There’s a ‘serious and spreading threat’ to America — and the media is missing it: analysis
America could be rapidly approaching a new civil war and the August 8 search warrant execution at Mar-a-Lago could be a turning point in American history.
Writing in The Atlantic, Tim Alberta warned, "this country is tracking toward a scale of political violence not seen since the Civil War. It’s evident to anyone who spends significant time dwelling in the physical or virtual spaces of the American right. Go to a gun show. Visit a right-wing church. Check out a Trump rally. No matter the venue, the doomsday prophesying is ubiquitous—and scary. Whenever and wherever I’ve heard hypothetical scenarios of imminent conflict articulated, the premise rests on an egregious abuse of power, typically Democrats weaponizing agencies of the state to target their political opponents. I’ve always walked away from these experiences thinking to myself: If America is a powder keg, then one overreach by the government, real or perceived, could light the fuse."
"What made January 6 so predictable—the willingness of Republican leaders to prey on the insecurities and outright paranoia of these voters—is what makes August 8 so dangerous," Alberta wrote. "Assuming that Trump runs in 2024, the stakes are even higher. If Biden—or another Democrat—defeats him, Republicans will have all the more reason to reject the results, given what they see as the Democrats’ politically motivated investigation of the likely Republican nominee. If Trump wins, he and his hard-line loyalists will set about purging the DOJ, the intelligence community, and other vital government departments of careerists deemed insufficiently loyal. There will be no political cost to him for doing so; a Trump victory will be read as a mandate to prosecute his opponents. Indeed, that seems to be exactly where we’re headed."
Alberta was interviewed about his analysis by CNN's Anderson Cooper.
"Tim, do you really believe we're tracking toward a scale of political violence not seen since the Civil War?" Cooper asked. "In the early '70s, there were political bombings. There were a lot of bombings in the country, often just against property, and that was something the U.S. hadn't seen in a long time. You think what we're heading for is potentially far worse than that?"
"I would say a couple of things," Alberta replied. "First, in the 1970s, as far as I can recollect, there were not members of militia scaling the walls of the United States Capitol building. You did not have the sort of technological capacity to organize the way that we have now, and in fact, when you hear the warnings being issued by the Justice Department this week, listen, I've talked to people in the FBI, I've talked to people at Justice, they're not issuing these warnings just, you know, for the warning's sake."
"There is a serious and spreading threat to the stability of the country right now, and it is happening largely in venues that, respectfully, most of the mainstream media is completely oblivious to," Alberta explained. "They're not being covered, and I think we all want to tell ourselves that actually, this is just a lot of, you know, keyboard cowboys who are talking tough in some of the dark corners of the internet. But, in fact, when we see this guy go try to shoot up an FBI office in Cincinnati immediately after the Mar-a-Lago search warrant was executed, we see some of this other activity proliferating online, and it's a reminder that Jan. 6 was not an isolated incident."
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"In fact, we should have seen it coming and my fear is we're going to find ourselves in a spot not too long from now when we're looking back wondering why we didn't see more of it coming," Alberta warned.
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