Max Bergmann, a former State Department official and now program director with the Center for Strategic International Studies, predicts Russian-fueled turbulence at the Democratic national convention in August. He foresees attempts of Russian operatives to infiltrate groups of protestors and attempt to turn protests violent.
He also notes that social media has “become way more of a cesspool than it was in 2016.”
Sometimes people take politics too personally, eventually resorting to violence but the question is whether violence is justified during the time of elections?
Nearly half of voters across a group of swing-states said they expect violence around the upcoming presidential election, according to a new poll.
"It is not clear to me how anyone can any longer deny that Trump is promising to destroy our democracy and usher in authoritarianism.
But it is also not clear that he is still a figure that any but the extremes of his base will follow to that end. Hence his emphasis on turning them to violence."
"A vote for Trump is a vote for more gun violence. It got lost in the coverage, but Trump promised the NRA that he would repeal all of Biden's gun safety actions. …
Trump promised, 'In my second term, we will roll back every Biden attack on the Second Amendment.'
"les patriarches ont pour mission de séparer les hommes des femmes, d'établir que les femmes sont opposées aux hommes. Je crois profondément que cette #binarité est très problématique car cette construction binaire vise à diviser afin d'obtenir un différentiel de #pouvoir, et ce différentiel de pouvoir est à la base du type de #violence politique qu'est le #féminicide."
Four young Germans beat The Ecke, the SPD's top candidate in elections for the European Parliament in Saxony, so badly in Dresden on May 3, that he had to be treated in the hospital for a broken cheekbone and eye socket. He had been out posting campaign posters. The shockwaves are still being felt, even as far away as Berlin.In an unusual step, Faeser called for a special meeting of state interior ministers last Tuesday evening at 6 p.m., where they discussed improving security measures for politicians.
The interior ministers didn't even have the chance to log in to their video conference when, at around 4:15 p.m., a man hit Berlin Senator for Economic Affairs Franziska Giffey (SPD) over the head with a blunt object that had been wrapped in a bag. She had been visiting a public library in Berlin's Neukölln district.
At 6:50 p.m., the ministers still hadn't logged out of their conversation when the Green Party politician Yvonne Mosler got attacked and spat upon while putting up posters in Dresden.
Is there any way of stopping all this?
There have been numerous attacks on politicians and volunteer election workers in recent days. Even the running camera of a Deutsche Welle film team that accompanied Mosler failed to deter the perpetrators. Society, it appears, has reached a new level of brutalization. Berlin politician Giffey has called it a "fair-game culture."
These are acts that are usually only in the headlines or public consciousness for a short amount of time. Taken together, though, they act like a corrosive solution: Drop by drop, act by act, they erode democratic structures. Will they corrode to the point that they threaten to collapse?
"Republican Gov. Greg Abbott... pardoning Daniel Perry, the former Army sergeant convicted in the fatal #shooting of a protester during a #BlackLivesMatter march...
Rachel Maddow discusses her research into fascism, disinformation, and propaganda.
It's not merely an attempt to foster animosity towards a particular group. Fascist disinformation is to erode our democracy by convincing us that a specific group is perilous, untrustworthy, and should be disenfranchised.
What has transpired since 2016 with the former president is not just the vilification of ethnic minorities. He, along with Fox propaganda and other purveyors of disinformation, have escalated lies and disinformation into a violent domestic terrorist movement and a MAGA-driven fascist party. The presence of Republican fascists is a reality now.
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Fascism ... is about getting us to undo #democracy and we shouldn't stand for it.
Au moins 44 journalistes travaillant sur l'environnement ont été assassinés depuis 2009. Vingt-quatre ont survécu à des tentatives de meurtre. C'est ce qu'a rappelé l'Unesco dans un rapport publié hier, à l'occasion de la journée internationale de la liberté de la presse. ☠️
People in the U.S. complain about disruptive #protests, but the country has systematically closed down venues for #dissent. Want to vote for a non-genocidal President? Sorry, two-party system. Want to pass progressive legislation? Sorry, filibuster. Want to support the #Palestinians? Sorry, our ally is #Israel. Want your #university to divest from armaments? Sorry, fiduciary duty. Want to write some graffiti? Sorry, #vandalism. So disruption may be all we have left, short of #violence.
#Trump is trying to sound ambiguous, but make no mistake, this is a threat to compel #violence if he loses the #2024election. He says it depends on whether the election is "fair", but in Trump's mind the election will only be fair if he wins. If he loses, then it will be because the election was unfair, in which case he'll be fomenting violence. What the hell is wrong with people who are still supporting this wannabe tyrant?
Fear is widespread on American campuses, researcher says
Students are “observing acts of physical violence and intimidation right in front of them. Jewish students are seeing Jewish buildings attacked. Muslim students are seeing people ... counterattack against Muslims. The students that are not Jewish and not Muslim, they’re just seeing everybody getting ... attacked.”
This is not normal. This cannot become normal. We as a community, we as a society, we as a country cannot condone the normalization republican insurrection of the January 6 Capitol attack.