Friday marked 100 days since the shocking assault on our nation’s Capitol and our legislative branch of government by thousands of Trump supporters determined to stop the Constitutional process of counting the legally cast presidential electoral college votes.
In those 100 days, only hundreds of the thousands of people who smashed down the doors of the cathedral of our democracy have been arrested. Only those few from the thousands who broke windows, urinated and defecated on the walls and floors of the peoples’ house, beat up, mutilated, and even killed Capitol police officers, threatened to kill our legislators, and string up the Vice President. Of those, only 60 or so have been charged (so far), with the first to plead guilty, self-identifying as a founder of the Oathkeepers right-wing militia, and one of the organizers of the assault.
What they did is not democracy. It is a growing right-wing militant threat to our democracy, based on a lie, being promoted by the Republican party into the mainstream. We ignore this reality at our own risk.
A U.S. naturalization Ceremony. Image courtesy of Democracy Journal. Democracy doesn’t end with Election Day.
The greatest threat to national security is no longer a foreign terrorist threat.
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) the greatest threat lies within; right-wing domestic terrorists driven chiefly by white supremacist, racist and anti-government extremists, who are rapidly moving mainstream.
This element of mostly white, Republican Trump supporters, is being infused with QAnon conspiracy theories, white supremacy bigotry, and hatred. They’re armed, they are violent and they are angry that the rest of us don’t share their delusion.
In late March, FBI Director Christopher Wray bluntly labeled the January riot at the U.S. Capitol as “domestic terrorism” and warned of a rapidly growing threat of homegrown violent extremism that law enforcement is scrambling to confront through thousands of investigations.
There is strong evidence of coordination among elements of that Jan. 6 mob. There was also warning that something could happen, although few among us Americans could imagine the horror that actually occured. Ark Valley Voice investigative reporters tracked the comments prior to Jan. 6 and we continue to track the movement of the lies and nonsense into the mainstream.
Right-wing violence is growing. Just in the past five days, The Washington Post recapped statistics from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tracking the rising incidents of domestic terror incidents; there are far more right-wing attacks than left-wing incidents. The data shows that since 2015, right-wing extremists have been involved in 267 plots or attacks and 91 fatalities.
Since the Jan. 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol, the big lie that precipitated this latest series of events has not gone away. In fact, the lie that election fraud occurred (it did not) and that somehow Donald Trump won reelection to the presidency (he did not) is the tinder for a seemingly endless litany of false claims and grievance that is clogging social media platforms, from private Facebook groups to platforms like Telegram and MeWe. They are echo-chambers of disinformation.
Here in Colorado, AVV has noted the Patriot training events, the ads running in rural papers recruiting for right-wing extremist groups; carefully coated in sunsets and smiling family images. From the top of party leadership right down to the local party level, the marching order is to infiltrate — Even in this county the directive is to get appointed to committees and run for local offices so as to be ready for Trump’s move back to the power they imagine.
“Jan. 6 was not an isolated event,” Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now and it’s not going away anytime soon.”
Wray said that the number of domestic terrorism investigations has increased from around 1,000 when he became director in 2017 to roughly 1,400 at the end of last year, to about 2,000 already in 2021. The number of arrests of white supremacists and other racially motivated extremists has almost tripled.
Some Republican lawmakers who want their identities shielded say that when they don’t vote to prevent things like gun reform, they get threatened by voters. So now Republican lawmakers are afraid of not just Trump, but a minority of their own voters? What is wrong with this picture is that this is not democracy.
The Nazi fascists used to talk about how they handled “the Jewish question,” “the Polish question,” and “the Gypsy question” with tragic consequences. One actually doesn’t have to wonder how today’s authoritarian element refers to we who don’t agree with them. Their rhetoric is violent.
It should be noted that the fascistic movement that remained after WWI was focused on getting democratic countries to line up against communist countries. The goal: to get us to destroy each other, so their authoritarian element could take advantage of that no-win situation. The strategy at work now — is to divide us. The way to defeat America is to turn one anti-democracy delusional group of people against the other pro-democracy group. Who benefits from that? Take a few guesses.
Abraham Lincoln said, “a house divided cannot stand.”*
Featured image: Democracy image. Courtesy of Harvard Business Review.
*The speech given by Abraham Lincoln in 1858 had a passage starting with this idiom. He used it in reference to the U.S. government and slavery laws. It was the most popular passage of the entire speech and eventually led to legislation against slavery. The basis of the phrase Biblically was Matthew 12:22-28.
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