Driving Up The Probability Number

Variation on a theme: How often do you have to pose the "rhetorical" question: "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" before you get to a sufficient level of certainty?

An Ad

Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest

He Said It

Kinda funny how the gang who loves Trump because he "speaks his mind - he says what he means" is frequently going to great lengths to explain that he didn't mean it that way.

Trump says things the way he says things on purpose. He wants his army of devotees to cover his ass, but he knows there are some who'll pick up on it as a signal to start some shit. And the bonus is that it can scare some of the normies just enough to alter their behavior - to keep them on the sideline out of his way.

That's how Stochastic Terrorism works - kinda disappointing that Snopes doesn't address that.

Did Trump Say It Will Be a 'Bloodbath for the Country' If He Doesn't Get Elected?

Claim:

At a campaign rally in Dayton, Ohio, on March 16, 2024, former U.S. President Donald Trump said: "Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country."

Rating:

Correct Attribution

Context:

The context of the remark suggests Trump was predicting an "economic bloodbath" for the country, not a literal one, if he loses the 2024 presidential election.

On March 16, 2024, the hashtag "#bloodbath" trended sharply on social media in the wake of a Dayton, Ohio, campaign speech earlier that day by former U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump stirred up controversy by claiming that if he didn't get elected for another presidential term, "It's going to be a bloodbath for the country."

A video recording of the speech from C-SPAN provides proof that he said exactly those words, which many partisan observers, such as the author of the X (formerly Twitter) post below, interpreted as a threat of post-election violence:

The post above linked to an article on Occupy Democrats, a left-wing website, which pushed the "violent bloodbath" interpretation of Trump's words even as it acknowledged that, as the author put it, the context left "wiggle room" for interpretation. What was that context? Broadly speaking, it was economic. Trump was in the middle of talking about the U.S. automobile industry and the country's trade imbalance with China (emphasis added):

China now is building a couple of massive plants where they're going to build the cars in Mexico and think, they think, that they're going to sell those cars into the United States with no tax at the border.

Let me tell you something, to China, if you're listening, President Xi — and you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal — those big, monster car-manufacturing plants that you're building in Mexico right now, and you think you're going to get that, you're going to not hire Americans, and you're going to sell the cars to us?

No, we're going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you're not going to be able to sell those cars if I get elected. Now, if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that's going to be the least of it, it's going to be a bloodbath for the country, that'll be the least of it. But they're not going to sell those cars, they're building massive factories.

As some social media users pointed out in lengthy threads debating what Trump really meant, popular dictionaries like Merriam-Webster include "major economic disaster" as a secondary meaning of "bloodbath."

Ultimately, however, "bloodbath for the country" is an ambiguous figure of speech, and Trump has a controversial history of using violence-tinged language in reference to political opponents, which, even if the intent was metaphorical, sarcastic or just to get media attention, makes it unsurprising that his use of the phrase "bloodbath for the country" drew instant public criticism.

Trump spoke about trade tariffs with China at a campaign rally in Dayton, Ohio, on March 16, 2024.

Today's (Alleged) Fuckery

I use the word "alleged" because even a small-potatoes blogger should at least try to follow the rules.

That said, no one paying any attention at all can dismiss the real potential for disaster here.

These assholes ain't playin'.

Exclusive: Roger Stone Spoke With Cop Pal About Assassinating Eric Swalwell and Jerry Nadler

Weeks before the 2020 presidential election, infamous political operative Roger Stone sat across from his associate Sal Greco at a restaurant in Florida.

At the time, Greco was an NYPD cop working security for Stone on the side. Their conversation, at Caffe Europa in Fort Lauderdale, focused on two House Democrats for whom Stone harbors particular animosity, Jerry Nadler and Eric Swalwell.

In audio of the conversation obtained exclusively by Mediaite, Stone made threatening comments about the two lawmakers.

“It’s time to do it,” Stone told Greco. “Let’s go find Swalwell. It’s time to do it. Then we’ll see how brave the rest of them are. It’s time to do it. It’s either Nadler or Swalwell has to die before the election. They need to get the message. Let’s go find Swalwell and get this over with. I’m just not putting up with this shit anymore.”

A source familiar with the discussion told Mediate they believed Stone’s remarks were serious. “It was definitely concerning that he was constantly planning violence with an NYPD officer and other militia groups,” the source said.

Both Nadler and Swalwell serve on the House Judiciary Committee. At the time of the Caffe Europa conversation, Nadler had announced the committee would be investigating then-President Donald Trump’s decision to commute Stone’s sentence after he was convicted of federal crimes in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

“A jury found Roger Stone guilty,” Nadler wrote on Twitter in July 2020. “By commuting his sentence, President Trump has infected our judicial system with partisanship and cronyism and attacked the rule of law. @House Judiciary will conduct an aggressive investigation into this brazen corruption.”

The source told Mediaite of Stone: “Stone had been at war with Nadler and Swalwell for years. He just hates them.”

“He just wanted to get Trump back into office so these things would stop,” the source added.

Stone was convicted of obstruction, witness tampering, and lying to Congress in the Mueller investigation. Prosecutors sought a nine-year prison sentence for the longtime Republican operative, but Trump’s Justice Department reportedly intervened to impose a less severe sentence. Stone’s sentence was eventually commuted by Trump days before reporting to prison.

The intervention from the Justice Department prompted Aaron Zelinsky, the prosecutor and Mueller deputy who led the case against Stone, to recuse himself from the case in protest. Mediaite reported last week that Stone was caught on tape in December 2020 urging Greco to “punish” Zelinsky.

“He needs to be punished,” Stone told Greco in the audio. “You have to abduct him and punish him. That has to be done. It will be easy to abduct him because he is a weakling.”

Stone denied making those comments, claiming they were generated by AI. He has previously claimed videos of his comments are actually “deep fakes.” In response to a request for comment on the remarks aimed at Swalwell and Nadler, Stone said, “Total nonsense. I’ve never said anything of the kind more AI manipulation. You asked me to respond to audios that you don’t let me hear and you don’t identify a source for. Absurd.”

Greco did not deny the comments, but said in a text to Mediaite: “I don’t think your reader is interested in ancient political fodder.”

Greco, who acted as security for Stone and was with the operative during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol soon after the 2020 election, was fired by the NYPD over his association with Stone. An NYPD spokesperson confirmed to Mediaite that Greco was terminated in August 2022.

Nadler and Swalwell did not respond to requests for comment.

Today's Stochastic Threat

I think we all know what "guard the vote" will mean to the MAGA thugs.

Trump calls on supporters to 'guard the vote' in Democratic-run US cities

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, told his supporters on Saturday to "go into" Philadelphia and two other Democratic-run cities to "guard the vote" in 2024, repeating his unfounded claims of widespread election fraud in 2020 as justification for the call to action.

Speaking at two events in Iowa, Trump also sought to counter growing concern among Democrats and some Republicans that his potential return to the White House posed a threat to democracy.

Even as he faces criminal charges over his efforts to reverse his 2020 loss, Trump attempted to flip the script and paint the winner, President Joe Biden, as a dangerous autocrat, calling him a communist, fascist and a tyrant.

A spokesperson for Biden's re-election campaign said Trump's comments portraying Biden as a threat to democracy were an attempt to divert the public's attention from his own problems.

Looking ahead to next year's general election, Trump said it was important to scrutinize the vote in the battleground states likely to determine the outcome. He singled out the biggest cities in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia - all Democratic strongholds at the center of the blizzard of false voter fraud claims made by Trump and his allies three years ago.

"So the most important part of what's coming up is to guard the vote. And you should go into Detroit and you should go into Philadelphia and you should go into some of these places, Atlanta," Trump said in Ankeny, a suburb of Des Moines.

Trump's comments foreshadow what is likely to be a contentious election in November 2024. Despite the failure of dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies challenging the 2020 outcome, Trump continues to claim, without evidence, that he lost to President Joe Biden due to fraud.

Trump did not specify who he was asking to "go into" the battleground-state cities. A campaign aide, when asked to clarify, said he was referring to poll-watchers and volunteers whose objective would be to ensure a secure election.

That would mesh with plans outlined by the Republican National Committee, which is aiming to recruit and train tens of thousands of poll workers and watchers in states that are hotly contested because their voting preferences could swing either to Republicans or Democrats.

'VOLATILE PERIOD' FOR DEMOCRACY

The comments by Trump, president from 2017 to 2021, come amid growing scrutiny over his recent rhetoric on the campaign trail, which has included referring to his political enemies as "vermin," a word some historians said echoed the language of Nazi Germany.

Timothy Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, said Trump's comments calling for scrutiny of elections in large Democratic-controlled cities were concerning because he made them while seeking to undermine trust in U.S. elections.

"We are in a very volatile period in our democracy," Naftali said. "If he is seeking to increase trust in our system, he should be more explicit. But what he said today was in the context of his mistrust of our system."

In recent weeks Biden's re-election campaign has more aggressively gone after Trump, highlighting his mounting legal troubles and likely policies it argues would hurt the economy and damage the foundations of democracy. Trump, for instance, has vowed to use his power to imprison his political enemies.

"Donald Trump’s America in 2025 is one where the government is his personal weapon to lock up his political enemies,” campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa said in response to Trump's Iowa remarks.

"After spending a week defending his plan to rip health care away from millions of Americans, this is his latest desperate attempt at distraction — the American people see right through it and it won’t work.”

Trump is facing four criminal trials, including two accusing him of seeking to subvert the 2020 election, helped by a mob of his supporters who ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

At an event in Cedar Rapids, Trump's campaign passed out signs reading 'BIDEN ATTACKS DEMOCRACY'. During his speech Trump repeated his unsubstantiated claim that Biden was using the Justice Department to go after him, among other alleged transgressions making Biden the threat to democracy.

"Joe Biden wants to make this race a question of which candidate will defend our democracy and protect our freedoms," Trump said. "This campaign is a righteous crusade to liberate our republic from Biden and the criminals."

Also on Saturday, Trump doubled down on comments made a few days earlier indicating he wanted to make significant changes to the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, calling the healthcare insurance program used by millions of Americans "a disaster." He did not provide specifics.

Retrospect

Because we (progressives, liberals, etc) don't tune in to DumFux News, we don't hear what guys like Lindsey Graham say. And so we don't hear the threats.

Daddy State Awareness Guide - rule 3:

Every prediction of some dire consequence is a veiled threat.

Whatever terrible thing they're "warning" us about is something they intend to make happen - usually in an attempt to coerce us into doing something they want.

 

Today's Stochastic Thing

Cue the crazies in 3 ... 2 ...1

False flag!!

It was antifa!!

Libruls!!

Communists!!!

Man who crashed U-Haul near White House charged with threatening harm

U.S. Park Police arrested a man after a U-Haul truck crashed near the White House on Monday night, prompting the evacuation of the nearby Hay-Adams hotel.

The man, whom police did not publicly identify, was charged with threatening to kill, kidnap or inflict harm on the president, vice president or a family member, along with other counts including assault with a dangerous weapon and trespassing.

Police declined to provide further details early Tuesday about the nature of the alleged threat to the president, vice president or their families.

Officials opened an investigation after the box truck hit security barriers on the north side of Lafayette Square, the Secret Service said. “There were no injuries to any Secret Service or White House personnel,” agency spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said earlier Tuesday. He said a preliminary investigation indicated that the driver “may have intentionally struck” the barriers.

Earlier Tuesday, a Secret Service spokesman said the truck involved in the crash was “deemed safe” by D.C. police and that a driver was detained. Roads and walkways were closed during the investigation, according to the Secret Service.

When Coincidence Is Not Coincidence

I try to be careful not to do a Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc on these things, but I think I have good reason to say you'll never convince me that this:

New York Is a Hellscape, Republicans Say. A Cabby Told Them So.
A look at the stagecraft behind the House Judiciary Committee hearing on “Victims of Violent Crime in Manhattan.”

... and this:

Republicans Are Using Paul Pelosi Attack to Target Democrats on Crime
Republicans and conservative figures have taken aim at Democrats over crime following an attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

... can't possibly be linked to this:

84-Year-Old Is Charged in Shooting of Black Teenager Who Went to Wrong House
Lawyers for the family of Ralph Yarl, 16, said he was critically injured when he was shot twice in Kansas City, Mo.

... and this:

Man Charged With Murder in Shooting of Woman Who Went Up Wrong Driveway
Kevin Monahan shot Kaylin Gillis, 20, when she and several friends wound up outside his house in a rural part of upstate New York, the authorities said.

When so many Americans are being pounded every day with the hatred and paranoia coming from outlets like DumFux News and OAN and Breitbart (and and and), we have to consider the probabilities for deliberate purposeful mayhem.

So we have to acknowledge that there could be a stochastic method to this madness. 

ie: Somebody wants this shit to happen, and it's not just a matter of the NRA selling more guns, and buying political power thru the purchase of more Coin-Operated Politicians.

I can't shake the feeling there's quite a bit more to it than simply Commercial-Interests-At-Any-Cost.

Prove me wrong

Let's hash it out

A Bad Day Made Worse

At about 3:20, when Jessica Tarlov points out the stochastic terrorism aspects of the George Soros fantasy, Greg Gutfeld trots out the shitbird "argument" that "everything puts lives in danger", and goes on to voice the giant shrug coming from "conservatives" - like:

"Well gee, we'll never acknowledge our part in fomenting violence, so we can't do anything but go on pretending it's a big mystery and blah blah blah".

He's normalizing and excusing the violence. He's broadcasting to the entire DumFux News audience that political violence is just the way of things.

But he's doing some important cherry picking too. He knows the same stochastic bullshit that motivates a nutball to mail pipe bombs to Democrats, can just as surely motivate a trans kids to shoot people at a Christian school, but he'll never allow the dots to be connected.

The non-suggesting suggestion that leads to some horrific act will always be followed by the non-condemning condemnation, unless the attack is directed at a "conservative" target. Then the condemnation is quick and specific, and the similarities are denied, even as the pundit tries to gaslight the shit out of us with, "it happens all the time" or "the extremists on both sides" or "it's god's will' or whatever else they can yank out of their ass at the time.

It Rolls

ICYMI

Anger as Trump posts picture of himself wielding baseball bat next to Alvin Bragg’s head

Donald Trump sparked anger by posting a picture of himself holding a baseball bat next to the head of the Manhattan District Attorney leading an investigation into him.

The one-term president posted an article to Truth Social which included a composite picture of himself and Alvin Bragg, who has accused the one-term president of creating “a false expectation” of being arrested this week.

The Manhattan grand jury is investigating hush money payments Mr Trump is accused of making to adult actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Mr Trump has repeatedly denied any sexual relationship with Ms Daniels.

But critics were quick to point out the Truth Social post featuring Mr Bragg and demanding that action be taken against Mr Trump.

“This threat is obstruction of justice and is a dangerous call to violence. Everyone needs to speak out,” wrote author Jennifer Taub on Twitter.

“Trump has today issued repeated stochastic terrorist calls for his cult to “remove” the “animal” Alvin Bragg - and use a baseball bat,” tweeted former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann.

And he added: “He’s trying to get this man killed. Period. Enough.”

CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen also spoke out about Mr Trump’s post.

“Threatening a prosecutor is a crime in NY. In fact MULTIPLE crimes:

• Harassment in the first degree NYPL 240.25
• Menacing in the second degree NYPL 120.14
• Stalking in the fourth or third degree NYPL 120.45 & 120.50

And that’s just for starters….” he tweeted.

Mr Trump’s post came as Mr Bragg’s office blasted House Republican chairs of the House Judiciary, Oversight, and Administration committees, who sent a letter claiming the investigation was an “unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority.”

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office general counsel Leslie Dubeck called the letter sent by the chairmen on 20 March “an unprecedented inquiry into a pending local prosecution”.

“The Letter only came after Donald Trump created a false expectation that he would be arrested the next day and his lawyers reportedly urged you to intervene. Neither fact is a legitimate basis for congressional inquiry,” she added.

I Shouldn't, But I Will

I would normally avoid quoting or boosting a Never-Trumper in any way, but sometimes even a pimp like Charley Sykes should get a look-see.

Retribution, Eradication, and the Coming Storm
The words of CPAC

Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before his speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Hello darkness, my old friend.

If you want a preview of what’s coming our way, take a look at the vocabulary of CPAC, including the former president’s promise of retribution, obliteration, and war.

Attention, perhaps, should be paid.

“Retribution”

“In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice,’” Donald Trump told his acolytes at CPAC. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

In case anyone missed it, Trump repeated the phrase: “I am your retribution”.

It was probably the strongest line of his speech, and the threat was intentionally unsubtle and unmistakable. He would “totally obliterate the ‘deep state,” and wreak vengeance on the sinister scum who opposed him.

Ronald Reagan proclaimed “It’s Morning in America”; Trump declared, I am Nemesis.

This is not, to put it mildly, normal political rhetoric, at least in the English language. But it gives a taste of the bleak storm to come. The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson writes:

For much of the speech, Trump’s voice took on more of a soft and haggard whisper than the booming, throaty scream that characterized his campaign rallies. His language, by contrast, was bellicose.

Tonight’s address was among the darkest speeches he has given since his “American carnage” inaugural address. Trump warned that the United States is becoming “a nation in decline” and a “crime-ridden, filthy communist nightmare.”

He spoke of an “epic battle” against “sinister forces” on the left.

He repeatedly painted himself as a martyr, a tragic hero still hoping for redemption. “They’re not coming after me; they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in their way,” Trump told the room. He pulled out his best, half-hearted Patton: “We are going to finish what we started. We’re going to complete the mission. We’re going to see this battle through to ultimate victory.”

He was heavy on adjectives, devastating with nouns. “We will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all,” he said…

And he is all-in on the Insurrection:

After seven mind-bending, soul-crushing years, it’s easy to get numbed by this sort of thing. But, as former congressman Joe Walsh writes in this morning’s Bulwark, we ought take this sort of language seriously. Tom Nichols agrees, writing yesterday, “We need to stop treating support for Trump as if it’s just another political choice and instead work to isolate his renewed threat to our democracy and our national security.”

“There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It is all or nothing. If transgenderism is true, if men can become women, then it’s true for everybody of all ages.

“If it is false, then for the good of society, and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology.”

“Eradicated”

ICYMI, Michael Knowles, a commentator for the Daily Wire and BFF of Ted Cruz, declared at CPAC:

“There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It is all or nothing. If transgenderism is true, if men can become women, then it’s true for everybody of all ages.

“If it is false, then for the good of society, and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology.”

Michael Knowles tells CPAC that "there can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. ... Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely." https://t.co/57hJF4frgq pic.twitter.com/szvnC1qWrP

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) March 4, 2023

After Knowles was accused of using genocidal language, he threatened lawsuits and indignantly insisted that he was not talking eradicating transgender people, only transgender-ism. This was enough of a distinction that the Daily Beast changed it’s original headline “to more literally reflect the words Knowles used.” Insisted Knowles:

“Nobody’s calling to exterminate anybody because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category,” he added. “It’s not a legitimate category of being.”

But “eradicated,” is a distinctive word with distinctive connotations and associations, and we should pay Knowles the compliment of thinking that he chose it carefully, specifically, and specially for the occasion.

He could have said that we should “challenge,” “confront,” “oppose,” “resist,” or “push-back” against transgenderism.

Instead, he chose to use the word “eradicate.” Oxford Languages offers a few synonyms for his word choice: eliminate, exterminate, destroy, annihilate, extirpate, obliterate, kill, wipe out, liquidate, decimate, abolish, extinguish.

So let’s try an experiment here. Imagine that we had a speaker — at an event that is definitely not meant to be CPAC — who said, “Jew-ishness must be eradicated from public life.” Or how about “Judai-ism must be eradicated.” Or, how about saying “Zion-ism must be eradicated from the Middle East.:

He (or she) might deny that this in any way suggested the eradication, elimination, or extermination of any actual Jews or Zionists. But it seems unlikely that anyone except the most determined denialists and rationalizers would swallow that explanation.

“Knowles may or may not be smart enough to realize that a word like eradicate inherently carries a hint of physical menace,” writes Jonathan Chait.

The most generous account of his argument is that he lacks the intelligence to grasp the implications of his own position. The least generous account is that he is making a winking nod to ugly and hateful forces he has no intention of holding back.

But Michael Knowles is not dumb.

In fact, he is a very smart guy, who understands the language of the right: its nuances, and its various dog whistles. Back in the Before Times (2016) he actually wrote a valuable guide to to the Alt-Right, which included “8 Things You Need To Know.” (It was so good, I included it in a footnote in my book, “How The Right Lost Its Mind,” page 169.)

The first thing Knowles said we should know about the New Right?

• Racism is not a fringe element of the Alt-Right; it’s the movement’s central premise.

And he offered some examples of the language and signals they used:

• Sam Francis, the late syndicated columnist who famously called for a “white racial consciousness”
• Theodore Robert Beale, the white nationalist blogger better known by his pen name Vox Day, who counts as a central tenet of the Alt-Right that “we must secure the existence of white people and a future for white children,” which represents one half of the white nationalist, neo-Nazi numerical symbol 1488. (That phrase contains 14 words, while 8 refers to the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, which doubled represents “Heil Hitler.”)
• Paul Ramsey, a white nationalist who produced a video titled “Is it wrong not to feel sad about the Holocaust?” and who seeks to revise historical accounts of the Holocaust, asking, “Do you mean that six million figure? You know that six million figure has been used many times before World War II, did you know that?”

Some other things Knowles said we needed to know about the Alt-Right:

• It’s also explicitly anti-Semitic….
• The Alt-Right loves Christendom but rejects Christianity. The Alt-Right admires Christendom primarily for uniting the continent and forging white European identity.
• The Alt-Right wants to burn American politics to the ground. The Alt-Right most immediately opposes conservatism.
• The Alternative Right asks conservatives to trade God for racial identity, liberty for strongman statism, and the unique American idea that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” for a cartoon Nazi frog.

The point is that Knowles knows the nomenclature, the memes, and the signals of the movement that now seems to have blended into CPAC/MAGAism. So, while he may not have been advocating actual genocide, or even the harm of any individuals, he knew perfectly well that he was using the sort of eliminationist rhetoric that fires up the fever swamps.

He knew his audience and the words they wanted to hear.

“When I said, like, I don’t know, it’s sort of weird that Pennsylvania managed to elect a vegetable, they criticize me as being ableist. I didn’t know what that was. But there’s always an ‘ist’. It doesn’t matter what you’re talking about. And apparently an ableist is someone who discriminates against those with disabilities.”

“I said: ‘Well, I’m not discriminating against any... ‘ I’d love for John Fetterman to have, like, good gainful employment. Maybe he could be, like, a bag guy at a grocery store. But, like, is it unreasonable for me to expect, as a citizen of the United States of America, to have a United States senator have basic cognitive function?”

Nota bene: A reminder that Trumpism is not merely post-truth and post-shame, but also post-even-a-shred-of-decency.

Cracking Down

Yes, the Jonathan Reesers of the world are stupid, brutish and dangerous.

But in one very real and very important way, they're the symptom of the disease, and not the cause.

The Setup

The Reveal

The payoff

And if there's any kind of "blessing" that could possibly grow from this irredeemable dung heap, it's that these jerks have been egged on to the point where they're doing their shit out in the open now. They've been conditioned to believe they're in the majority - that their shitty attitudes and shittier behavior are the norm - and will be rewarded - so they air it all out in the public square.

The Mystery

David DePape, the unhinged lunatic who busted up in the Pelosis' house and beat 82-year-old Paul Pelosi with a hammer because his intended target 82-year-old Nancy Pelosi was not available, went to court yesterday. Dude has been talking from the beginning, and confessing. We already knew he wanted to "break her kneecaps" as an example to the other Democratic congressmen. He apparently had others on his list, but we didn't know exactly who.

We knew things he loved included Donald Trump, QAnon, Kanye, Russian stuff and white power stuff. He hates Jewish people, trans people, women, Black Lives Matter, and more. (Pretty typical profile these days in MAGA America.)

We also knew that literally every Republican conspiracy theory about the attack wasn't true, that this weird young man and old Paul Pelosi are not secret gay lovers, that he had not been invited to the Pelosi house for Netflix 'n' grooming, that it was not a false flag to make DePape LOOK LIKE a would-be January 6 terrorist who couldn't afford bus fare to January 6, and all the rest of whatever they said.

Oh, and lest we forget, we also know that extreme rhetoric on both sides did not attack Paul Pelosi. One entire side of extreme rhetoric didn't even show up at the Pelosi manse that night.

It was shocking, but it appeared Republicans' assessments of the attack weren't quite right.

Tucker Cannot Believe Berkeley Hippies These Days, Hurting Poor Paul Pelosi With Hammers

Nancy Pelosi's Husband Paul Will Be Fine After G*ddamn F*cking HAMMER Attack, Fox News Will Not

But about that court appearance. We know even more now about who was on his list. Let's have a look!

He wanted to attack Hunter Biden.

He wanted to attack Tom Hanks.

He wanted to attack Gavin Newsom.

He wanted to attack Gayle Rubin, who as the New York Post explains is "a University of Michigan professor who writes on queer theory, sex and gender."

You know, the targets you might be mad at if you consumed a lot of rightwing media and rightwing message boards. With the exception of Tom Hanks, about whom the conspiracy theories are uniquely QAnon, it reads like the Two Minutes Hate from any Fox News monologue.

(By the way, the New York Post goes to great pains not to connect any of the dots as to what might have been motivating the attacker. "DePape’s choice of targets and reasoning was unclear, beyond a general dislike of Democratic Party politicians and left-leaning figures," they type with a straight face. You betcha!)

These things were testified to by San Francisco Police Sgt. Carla Hurley, who said DePape confessed to them after his arrest. She also played video of his interview:

“There is evil in Washington. It’s this f–king record-breaking crime spree!” DePape said in the video. “The Democratic Party was for the past four years — This was f–king insane … So not only were they spying … they were spying, covering it up … They go from one crime to another crime, it’s the whole f–king 4 years.”

Add some all caps to that and deteriorate the grammar and what does it remind you of?

“I explained to him — I have other targets,” DePape said on the video. “I can’t be stopped. If you are willing to stop me, I’m not going to be stopped here.”

Spoiler, he was stopped, and he lived to face the charges.

Seriously, though: Hunter Biden, Gavin Newsom, Tom Hanks, some 73-year-old queer theory professor, where could he have gotten these names, what could it beeeeeeeeee?

So many mysteries - we must leave you to your uninformed speculations.

On Wolves And Loners

We know now that the Alpha Male exists only among animals in captivity. And this either escapes the notice of all these MAGA macho pussies, or (prob'ly more accurately) they choose to remain ignorant of it.

And here comes the editors at NYT, making the case that all these Lone Wolf assholes are alone only in that they have no real social interaction and are easily conditioned to carry out "instructions" they're absolutely sure are coming from a legit authority.

Stochastic Terrorism is alive and well, and prob'ly quite a bit more specific and organized than we've been giving it credit for being - which would seem to require us to strip away some of the cover provided by the word "Stochastic".

(pay wall)

There Are No Lone Wolves

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This editorial is the third in a series, “The Danger Within,” urging readers to understand the danger of extremist violence and possible solutions. Read more about the series in a note from Kathleen Kingsbury, the Times Opinion editor.

Sometime in May 2020, Payton Gendron, a 16-year-old in upstate New York, was browsing the website 4chan when he came across a GIF.

It was taken from a livestream recording made the previous year by a gunman as he killed 51 people and wounded more than 40 others at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The killer had written a manifesto explaining that he was motivated by the fear of great replacement theory, the racist belief that secretive forces are importing nonwhite people to dilute countries’ white majorities.

Seeing the video and the manifesto “started my real research into the problems with immigration and foreigners in our white lands — without his livestream I would likely have no idea about the real problems the West is facing,” Mr. Gendron wrote in his own manifesto, posted on the internet shortly before, officials say, he drove to a Tops grocery store in Buffalo and carried out a massacre of his own that left 10 Black people dead.

The authorities say Mr. Gendron’s attack in May mimicked the massacre in Christchurch not just in its motivation but also in tactics. He reduced his caloric intake and cataloged his diet to prepare physically, as the Christchurch killer did. He practiced shooting. He wrote slogans on his rifle, as the Christchurch gunman did. He livestreamed his attack with a GoPro camera attached to his helmet, with the idea of inspiring other attacks by fellow extremists. Mr. Gendron’s screed ran to 180 pages, with 23 percent of those pages copied word-for-word from the Christchurch killer’s manifesto, according to an investigative report on the attacks released last month by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.

On the day of the shooting, State Senator James Sanders echoed the horrified response of many: “Although this is probably a lone-wolf incident, this is not the first mass shooting we have seen, and sadly it will not be the last,” he said.

It’s unfortunate that the term “lone wolf” has come into such casual use in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. It aims to describe a person — nearly always a man — who is radicalized to violence but unconnected to an organized terrorist group like Al Qaeda. But it is wrong to think about violent white supremacists as isolated actors.

There are formal white supremacist organizations going by names like Atomwaffen Division (Canada, Germany, Italy, Britain, United States), Honor and Nation (France), the All-Polish Youth (Poland). But while the majority of adherents to the white supremacist cause aren’t directly affiliated with these groups, they describe themselves as part of a global movement of like-minded people, some of whom commit acts of leaderless violence in the hopes of winning more adherents and destabilizing society.

The atomized nature of the global white extremist movement has also obscured the public’s understanding of the nature of their cause and led to policy prescriptions that aren’t enough to address the scope of the threat. Thoughts and prayers alone will not solve the problem, nor will better mental health care, important though all those things are. One missing piece of any solution is acknowledging that right-wing extremist violence in the United States is part of a global phenomenon and should be treated that way.

There has been a steady rise in political violence in the United States in the years since Donald Trump became president. Threats against sitting members of Congress have skyrocketed. The husband of the speaker of the House was assaulted in his home by a man wielding a hammer. This year, venues from school board meetings to libraries have been the sites of physical clashes. The majority of the political violence in the past few years has come from right-wing extremists, experts say.

The country cannot accept violence as a method of mediating its political disagreements. There are steps the United States should take now, including cracking down on illegal right-wing paramilitary groups and weeding extremists out of positions of power in law enforcement and the military. Extremists succeed when they have access to power — be that positions of power, the sympathy of those in power or a voice in the national conversation. They should be denied all three.

Violent right-wing extremists harbor a variety of beliefs, from a loathing of the government to explicit white supremacy. During his time in office and in the years since, Mr. Trump and his political allies have not only encouraged political violence, through their silence or otherwise, they have also helped bring explicitly white supremacist ideas like the “great replacement” into mainstream politics and popular culture. “This extremism isn’t going to go away or moderate until the people who have normalized it realize their culpability in the things that it inspires,” Oren Segal, the vice president of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, said in an interview.

The Danger Within

A series on the danger of extremist violence and possible solutions.

• INTRODUCTION America Can Stop Violent Extremism
• PART IAmerica Can Have Democracy or Political Violence. Not Both.
• PART IIExtremists in Uniform Put the Nation at Risk
• PART IIIThere Are No Lone Wolves

White supremacy has been part of the story of this country since its earliest days, but the modern notion of replacement is a foreign import. It was outlined in 2012 by Renaud Camus, a French author who has written that immigrants with high birthrates are a threat to white European society. He built on the ideas of another Frenchman, Jean Raspail, who wrote the 1973 book “The Camp of the Saints,” which imagined a flotilla of immigrants who overthrow French society.

The book is a touchstone in white supremacist circles and is popular with some prominent Republicans. Stephen Miller, a senior official in the Trump administration, once recommended the book to the staff of Breitbart when he was a Senate aide, according to emails obtained by the A.D.L. A former Iowa congressman known for defending white supremacy, Steve King, has said that everyone should read it.

The idea of hostile replacement by immigrants has gained currency and some acceptance around the world, even after inspiring mass killers in New Zealand and Buffalo, Norway and South Carolina. Extremists driven to murder are a tiny fraction of those who subscribe to racist ideologies, but the mainstreaming of their ideas can make the turn to violence easier for some.

That’s why it is alarming to see the great replacement idea espoused by political leaders around the globe, including Jordan Bardella, who this month was confirmed as the successor to Marine Le Pen as head of France’s leading far-right party. It has been cited approvingly by Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary and darling of some American conservatives. Tucker Carlson of Fox News talks about it often. An alarming poll by The Associated Press-NORC this year found that about one in three American adults believes that “a group of people is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains.” Last year a poll found that 61 percent of French people believe that, too.

That the great replacement theory has gone mainstream is a victory for white supremacists and their cause. “White power activists in the 1990s thought that political action on their cause was not possible — that the door to that was closed. That’s not true anymore,” said Kathleen Belew, a professor at Northwestern and author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.”

One of the best ways to counter a global ideology of violent extremism in a country that also wants to protect civil liberties is to create problems for extremists — to work to make them less popular and less capable, notes Daniel Byman in his new book, “Spreading Hate: The Global Rise of White Supremacist Terrorism.”

Domestic law enforcement agencies in the United States already have effective tools to target organized extremist groups, including wiretaps and undercover informants. They also don’t face language and cultural barriers that they may have had focusing on jihadis. A pervasive problem, though, is the political will to turn the power of the state against white supremacists. Too often, extremism researchers point out, there’s a reluctance in white-majority nations to see white extremists as threatening as nonwhite foreigners.

The United States is also newer to thinking about this white extremism as a transnational problem. “European intelligence officials have long expressed frustration that their U.S. counterparts have not answered their requests for legal assistance and information,” Mr. Byman wrote.

The Biden administration has at least started to heed the warnings of more than a decade’s worth of intelligence reports suggesting that domestic extremism is a problem with a global reach. The National Strategy for Countering Domestic Extremism, released last year, noted that “aspects of the domestic terrorism threat we face in the United States, and in particular those related to racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism, have an international dimension.”

The strategy laid out some good ideas about solutions to the threat, such as wider and deeper information sharing between the U.S. government and foreign nations about extremist groups and their networks, their finances and their movements. It directed the State Department to leverage public diplomacy to raise awareness about the threat and help counter extremist propaganda and disinformation. The strategy also noted that the cross-border nature of extremist networks makes it possible to collect intelligence (mainly by intercepting communications) of people outside the country. The tip that helps thwart the next attack by white supremacists inside the United States could very well come from overseas.

The strategy also raised the possibility of designating some foreign right-wing extremist groups as foreign terrorist organizations or “specially designated global terrorists,” which would make it illegal for Americans to support or receive training from them. But such an approach isn’t a panacea and carries serious risks — it could hamper efforts to de-radicalize extremists, for instance — and runs counter to a lesson of the war on terrorism, which was that not all extremist groups posed an equal danger to the homeland.

It is encouraging that this strategy is in place, but it needs more attention and urgency, from lawmakers and from the American public, to be successful. Congressional oversight committees will hold annual hearings to see whether the United States is making progress on this strategy, but so far it is not clear how effective it has been.

Another approach tried in about a dozen countries around the world is de-radicalization programs, which encourage extremists to either change their minds or at the very least reject violence. The German and British governments in addition to the United States have had some success with de-radicalization programs aimed at white supremacists. In Germany, EXIT-Deutschland works with neo-Nazis. In Britain, a program called Prevent that originally focused on jihadists has now been reoriented to white supremacists, though there are complaints that the net of problematic right-wing views is being cast too widely.

As with all these approaches, one of the precarious aspects of the domestic fight against far-right and white supremacist extremists is that the government’s response must try to avoid alienating people who believe in things like expansive gun rights or strict limits on immigration yet eschew violence. Often, they are the only credible messengers who can reach the deeply radicalized and talk them back from a more violence course.

This tension is evident around efforts by social media companies to crack down on extremist content. When mainstream companies like Facebook ban content, it can push people who are interested in extremist or offensive material to lesser-known platforms, like 4chan, where moderation is less aggressive and moderators have fewer resources.

There is hope, however, that better automatic monitoring of content and enforcement of platforms’ terms of service, which take freedom of expression concerns into account, can push extremist material to the fringes. The massacre in Buffalo, for instance, was livestreamed on the platform Twitch. About two minutes after the first shots were fired, the stream was taken offline. As social media experts told The Times, that was “the best that could reasonably be expected.”

The quick response and the scrubbing of subsequent copies of the video and the manifesto from the internet was made possible in part by groups like the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, which was founded by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube in 2017 and now includes more than a dozen platforms.

The consortium can flag extremist content like videos of shootings and tag it in a way that other platforms can search for and remove copies that pop up on their services. In the nine weeks after the Buffalo shooting, Meta automatically removed around one million pieces of content related to the attacks.

Of course, the automated tools aren’t perfect. The New York attorney general’s office found videos of the shooting or links to them on Reddit, Instagram and Twitter, and links to the manifesto on Rumble, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. Tech companies can and should invest more money and resources in content moderation at scale, but that alone will not purge the internet of extremism — especially when the networks for sharing it cross international borders, span continents and come in countless languages.

Recognizing that violent white supremacy is a global problem should help the United States and its allies develop more cooperative, international solutions. Success will be difficult to measure; the ideology may never disappear, but levels of violence can be reduced. Most important, if lawmakers and ordinary Americans make a concerted effort to drive extremist rhetoric out of mainstream politics, the influence of these groups will again fade.