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Bill USA

(6,436 posts)
Thu Aug 11, 2016, 06:07 PM Aug 2016

Trump’s 2nd Amendment comment wasn’t a joke. It was "stochastic terrorism."

Last edited Thu Aug 11, 2016, 08:14 PM - Edit history (4)

... a very important article about how Trump is laying the groundwork for idiots to commit violent acts. Acts of terrorism grow out of a sense of victimization and self-pity which provides a rationalization for striking out at those who have treated the self pitying 'victim' so badly. Trump is a classic demagogue. He is just taking the anti-Government rhetoric that Raygun started and beating that drum more relentlessly. No one should be surprised if some loser 'elevates' himself from being a loser to a martyr fighting the evil one who has beaten him down and is the reason he's feels so inadequate.


http://www.vox.com/2016/8/10/12422476/trump-second-amendment-hillary-stochastic-terrorism-anti-abortion-violence

Many saw Donald Trump’s latest shocking comment, about how "Second Amendment people" might be able to do something to stop Hillary Clinton from picking the Supreme Court judges she wants, as beyond the pale. Whether or not it was a joke, the implication of his comment is pretty clear: that gun owners could use their weapons to stop either Clinton herself or liberal judges from implementing gun control.

The explicit-sounding call to violence is bad enough. But even worse is that, intentionally or not, Trump has been laying the groundwork for this idea for a while. From his talk of "rigged elections" to his suggestion that we need Russia to hack Clinton’s emails if the Justice Department won’t indict her, Trump’s message is clear: Clinton is so corrupt, and the system that favors her is so broken, that our ordinary democratic and legal processes aren’t equipped to handle it. She should be thrown in jail, but she probably won’t be.

It’s a pretty short step from that idea to violent fantasies of going outside the law for real justice — even from official sources like the Republican Party of Riverside County, California, which recently tweeted a picture of a hangman captioned "Ready For Hillary."

And there’s an unsettling parallel for this kind of rhetoric and what it can lead to, as law professor David S. Cohen pointed out Wednesday in a Rolling Stone op-ed: anti-abortion terrorism.
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