Giving Permission to Political Violence

Undermining the legitimacy of institutions—as the left and the right have both done—is just the first step.

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Steve Daniels, a candidate for chairman of the Republican Party of Arizona, spoils his ballot during the Republican Party of Arizona Statutory Meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona, on January 28, 2022, by writing "Machines Are Fraud!" (Photo by Rebecca Noble for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Maricopa County is where you go to catch congenital syphilis and up on the latest shenanigans from the Trump cult.

About the latter: A mob shouting about “revolution” and such stormed a meeting of the board of supervisors in late February, with the elected county officials having to be escorted from the venue by security guards backed up by sheriff’s deputies. I probably don’t have to tell you this was a Trumpist mob, and not one full of would-be Jacobins, Antifa, Greta Thunberg followers, or “defund the police!” types. 

“I’m here today to put you on public notice and I’m here to inform you that you are not our elected officials,” one of the leaders, bearing the possible aptronym Michelle Klann, declared. “None of you have ever signed an oath of office to the Republic of Arizona, instead you’ve signed an oath of office to a foreign corporation, which means this is an act of insurrection. … Due to all the voter fraud, you have never been formally voted in. Acting as if you are authority over the people is a direct act of treason.” Klann is the founder of a pro-Trump organization, and there were the usual MAGA hats and Trumpist regalia in the mob. Klann really got cooking in her statement: “Your act of treason will be grounds for an immediate military tribunal. We do not need to tell you the penalties for treason.”

That’s quite a two-step, from “all the voter fraud” to firing squads.

If you close your eyes, you can see, and possibly smell, the scene. And to be clear: In referencing “penalties for treason,” Klann was talking about murdering those county officials. That’s how cowards threaten violence against their perceived enemies—not forthrightly and honestly, but with an “I’m just sayin’,” a moral fig leaf. It is contemptible.

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  1. Avatar photo
    ReneFerrerJr

    Thank you for the blip about hispanics. I'm a proud Latino from a Latin American country with a culture of rape. I, like other Latinos I know, do not identify as hispanic but Latino. And when I was an enumerator for the 2020 Census all the Latinos I spoke with did not know what a hispanic is. What is interesting to me is the people who use the word hispanic are not so. So I correct them as politely as I can. Also, I like other Latinos only use this designation on official forms since we consider ourselves American, and proudly so.

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  2. Avatar photo
    Davis

    I'm getting really tired of this need to always equivocate between the left and the right. "I'm writing a piece all about how bad the right is, but I need to wedge some criticism of the left in there too, to legitimate my criticism". Come on. Comparing the unhinged conspiracy theories of the right to the leftist complaints of police brutality that actually happened? What are we even doing here? I respect the hell out of KDW, but...you can just criticize the right if you want to. You don't have to both-sides everything.

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    1. Kevin Williamson

      The belief that unarmed black men are routinely gunned down by police because of their race is as false as the belief that COVID vaccines are part of a conspiracy organized by Bill Gates.

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      1. Avatar photo
        Davis

        Kevin, I didn’t argue “the belief that unarmed black men are routinely gunned down by police”. I was only responding to your own given examples: “the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the acquittal of the LAPD officers charged in the 1991 Rodney King beating, the killing of George Floyd”, as you wrote. All of those things happened, as you said. None of those things are fabricated conspiracy theories. And people justifiably protested after those objectively bad things happened. Why are you comparing that to “the belief that COVID vaccines are part of a conspiracy organized by Bill Gates.”? I mean… if you wanna criticize the left, why not point out the ridiculousness of the myth that women only make 70 cents on the dollar as men? Or the ridiculousness of banning AR-15’s, but not Mini-14’s?

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  3. Vaddeman

    'None of you have never signed an oath...'

    One of my favourite self-contradictions.

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  4. Betsybowditch

    Reggie Walton was appointed by Reagan, a tough on crime African-American conservative, and presided over the Scooter Libby trial. He’s put out a warning that was published in the WaPo:

    A Republican-appointed judge denounced Donald Trump’s social media attacks against the judge presiding over the former president’s hush money trial in Manhattan and his daughter, calling them assaults on the rule of law that could lead to violence and tyranny.

    “When judges are threatened, and particularly when their family is threatened, it’s something that’s wrong and should not happen,” U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in a live interview Thursday. He added, “It is very troubling because I think it is an attack on the rule of law.”

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  5. Betsybowditch

    Public shaming is unlikely to have an effect of this man. Of those I have seen prosecuted, they all cast ballots on behalf of dead relatives for Trump and claimed to have been misled by drinking the Kool-Aid. FOX News, Newsmax, etc. There isn't a comparable information ecosystem for the left.

    Extract: Georgia Republican official who pushed false claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” was found to have voted illegally nine times, a judge ruled this week. Brian Pritchard, first vice chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine, as well as investigative costs, and be publicly reprimanded.

    Pritchard had been sentenced in 1996 in Pennsylvania to three years’ probation for felony check forgery charges. His probation was revoked three times — once in 1999, after he moved to Georgia, and again in 2002 and 2004. In 2004, a judge imposed a new seven-year probationary sentence on Pritchard, thus making him ineligible to vote until at least 2011 in Georgia, where state law prohibits felons from voting.

    Despite that, court documents showed that Pritchard signed voter registration forms in 2008 in which he affirmed that he was “not serving a sentence for having been convicted of a felony involving moral turpitude.”

    He then cast ballots in four Georgia primary and general elections in 2008, as well as five special, primary and general elections in 2010.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/28/georgia-republican-illegal-voting/

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  6. Betsybowditch

    There's a fear that Trump's bloodbath call will usher in violence against Asian Americans as happened in 1982, when Vincent Chin was beaten to death in Detroit, where he grew up, by two white autoworkers who accused him of stealing jobs. They thought he was Japanese. Neither served a prison sentence to the outrage of the Asian American community.

    As the New Republic reports: Donald Trump, who first came to prominence in the 1980s, seems to be trying hard to single-handedly bring back that awful decade and the type of panicked, racist frenzy that killed Vincent Chin. His recent remarks about Chinese electric vehicles sound particularly dangerous. Trump has been claiming—falsely—that Biden’s electric vehicle policies will allow a flood of Chinese imports (the administration’s policies support the growing domestic E.V. industry) and put Americans out of work.

    He promised a “bloodbath” if he lost the election, linking the fantasized violence to these imports, insisting, insisting, “They’re not going to sell those cars.” (United Auto Worker president Shawn Fain was unimpressed, saying, “Trump only represents the billionaire class, and he doesn’t give a damn about the plight of working-class people—union or not.”)

    Experts interviewed by The New York Times noted that Trump’s language about E.V.s is consistently violent: They will “kill” or amount to an “assassination” or a “hit job” on American jobs.

    https://newrepublic.com/article/180204/trump-racist-asian-cars-electric

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  7. Mil001

    Good article; well said.

    I may be a bit late to the game here--life happens--but I went to the website you linked, where I indeed found the (weirdly homoerotic) image of a bulked up Trump aboard his steed. (What is it with these MAGA folks?)

    I also found the two images and "quotes" from President Kennedy. The Trumpists have been trying to ride his coattails for years, though the comparing of Trump to John Kennedy is almost obscene. The first quote given, about plots to enslave, never passed JFK's lips, as I'm sure you are aware. To complete the imagery of their Sons of Liberty theme, Kennedy is attired in colonial era clothing in the image.

    The second Kennedy quote, which was indeed from him, is accompanied by another image. This one was, to me, telling. That uniform he was wearing was not, nor ever has been, a uniform of the US Navy, as far as I can tell. Indeed, it struck me as something an officer in another navy whose search for warm water ports has driven much of that country's policies. Post Czarist, maybe?

    One might wonder where this pro-Trump organization gets its imagery and artwork, as well as its rhetoric.

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  8. Iowafocus

    one of your best articles

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  9. Betsybowditch

    Last week on nextdoor someone reported encountering a dangerous driver on an artery road and complained he wasn’t cited because “we defunded the police.”

    Immediately someone else pointed out that never happened and the person was confusing an aspirational slogan, voiced in some quarters, with policy.

    I have a friend whose son-in-law is a sheriff’s duty and he complained they can’t hire the people they need. This is true in many police departments.

    In my opinion the problem lies in excessive news coverage of rogue cops. If someone is doing their job, there is no story. This leaves the public unable to ascertain how many of those patrolling are good officers.

    The majority are but there are always bad apples.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Davis

      The problem is that the good apples make excuses for the bad apples, rather than root them out. Remember, the bad apple spoils the batch.

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      1. Betsybowditch

        In the case of rogue cops, unions will protect them and that can get in the way of termination.

        It is true organizations have a tendency to sweep their dirty laundry under the carpet to maintain their status in the community. The Catholic Church and it pedophilic priests is exhibit A.

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  10. Betsybowditch

    "That is how you build a permission structure for political violence. First, you undermine the legitimacy of institutions as the right has been doing with election procedures and the left has been doing with (among other targets) the Supreme Court...:

    There’s false equivalence here. Unelected judges, who enjoy lifetime employment, derive their legitimacy from being perceived as apolitical. (The Right is always railing about what tyranny unelected bureaucrats can wreak.) Mitch McConnell’s bait and switch on confirmation ensured the current lineup isn’t and, coupled with revelations about luxury vacations waved off as expressions of personal hospitality, added to the perception the political class is cloistered off from everyday life that, to me, is reminiscent of China.

    Senator Ted Cruz, who already requests a police escort every time he traverses the Houston airport, has put in motion legislative efforts to require law enforcement officers to give top national officials a private escort past airport security. This is exactly the way things work in Beijing.

    As a preteen on a walk I met Senator Eugene McCarthy, when he was running for president, and he couldn't have been more gracious. That was also true of the late John McCain when he got off a plane I was waiting to board in 2014. Constituents came up and he chatted with them. These were public servants devoid of the “I’m an important person” entitlement mentality.

    There was that man who traveled from California to Kavanaugh's Virginia home who posed a threat but nobody signed on that and I’m glad he was apprehended. The justices all enjoy taxpayer funded security and that may be next on Senator Cruz's wish list.

    By contrast, if you want a job art the RNC you have to sign off on the stolen election narrative. For good measure, you should refer to anyone in legal trouble for storming the capital as a hostage, which is ridiculous.

    In reading about the death of Joseph Lieberman this afternoon, I recalled the "Sore Loserman" taunts in 2000. How things have changed for the GOP where the victim card seems to trump everything.

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