Lie Down With Dogs

A most divisive election looms. I fear America will be the loser.

Note: not published in the Eagle, just on my blogs.

Lie Down With Dogs

One might think the attack on Paul Pelosi, at 2 am inside his own home, is an easy one to report on. The perpetrator, armed with a hammer and zip-ties, broke into the Pelosi home, sang the discomfiting and Halloween-creepy song, “Where’s Nancy,” a recurrent hit you might remember from such events as the January 6th Capitol insurrection, proceeded to beat the 80 year old husband of the Speaker of the House, fracturing his skull and injuring his hand and arm.

And yet in our perversely polarized world, it wasn’t even hours before Republican pols were floating all kinds of conspiracy theories, and engaging in irrelevant (is there any other kind?) whataboutisms.

For the former, we find billionaire enfant terrible Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, retweeting an obscene speculation from the vaunted San Jose Observer (a chronic trafficker in false and often obscene speculation that also proclaimed Hilary Clinton died in the 9-11 attacks), that the perp was a male prostitute in an intimate dispute with the 80 year old.

Seriously. 

Musk retweeted that nonsense to his tens-of-millions followers before taking it down. Apparently—unsurprisingly, but still disappointingly—this is what we can expect from Twitter going forward. It begs for content moderation with which even its new CEO and sole board member must comply. After all, he said, “I bought Twitter to help humanity.”

Seriously.

Simultaneously, the right-wing media channels proffered their own self-serving, inhumane variations on the theme of blaming the victim, running the gamut from this is what you get when you let criminals out of jail without bond (a totally irrelevant statement, as the alleged perpetrator was not facing charges anywhere, to, that’s what you get with Democrats).

Bloomberg: “The hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband was like something out of a horror movie. The intruder allegedly told police the Speaker of the House was his intended target, and that he planned to take her hostage and break her kneecaps if she didn’t tell ‘the truth.’

“One week out from the midterm congressional elections, it’s a stark reminder of how febrile the political atmosphere in the US has become. President Joe Biden blamed political rhetoric for the attack. Donald Trump, the former president eyeing a 2024 comeback, has said nothing.”

Media Matters for America, a liberal press watchdog says of the distressing right-wing reaction to the attack, which was a combination of “they have it coming” and “the lie that the intruder was an invited guest,” says it is, “a standard case of right-wing online radicalization. QAnon, Great Reset, Pizzagate, Gamergate and all there, along with M[en’s] R[ights] A[ctivist]/misogyny, hatred of Blacks/Jews/trans people/’groomers,’ and anti-vax conspiracy theories.”

Somehow, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell invoked my least favorite excuse: both sides do it, then correctly stated that two Republicans on the January 6th Committee, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, have been threatened, but she didn’t seem to know they were threatened not from the left, but by right-wingers. If you have to invoke false equivalences, you should probably use the awful shooting of Steve Scalise at that Republican softball practice, but you could go no further since there was an outpouring of genuine compassion from Democrats—not derisive memes as is the case today with the Pelosi’s.

What are we to expect when an entire political party vilifies an opposition leader for years and years, often calling for violence against her? From Marjorie Taylor Green’s statement that Nancy Pelosi is “treasonous and treason is punishable by death,” to Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s desire to “hit her with the gavel” when he takes over the Speakership. For the record, there’s a name for this type of rhetoric that leads to personal threats and injury. It’s called “stochastic violence,” and we are witnessing it today. 

Finally, from the San Francisco hyper-local website, Mission Local, we see the full debunking of the ridiculous claim that this was just a random act of violence, or as our friend Doug Porter noted, “Having found no place in the marketplace economy, he found solace in an alternative universe, one allowing him to believe he was a warrior against the forces of evil…Here’s a job for the news media: Make the people responsible for this attack own it. Mealy-mouth excuses shouldn’t be accepted. Only when the condemnations of extra-legal, libelous, and paranoid behavior become more widespread will we see a decline in this wave of stochastic terrorism.”

We should not be surprised that a party that consistently aggrandizes violence, like the many times candidate Trump encouraged rally attendants to assault protesters, or the time he had peaceful protesters violently removed from Lafayette Park, or most recently when he egged on January 6th rioters. 

From the New Yorker article How Election Subversion Went Mainstream we read this about Pennsylvania, “In the state’s midterms—which could determine the balance of the Senate and the integrity of the Presidential race in 2024—Democrats are fighting for the vote. Republicans are fighting to undermine it.”

Incitement is the currency of their realm, as in the 2020 Facebook video in which Greene said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason, “a crime punishable by death.”

In advance of Tuesday’s vote, I’m worried. The Republican election deniers running this time say they won’t accept the results if they lose. They’ve done what they can to stack the deck and get their desired, pre-determined outcome. What happens if they don’t? And probably worse, what happens if they do?

©2022 Jon Sinton