THE FIRE THIS TIME

Clowns with flamethrowers, still have flamethrowers

A poll conducted earlier this year found that 56 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement: “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”

On August 29, Steve Lynch - a Republican running for Northampton County executive in Pennsylvania gave a heated address about school mask mandates. After stating that he was tired of providing his school board with arguments and data - which he evidently thinks supports kids going to school maskless), he went on:

“Forget into [sic] these school boards with frigging data. You go into school boards to remove ’em! That’s what you do! They don’t follow the law! You go in and you remove ’em. I’m going in there with twenty strong men, I’m going to speak to the school board and I’m going to give them an option. They can leave or they can be removed.”

Steve Lynch has never before run for office. He was one of the seditionists who was at the January 6 rally in Washington, D.C. and has since posted on social media the violence that day was a false-flag operation which was meant to discredit Trump supporters.

This past weekend in Georgia, a mobile vaccination location was forced to shut down because of a serious threat of violence made by a mob of anti-vaccination protesters. A spokeswoman for the state health department told the Atlanta Journal Constitution:“Aside from feeling threatened themselves, staff realized no one would want to come to that location for a vaccination under those circumstances, so they packed up and left.”

This past Sunday in North Carolina, Congressman Madison Cawthorn spoke at a meeting sponsored by the Macon County Republican Party. His speech was a collection of the lies that have become routine among Republicans: The election was stolen, not merely the vote for president but also for Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, who defeated his Republican opponent by over 250,000 votes. Young Master Cawthorn went on to tell the audience that vaccines are harmful to children and urged them to “defend their children.”When asked what he plans to do about the “535 Americans who have been captured from January 6,” he forcefully called them “Political hostages!” then went on to assure his listeners that “we” are working on the issue and called for “busting them out.” When someone in the crowd asked, “When are you gonna call us back to Washington?” he replied “We are actively working on that one.” He reminded the audience that the Second Amendment is “not for the protection of hunters or collectors, it’s to give us the power to resist tyranny!s and then finished with “The things that we are wanting to fight for, it doesn’t matter if our votes don’t count. Because, you know, if our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place—and it’s bloodshed.”

Cawthorn has been serious about insurrection since he arrived in Congress. When he spoke at the Stop the Steal rally on January 6, he praised the courage of the crowd courage and contrasted that to the “cowards” in Congress. His resume before arriving in Congress consisted of a stint at Chick-fil-A before the accident that put him in a wheel chair, and a part-time job in a congressional office. His educational attainments are similar: he dropped out of Patrick Henry College after a single semester, with grades that were mostly Ds. But even confined to a wheelchair, he was apparently active in other activities. During his congressional campaign,more than 150 of his classmates signed a letter in which they accused him of being a sexual predator. One woman recounted to the Washington Post that he once drove her out to a rural area where he became sufficiently enraged when she rebuffed his sexual advances to scare her and then drove back at speeds over 80 miles an hour. Recall that Patrick Henry University is no hotbed of campus liberalism; the school was created to train mostly home-schooled fundamentalist Chirstianists so they could enter politics as fighters for the movement conservative cause. With a record like this, it was unsurprising that Donald Trump has endorsed him for “whatever he wants to do.”

The week before in Tennessee, a meeting of the Williamson County school board was disrupted by anti-mask parents. Doctors and nurses who testified masks would help limit the spread of COVID-19, were cursed at and threatened them. Outside, one male parent - who has since been identified as a convicted felon out on parole - beat on the window of one doctor’s car, screaming “We will find you!” “We know who you are!”

In an interview early last month, Liz Cheney said that one reason more Republicans might not have chosen to join her was because “there were members who told me that they were afraid for their own security—afraid, in some instances, for their lives.”

This is all being whipped up the performing clowns of the Conservative Entertainment Complex, despite the fact that - while the performing clowns rail against vaccinations - they themselves are vaccinated and work for a company that has a vaccine mandate for employees to remain employees. Republican office holders join in, despite knowing that what they are saying is a lie.

This past Sunday, uber-insurrectionist and anti-vaxxer stalwart Senator Ron Johnson gave an interview to a liberal activist he thought was one of the conservatives at the rally he was attending. She asked if he believed Trump had lost the election. He replied: "If all the Republicans voted for Trump the way they voted for the Assembly candidates, he would have won. He didn’t get 51,000 votes that other Republicans got, and that’s why he lost. There’s nothing obviously skewed about the results."

Paul Ryan, the GOP’s vice presidential candidate in 2012 and former Speaker of the House, who has kept a very low profile since returning to Wisconsin, was asked about the election recently in one of the few interviews he has given. He replied: "President Trump lost the election. Joe Biden won the election, It was not rigged. It was not stolen. Donald Trump lost the election. Joe Biden won the election. It's really clear." Of course, Ryan now devotes his energies to supporting his family by “working” as a member of the Board of Directors of Fox Broadcasting.

I could go on.

Political violence by the Right is nothing new. When I was at The Oleo Strut coffeehouse outside Fort Hood, in Killeen, Texas, back in 1968, we had a lawyer, Davis Bragg, who was a long-time “Texas progressive.” The first time we went to have dinner with him in his house outside of town, the driveway from the county road seemed to go on so long that at one point we wondered if we had missed a turnoff. When I mentioned his driveway to him, he replied with a smile, “Yes, it’s out of range.”

When we traveled outside of town, down to Austin or such, we would call those at the destination to tell them we were leaving and when we expected to arrive, and when we got there, we called home base to let them know we had arrived safely. At that time, it was common to see pickup trucks with guns in the rear window gunrack, the bumpers festooned with Wallace for President signs. That year, a local activist in Austin who worked in a convenience store was shot and killed by a man who called him a “communist.” The assassin was never found.

What is new is that, back then, the local “good ol’ boys” - who were called “goatropers” (i.e., “too dumb to rope a goat”) - were looked down on by the “respectable” people in Killeen. The “church ladies” who asked us to come speak about what we were doing in town, working with the GIs .at Fort Hood were appalled when we told them what went on outside the coffeehouse on Saturday nights after the local bars closed and the drunken “patriots” showed up to harass soldiers and threaten to “burn that place down.” When I later worked in politics in Sacramento, my Republican counterparts laughed at the “kooks” who inhabited the right wing of the party. Those people were seen as “marginal,” and I am certain that if I could go back in time 45 years and tell one of my friends from the other side of the aisle what the political future of his party was, he would consider me crazy.

Nowadays, the threat of violence is so mainstream in the Republican Party that people like Cawthorn, Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene say things that would have been unspeakable by a member of Congress any time before Trump came riding down his golden escalator. Kevin McCarthy, the leader of the House Repuiblicans, thinks nothing of making threats against telcom companies that comply with the (entirely legal) request of the January 6 Investigating Committee that they preserve phone records of members of the Trump Administration and House Republicans, who may have conspired in the January 6 insurrection. Anti-vaccination protesters regularly show up brandishing weapons outside the homes of local officials or medical professionals. Armed invaders have shown up in state legislatures.

The Republican Party now has an armed, paramilitary force it can call on. This is what is new in our politics. Such a situation wasn’t seen in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Mona Charen, a conservative writer I used to disagree with regularly before she demonstrated the integrity to see through Trump and act on that knowledge, writes:

“Criminal violence is a problem, but the kind of violence Republicans are now flirting with or sometimes outright endorsing is political—and therefore on a completely different plane of threat. They are playing with fire. Nothing less than democratic legitimacy is on the line. These menacing signals suggest that January 6 may have been the overture, not the finale.”

A demonstration is planned in Washington to happen on Saturday, September 18. The organizers say it’s to demonstrate support of and call for the release of the “political prisoners” from the first insurrection on January 6. This event was started by Matt Braynard, who was director of data and strategy during the early months of Trump’s first presidential campaign. The Proud Boys have publicly declared support for the event and called for those who were in Washington on January 6 to return.

88 years ago, my late friend here in Hollywood witnessed the rise of the Nazis in Berlin. His warnings to his friends about the threat they constituted were pushed aside by those who called the Nazis “clowns.” He left Germany the night Hitler won the January 1933 election. “When I returned 12 years later, all my friends who had told me the Nazis were clowns, were dead. Killed by the clowns.”

These people are serious. They may be clowns, but “Clowns with flamethrowers, still have flamethrowers.”

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