"The movement is marked not only by its obsessions with conspiracy theories, magic......

[marmar]

, sexual repression paranoia and death, but also by its infatuation with apocalyptic violence and military force. On its outer fringes are collections of odd messianic warriors, ready to fight and die for Christ. These include American Veterans in Domestic Defense, a Texas group that transported former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore's 2.6-ton 10 Commandment monument by truck around the country. Moore, who graduated from the U.S. military academy at West Point, lost his job as chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court after he defied a judge's order to remove his monument from the Montgomery judicial building. He and his monument became celebrities for those preaching that Christians were under siege, that there was an organized effort to persecute all who upheld God's law.
These carefully cultivated feelings of persecution foster a permanent state of crisis, a deep paranoia and fear, and they make it easier to call for violence - always, of course, as a form of self-defense. It turns all outside the movement into enemies: even those who appear benign, the believer is warned, seek to destroy Christians."

- an excerpt from American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges.

Seems particularly timely.

[AllentownJake]

1. What do you think all the dog whistles were about during the election?

You honestly believe the GOP wasn't aware of these nut jobs and what they are capable of?

[marmar]

2. "You honestly believe the GOP wasn't aware of these nut jobs...? "

Of course not.....or was that intended to be rhetorical?

[AllentownJake]

3. rhetorical

they have been out right calling for an assassination since they realized they would lose.

[Echo In Light]

4. Hedges' book - a must read - contains this quote from Karl Popper:

"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
-- Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies