whatnot to make sure we don't even have a goddamn discussion about this.  And even though we're not in a warzone, we're gonna have a body count in the United States about as bad as some war-torn Third World nation.  All because a small, very vocal minority of citizens worship some hunks of metals more than they care about peoples' lives.

We have sensible restrictions on a lot of things that can hurt people.  We restrict car ownership and driver's licenses with regard to public safety.  But the automobile came after the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written, so the car doesn't have an amendment allowing its free open use for any drunken incompetent who could plow into a school bus full of kids.  Yes, that still happens anyway with car accidents, but at least we have laws and a method of enforcement to reduce such a deadly risk.  We can't for guns.

And innocent people get shot because we DARE NOT consider even the slight possibility that we don't need a Second Amendment to protect the frontier anymore.

Madness.

Tragedy July 20 2012

To the families and friends who lost people last night in Aurora, Colorado, my prayers and sympathies are with you.  These are weak words, they always are, compared to the suffering you all are going through right now.

These people went to the movie theater to be entertained.  Instead, they received pain and sorrow because of a sicko with a gun and with hate and fear in his heart.

Blood On The Streets of Tucson AZ

Today has been a terrible day for the nation.  A gunman opened fire at a public event being held by Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.  Eyewitness reports have the gunman coming right up behind the congresswoman, shouting something and pulling the trigger.

Giffords was shot in the head.  Ten others were wounded and along with her taken to hospital for rescue.  One of the wounded, a nine-year-old girl, died at the hospital.  For hours, word kept getting out that Giffords had died, but surgeons finally came out to report that they were able to save her life and that she will with hope recover.  Five others, including a federal judge John Roll attending the public meet-and-greet, were killed on the spot.

It is difficult to explain the rage I have at this moment, for almost the whole day...

Regardless of the political leanings of the shooter - and the Far Right are eager to point out how Loughner is some left-wing hippie, with the Far Left pointing out Loughner's gold-standard obsessions fit right in with Ron Paul's - this horrifying crime underscores a LOT that is f-cking wrong with this country.


In case Giffords was someone you didn't know before today, she was one of 20 Democratic House members targeted - LITERALLY TARGETED - by Sarah Palin's crew during the 2010 midterms.  And in case you didn't know this by this evening, but Palin and her supporters had quickly pulled that poster (THAT THEY STILL HAD UP ON THEIR WEBSITES AFTER THE MIDTERMS) from their pages, trying desperately to scrub away the violent rhetoric that they have been pushing on our nation over the last two, no eight, no eighteen years.  That bulls-eye poster reminds me of the John Bircher crap back in the 1960s... for example that infamous WANTED poster of JFK that happened to be in a Dallas newspaper around Nov. 22 1963...

We had violent rhetoric about an abortion doctor in the Midwest, and Bill O'Reilly kept talking about him and about how he needed to get taken out.  Someone comes along and shoots him AT A CHURCH.  The Fox-Not-News crowd of opinionated pundits rail against liberals as socialists and how they're destroying our nation. Someone who listens and reads their crap, writes up his own list of targets to kill before driving out to a Unitarian church to shoot up a recital of Annie.

We get political candidates on the Right running for office screaming about "gathering your armies" and relying on "Second Amendment remedies," throwing tantrums for special treatment and privileges and reviling their opponents for un-American actions they can't ever prove in court but are able to convince their teabagger followers as God's honest truth.  But then the second any actual violence on a Democrat or Liberal takes place, then by God the same Far Right talking heads come out of the woodwork insisting the violence is all from the Left while quickly scrubbing away the evidence that it was the goddamn Right wingnut lies in the first place.

There is blood on the streets of Tucson Arizona.  There is sorrow within most of our souls tonight as we mourn the dead.  But will there ever be any semblance of accountability on the Right for their lying bullshit, for their obsession with violence?

Probably not.  Welcome to our Hell.