Last updated on January 23rd, 2025 at 12:54 pm
Please do not take anything I say in my commentary as an excuse to commit political violence. I am not inciting attacks on Republicans, I’m simply pointing out facts.
Political violence has been increasing ever since Trump came down that escalator. He has used stochastic terrorism to strike fear in the heart of anyone who would dare to speak out against him, and incite death threats and violence against anyone who has. While I do believe that we all must speak out against what happened on Saturday, I refuse to say that this is a โboth sidesโ issue.
There was a near-fatal attack on Paul Pelosi by a man who said he was there for Nancy Pelosi, and he had planned on using the hammer โto break her kneecapsโ if she refused to tell him the โtruth.โ The truth was whatever the right told him it was. We can assume he would likely have killed her because she wouldn’t have known what โtruthโ to admit to in order to save herself from torture.
Just talking about what could’ve happened to Nancy makes me sick. Paul Pelosi suffered critical injuries involving surgery for a crushed skull, yet the right joked about the attack the day after it occurredโwith Don Jr. posting a picture of menโs underwear and a hammer calling it the Paul Pelosi Halloween costume. A Fox News host just this May suggested Paul Pelosi be given a hammer instead of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Again, I completely agree with what the author is saying here, I’m just not willing to agree that both sides are guilty of rhetoric meant to incite political violence, while the Right most certainly has. That being said, we should all condemn what happened on Saturday and do what it takes to prevent political violence from happening in the future.
โZany Progressive
โWhenever any Americanโs life is taken by another American unnecessarilyโwhether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violenceโwhenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children,ย the whole nation is degraded.โโ Robert F. Kennedy on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968)
Thereโs a subtext to thisย assassination attempt on former President Trumpย that must not be ignored, and it is simply this: America is being pushed to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.
More than 50 years after John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, America has become a ticking time bomb of political violence in words and deeds.
Magnified by an echo chamber of nasty tweets and government-sanctioned brutality, our politically polarizing culture of callousness, cruelty, meanness, ignorance, incivility, hatred, intolerance, indecency and injustice have only served to ratchet up the tension.
Consumed with back-biting, partisan politics, sniping, toxic hate, meanness and materialism, a culture of meanness has come to characterize many aspects of the nationโs governmental and social policies. โMeanness today is a state of mind,โ writes professor Nicolaus Mills in his book The Triumph of Meanness, โthe product of a culture of spite and cruelty that has had an enormous impact on us.โ
This casual cruelty is made possible by a growing polarization within the populace that emphasizes what divides usโrace, religion, economic status, sexuality, ancestry, politics, etc.โrather than what unites us: we are all Americans, and in a larger, more global sense, we are all human.
This is what writer Anna Quindlen refers to as โthe politics of exclusion, what might be thought of as theย cult of othernessโฆ It divides the country as surely as the Mason-Dixon line once did. And it makes for mean-spirited and punitive politics and social policy.โ
This is more than meanness, however.
We are imploding on multiple fronts, all at once.
This is what happens when ego, greed and power are allowed to take precedence over liberty, equality and justice.
This is the psychopathic mindset adopted by the architects of the Deep State, and it applies equally whether youโre talking about Democrats or Republicans.
Beware, because this kind of psychopathology canย spread like a virusย among the populace.
As an academic study into pathocracyย concluded, โ[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.โ
People donโt simply line up and salute. It is through oneโs own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil. To this end, โwe the peopleโ have become โwe the police state.โ
By failing to actively take a stand for good, we become agents of evil. Itโs not the person in charge who is solely to blame for the carnage. Itโs the populace that looks away from the injustice, that empowers the totalitarian regime, that welcomes the building blocks of tyranny.
This realization hit me full-force a few years ago. I had stopped into a bookstore and was struck by all of the books on Hitler, everywhere I turned. Yet had there been no Hitler, there still would have been a Nazi regime. There still would have been gas chambers and concentration camps and a Holocaust.
Hitler wasnโt the architect of the Holocaust. He was merely the figurehead. Same goes for the American police state: had there been no Trump or Obama or Bush, there still would have been a police state. There still would have been police shootings and private prisons and endless wars and government pathocracy.
Why? Because โwe the peopleโ have paved the way for this tyranny to prevail.
By turning Hitler into a super-villain who singlehandedly terrorized the worldโnot so different from how Trump is often depictedโhistorians have given Hitlerโs accomplices (the German government, the citizens that opted for security and order over liberty, the religious institutions that failed to speak out against evil, the individuals who followed orders even when it meant a death sentence for their fellow citizens) a free pass.
Author John W. Whitehead on people not speaking out against evil
None of us who remain silent and impassive in the face of evil, racism, extreme materialism, meanness, intolerance, cruelty, injustice and ignorance get a free pass.
Those among us who follow figureheads without question, who turn a blind eye to injustice and turn their backs on need, who march in lockstep with tyrants and bigots, who allow politics to trump principle, who give in to meanness and greed, and who fail to be outraged by the many wrongs being perpetrated in our midst, it is these individuals who must shoulder the blame when the darkness wins.
โDarkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that,โ Martin Luther King Jr. sermonized.
The darkness is winning.
Itโs not just on the world stage we must worry about the darkness winning.
The darkness is winning in our communities. Itโs winning in our homes, our neighborhoods, our churches and synagogues, and our government bodies. Itโs winning in the hearts of men and women the world over who are embracing hatred over love. Itโs winning in every new generation that is being raised to care only for themselves, without any sense of moral or civic duty to stand for freedom.
John F. Kennedy, killed by an assassinโs bullet five years before King would be similarly executed, spoke of a torch that had been โpassed to a new generation of Americansโborn in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritageโand unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.โ
Once again, a torch is being passed to a new generation, but this torch is setting the world on fire, burning down the foundations put in place by our ancestors, and igniting all of the ugliest sentiments in our hearts.
This fire is not liberating; it is destroying.
We are teaching our children all the wrong things: we are teaching them to hate, teaching them to worship false idols (materialism, celebrity, technology, politics), teaching them to prize vain pursuits and superficial ideals over kindness, goodness and depth.
We are on the wrong side of the revolution.
โIf we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution,โ advised King, โwe as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.ย We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.โ
Freedom demands responsibility.
Freedom demands that we stop thinking as Democrats and Republicans and start thinking like human beings, or at the very least, Americans.
JFK was killed in 1963 for daring to challenge the Deep State.
King was killed in 1968 for daring to challenge the military industrial complex.
Robert F. Kennedy offered these remarks to a polarized nation in the wake of Kingโs assassination:
โIn this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. [Y]ou can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarizationโฆfilled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort โฆ to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and loveโฆย What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.โ
Two months later, RFK was also killed by an assassinโs bullet.
Fifty-plus years later, weโre still being terrorized by assassinsโ bullets, but what these madmen are really trying to kill is that dream of a world in which all Americans โwould be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.โ
We havenโt dared to dream that dream in such a long time.
But imagineโฆ
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to stand upโunitedโfor freedom.
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to speak outโwith one voiceโagainst injustice.
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to push backโwith the full force of our collective numbersโagainst government corruption and despotism.
As I make clear in my bookย Battlefield America: The War on the American Peopleย and in its fictional counterpartย The Erik Blair Diaries, tyranny wouldnโt stand a chance.