Extremist organizers have tried to hold on to the momentum they built in recent years by finding big-tent causes disparate factions could rally around, such as opposition to pandemic restrictions, “Stop the Steal” election denial, or an imagined socialist “indoctrination” of schoolchildren.
It's a weird line to walk: "these extremists have millions of followers." How extreme can you be if six million people agree with you enough to watch your podcast every day? I don't, myself, watch "Louder with Crowder," because it's not my kind of thing. But I don't have six million followers; I don't have a thousand. My way of approaching things is far less mainstream (and consequently more extreme if 'extremity' means 'far from the mainstream') than his. He's doing what lots of other people do successfully: raising the drama level as a way to gain attention. It works because lots of people, ordinary people, like that approach. Heck, this very piece is an example of trying to do the same thing from the left.
An immediate concern is the safety of the federal judge in Florida who approved the search warrant. Once his name made its way to right-wing forums, threats and conspiracy theories soon followed. Online pro-Trump groups spread his contact information and, as of Tuesday afternoon, the judge’s official page was no longer accessible on the court’s website.
That's unprecedented, except by Jane's Revenge doing the same thing to the Supreme Court's right wing justices, who now have loud angry protests outside their homes more or less daily.
In mainstream GOP quarters, extremism trackers say, the nudges toward violence are more subtle, with statements delegitimizing the government as a “police state” or a “banana republic” that must be opposed, starting with the dismantling of federal agencies.
That's a mainstream view now? Good to hear.
Far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) tweeted “DEFUND THE FBI!!” She added an image of an upside-down U.S. flag, which many on the right have embraced as a symbol of the nation in distress.
US Federal Law defines the upside-down flag as a dire distress symbol, but ok. (§8a) At least she's not burning it, like her counterparts on the other side.
A recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found that about 1 in 3 Americans say they believe violence against the government can at times be justified, the largest share to feel that way in more than two decades.
As we have discussed here before, there is no way of reading of the Declaration of Independence without outright rejecting it that does not accept that violence against the government is sometimes justified. The opening sections are a philosophical defense of the idea that citizens can have the right, and occasionally the duty, to set aside a government and replace it with a better one.
By all means temper your rhetoric and think things through. Open your eyes, though: this isn't a one-sided thing, and distrust of this process can be rational and considered as well.
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