Self-defensive fascism

In Republican states, you can now "stand your ground" from the front seat of your moving car.

This is now legal in Oklahoma if you claim self-defense.

They’re getting ready out there, Republicans and those even further to the right, to justify killing libs as self-defense.  They did it in Florida in April when the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law, signed by the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, granting civil immunity to people ramming cars into crowds of protestors so long as the driver claims he feared for his life or was attempting to flee from the crowd. 

The same week, the Republican-controlled legislature of Oklahoma passed a law, quickly signed by Republican Governor Kevin Stitt, that goes Florida one better by granting criminal immunity to drivers who kill protestors under the same circumstances.  The law was passed in response to an incident in 2020 during protests in Tulsa against the killing of George Floyd when a pickup truck rammed into a demonstration injuring three protestors, one of whom was paralyzed from the waist down.  The Tulsa district attorney refused to press charges against the pickup’s driver and took the position that the driver was the victim and the protestors were guilty of causing the incident.

Both states went further in their laws against protests.  The Florida law declares that a gathering of three or more people can be legally classified as a “riot,” and makes anyone participating in such a “riot” liable to be charged for a third degree felony.  The Oklahoma law makes obstructing a public street in a protest a crime punishable by fines and prison sentences.  The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law’s U.S. Protest Law Tracker has counted 17 states that have passed at least 30 anti-protest laws that have expanded the definition of “riot” and increased penalties for violating new anti-riot laws.  Sixty-eight other bills are pending that would limit dissent and/or make various forms of protests illegal. 

The Wall Street Journal reported last year in October that there had been more than 100 incidents of cars hitting protestors during demonstrations against racism.  The Journal reported that TikTok videos showing images of vehicular violence with the hashtag #AllLivesSplatter had been viewed more than 790,000 times, and videos featuring the hashtag #RunThemDown were viewed more than 48,000 times. 

My Twitter feed is still lit up with right-wing outrage at my column last Friday about the school shooting in Michigan.  Most of the tweets have been critical of my use of the words “military grade” to describe the pistol used by the shooter, but almost as many have made sarcastic references to the red SUV that drove into a Christmas parade in Wisconsin killing five people and injuring 48.  “I saw a military grade SUV mow down 50+ people in Wisconsin” was the tweet that set off the sarcasm.  “Watch out that’s a semi fully automatic SUV” tweeted one clever gun nut.  “How much for a red SUV?” asked another.

Clearly, the tweeters are making gleeful jokes about automobiles being used as weapons at a time when Republican legislatures around the country are making exactly that legal when the vehicle is used against protestors in the street. 

And then of course there is the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, found not-guilty by a jury of his “peers” for shooting and killing two protestors during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year.  Legal experts said the jury believed his claim that he was acting in self-defense, despite the fact that Wisconsin has a law against claiming self-defense if you have incited the incident you’re charged with.  Republican legislatures around the country are busy changing their state laws to allow the claim of self-defense under the same circumstances.  In other words, by next year, after the Supreme Court basically allows anyone to carry a gun anywhere when it issues its decision in the New York State case they just heard, it will be legal to bring firearms to protests, and in many states, you’ll be able to claim self-defense if you use the firearms to kill protestors.

The Atlantic has a big cover story out today by Barton Gellman titled “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.”  It’s worth getting a subscription to the magazine to read in its entirety.  Gellman goes into incredible detail as he explores the plans Trump and Republicans have for 2024 to steal the election if they don’t get enough votes to win.  Most of what they are doing has been at the state level, taking over election boards, pushing Trumpian candidates to run for Secretary of State offices that run elections, and planning for a post-election reversal of the outcome of the 2024 election if it goes to the Supreme Court.

But by far the most remarkable part of the Atlantic article is Gellman’s description of the Republican turn to violence as a political weapon.  January 6 was a rehearsal for what’s coming, Gellman believes.  He quotes Kathleen Belew, author of “A Field Guide to White Supremacy” and a historian from the University of Chicago: “January 6 wasn’t designed as a mass-casualty attack, but rather as a recruitment action.”

Gellman reports that a group called the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, or CPOST, has researched January 6 insurrectionists looking for similarities in age, background, income, employment and other factors. “Only one meaningful correlation emerged,” Gellman reported.  “Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.”

The CPOST group ran a poll in March of this year based on themes picked up in the social media posts of insurgents and statements they made to the FBI under questioning.  The poll looked for people who said they “don’t trust the election results,” and found that 4 percent of respondents were willing to join a protest “even if…the protest might turn violent.  That corresponds to 10 million Americans. 

Several months later, CPOST ran another poll looking for people who agreed with the statements, “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.”  Rather than asking if respondents would join a protest that “might” turn violent, they asked if respondents believed “the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.”  

“In the June results, just over 8 percent agreed that Biden was illegitimate and that violence was justified to restore Trump to the White House,” CPOST found. “That corresponds to 21 million American adults.”  Gellman reports that “An unrelated Public Religion Research Institute survey on November 1 found that an even larger proportion of Americans, 12 percent, believed both that the election had been stolen from Trump and that ‘true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.’”  That number corresponds to more than 25 million Americans.

CPOST referred to the larger number in their poll as “committed insurrectionist,” and found that they were “genuinely dangerous” and “…more than one in four said the country needed groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. One-third of them owned guns, and 15 percent had served in the military. All had easy access to the organizing power of the internet.”

This is the difference between “then” and “now”:  Violent insurrection was not even contemplated in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, but it happened on January 6 of this year.  A significant part of the Republican Party has accepted violence as a legitimate form of political action.  Republican members of congress and other Republican political leaders regularly refer to those arrested for assaulting the Capitol as “political prisoners.”  There is little doubt that if Trump were to achieve the presidency in 2024, he would pardon all of those arrested for the insurrection on January 6. 

Republican-led legislatures and Republican governors around the country are engaged as we speak in re-defining protests as riots and justifying killing protestors as self-defense.  This is fascism, pure and simple.  There are people in this country right now who are planning for violent insurrection.  Hitler ordered the last Night of the Long Knives, killing his political opponents in a purge to put himself in power.  Donald Trump is preparing to order the next one.