The posts are ominous.
“Pick a side, or YOU are next,” wrote conservative talkshow host Dan Bongino on the Truth Social media platform in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions.
The replies were even more so.
“Dan, seriously now,” one user wrote in response to Bongino. “I see no way out of all this mess without bloodshed. When you can rig an election, then weaponize the government and the courts against a former President, what other alternative is there? I’m almost 70 and would rather die than live in tyranny.”
That’s a common version of how many people on the US right reacted to the ex-president’s verdict, drawing on a “mirror world” where Trump is seen as the selfless martyr to powerful state forces and Joe Biden is the dangerous autocrat wielding the justice system as his own personal plaything and a threat to US democracy.
Calls for revenge, retribution and violence littered the rightwing internet as soon as Trump’s guilty verdict came down, all predicated on the idea that the trial had been a sham designed to interfere with the 2024 election. Some posted online explicitly saying it was time for hangings, executions and civil wars.
Nobody accepts that they’re going to win, because Biden’s institutional-inertia & assumed-entitlement aren’t sufficient to win.
Also, the economic house-of-cards that both China & the US are trying to keep from collapsing must go down, sooner or later, & if it goes down before the US election, then the incumbent’s hosed.
( that is true no matter who the incumbent is, and I believe it always has been true: that it’s a general rule of elections: economic-collapse automatically rips the rug out from the incumbent )
Nobody understands that they need to do the ideological psyching-up, in order to “justify” all the butchery, all the “getting even” their side’s committed to enforcing, so that they will later be able to maintain they weren’t responsible…
( it makes me wonder if there was similar unconscious-understanding, & similar setting-up-non-responsibility, among other violent political, or religious, movements’ people )
shruggeth
A dozen years from now, I’m going to be very surprised if more than 150 million are left alive in the US of A, after Civil War Part2 is finished.
There are currently around 400 million, iirc.
I’m expecting 2/3rds extinguished in the coming maelstrom, & its consequences.
And that is just within the US.
Trump’s commitment to gut NATO & back Putin…
the butchery of the US of A will be only the beginning, obviously.
But for ideology-addiction, rampaging’s “The Answer”, isn’t it?