Democracy Nears Abyss: Many in Office & Across the Land Whip Chaos and Distrust

January 6 set the scene for today

(“Standing by” for new orders)

How Trump cultists see him and their role

This lead-in to the main article that follows below is from Business Insider with this headline:

“The far right is calling for Civil War after the FBI raid on Trump's home. Experts say wouldn't look like the last one”

·  Some on the far right have been calling for civil war since an FBI raid on Trump's Florida home.

·  Some experts say the warning signs for civil war have been emerging in the US in recent years.

·  But they also say that such a conflict would look very different from the Civil War of the 1860s.

In the wake of an FBI search of Trump's Florida home, some far-right figures have been spreading violent rhetoric online including calls for war.

Republicans has long portrayed itself as the defender of “law and order,” but the aftermath of the raid has seen GOP lawmakers like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) calling for “defunding the FBI.” 

She also made references to civil war on social media as her Republican colleagues compare the FBI to the Gestapo and depict the raid as the type of thing that only happens in “third world” countries. 

Meanwhile, pro-Trump internet channels have seen a spike in talk of civil war since the raid. 

The FBI raid of Trump's Mar-a-Lago home came in a historically divisive period for us, one in which millions of voters continue to believe the Trump false notion (the “Big Lie”) that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him  and that Joe Biden is in illegally. Such erroneous claims were at the heart of what catalyzed the deadly January 6 riot on the National Capitol last year.

Historians and experts on democracy warn that these lies continue to foster the potential for further violence, and say that if we did see civil war, it wouldn't look like the first one. 

For example: Fiona Hill, who served as the leading Russia expert on the NSC (National Security Council) during the Trump administration, said in a conversation with Insider last month that: “The distrust in the electoral process and government institutions fomented by Trump and his GOP allies has created a recipe for communal violence and that the U.S. could ultimately end up in a civil conflict. The country is at a point in which trust in the different communities and authorities has eroded to such an extent that people just start fighting with each other.”

Hill also underscored that a civil conflict in the present day would be unlikely to look like the American Civil War, an extraordinarily bloody fight between the Union and Confederacy that left an estimated 618,000 to 750,000 Americans dead. 

Hill concluded: “I don't think we'd end up in the kind of conflict that we had between the states — the Union and the Confederacy — back in the day. But people's sense of the civil and civic ways of resolving disputes are out the window.”

Then less than a week after the raid on Trump's home, an armed man attempted to break into the FBI field office in Cincinnati shooting up the place with a “nail gun” and carrying an AR-15. Authorities have not announced a motive but are reportedly investigating whether the man — who was ultimately killed by police — had ties to far right extremism.

Full article at the main link. 

The main article for today follows below:

Abyss: Here comes the Republican-GOP-Conservative-Far Right leading the charge full bore…

The flood gates are now overwhelmed and the daily/hourly news is all consuming based on the Mar-a-Lago FBI search of Trump’s squirreled  away classified documents out line in this extensive and comprehensive and very good article from Vox.com with this headline:

“Trump is pushing us toward the abyss”

His conspiracy theories about the FBI search have spawned a GOP assault on the legitimacy of the American state — and set the stage for violence.

* The Mar-a-Lago FBI document release now shows that Trump is under investigation for potential violations of three federal statutes, including the Espionage Act.

* The NYS investigation into his business practices is heating up after he spent four hours in questioning, but pleading the Fifth on every question except when he was asked to state his name.

* The Trump Organization lost a motion to dismiss the Manhattan district attorney’s tax fraud case against it.

* In Georgia, where a grand jury has been impaneled to examine potentially criminal 2020 election interference, Trump hired a criminal defense attorney famous for representing rappers.

* Plus, January 6 public examination is starting to reach him too. Just ten days ago, it was reported that his legal team had sat down with the DOJ to discuss whether conversations he had while in office could be shielded from investigators or not.

None of these investigations is a witch hunt. In each case, there are serious reasons to believe that the president violated the law.

If prosecutors chose not to even investigate Trump, that itself would be politically motivated — a tacit admission that if a political figure is popular enough, he is above the law.

But the result of prosecutors doing their job is predictable: Trump reacts by casting it as proof that he is under attack by nefarious forces. Take his reaction to the reports of the nuclear weapons documents, posted on Truth Social:

His fav word is Hoax, Hoax, and Hoax

(And misspelled Christopher)

The litany of Trump grievances, the sense that he has been forever persecuted by the government, the unfounded implication that the FBI was “planting information” at his house, all screams that he is a victim, and that he is the target of a vast and shadowy conspiracy pulling the FBI’s strings.

Trump is, as the political scientist Julia Azari puts it: “A nationalist who has no concept of a nation; a narcissist who abuses the language of patriotism without any commitment to the underlying idea that he has some responsibility to preserve order and cohesion in the polity. In fact, he does the opposite — sowing division and stoking violent distrust if it helps him.”

Perhaps Trump’s talk wouldn’t be so dangerous if the rest of the GOP would work to tamp it down. Yet it’s become excruciatingly clear in the wake of his emergence as the GOP’s standard-bearer that Republicans are not taking Trump’s transgressions and troubles as opportunities to dump him, but rather to dig in, right by his side, in similarly radical terms.

Look at leading Republicans and the RNC are willing to attack federal law enforcement, and how swiftly some of them moved to paint the FBI as jackbooted thugs.

They seem to be operating at the behest of a tyrannical federal government that needs to be defunded as described in this now-banned Amazon bookbut may be now revived as their new handbook.

* Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, the leading non-Trump prospective candidate in the 2024 GOP primary race, called it “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents.”

* Florida GOP Sen. Rick Scott, head of the NRSC, described the FBI’s behavior as “3rd World country stuff.”

* NYS GOP Rep. Rep. Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking House Republican, called for “an immediate investigation and accountability into Joe Biden and his Administration’s weaponizing this Justice Department against their political opponents.”

Stefanik is my district Rep. in Congress 

(I have never supported her) 

Conservative media has taken a similar line:

* Fox News has been leading the charge against Judge Bruce Reinhart, who authorized the FBI search warrant, on grounds that he represented clients with ties to Jeffrey Epstein over a decade ago. (He has been getting all sorts of threats since that bogus story broke), plus this:

Follows the new Trump owned & operated GOP

(This was hawked by FOX News) 

* Host Brian Kilmeade displayed that fake picture of Reinhart on a plane with Epstein confidante Ghislaine Maxwell. Little wonder, now then, why Judge Reinhart and his synagogue have been receiving threats. 

My 2 Cents: We can’t fire Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Rick Scott, or Rep. Elise Stefanik (but we can vote them out of office and should in my view).

Also, I firmly believe that FOX should fire Kilmeade, Hannity, Ingraham, Watters, or any others who spew that harsh propaganda and anti-American rhetoric filled disinformation.

They or anyone else like that that on any network are truly a “clear and present danger” at least based on my view and lifelong experience in the service of our country.

If those radicals are not voted out of office, or fired, or removed from the networks, then shame on the voters, the network bosses, the rest of us in general for not working to save the nation.

I do not say that lightly but this Trump GOP cult revival scares me and believe me when I say I don’t scare easily. However, from what I have seen and heard does more than I have ever seen in my life including two tours of heavy combat in VN as an infantry Marine.

Thanks for stopping by.