Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans don’t trust women.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Come on, man.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

Let there be snark.

The words do not have to be perfect.

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

You are here: Home / Domestic Terrorism / GOP Domestic Terrorism Open Thread: ‘Violence in the Streets’

GOP Domestic Terrorism Open Thread: ‘Violence in the Streets’

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IMO, our best arguments for the moment are not about Trump’s MAGAt base voters; they’re about encouraging the better-hinged generic Republican voters to stay home on Election Day.

And TFG himself is doing the Democrats’ work now!

… Trump has a hold on a party that has been offered plenty of exit ramps from its relationship with him, but he is not Voldemort. He has been isolated and humiliated. Many of the individuals who used violence to support him on January 6 are now in jail. His audiences have dwindled. Even on the night of the FBI search, in the area of Florida that he now calls home, an impromptu roadside demonstration in support of him attracted “roughly two dozen” supporters, the Miami Herald reported. “Roughly two dozen” isn’t a revolution. It isn’t even a rally.

For many Americans who wish for a peaceful democracy and remain frustrated about Trump’s continuing influence in Republican primaries, hope springs eternal that someone or something—Robert Mueller, two impeachment drives, and now criminal investigators—will definitively erase his power. But expecting saviors to intervene is the wrong way to think about how the threat of violence from Trump’s supporters might dissipate. Rather, the danger will be over when violent MAGAism becomes a rallying cry for a limited pool of adherents whose online anger fizzles upon contact with the real world.

A win, at this stage, isn’t that Trump’s troops make an apology. It is that they remain an online threat, a cosplay movement, a pretend army that can’t deliver, whose greatest strength is in their heads rather than reality…

But allow me at least a glimmer of optimism. “Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come,” the poet and author Carl Sandburg famously wrote. And the decline of MAGA looks something like that—just a smattering of people respond to the overheated rhetoric of Trump and his allies. If Trump’s supporters only end up cosplaying a civil war, that itself is a small victory.

Reader Interactions

57Comments

  1. 1.

    Mai Naem mobile

    Amazing how none of his kids or innlaws want to get their soft manicured hands dirty with this insurrecting business. Ivanka doesn’t want to go live in the boonies without Consuela and her stylist and pull a Ruby Ridge. Let the peasants do the bleeding.

  2. 2.

    jackmac

    So perhaps the best case scenario is that MAGA ends “not with a bang but with a whimper.” (With apologies to T.S. Eliot)

  3. 3.

    Chetan Murthy

    Wait: who got jail time for the Malheur occupation?  I thought they all got off (except for the one guy who got shot b/c he tried to draw down on federal agents).

  4. 4.

    Feathers

    Appointed Forever

     

    Imagine me as God. I do.
    I think about it day and night.
    It feels so right.
    To be a federal district judge and know that I’m
    Appointed forever

    Hilarious comedic a cappella song (via Courtney Milan’s Twitter)

  5. 5.

    Tony G

    This sounds about right.  Trump’s cult members are, by definition, very stupid people, and, with some rare exceptions, they are too cowardly and lazy to do much damage.  If there are (hopefully not ) a few Timothy McVeigh’s among them, then so be it.  Thousands of people die in the U.S. unjustly every day.  If a few fascist terrorists blow up buildings then a nation of 329 million people should not and will not be cowed by them.  Screw these people.  Let them crawl back into whatever hole they came from.

  6. 6.

    Cacti

    Rob Reiner more or less made this point.

    If we’re afraid to prosecute an overtly criminal ex-POTUS due to fear of a civil war, there was already a civil war, and the rule of law side lost.

  7. 7.

    Mike in NC

    Trump is a crude uneducated thug from Queens. Street violence just comes naturally. His mentors were Roy Cohn and Roger Stone.

  10. 10.

    Rocks

    @Tony G:   This is Baylee Almon.  She was one of 20 toddlers murdered by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.  She turned one year old the day before this picture was taken.  She would be 28 today.  This is what Trump, and Grahman, and all the other enablers are egging on the psychopaths to do.  Even one incident like this is too much.  They need to be stopped before this happens again.  By the way – the name of the prosecutor who brought the case against McVeigh and had him sentenced to death?  Merrick Garland.

  11. 11.

    H.E.Wolf

    Balloon Juice fundraising this year has been deliberately focused on GOTV organizations led and staffed by Americans of color, who are disproportionately targeted by white supremacist violence and disenfranchisement.

    They (and we, because of our financial contributions) are doing the non-headline-grabbing work to thwart bigots and bullies, and improve the health of our democracy.

    Armchair panic can be thrilling, in a horror-movie fashion… but it isn’t one of the activities that gets us further toward our goals of a peaceful and just society.

  12. 12.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Hob: OK, fair, some plead, and some were convicted.  But the ringleaders ?  It seems they got off, no?  The Bundys got off

    ETA: The lesson seems to be: “don’t take a plea”.

  13. 13.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, a good Cal law prof on the MaL order:

    Thread.

    I know it's un-Twitter-like to ask a genuine Q, not try to score points, but a Q. I understand how a court can enjoin further execution of a warrant. But does a federal court have authority to enjoin executive branch "use" of seized materials for "investigative purposes"?

    — Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) September 5, 2022

    […]

    I take the judge's view to be that she has to control the executive branch's investigation to stop it from potentially violating Trump's rights. But under our system of separated powers, that has to be dealt with ex post, not through an injunction. LA v. Lyons, 461 US 95 (1983). pic.twitter.com/MqrlWAjhSX

    — Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) September 6, 2022

    Destroying Separation of Powers?? Bold move, Judge Aileen Cannon.

    This is going to be an interesting next few days…

    (via nycsouthpaw)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  14. 14.

    Kent

    @Chetan Murthy:ait: who got jail time for the Malheur occupation?  I thought they all got off (except for the one guy who got shot b/c he tried to draw down on federal agents).

    A whole shitload of them pled guilty and got jail time.  Amon Bundy went to trial and got off through a combination of shitty prosecution and jury nullification

    And of course one of the dipshits got his ass shot and killed when he charged a police roadblock.

  15. 15.

    piratedan

    @Another Scott: well, for those of us who don’t get the option to call balls and strikes nationally, when it comes to the ins and outs of the law and what is legal and what is right/correct/proper (and whatever intersection there is).

    I would certainly wonder how the punditry of the new CNN might portray this decision in terms of the optics.  After all, Biden had a military presence at his speech at a national monument, 18 months after an attempted coup and anyone can see how that could provoke themes of bias and politicizing the military in doing military things like protecting the commander in chief.

    I guess I’m just tired of playing on a field that is tilted, obviously so and after watching the other side take advantage of that and being told, what, you didn’t think that was fair?  In the grand scheme of things, sure this may be just a temporary setback, but it is wearisome.

  16. 16.

    Another Scott

    @piratedan: Yeah, it does seem that the Federalist Society judges have gotten a bit too far over their skiis.

    Inshallah.

    Another good pointer from Popehat:

    OK, #LitigationDisasterTourists, let's take a run at a true litigation disaster – Judge Canon's order in the Trump Mar-a-Lago case. Will have to take a few breaks to help around the house, but let's do something different this time, and NOT start by reading the order. https://t.co/IqVdulzyui

    — Akiva Cohen (@AkivaMCohen) September 6, 2022

    He goes through the Nixon cases and shows that she gets the law exactly backwards.

    The order is through the looking glass.

    BTW: Long term, this order doesn't actually do much for Trump. I've had a couple of people already claiming my reaction to this is based on "orange man bad" and guys… no. Orange man is *already* fucked. He's getting indicted one way or the other.

    My concern here is rule of law

    — Akiva Cohen (@AkivaMCohen) September 6, 2022

    Read the whole thing. She didn’t do her job as a judge, and what she did was nonsensical and directly contrary to what the SCOTUS said in the Nixon cases.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  18. 18.

    Brachiator

    @Tony G:

    This sounds about right.  Trump’s cult members are, by definition, very stupid people, and, with some rare exceptions, they are too cowardly and lazy to do much damage.

    Yeah. A few deaths and threats against members of Congress, and an attempt to overthrow the government on January 6 is no big deal.

    Thousands of people die in the U.S. unjustly every day.  If a few fascist terrorists blow up buildings then a nation of 329 million people should not and will not be cowed by them.

    We should probably adjust this number by some percentage of Trump voters.

    President Biden has tried to raise the national awareness of those who flirt with, if not openly advocate fascism.

    I’m not sure that we can do much more than be vigilant and hope that those who support Trump and the Republican Party have a change of heart.

  19. 19.

    Edmund Dantes

    @Another Scott: This reasoning is highly suspect, and I am amazed people keep going back to this well. Even after several said “cannon in no way will appoint a special master. Citing  of these previous things”. She then went and did it completely ignoring the previous things or twisting them to be what she wants.

    SCOTUS will never go after a precedent they just made. They went and did it. Scotus won’t ever do Roe fully. Et al.

    Any reasoning that rests on the the rubric of “this federalist judge won’t do this act cause of all this other prior stuff that’s been ruled on” is highly suspect as being believable to any extent.

    I think people have been lulled into a sense of what federalist judges will and won’t do. Not realizing we are finally starting to get to the full cohort that marinated in federalist propaganda from when they were young pups  all the way through to law school and their judgeship.

     

    Also they’ve shown they care not a white about consistency from case to case with similar fact patterns but different sides for the in groups  and thus the ruling following the side the in group is on. Any argument that relies on institutional reverence, judicial reverence, etc is beyond any worth in considering. The true believer federalist judges in their 30-50’s are all true believers and know they are political actors not impartial jurists.

  20. 20.

    billcinsd

    @Another Scott: Orin Kerr is not a good Cal law prof. He’s probably better than John Yoo, but he clerked for Kennedy and worked for John Cornyn. Kerr is a libertarian, IIRC, and is part of the Volokh Conspiracy

  21. 21.

    Ruckus

    @Edmund Dantes:

    All of this.

    This is how overthrowing a government gets a start. The rule of law is either ignored or overruled by judges. And in this case, with the shitty six on the SC, they have protection. I’ll make no predictions of how I think this will go but I see a real possibility of the shit hitting the fan.

  26. 26.

    Mike in NC

    Lindsey Graham will show up for this neo-Confederate civil war 2.0 cosplay wearing what the rebs called “chicken guts” on their sleeves.

  28. 28.

    Lacuna Synecdoche

    @jackmac: ​

    So perhaps the best case scenario is that MAGA ends “not with a bang but with a whimper.”

    Well, it’s Trump, and Republicans, so it’ll probably be more like, “Not with a bang, but with whining.”

  33. 33.

    Brachiator

    @Another Scott:

    And yet TFG lost every election challenge in court.

    We’re not doomed.

    In Arizona and other states, people are winning elections who believe that Trump won the presidential election.

    If Trump becomes the GOP candidate in 2024, he will certainly spew out his rigged election bull crap again.

    And whoever the 2024 GOP candidate might be, the question will be, might state officials cheat or deliberately bend the rules to deliver Republican electors no without regard to the actual vote.

    No, we are not doomed. But Republicans are intent on eliminating or neutralizing those who would do the right thing.

     

    ETA. I have a friend who does not believe that democracy could be toppled here. She absolutely believes that Trump election deniers will do their jobs. I don’t know that they could do their jobs properly because of their beliefs. I asked as a hypothetical. Could someone who believes in a flat Earth work as a NASA engineer and help send a crew to the Moon and back?

  34. 34.

    James E Powell

    @Brachiator:

    Remember the Trumpster who prevented the transition from starting until late November?

    Imagine 20 or 30 of those scattered through the swing states. County officials who refuse to certify vote totals. State officials who simply do not report a winner. And so on.

  35. 35.

    JaySinWA

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: A version of this is what I fear, orchestrated by people like Flynn. They are currently organizing training for takeovers in local governments through intimidation and violence, a start to remake a Jim Crow style (not necessarily race based) control over who can live where, and who has any authority.

    “General Flynn has said at one of these rallies that people need to pay more attention to their Constitution than to the Bible,” he said. “The Constitution includes the separation of church and state. They seem to be conveniently ignoring that.”

    Matters said he’s also concerned about reports that he’s heard of hate groups using tour events to recruit new members.

    “Several of the speakers at a typical ReAwaken America tour are Proud Boys or helped organize and execute the January 6 insurrection,” he said.

    https://spokanefavs.com/pastors-organizations-speak-against-reawaken-america-tour-coming-to-post-falls-this-month/

  37. 37.

    JaySinWA

    @JaySinWA: I can’t find a source now, but Flynn related groups have been doing training in harassment techniques to drive opposition out of office, into silence, or even out of town

    Replicating the School board and town council campaigns to bully people into submission.

  38. 38.

    Balconesfault

    Following one of the David Simon tweets (twitter links won’t open in my BJ window?) I was led to a string of quasi-socialists bashing the aid to Ukraine.

    One of the posts?  Dr. Jill Stein calling for dissolution of NATO.

     

    Color me shocked.

  41. 41.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Balconesfault:

    The US Greens at this point should be treated as nothing more that a Putin front organisation. They are simply terrible. While I am not enamoured of the Oz Greens, they are light years away from their US namesakes, and are thoroughly opposed to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as well as being able to be elected to our Parliament with reasonably broad based support.

    Jill Stein and whoever the current leader is should be shunned by every and any ‘left’ in the US, and any flavour of US left that supports them should be shunned. They are simply terrible.

    In addition, while first past the post systems are inimical to democracy in my opinion, and the US fetishisation of a two party system is a sign of political immaturity, while you have that system, the US Greens and any other formation that promises to be able to ‘rise’ above it by spoiling a popular front against real live US fascism should treated as the enemy of democracy they are.

  42. 42.

    Joey Maloney

    @JaySinWA: I saw yesterday –  can’t remember where – they just showed up at GA SoS to drop off 37K voter registration challenges.

    See if you can guess which party and/or ethnicity those challenges comprise.

  43. 43.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Aussie Sheila: FPTP systems make third parties into trolls and clown shows because when a spoiler is all you can be, candidates and supporters OK with being spoilers (or capable of denying the obvious) are what you will get. Trolls, fanatics and the delusional.

  44. 44.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Rocks: I’ve been through the OK-bomb museum on the site of the Murrah Bldg in OK City. You follow a path that takes you minute by minute through that day. It’s very sobering. I recommend it to anyone who’s stuck in visiting OK City.

  45. 45.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Brachiator: I see the judicial attack on democracy as a percolation problem on a tree graph (the tree of appeals courts leading up to SCOTUS). Some of the courts in that tree are corrupt.  If only a few of them are completely corrupt, bad-faith suits to nullify democracy can eventually get stopped. As the number of corrupt courts increases (and if SCOTUS is sufficiently corrupt), occasionally some will percolate all the way to the top. At first this will be a rare event. But if some critical threshold of corrupt courts is crossed, they become more likely than not to succeed, and the rule of law breaks down one way or another–either the courts become our oligarchic rulers, magically making tyrannical edicts into law, or people stop obeying them and the law means nothing. This could be a quite sudden transition.

  46. 46.

    p.a.

    @Matt McIrvin: The other question is where else and how deep is the rot in the u s military, state natty guards, state & local police (IMO with just gut feeling ‘reasoning’ the most corrupt.)

    We already know red state governments are all-in on The 1861 Project.

  47. 47.

    Matt McIrvin

    @p.a.: The thing that worries me about the courts getting corrupt is that it would short-circuit the military’s commitment to rule of law, which seems fairly impressive otherwise. They are committed to doing things by the book, but when the book itself disintegrates and suddenly they get “legal orders” to commit atrocities because the definition of the law is now subject to whim, that’s up in the air and they have to start making calls they’re trained, for good reason, NOT to make.

    I know Adam has worried out loud about this. I suspect the most likely result is that they just try to stay out of it when anything gets too hairy (which means that other armed entities have free rein).

  48. 48.

    Geminid

    A report today in the Times of Israel details death threats against retired Air Force officer Mickey Weinstein and other members of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation which Weinstein founded. On Saturday someone posted on the foundations website an offer of $5,000 to anyone who “behe3ded” an MRFF member, with a $1,000 bonus if the target was Jewish.

    The person associated himself with the Council on Islamic American Relations, but Weinstein said his organization’s head researcher identified the poster’s IP address as that of someone who had no connection to CAIR (the MRFF and CAIR have worked together in the past). The FBI is investigating the matter, said Weinstein.

    Weinstein founded the Military Religious  Freedom Foundation over 16 years ago. He was alarmed by his son’s account of coercive religious practices at the Air Force Academy. The Foundation has won lawsuits aimed at religious coercion in the military and is a target for religious bigots including some members of Congress.

  49. 49.

    cmorenc

    One telling informal metric that Trump’s MAGA support base is leaking can be seen along our short street down at a beach town along NC’s coast.  During summer 2020 and 2021 and up through about Memorial Day 2022, there were three houses that whenever their owners came down here, consistently, prominently flew both “Trump” flags and one of those black-and-blue pro-police flags.  Only one of them still flies the Trump flag (though all three fly the black-and-blue police flag).  One of the two houses where the Trump flag is now missing from the deck or frontyard flagpole is notable in particular: the owner is running for sheriff as the R nominee back in his home in inland county on a “law and order” platform.  All through 2020 and 2021, this now sheriff candidate would also, whenever he went out to the beach, would also put up a huge ‘Trump” banner behind his chair.  That was also notably absent this past Labor Day weekend, though I actually ran into him and briefly spoke to him Satuday as I passed by his chair out on the beach (I’ve casually known him as a neighborto briefly speak with in passing  for years pre-dating MAGA and Trump) .  Some of his advisors must have convinced him that overtly flying the Trump flag (even 80 miles away from his inland home where he’s running) is not a good idea for his prospects in the November election.

    Don’t get me wrong – there is vanishingly little likelihood that the two owners now not-flying Trump flags have fundamentally changed their hard-core RW spots, but clearly both have chosen to detach themselves from being so publicly identified with Trump this summer.

  50. 50.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Edmund Dantes: This is exactly correct. The Trump-installed Federalist Society “judges” simply do not care at all about what many people in the system thought was sacrosanct. They don’t care about precedent. They don’t care about judgement based on the actual law. They don’t care about logic. They don’t care even about contradicting themselves one day to the next. They are full-on political animals and view their role as simply to serve a political goal (whatever the flavor of the day is) via their position in the judiciary branch.

    The Republicans, and more importantly, the insanely wealthy authoritarians who pay for the Republicans, recognized the power of an untethered judiciary and have been ruthlessly pursuing it for decades. Admittedly this isn’t necessarily new in the history of our country, but I don’t want to return to the Gilded Age and before.

  51. 51.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Geminid:

    …coercive religious practices at the Air Force Academy

    Hell, the centerpiece of the AFA is a god-damned Christianist chapel regardless of whatever nondenominational bullshit that blather on about it.

  52. 52.

    Matt McIrvin

    @cmorenc: The thing about the cop flag is that there’s a deniability about it–it’s possible to frame it as a relatively anodyne “cop awareness” gesture rather than advocacy of police brutality. Especially if you’ve got the version where the stripe is half red to honor firefighters.

  53. 53.

    J R in WV

    @Brachiator: ​
     

    This is not technically true at all — these traitors have been winning Republican Primarys in AZ and MI, not elections, which start in a few weeks. There have been a rare couple of special elections so far, which have been won by Democratic candidates, even in far right Alaska!!

    There is plenty of real bad news to go around, we don’t need to proffer fake bad news here, thanks so much !!!

  54. 54.

    StringOnAStick

    What about all the judicial appointments Biden has been making?  Didn’t I see something about how the rate of appointment exceeds both the 45 era and the Obama era?  Joe knows the score on the judiciary and has been quietly filling every open seat he can, much to the Turtle’s chagrin.  We’re not beaten yet, hold some hope people!

  57. 57.

    bbleh

    IMO, our best arguments for the moment are not about Trump’s MAGAt base voters; they’re about encouraging the better-hinged generic Republican voters to stay home on Election Day.

    Yes yes yes!  20 million times this!

    And, of course — and even more so — to encourage OUR voters, and especially our former / sometime NON-voters, to make sure to get out and vote.

    Dobbs and 1/6, among other things, accomplish both.

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