The Coen Brothers clearly saw this coming way back in 1998:
“Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
I’m honestly surprised only that things haven’t gotten uglier than they are. I have a grad school acquaintance who I keep on my FB friends feed mostly because her posts give me a window into what the right-wing fever swamps are saying that I wouldn’t otherwise have, and one of the things that struck me was that there seemed to be almost no celebration of anything positive after the election – just a desire to crush protestors and bathe in liberal tears. These people are addicted to anger, and the problem with unified Republican control of the federal government is that there’s now nowhere to direct that anger except at private citizens who disagree with them.
Add to this the fact that trump has told the anti-terrorism office to concentrate only on “radical Islamic terrorism” ™, and ignore all the rightie domestic stuff.
As one of my professors once said: “Situations that are perceived as real can have real consequences.”
Given that the FBI has for years considered right-wing extremism an equal or greater threat than Islamic extremism, perhaps you should tell them that they don’t have any actual data.
Hey I got 97% in that course. It was good for my GPA! 
Towering statesmen by comparison.
George W. Bush expended a lot of his political capital trying to fight AIDS in Africa. There is no particular domestic political advantage to doing this; he just felt it was a good thing to do. I’m not saying it makes up for his failures, but he has objectively tried to do something good, and has had quite a lot of success at it, solely for the purpose of helping people who need it. He has been praised by people from across the political spectrum for his work on the matter. He wrote an open letter in April calling on the government for more funding. He had to do this because - of course - Trump’s budget called for huge cuts to the program (which the Obama administration kept running.)
It is absolutely inconceivable to me that Donald Trump would ever care to do something like what Bush did.
Y’see, now that the government is no longer coming after their guns, you have to switch to how it’s the “thugs” and the leftists who will engage in terrorism so they STILL need to be ready for battle. We see these folk seeming to *look forward *to “the shit hitting the fan”, but it is that they have been sold a myth about living in the End Times and that it would be unthinkable for it to just not happen.
What do you mean, “You People”?
Chimera, whatever you do, don’t look for the latest NRA videos. They are flat our calling for a revolution. I guess since they don’t have a Democrat to demonize, they are searching for another boogie man. that happens to have dark skin.
I’m not linking to them on purpose. they have no redeeming qualities.
I think these people are pieces of shit but I don’t take them all that seriously as a threat to the average liberal. It’s not like people are going to rise up *en masse *and slay their brothers. To be that desperate I think you have to have a certain amount of discomfort that the average American has not yet reached.
I wouldn’t be too sure things have changed that much from the “glory days” of Reagan et al. Republicans are still heavily about Empowering Americans through deregulation and riding that big economic engine to glory, which means weakening federal oversight of most things and returning power to state and local government (unless it is behaving immorally, in which case it’s OK for the federal government to dictate policy).
You can see it in all its glory [-ben_1468872234.pdf"]here](https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/media/documents/DRAFT_12_FINAL[1) (my personal favorite is assuring Abundant Harvests).
It’s hard for me to get upset about their current level of disorganization in getting big things done.
Oh, I’ve read about those too and I’m including those people in this.
Well you did have conservative talk radio (the Rush Limbaugh type) before the internet became pervasive:
That really started growing in 1987 when the FCC stopped enforcing the fairness doctrine.
But before that radio and TV were subject to the fairness doctrine and the print media had small circulations. For example something like Human Events would have had less than 100,000 circulation:
Does the same sentiment apply to Kathy Griffin?
I’m disgusted by her behavior, but I’m not familiar enough with the law to determine whether she broke it. If she broke the law, then yes, she should pay the consequences. I don’t think Alex Jones is a comedian or a performance artist, as evidenced by his own statements here. By his own insistence we should take seriously everything he has to say (unless he’s imitating a Goldman Sachs banker. I guess.)
Not to mention that someone posing for a photo session is quite different from a conspiracy theorist with a radio program and a large number of like-minded followers.
Agreed. As with terrorism in general, I see no reason to think that the odds of it affecting you aren’t really low. Similarly, I have no reason to think that 99.9% of these people will do anything but talk on the Internet.
Who they end up electing is of far more concern.
Until some psycho gets it into his head that he’ll be hailed as a hero for walking into a Democrat gathering with a ton of guns and shooting up the place.
We’ve already had them in abortion clinics and pizza parlors. Alex Jones has an audience between 2 and 3 million people. Even if 0.01% of them did something, that’s still a couple of hundred dangerous loons.
Again, I don’t see much of a difference between that and terrorism committed by anyone else.
We liberals tell people all the time that the odds of being impacted by terrorism in general are low, so that’s one reason why we don’t pass laws against Islam or what have you. I apply the same thinking here.
Charles Coughlin is worth citing. His radio audience in the 1930s dwarfed that of Jones and even Limbaugh, and Coughlin didn’t have yer fancy-schmancy modern conspiracies to work with - he relied on good ol’ anti-Semitism.