Heather wonders about the wider political significance of the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, and the callous MAGA response, coming during an epic battle of faithful election deniers versus a potential tsunami of voters, especially young, especially female. The deranged attack on Paul Pelosi, 82, who survived at least one hammer blow to the head, has become fodder for sly MAGA sadists joking about the violent home invasion on right-wing news outlets. As Adam Serwer wrote, the cruelty is the point. Heather:

“Anecdotal data point,” conservative commentator Tom Nichols tweeted this afternoon, “Had lunch with an old friend, a fellow former [Republican] (but not in politics or media or anything) and he said that things feel different after the Pelosi attack. Not sure why. I feel the same thing; not sure that it’ll matter, but have that same sense.”

Perhaps it is the echoes of lawyer Joseph Nye Welch, who in 1954 on television confronted Joseph McCarthy as the Wisconsin senator shredded people’s lives by accusing them of being communists: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Perhaps it is the many observers pointing out that in a time when more than half the Republicans running for office have refused to acknowledge that Democratic President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and when Republican legislatures are claiming the right to choose presidential electors without the input of voters, “American democracy is on the line.”

Or perhaps it is the sheer horror of Republican politicians joking about a brutal attack on the Speaker of the House, the second in line for the presidency, an attack that left her elderly husband with a fractured skull, but Nichols is right: something feels different.

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/november-2-2022?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Then she quotes extensively from an excellent speech Biden delivered tonight about the present struggle to preserve our experiment in democracy.

Whenever you want a small group of wealthy men, with unpopular ideas, to weild absolute power, over the wishes of the majority of citizens, you need to employ deadly violence. These powerful autocratic men need deadly groups of violence fanatics, like the Ku Klux Klan , as enforcers of their will.

The Ku Klux Klan would be powerless without their credible rep for torture, humiliation and terrifying death, unpunishable by the law.

See that picture in your mind of laughing law enforcemeny klansmen at their attaignment for murdering three civil rights workers. They couldn’t look more relaxed, one of them dipping into a bag of Red Man tobacco, his buddy with a big Lyin’ Ted smile on his face. Those are good old boys that mutilated three voting rights advocates in Mississippi, looking forward to Justice at the hands of a a jury of their white peers, under the state criminal code, and local customs, of Mississippi.

Without groups like the Klan it would be very hard, in a democracy, to effectively suppress minority voting, that is the voting of the local majority. The majority will win elections unless intimidated by terrorism so they will not cast a vote. Hang, burn and dismember just a few of their leaders and watch how quickly the rest of them will hide on Election Day.

That’s how it’s done whenever you want a small group of wealthy men to rule absent the consent of everyone they rule. The only way to do it is by force, you have to have the threat that you will actually be able to legally torture and murder as many motherfuckers as you need to make examples of, if not all of them in the ultimate solution, or as Mr. Hitler’s colleagues called it die endlösung.

Get out and vote. Vote against American Nazism. It is a cliché because it always works this way, but first fascists come for those they deem helpless, poor, frightened women, and girls, and then political opponents, and then other enemy groups they have a vendetta against. In the end, if they haven’t gotten to you yet, they inevitably come for you.

I never had a strong feeling about Jake Tapper one way or the other. Tapper seemed reasonable enough, the few times I watched him opining on the news.

New leadership at CNN, formerly disparaged by the right as the “Clinton News Network,” determined to capture more centrist viewers with content more sensitive to the views of American Nazi types.

In the aftermath of the horrific assassination attempt at Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco, and in the stinking wake of new Twitter CEOs tweet claiming Pelosi’s husband was drunk and fighting with a male prostitute (tweet since taken down) Jake Tapper weighs in to remind CNN viewers that certainly not all political violence is restricted to the extreme right.

In fact, in 2017, Tapper intones, it was a left-winger who shot up a bunch of Congress people at a softball game. He then goes down a short list, a guy wanted to shoot Boof Kavanaugh. He includes on the short list the (right-wing, pro-Trump) punks recently convicted for their plot to kidnap and execute the Democratic governor of Michigan, and a presumably left wing attack on MAGA NY gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin to, eh, prove his point. Both sides are violent!

Apparently a highly paid shill like Tapper will read whatever is placed on his teleprompter. Fuck media pundits like Jake Tapper, who know better, but speak with the authority of paid celebrity product endorsers.

Listen for yourself to how fair and balanced CNN’s presentation of political violence is. No reason to mention that American intelligence (Homeland Security) and law enforcement (FBI) have rated the alarming rise of right-wing, white supremacist terrorism as the number one threat to our democracy.

Or, as Jake Tapper points out, political violence is never acceptable and does not belong to either party. Here’s 90 seconds of fair and balanced influencer Tapper, giving both sides, for his new boss at CNN.