https://twitter.com/EricGreitens/status/1538876823978713089
LITERALLY wanting to shoot people who don’t support Trump.
Tell me again how both parties are TOTALLY the same. Tell me again how the Republican party is TOTALLY a legitimate political party and not a group of batshit crazy, fascist terrorists.
Please let me know if you would like this rant moved to the Pit or if it should remain closed.
As per the OP’s request, moved to the Pit from P&E.
Even more disconcerting given that Greitens is a former US Navy SEAL, has been charged with harassment and felony invasion of privacy, and accused by a former hairdresser with sexual assault and blackmail that a Special Investigative Committee of the Missouri state legislature found “overall credible” in their report. Even vocal Trumpster Josh Hawley pressured Greitens to resign.
This ad is pretty much the template for an appeal to fascism. Never mind policy discussion or arguments about personal ethics of opponents; just suggest literally gunning down people who are not adequately aligned with your ‘cause’.
Stranger
Eric will be putting out an “it’s an allegory” press release soon. He doesn’t mean actually shooting them, just chasing them from office.
I’d move, but for work reasons it would have to be Kansas, which is really not much better (but a little).
It’ll take something like this to get through to some current Republicans. Same old “I don’t care until it happens to me” thing.
Nothing will get through to them, they are shit people.
Nah, there are some who will wake up after their own lives and families are threatened by the same people they were pandering to. Not all, admittedly, but some, and I do attach some importance to them, as craven as they are. Every link in the chain is important; without just one, the chain is demonstrably not the same.
We don’t have to have a two party system in this country, but as it stands, that’s what we have. One of those two parties is off the fucking rails delusional crazy. The Texas Republican party has made, as part of their actual fucking platform, the claim that Biden did not legitimately win the election that Trump lost to him. Either batshit fucking crazy, or outright fucking liars. That’s the Republicans, one of two choices Americans realistically have.
It’s fucking nuts, and it ain’t good.
Will they? Or will they go along to get along? Most Germans didn’t support or join the Nazi Party, but they didn’t really oppose it, either. They just acceded to it because it seemed inevitable, and wherever you turned other countries were also turning to fascism or authoritarianism.
Literally nothing about this is new, save for the technology aspect of social media, and even that has parallels in the use of radio and pamphleteering in Weimar-era Germany. If this were a movie, the director would be accused of ripping off the 1930s for direct inspiration. Even the Republican Party actively purging designated RINOs in ridiculously over the top fashion. (Was it really necessary to censure Cindy McCain, a woman who has expressed absolutely no political ambitions of her own, just to make a performance about how much the GOP has rejected the supposed ‘moderation’ of the politically conservative John McCain?)
The behavior of the GOP today is paralleled in the NSDAP going after the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) and later more extreme Deutschvolkische Freiheitspartei (DVFP), which eventually capitulated and essentially merged with the NSDAP. And I’ll wager you won’t see anyone from the Republican leadership speaking up to condemn Greitens’ ad as egregious, gratuitous, or even inappropriate given the recent glut of mass shootings.
Stranger
I didn’t quite get the level of alarm for this tweet. For those who haven’t, click on the Twitter link. It’s not just the sentiment expressed, it’s a video acting it out, with him carrying a huge (looks like) shotgun (or elephant gun?), and four guys in battle dress breaking down a door, throwing in flashbang/smoke grenades, and then piling into an empty living room ready to shoot to kill. Is this a campaign ad? Good gravy.
Oh, and there’s Twitter’s comment that this tweet violates rules about abusive behavior (?) but they’re leaving it up anyway because reasons.
Nope, they’re shit people and decent Americans have to get it out of their heads that if only we could reason with them, they’d be different. This is who they are, they are fucking fascists.
I had a similar reaction before clicking on the link. Nope, not just extraordinarily bad taste in a way that could encourage followers to shoot political enemies, but insanely featuring a death squad to purge “RINOs”.
There should have been a catchy campaign tune with Greitens on vocals.
I was in no mood to trifle,
I took down my trusty rifle
And went out to stalk my prey
What a haul I made that day.
I tied them to my fender, and I hauled them with my car
Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney and Bill Barr
Licking the boots of someone who insulted your wife is one thing. “Going along to get along” with someone who directly terrorized you and your loved ones is another thing entirely. It may not be different enough, but it is different.
And I’m not talking about the general idiot populace, or “reasoning” with anyone. I’m talking about politicians doing what they do best: acting in their own naked self interest. January 6 didn’t do it, because most of the Republican lawmakers came out of it confident that it wouldn’t be them on the gallows. All I’m saying is, that could change, and rapidly, and once one domino falls, I could very well see more falling in turn. While I hope it doesn’t get to the point where we have to rely on that, I really do think it’s at least possible, and with every incident like this, the odds get better, IMO.
You’re right: the first example is just someone who has no spine or fundamental principles. The second is someone making a sort-of rational decision that if the United States is going to go full-on with fascism, it is better to wear the symbols and chant the slogan than to be castigated, hunted, and thrown in a camp with the undesirables.
If the January 6, 2021 insurrection in which rioters were hunting for Vice President Pence chanting, “Hang Mike Pence” didn’t convince mainline Republicans that they, too, could, could be targeted with violence, then what is it going to take? It isn’t as if Mike Pence is a RINO or a “Never Trumper”; he stood by Trump through one scandal and failure after another, never criticizing or undermining him, the perfect little servile toe rag up until the point that he did his Constitutionally-required job as President of the Senate and certified the 2020 Electoral College vote for Joe Biden.
Seriously, what would it take for these people to be “acting in their own naked self interest” as you define it. instead of going along with blatant authoritarianism and following the GOP party line rather than the oath they took to “support the Constitution of the United States”? Will Trump have to admit to being the pedophile that they’re all accusing Nancy Pelosi of being? Does he have to pull off his mask and reveal his lizard face? Does Trump have to swear under oath that he is actually dedicated to destroying the United States as an economic and military superpower because Vladimir Putin has picture of him with a live boy or a dead girl? What would it take to abandon Trump and the alt-right contingent that has taken over the GOP en masse beyond what he has already done?
Stranger
I would suggest that we also pit Twitter for being spineless on this. It’s a clear threat of violence and violates their rules. And they could deal with it fairly quietly by simply removing the tweet.
Why the hell are they so scared of Musk that they want to do his bidding before he actually succeeds in buying the company? Hell, why don’t they directly call out Musk and say that these types of threats are the shit they ban, not normal conservatism, and challenge him to defend threatening to kill as “free speech”?
The second he does, then it becomes open season to say that billionaires should be hunted down. And not only does he seem to think billionaires are oppressed (cf. his tweet about how billionaire is used as a pejorative), but I bet those he want to get money from would object as well.
Grow a fucking backbone, Twitter. Either Musk won’t take over, and it will be fine, or Musk will take over, and you can try to steer the direction he would have to go by letting him see the fallout of trying to actually do what he claims he will do.
It actually happening to them, of course, a’la Crenshaw. It isn’t real until it actually and factually happens directly to them. We see this over and over. We point this out and mock this over and over in the Pit. Exactly the same thing here.
Look, I do acknowledge that it won’t go the way I’m suggesting for a majority of politicians. As you astutely pointed out, there are a lot who will go along to save their own skin. But I think the ease with which certain portions of the current right throw around threats of (and more importantly, actual) violence isn’t going to be a universal good for them, and has a better likelihood than many other things of being their ultimate undoing.
My view may also be due to my belief that, like the populace in general, the proportion of those who wield true power who are true believers in the current madness is low. I just don’t think that the nation taken over by crazies is compatible with a profitable and comfortable status quo, and they, by and large, know it. I’m not saying that they won’t go along anyway, or won’t get caught up in the hysteria, or anything like that; I just think that, right now, there is some significant weight working against the idiot wing, and the more pressure they put on themselves (in general, not talking in particular about violence), the better off we all are.
But to get back to the topic at hand, yes, despite (or because of) what may result from it, stuff like this is very much worrying and indicative of larger trends I absolutely do not like. While I am (in a twisted way) pleased that the masks are finally coming off and the choices are being made plain, I don’t relish the thought of anyone needlessly dying or being hurt. It is unfortunate how many votes this dude will gain because of this, no doubt about it.
When they start actually shooting RINOs, then we’ll see.
Because the so-called RINOs own guns too, and probably won’t take too kindly to being shot at by the (other) nut job repubs.
Hell, if they actually shoot enough of each other, it could be a self-correcting problem.
Unsurprisingly, Beau of the Fifth Column (a gonzo journalist who I follow) caught something we missed.
The terminology for hunting animals is “tag and bag limit” But this ad uses “tagging and bagging.” That’s a term that is only used about people. And that is extremely well known in the hunting community, as Beau proved by going up and asking some random hunting guys at his local burger joint (who mocked him for not knowing the term).
He cites this as the reason that the leader of the Senate called the cops after this ad. And mentions that this what tends to happen when the right goes fascist: they target the people who are supposedly on their side.
Also do note that the guy in question is a known domestic and sexual abuser. But the guy he’s running against in the primaries is that guy who (with his wife) pointed their guns at protesters. Unless Missouri goes blue this time, we will get one violent psycho in the Senate.