Republican Slaps Colleague For Not Supporting Trump Enough

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

I don't believe in taking the most extreme, uncommon case and making it into a paranoid rambling about how ALL Republicans are going to become violent and threatening. Along those lines, I constantly--and I hope it isn't annoying by now--talk about how things in life are complex, made of many variables and those variables are most often continua or spectra. In this particular case, being "Trumpian" is a dimension or variable and that has intensity or lies within a distribution and violent response is clearly a reality but uncommon. We must understand the whole distribution, where is the average, the extremities, and where is it leading.

For every conservative screaming "Hang Mike Pence!" or this guy slapping another Republican for not being loyal enough or people making death threats until someone retires, there might be a thousand Republicans trying to merely cancel non-loyalist Republicans in non-violent ways. And for each of those cancellers, there might be another 3-1 Republicans that are just ignorant, non-activated citizens who just vote and believe but don't engage in the cancelling. Who knows? We should refer to statistics and other analysis.

In examining statistics, I believe there actually is a concern.

There is an interesting paper on the topic of political violence here. Here is an excerpt:

"In January 2020, 41 percent of Republicans agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands”; a year later, after the January 6 insurrection, 56 percent of Republicans agreed that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves even if it requires taking violent action.”23 Moral disengagement also spiked: By February 2021, more than two-thirds of Republicans (and half of Democrats) saw the other party as “downright evil,”; while 12 percent more Republicans believed Democrats were less than human than the other way around.24​

​

The false narrative of a stolen 2020 election clearly increased support for political violence. Those who believed the election was fraudulent were far more likely to endorse coups and armed citizen rebellion; by February 2021, a quarter of Republicans felt that it was at least “a little” justified to take over state government buildings with violence to advance their political goals.25"​

 

[Rhea]

To me that’s a huge issue, and one that media companies large and small have to make a decision about. Do they fan the calls for violence, or publicly repudiate them. Media companies and every single one of us as citizens (in all countries).

This turn to violence comes and goes in waves in society, and we need to care about whether we are bystanders to it (enablers of it,) escalaters of it, or mitigators of it.

 

[Elixir]

Grab the popcorn, pull up a La-Z-Boy and settle in for the long wait.
Will the Jan6 Committee get DOJ to indict the elected officials who planned, aided and abetted the coup attempt? Or will planning and executing violent coup attempts become SOP for American political parties?

I don’t see any middle ground. Time has nearly run out for any retribution for the treason of Trumpsuckers to have any preventative effect, so I am not hopeful.