when Trump said he’d create jobs, i didn’t realize the plan was to escalate rhetoric and advocate violence against the media in order to create work for bomb squads, but hey, it’s working.
as of this writing, i think we’re up to eight confirmed bombs sent to people that are Democrats, or media that are insufficiently friendly to Trump, so far today (or possibly some were yesterday?).
just for reference: this is not normal.
suggest that, if you don’t think it should be normal, you consider the possibility that the rhetorical environment in which it seems normal is probably the problem, and that the thing where the Republican party as a whole cannot be seen to say anything negative about Trump openly claiming to be a nationalist and praising people for killing dissidents and censoring their media is probably the primary root of that problem right now.
options include (1) cause the Republican party to stop doing that, (2) cause them not to be in a position of power.
suggestion: vote.
While not meaning to normalize it, but didn’t the white house and some republicans just receive ricin letters last month? I find it a bit strange that that kind of just slid under the radar without this discussion of either side normalizing this behaviour before or whatever, but then presumably a mirror version happens and this discussion is now at the forefront. I mean, are we just going to apply anything negative we want about whatever group we want to blame and say that it normalizes ricin letters now? How about any religion? I just don’t see the correlation here being justified and just trying to equate one bad thing as being the fault of a thing you want to be thought of as bad by others.
Uh… This line of discourse is sort of complete bullshit.
What normalizes violence is actively advocating for it and cheering it on and treating it as normal.
And since before the 2016 election, we’ve had people talking about getting death threats from Trump supporters, and Trump talking about how he could just shoot someone and his supporters wouldn’t care (true enough), and violence at Trump rallies, and Trump praising the fucking dictator of North Korea, specifically his “relationship with his people”, and Trump supporting the Saudis and accepting their claim that probably the journalist was dismembered before he even got to their consulate.
That is normalizing violence as a response to political disagreement.
It has nothing to do with “religion”. It has nothing to do with any of the other negative things you might believe about Trump’s coterie. There are people out there who are racist assholes and think that putting little kids in detention camps is great, who still absolutely oppose the normalization of violence. And they are not at fault in the thing where it seems normal that we’ve had more attempted political assassinations in the US this year than we had during probably any previous decade of my life.
I don’t see how you can look at someone specifically praising violence and repression, and calling out “the media” as the Enemy of the American People, and then say “I don’t see how that’s correlated to package bombs being sent to the media”.
It wasn’t ricin, it was ground up castor beans which, while they do contain ricin in small non-lethal amounts, are also the source of Castor Oil. Lethal doses of ricin can be refined from castor beans, but the process is somewhat more involved than just grinding them up. Here’s Wikipedia on castor bean toxicity. Here’s CBC’s Story on the whole episode(purely because it was the first reliable source google coughed up). If you’ve encountered stories claiming it was ricin either you were lied to by the sources of those stories, or it was very early coverage of the event.
the tl;dr on this story, as I see it, is: the guy has a history of domestic violence(<sarcasm>big surprise there</sarcasm>), is ex-Navy, and seems to have been distressed over his wife being sick and, presumably, the difficulties they’ve faced in getting her care, which he seems to blame Republicans for. Which, just to be clear: Isn’t Entirely Baseless. Republicans are trying to make medical care more Difficult And Expensive to obtain, and have been For Years. Pointing out such facts, as the stories I’ve linked do, is not inciting violence. Pointing out such facts even in a polemical tone, as some of those stories do, is not inciting violence.
And let’s be clear what this is being equated to here: Actual Pipebombs Mailed to Prominent Liberals and the Media. And the environment in which that is happening is one where the Republican president, as well as some other Republican politicians and pundits, frequently present Liberals and “The Media”(especially the individuals and orgs targeted by this attack) as the True Cause of Violence in US politics; portrays them as part of a Crazy, Dangerous, and Lawless Mob which threatens the US and its culture; Praise violence targeted at them and Patronize those who commit it; and justify all of this through constant and Ridiculous Lies. That is inciting violence. So: is “either side normalizing this behaviour”? Republicans certainly seem to be.
