The Violence Will Get Worse - The Bulwark

[erronis]

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/violence-trump-political-rhetoric

Trump has called for cooler political rhetoric from his opponents, but his own angry words are keeping the temperature—and the risk of violence—high.
Matthew Sheffield

DONALD TRUMP IS INFAMOUS for saying anything to win. Before he ran for president, he claimed to have detectives investigating Barack Obama’s birth certificate. In his 2016 campaign, he said he’d support a higher minimum wage, spoke affectionately of single-payer healthcare, and promised he’d close the tax loophole for carried interest.

None of these statements amounted to anything, of course, as Trump never lifted a finger to enact them. This year, he’s continued the tradition by promising to give free in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment to women who have difficulty getting pregnant. Once again, he’s doing absolutely nothing to make it happen.

Despite his numerous broken promises and fake policy initiatives, however, there is one issue on which Trump has been remarkably consistent throughout his third run for the presidency: his promise to conduct “the largest deportation in the history of our country.” It’s an effort that immigration enforcement experts estimate would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, require the construction of massive detention facilities, and see the uprooting of 3 to 4 percent of the entire population. Trump has repeatedly pointed to “Operation Wetback,” the deportation initiative taken during the Eisenhower administration, as a model to emulate and expand upon with multiple camps featuring tens of thousands of people.

Trump’s commitment to mass deportation makes his the most rabidly anti-immigration platform in our nation’s history. And if he is put in a position to enact his plans, it could produce one of the more threatening and violent chapters in recent history, as well.

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WHILE SPRINGFIELD OFFICIALS do say they need more state and federal resources to handle the city’s population increase, Trump’s depiction of life in Springfield doesn’t correspond with reality on the ground there. It does, however, coincide with the plot of the racist novel The Camp of the Saints, which depicts the total collapse of European and American governmental systems under massive immigration from the Global South. While the book remained obscure in the United States after its 1973 publication in France, it has become highly influential in right-wing circles in recent years. Trump consigliere Steve Bannon has made many references to it, as has Miller, the person who presumably would be responsible for implementing the mass deportation camps.

Although Camp has only recently caught on, fantasies of violence against black and Hispanic people have been a staple of militia types since the publication of the neo-Nazi pulp fiction novel The Turner Diaries in 1978. Racially motivated mass murder is the persistent theme of a series of novels published by a columnist with the Republican-establishmentarian website Townhall, as The Bulwark reported. Spend ten minutes on hard-right forums and you can easily find posters spelling out their violent dreams. Lurid visions of “civil war” also figured large in the propaganda that Russian media outlets recently paid far-right influencers to produce. One of them, YouTuber Tim Pool, has been particularly obsessive, tweeting 39 times about the topic in the past two years and repeatedly telling his followers, “we are already in a civil war period.”

These postings are having an impact. According to a new PRRI poll, more than 25 percent of Republicans who viewed Trump favorably agreed with the statement that “if the 2024 presidential election is compromised by voter fraud, everyday Americans will need to ensure the rightful leader takes office, even if it requires taking violent actions.”

Comments on the author (Matthew Sheffield) from EmptyWheel (https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/09/16/the-concerning-paragraph-in-the-ryan-routh-complaint/#comment-1070683)

The nutjobs coming out of the woodwork, the Karma of Stochastic Terrorism?

Good article at The Bulwark this day, never heard of the author:

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/violence-trump-political-rhetoric

One third of our country wants this Bullshit of destroying a Second third while the last third stands by and does nothing? The hell with that. Where have we seen this movie before…

The CPAC clip with Dan Bishop, Ken Paxton and Steven Miller is particularly ghoulish. And Paxton as AG under a Donvict 47 administration – makes my skin crawl.

It is indeed an interesting piece on the Bulwark, and I believe it is Sheffield’s first guest piece for them.

His backstory is discussed here (March 2024) in a Q&A with George Takei

https://plus.flux.community/cp/142601913

Tldr: he was a very right wing activist, extricated himself from that milieu and now writes on right wing extremism

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Here’s more from Rick Perlstein @ American Prospect. The backstory is something else…

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-09-11-zeal-of-the-convert-matthew-sheffield/

[Bev54]

1. The MSM will report this as a both sides issue, as usual.