Republicans who run Texas are in open defiance of the US Supreme Court and the federal government over who has legal responsibility for enforcing our immigration laws and protecting our borders. It’s the most significant challenge to federal authority since the Nullification Crisis of 1832 that led us straight toward the Civil War.
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And, indeed, it’s stirring up pro-new-civil war rhetoric among the racist base of the GOP. Televangelist Andrew Wommack, a big Republican supporter who called COVID a hoax “hyped by liberals as an opportunity to come against Trump,” on his Truth & Liberty podcast recently promoted the idea, along with replacing the US Constitution with the Christian Bible:
“I’ve actually had people say that if Trump was to be elected if we got a conservative Congress, that they fear that we would have another civil war,” Wommack told a caller. “And you know what? I don’t want a civil war, I don’t know anybody that does, but would it be worth it? To turn this nation back? I believe it would.”
Having been caught in the middle of a civil war years ago in Uganda (and having had one of my colleagues killed in it by stray gunfire into our refugee camp), I can say with a pretty high level of certainty that anybody who’s pushing civil war here in America has never experienced one.
Nikki Haley has been swatted twice, been physically attacked on stage, and is now being stalked at campaign events by Putin-loving Trump followers who are outraged that she’s calling for more military aid for Ukraine.
Jacob Ware, author of Guns, God, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America and a consultant to the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC):
“I think intent to commit violence is high across the political spectrum, but especially on the far right. And in the United States, we always have the capability to conduct violence because of our gun laws. There’s a very poisonous mix being brewed with the great potential for violence in 2024 and beyond.”
Just days after Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows ruled that Trump had committed sedition and therefore couldn’t be on that state’s ballot, she was swatted at home. Judges Tanya Chutkin and Arthur Engoron have also been targeted by fascist Trump followers.
A Trump devotee armed with a hammer broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and tried to beat her husband, Paul Pelosi, to death; on the campaign trail, Trump regularly refers to the incident as if it was some sort of victory for him and his people, joking about it in a way that some interpret as encouragement for future similar attacks on Democrats.
Another apparent Trump follower, just last month, murdered and decapitated his own father because he was a federal employee and, therefore, part of the “deep state” that Trump has repeatedly called on to be destroyed.
An October survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that fully 23 percent of Americans agree with the statement that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.” The Institute’s CEO, Melissa Deckman, told the CBC:
“You have political leaders like Donald Trump who are not willing to ratchet down that rhetoric — in fact, they're doing the very opposite. In that context, I’m not surprised to see that Nikki Haley is asking for more security.”
When The Washington Post looked into the problem, they found that people running for Congress increased their spending on security by over 500 percent between the time Trump lost in 2020 and last November’s midterms.
The Brennan Center for Justice questioned over 1,700 state and local elected officials in all 50 states and found that fully 40 percent reported being threatened or physically attacked in the three years since Trump lost. Ninety percent said they’d been “harassed, intimidated, or stalked,” and one in ten state legislators reported that a person with a weapon had tried to intimidate them on one or more occasion.
Fascist Republicans are apparently getting what they want out of these intimidation tactics: one-in-five state officials, and almost half of local elected officials report that because of the threats they’re less willing to involve themselves in any way with “controversial” issues like abortion, immigration, or gun control.
Last year, Republican anti-abortion extremist Philip Buyno loaded his car with a hatchet, flares, matches, and bottles and cans filled with gasoline, then drove to the offices of an Illinois reproductive care clinic, Affirmative Care Solutions.
He repeatedly rammed his car into the front entrance of the building, destroying the main entrance and damaging the building’s foundation, and told police that when he got out of jail he was going to “finish the job.”
Buyno told police he was a member of a “rescue group” along with Matt Trewhella and Dan Holman; Trewhella signed the “Justifiable Homicide Statement” supporting people who murder abortion doctors, while Holman has defended using murder as a way to stop abortion.
Last week an openly Nazi group marched in front of the home of Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey. In Idaho, a group of 31 hateful white supremacists had the case against them dismissed because FBI agents and local prosecutors had “accidentally” bungled evidence and interrogations.
Last week, a Tennessee man was arrested for trying to participate in a plot with two Texas men to visit the southern border and murder Border Patrol agents along with any immigrants they could find. One of them was in possession of six semiautomatic firearms, over 20 magazines, and around 1,800 rounds of ammunition.
The border has been inundated with immigrants ever since Speaker “Moscow Mike” Johnson held a press conference to inform people in South and Central America that “the US border is wide open.” NPR reported on it, noting in their headline, “The border crisis is helping to mainstream a dangerous conspiracy theory.”
Johnson has openly promoted that hateful and antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory” that says wealthy Jews are funding the entrance of millions of Hispanics into our country so they can illegally vote for Democrats.
“If you’re scratching your head,” Johnson told his followers, “you’ve seen the video, you see droves of people, 2.4 million people coming over the border illegally, the president allowing it, the Democrats in charge of Congress are allowing it. The deal is they're going to turn them into voters.”
The Great Replacement Theory, a warmed-over reboot of Hitler’s theories about Jews and Gypsies, now has a huge following in the Republican Party and among Trump supporters.
Recently a “convoy” of armed white supremacists calling themselves “God’s Army” made its way to the southern border, echoing Trump’s (and Hitler’s) rhetoric that dark-skinned immigrants “poison the blood” of a country and intend to “replace” white men in the workplace and bedroom.
The FBI had to evacuate the Border Patrol processing center in Eagle Pass because of threats; a few days later Paul Faye Sr., identified as a “militia sniper,” was arrested for planning to murder Border Patrol agents. His hope was it would cause what he called a “domino effect” in which white men all over the country would take out their weapons and begin a mass slaughter of federal employees, much like the scenario from the novel Turner Diaries that inspired Tim McVeigh.
Faye credited the Great Replacement Theory as his main inspiration, as did the Trump followers and racists who murdered Jews in Pittsburgh, Black shoppers in Buffalo, and Hispanics in El Paso. The Theory was also the basis for Republicans’ impeachment of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a detail rarely mentioned in our media.
As the pro-democracy, pro-immigration group America’s Voice noted last month:
“Speaker Johnson, who was an instrumental supporter of Trump’s attempted coup, is far from alone as a Member of Congress promoting the conspiracy meant to undermine the faith in the democratic process.
“America’s Voice has identified 120 Members of Congress who amplified the replacement and invasion conspiracy in their official capacity just this last year.
“We identified over 1,040 times top GOP candidates, officials, or outfits that pushed the bigoted fiction in just the last year. We also identified this disturbing practice more than 700 times in 2022.
“In 2023 the Republican House majority also brought 13 witnesses to Congressional hearings who had promoted replacement and invasion conspiracies and even one witness who participated in Jan. 6 was asked by the Republicans to serve as a witness on one of their anti-immigrant hearings.”
Even candidates for the Senate are getting into the act, as American Journal News noted with their headline about the man who wants to take on Bob Casey for the US Senate this November:
“Republican David McCormick invests millions in website that platforms Holocaust denial.”
The Michigan House of Representatives just stripped Republican Representative Josh Schriver of his committee assignments for publicly promoting the Replacement Theory. Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist, a regular guest on my radio program, said:
“Rep. Schriver’s peddling of the racist ‘replacement theory’ is a deplorable demonstration of his fear of a dynamic and diverse Michigan future where all of our people in every community can succeed.”
Rolling Stone has discovered that fascist street gangs (“militias”) are embracing a new tactic, showing up on the scene of mass shootings and other mass casualty events to do their recruiting. Trace reporter Sonny Sone lays it out:
“According to geolocated footage reviewed by the magazine, members of a right-wing militia called Patriots for America — whose volunteers patrol the southern border with long guns and regularly espouse conspiracy theories targeting migrants — were on the scene, and spent almost 10 minutes beyond the police line, while law enforcement responded to the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022.
“Last fall, armed neo-Nazis responded to the mass-casualty gun rampage in Lewiston, Maine, and gained access to the shooter’s registered address.”
The highly publicized mass shooting at Joel Osteen’s megachurch last week was allegedly committed by a woman steeped in antisemitic writings. That same week, the FBI arrested a Minnesota man who was a member of the Aryan Freedom Network, an openly Nazi group of Trump supporters, for conspiring to modify semiautomatic weapons into full automatic mode for the “coming race war.”
Two weeks ago, police in Massachusetts arrested a second man in connection with four fires set at Jewish community centers and Jewish-owned businesses. Rabbi Avi Bukiet, one of the victims of the attacks, said the fires were, “a domestic terror attack fueled by antisemitic motivations.”
In Maine, a man and his son were arrested last week for painting swastikas on public streetcorners. In Dallas, a Jewish city councilwoman’s home was defaced with antisemitic and anti-abortion graffiti. Two days later the Hillel Center for Jewish students at Brown University in Rhode Island was on the receiving end of threats of violence. White supremacy stickers popped up on street signs in Stillwater, MN.
In Cheyenne, Wyoming, residents woke up to find White Lives Matter flyers in their mailboxes. The hateful screeds quoted America First leader Charles Lindbergh and mentioned an “anti-white trend” that “will continue to increase unless White people come together to Defend and support their common interests.”
The screed demands, the Rocket Miner newspaper reports:
“[T]hat white people ‘band together to preserve their European blood’ and ‘guard against dilution by foreign races’ because ‘harmonious coalescence is virtually impossible. America’s founding population has gradually been overtaken by a wave of immigration from all around the world which share no connection with American heritage, culture and history.”
In Ashville, NC a white supremacist shut off the power to a local restaurant and left racist material for people stumbling out to find on the front porch, provoking County Commissioner Al Whitesides to say:
“What concerns me is not just what’s alleged here but what you see in America going on all over the country. If you’re African-American, if you’re Jewish, we’re living in an environment in 2024 that I didn’t think in the ‘60s that I would see today.”
In Austin, Texas last week a white supremacist named Bert James Baker stabbed a victim because of the color of his skin or his national origin. Mustafaa Carroll, the interim executive director for CAIR, told reporters:
“Baker repeatedly screamed the N-word and other obscenities, opened a passenger door, pulled one of the victims out of the car and physically attacked him.”
The father of the victim told reporters:
“We came into the U.S. after the American dream. And my dream, and our dream, was not a big house or a big car. We want to live in peace and tranquility. We want to be able to cast our opinion without being jeopardized of being killed or shot or even harassed.”
Meanwhile, here in Portland, Oregon a man tried to set several people of color on fire, screaming racial epithets at them.
Almost everything in this article is from the past two weeks or thereabouts: the racist Trump followers who want a second civil war call this an “acceleration,” and hope they can create enough chaos that they can finally fulfill their adolescent fantasies about fighting in a “noble” civil war.
Will they get the conflict they so desperately want (and thought they were getting on January 6th)? I’m skeptical: to paraphrase President Eisenhower, their numbers are small and they are stupid.
Nonetheless, we must be vigilant if America is to survive as a pluralistic, multiracial society.
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