SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
political violence
All But 3 State Attorneys General Call for Peaceful Transfer of Power, Condemn Political Violence
The three Republicans who didn't join the statement "presumably want violence," said one critic.
Nov 05, 2024
A bipartisan group of attorneys general on Monday led the vast majority of the United States' top state-level legal officials in releasing a statement calling for a peaceful transfer of power regardless of the presidential election results—but three Republican attorneys general were conspicuously absent from the list of signatories.
Ken Paxton of Texas, Todd Rokita of Indiana, and Austin Knudsen of Montana did not add their names to the statement, which condemned "any acts of violence related to the results."
"A peaceful transfer of power is the highest testament to the rule of law, a tradition that stands at the heart of our nation's stability," said the officials. "As attorneys general, we affirm our commitment to protect our communities and uphold the democratic principles we serve."
The statement was released a day after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said at a rally that he wouldn't mind journalists getting shot and that he "shouldn't have left" the White House after he was voted out of office in 2020.
Trump urged thousands of his supporters to descend on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 to try to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden's electoral victory, and has continued to claim he was the true winner of the 2020 election.
Election experts have said in recent weeks that Trump has been setting the stage for the same baseless claims of election fraud and vote-stealing that he and his allies spread in 2020—telling supporters that Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris will only win the election if Democrats cheat and saying, along with his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), that he will only accept the election results if he views them as "fair and legal."
The attorneys general—representing 48 states, the District of Colombia, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands—called on Americans "to vote, participate in civil discourse, and, above all, respect the integrity of the democratic process."
"Let us come together after this election not divided by outcomes but united in our shared commitment to the rule of law and safety of all Americans," they said. "Violence has no place in the democratic process; we will exercise our authority to enforce the law against any illegal acts that threaten it."
The statement was spearheaded by two Democrats—Ellen Rosenblum of Oregon and William Tong of Connecticut—and two Republicans, Dave Yost of Ohio and Kris Kobach of Kansas. Kobach notably led a so-called Election Integrity Commission during Trump's term in the White House, searching unsuccessfully for evidence that the Republican was the true winner of the national popular vote in 2016.
Of the attorneys general who did not join the statement, Rokita and Knudsen are up for reelection on Tuesday.
Indiana-based author Steve Tally said Rokita, Knudsen, and Paxton "presumably want violence" and urged voters to oppose the state attorneys general.
"Where is the Indiana secretary of state and attorney general on this one?" said Destiny Wells, the Democratic candidate challenging Rokita. "Oh that's right, it's their team."
In Texas, Paxton has been a vehement supporter of Trump, announcing Monday he would deploy an "Election Day Rapid Response Legal Team" to polling places and suing the Biden-Harris administration over plans to send federal election monitors to Texas.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump and Trumpism Are the Violent Threat—And They Must Be Stopped
We are not our own worst enemies. Trump is the worst enemy of every one of us.
Nov 02, 2024
William Jacob Parsons was arrested recently in North Carolina on charges of appearing at a FEMA office carrying a semi-automatic handgun and making threats against employees.
According to the Washington Post:
Parsons said he was motivated by social media reports claiming that FEMA was withholding supplies from hurricane victims in western North Carolina. Such false claims are part of a wave of misinformation that has hampered hurricane recovery efforts across the Southeast. ‘I viewed it as if our people are sitting here on American soil, and they’re refusing to aid our people,’ Parsons told FOX8.
A ”wave.” The phenomenon sounds beyond human control, like the waves caused by the hurricane itself.
Only a few paragraphs down does the story mention that there is a politics here: “As the country digs out, false claims about the storms have divided the Republican Party. While Donald Trump and his allies have spread the falsehoods, other GOP lawmakers and officials have sought to counter these rumors without directly criticizing the former president.” It turns out that it was Trump and his allies who caused this “wave.” Even here, the reporter needs to emphasize that “other GOP lawmakers and officials have sought to counter these rumors without directly criticizing the former president.” What is not said: these officials, like Republican office holders throughout the country, continue to support Donald Trump as he runs a campaign centered on lies, threats, and promises to use coercive force to deal with immigrants, suspected criminals, and various “enemies from within”—the same types he described only a few months ago as “the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”
Focusing on the lone wolf rather than the rabid wolf pack led and incited by Trump, and exaggerating the extent to which anyone in the GOP is constraining him in any way, this piece exemplifies the widespread tendency of so many journalists and commentators to downplay the threat that Trump’s rhetoric and his promises poses to so many people—federal workers, election workers, Haitians, anyone suspected of a crime, and pretty much all people on the left.
Robert Pape is a highly respected political scientist at the University of Chicago, and the Chicago Project on Security and Threats that he founded and directs is a major source of data on political violence. In recent weeks he has weighed in on the current U.S. political situation, in a Foreign Affairs essay entitled “Our Own Worst Enemies: The Violent Style in American Politics,” and in a New York Times op-ed entitled “I Study Political Violence. I’m Worried About the Election.” Unfortunately, Pape furnishes the downplaying of Trumpist violence with a patina of “scientific” credibility.
Pape begins by noting that “As we approach the presidential election next month, our election sites and officials may be in considerable physical danger.” He proceeds to note the most obvious source of concern: “Over the past four years, an alarming number of election officials and workers nationwide have been intimidated or threatened by people who appear to believe the widespread lies about voter fraud and rigged voting machines that supposedly helped steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump.”
But as the empirical scientist of politics that he is, he seeks to go beyond the obvious. And the point of his interventions is to share the “worrisome evidence” of his center’s survey research: “we found disturbingly high levels of support for political violence. Notably, this attitude was bipartisan. Nearly 6 percent of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the ‘use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.’ A little over 8 percent agreed or strongly agreed that ‘the use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.’ These results reflect a relatively stable pattern over the past year.”
The upshot is clear: both sides of the political divide display troubling support for violence, and we are, as his essay says, “our own worst enemies.” His recommendation: Republican and Democratic Governors, especially in swing states, should make a joint public statement condemning violence, and dedicate resources to election security, so that both election officials and the broad public can feel safe and confident about the election.
The closing words of Pape’s op-ed underscore that the source of his urgent worry is even-handed and not partisan:
If we had not recently witnessed some of the worst election-related violence in modern American history — the Jan. 6 riot, the attempted kidnapping of Speaker Nancy Pelosi before the 2022 midterms and the two attempted assassinations of Mr. Trump — it might make sense to take more modest precautions. But the past four years have shown that we live in a dangerous new world.
Unfortunately Pape, the prisoner of his data, downplays the Trumpist danger no less egregiously than the many journalists who lack his scientific authority. And the problem is not in his data. It is in the lack of political judgment that he brings to it.
For it is quite obvious that not a single instance of violence that he references has anything to do with the left.
The January 6 insurrection, the attacks on Pelosi (and violent threats against many others, from AOC to General Mark Milley and Georgia Republican Brad Raffensperger), the threats to election officials—all of these things, like the threat to FEMA, come from the right and are indeed directly promoted and incited by Donald Trump. Even the two assassination attempts on Trump had nothing to do with the left—though Trump and Vance continue to lie about this. The first accused assassin was a registered Republican with obvious mental problems. The second was a disgruntled former Trump supporter who actually wrote a book explaining his disillusionment and calling for Trump’s assassination. Both assailants were products of the cult of violence produced by Trump (in a recent Atlantic piece, “The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator,” David Frum points out that Trump was the victim of his own rhetoric).
There is no obvious reason to doubt Pape’s survey results. There are people on the left who hate Trump as much as people on the right hate Democrats, and many of those on the left might be as willing to say “yes” to a survey question about violence as those on the right.
But all of the threats and the actual violence that Pape notes, and that are so obviously so very dangerous right now, have come from the right.
Not a single Democratic leader has done anything to justify or incite violence or question the legitimacy of the electoral system or describe J-6 insurrectionists as “us” and police as the “they” who had weapons at the Capitol. Only one of the two major parties has unreservedly supported a candidate whose entire campaign has centered on vindicating the insurrection and promising to “eradicate” an opposition that he describes as “vermin,” going so far as to propose using federal troops to repress them. Retired Generals Mark Milley and John Kelly—both former Trump appointees, and neither a member of Democratic Socialist of America– have publicly declared that Donald Trump is a fascist. A fascist. Has any serious military official outside of the deranged Michael Flynn said anything like this about Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or any Democrat? No. Because no Democrat is a fascist.
There may be some symmetry in the way “extremists” on both sides of our polarized politics poll as “sympathetic to violence.”
But as serious political scientists have long known, filling out questionnaires is one thing, and politics is another. Only on the Trumpist right is there an organized campaign to demonize opponents and to incite and justify violence, and only on the Trumpist right are there many thousands of armed individuals—some organized as “patriot” paramilitary groups, some as lone wolves—who have acted on the incitement to violence. Is there a single election official, anywhere, who fears that there are leftist activists who threaten them because they believe that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats, liberals, progressives and Marxists, and that “we need to take our country back” from the “lunatic communists?”
“There is violence on both sides,” or “we are our own worst enemies”—such rhetoric is stupid and grievously misleading as we approach a truly watershed election in which, to use the words of Trump critic, conservative Republican jurist J. Michael Luttig, democracy itself is “on a knife’s edge.”
There is no symmetry when it comes to the danger of political violence.
We are not our own worst enemies. Trump is the worst enemy of every one of us—from Liz Cheney to Bernie Sanders– who cares about constitutional democracy, and he makes no bones about saying so. He is retribution. He is vengeance.
Trumpism is the source of the violence that threatens to engulf us.
And the solution is simple: Stop Trump!
We have no time to waste.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Experts Sound Alarm on Potential Right-Wing Violence Fueled by 'Election Denialism'
Online discussion of potential violence has been on the rise over the past month, as it was ahead of the 2020 election.
Oct 31, 2024
Recent violent incidents at a Democratic National Committee office in Arizona and ballot boxes in the Pacific Northwest have been accompanied by rising online discussion of potential political violence following the November 5 elections, with people in right-wing forums ramping up the spread of baseless claims that Democrats will "steal" the presidential election and threatening to help Republican nominee Donald Trump take power by force.
That's according to a study published this week by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), which warns the group is "seeing the same warning signs of political violence based on election denialism combined with violent language across fringe platforms that we saw in the weeks before the 2020 election and before the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol."
At the messaging platform Telegram, violent rhetoric related to denying the results of an election that hadn't even taken place yet rose by 317% over the course of October 2020, and GPAHE found an identical trend this past month.
Users have threatened to "shoot to kill any illegal voters," apparently referring to the supposed scourge of illegal voting by non-citizens that Republicans including Trump and U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) have vowed to defeat, despite the lack of evidence that such a problem exists. A Telegram group frequented by members of the Minnesota Proud Boys have called for "patriots" to "take action" and attend a protest at the Minnesota state Capitol on November 2.
On other platforms, GPAHE co-founder Heidi Beirich told The Guardian on Thursday, the numbers of political violence threats "have been lower so far this year, but they are quickly rising as we approach Election Day."
On Gab in 2020, violent election rhetoric rose 462% during October and shot up "a staggering 8,309% the week of the election," said GPAHE. This month, the rhetoric has gone up by about 105%, with users saying people engaged in "election fraud"—a vanishingly rare occurrence—should face "public executions."
"The military needs to be brought in," at least one user wrote this month, echoing Trump's statement that an "enemy within on Election Day "should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military."
"The Trump campaign, its surrogates, or right-wing sympathizers could invite unrest, threats, or violence to try putting their collective thumb on the scales at key decision points."
Beirich told The Guardian that GPAHE is also seeing "posts targeting election workers with violence, a sign that real world activity could escalate."
The report was released as authorities investigate two incidents in Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon in which devices were used to set ballot boxes on fire, resulting in damage to hundreds of ballots cast by early voters. Officials have linked the alleged arson acts to an incident on October 8 in which a suspicious device was found in a ballot drop box.
A man named Jeffrey Michael Kelly was also arrested last week for shooting at the Democratic National Committee office in Tempe, Arizona. Authorities found 120 guns, 250,000 rounds of ammunition, and other weapons at his home, and said he was likely planning to commit a "mass casualty event" ahead of the election.
Those incidents and the memory of the violent riot on January 6, 2021, in which Trump urged thousands of his supporters to descend on the U.S. Capitol to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election results, are likely contributing to rising fears among voters about violence after next week's election. About 4 in 10 voters told The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research this week that they are "extremely" or "very" concerned about violence related to election denial.
In an analysis of political violence risks in the U.S. on Tuesday, the International Crisis Group noted that current conditions in the country may lower the chances of violent attacks related to election denial compared to 2020.
The prosecution of leaders of the January 6 insurrection and investigations into groups involved have "dented these groups' capacity," wrote program director Michael Wahid Hanna.
President Joe Biden has also lowered the risk of Trump challenging a potential election loss the way he did in 2020, when he and his allies urged "fake electors" in seven states to falsely declare him the winner, among other efforts. Biden signed the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act, which includes new rules for how Congress tallies electors chosen by each state and "raises the bar for any objection" to the election results, wrote Hanna.
However, added Hanna, "Trump himself remains a major risk factor" for violence after the election:
The Trump campaign, its surrogates, or right-wing sympathizers could invite unrest, threats, or violence to try putting their collective thumb on the scales at key decision points. Local officials told not to certify tallies and battleground-state Republican state legislatures urged to appoint 'faithless' electors could be subject to personal threats or rowdy demonstrations designed to show that 'the people' support Trump's preferred course of action. Later, Republican lawmakers in Congress could be intimidated in comparable ways. Democrats, who would presumably fight an effort of this sort at every stage in court, could be exposed to similar or worse. Any anti-Trump street protests, meanwhile, could very well be met with counter-demonstrations including far-right elements, which could lead to clashes, with the risk of deadly violence rising at each new phase of legal maneuvering.
With many in the Republican Party relentlessly transmitting the message that "its candidate cannot lose unless the other side cheats," wrote Hanna, the risk of political violence after the election can't be ignored.
"Responsible actors with Trump's ear should prevail upon him to stick to the rules," he wrote, "Election boards, state legislators, members of Congress, and judges will need to do the same: The country's electoral laws are in better shape than they were four years ago, but the reforms will only matter if the country's institutions adhere to them in good faith."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular