Ch 3.1 | ☠️Our culture of violence

Jun 30, 2023

As I attempt to discuss some of the challenges that we face, I will forewarn you that I am providing my opinion on many of these issues. That by definition, implies bias. In the final analysis, I do believe that the way you view an issue and the conclusions you draw are all about perspective. That said, I’ve done my level best to ensure that my information comes from a variety of sources across the political spectrum.

Before addressing such an important topic, I want to share a message of peace and optimism. Shimon Peres’ final work, "No Room for Small Dreams: Courage, Imagination, and the Making of Modern Israel," is a fantastic book. He finished writing it only weeks before his passing in 2016. May his memory be a blessing. I highly recommend reading it. Here is a passage from the final chapter.

Countries can no longer afford to divide the world into friend and foe. Our foes are now universal poverty and famine, radicalization and terror, these know no borders and threaten all nations and so we must act swiftly to build the bonds of peace to tear down walls built with bitterness and animosity so that we can together confront the challenges and seize the opportunities of a new era. Optimism and naivete are not one and the same. That I am optimistic does not mean I expect a peace of love. I expect simply a peace of necessity. I do not envision a perfect peace, but I believe we can find a peace that allows us to live side-by-side without the threat of violence.

Amen!

Gun control

When I was a kid, I learned archery and marksmanship. My father always kept a handgun at home for personal protection. At the age of 12, I learned to shoot .22 caliber rifles and by the time I was 14 had attained the level of 9th bar marksman. I still own guns today and I love going to the range and shooting with my son. I have a concealed weapons permit and used to carry a firearm on my person. I have attended retreats where I have trained in all forms of assault rifles and handguns, including training at a Blackwater facility where I did room clearing drills. While I don’t hunt, largely because I’m uncomfortable with the blood and guts of it, I’m not opposed to the concept of hunting and I know there are benefits to controlling populations of certain animals. For many years (no longer), I was a member of the NRA because I believed in my Second Amendment right to bear arms. As the number of mass shootings in our country began to rise, my point of view changed.

To me, common sense dictates that the proliferation of assault rifles, combined with the deleterious effects that social media are having on the psyche of our nation, should cause all of us to reconsider our right to bear arms, as defined by the Supreme Court.

The Second Amendment

The Second Amendment states:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

For much of U.S. history, the Supreme Court allowed restrictions to gun ownership. In fact, former Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative, had this to say in 1991:

The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies — the militia — would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.

Here’s the interview:

But since then, the court has taken steps to severely limit the government’s ability to set any controls on gun ownership, in decisions like District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago.

As the nation reacted to the horrific school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022, The Atlantic explained, rightly, we don’t have gun control laws because “The basic rules of American democracy provide a veto over national policy to a minority of the states”:

Polls are clear that while Americans don’t believe gun control would solve all of the problems associated with gun violence, a commanding majority supports the central priorities of gun-control advocates, including universal background checks and an assault-weapons ban. Yet despite this overwhelming consensus, it’s highly unlikely that the massacre of at least 19 schoolchildren and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, yesterday, or President Joe Biden’s emotional plea for action last night, will result in legislative action.
That’s because gun control is one of many issues in which majority opinion in the nation runs into the brick wall of a Senate rule—the filibuster—that provides a veto over national policy to a minority of the states, most of them small, largely rural, preponderantly white, and dominated by Republicans.

The data backs them up:

And yet, the current Supreme Court determined that U.S. citizens have the constitutional right to carry a concealed weapon in NYS Rifle & Pistol Association v NYS Police.

It’s so ironic. Republicans are using a handful of crimes by undocumented immigrants as a reason why we need a wall and stricter immigration rules (something worth discussing further), but they refuse to accept the mass shooting epidemic in America as a reason we need gun control.

One is an actual problem, the other is manufactured.

Please note, I am not denying that we have a problem at the border. I am a strong advocate for resolving the illegal immigration problem in America. I believe in the rule of law. I’m simply saying not everyone entering the U.S. illegally are “bad people” or murderers and rapists as some in the GOP would have us believe. See more in the seciton on immigration.

Do you believe that assault weapons should be legal?

Do you know that, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, the leading cause of death in children in the U.S. is gun violence?

Here’s a bit of levity on this very disturbing topic. Jim Jeffries does a good job of framing the issue and it’s entertaining to watch. It’s a great perspective — and it's funny as shit.

Regardless of your view of Jon Stewart’s politics, please watch this excerpt from an interview with Oklahoma state Sen. Nathan Dahm ®, who has penned several bills loosening gun restrictions, including the nation's first anti-red-flag law that blocks gun restrictions for those deemed dangerous:

This is what’s wrong with the GOP’s platform around gun control. How can we allow this trend to continue without taking action?!

Political/racial/cultural/religious violence is on the rise

“We want total war!”

That’s what Young Republican President Gavin Wax told an Upper East Side gala in December 2022: “We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets."

This is from the Jan. 3, 2023, edition of Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter. Letters from an American:

[T]he dramatic rise of violence in our politics since former president Trump entered political life is reshaping the country. In Vox yesterday, Zach Beauchamp noted that mayors, federal judges, public health officials, election workers, and even school board members, officials who previously had gone about their business without much attention, are facing unprecedented threats. Before 2020, threats against election workers were virtually nonexistent, Beauchamp notes; now they are so frequent that 11% of election workers surveyed by the Brennan Center for Justice are “very or somewhat likely” to leave their jobs before the 2024 election.
While attacks on election workers and political officials show Trump’s attempt to erode faith in our electoral system, Beauchamp notes that another key aspect of today’s violence has been to threaten Republicans to fall in line behind Trump. The fear of physical violence from Trump supporters kept certain Republicans from voting to convict him after his impeachments. MAGA Republican threats against other Republicans insufficiently supportive of Trump have led party members to swing publicly behind a leader that many of them privately oppose.
That pressure has reduced the formerly grand old Republican Party to a vehicle for promoting Trump.

According to The Washington Post, there is an enormous library of polling showing more sympathy for the use of violence as a political response by the right. Here, for example, is polling from PRRI making that point.

Hard to believe how far right the GOP is drifting. A poll released in November 2022 concluded that “30 Percent of Republicans Say True Americans May Have to Resort to Violence to Save U.S.”

When eight of 10 Americans are concerned about political violence, it is important we call out Republicans (or anyone) who accept the need for violence. It’s one of the biggest threats that we face in our country.

And that warning is not coming from me — it’s coming from law enforcement officials. Just look at a short list of what has happened in recent years:

Five people were murdered at Club Q, a gay bar in Colorado Springs.
The massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, which
Inspired the Poway shooter, who also tried to burn down a mosque
The El Paso massacre.
The Buffalo massacre.
The Highland Park massacre.
The attack on Paul Pelosi.
Far right goon squads menacing a drag show in Ohio.

The list goes on and on. It’s terrifying.

Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly hard to differentiate between protests and attacks because they're all harassment campaigns at heart. We have Elon Musk on X claiming that free speech is under attack because they took Hunter Biden’s dick picks off the internet, yet there's actual violence and actual threats of violence curtailing actual speech every day that is changing the way people live. There’s been a noticeable increase just in recent years among right wing extremists. They have taken part in at least 55 actions targeting the gay community and increase of 340% from just the year before in 2021. The Department of Homeland security just issued a terrorism advisory bulletin in November 2022 that warned about violent extremist targeting LGBTQ, Jewish and migrant communities.

It's happening across the spectrum. At a higher level, it's Republicans just saying that anyone who doesn't think like them, or look like them, is not worthy of feeling safe in this country. I believe this is all a byproduct of several factors, including some of the economic issues I have discussed elsewhere. But it’s also a failure of leadership! I say that because we know that when leaders condemn hate speech, they make it more difficult for their supporters to embrace it and less likely to incite them. Just as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and others supposedly joking around are more likely to incite this kind of violence, you can prevent it when people in positions of authority, people whom many in this country look up to and take cues from, say enough is enough.

And, in terms of antisemitism, I always hear from people, “It can happen here.” That’s just not true! How do I know? Because it already does! Everyone says Trump can’t be an antisemite because his daughter married a Jew, yet hate crimes against Jewish people increased at historic rates during his presidency. Obviously, I don’t know what’s in Trump’s heart but his pandering to the alt right and the KKK have emboldened them to think such abhorrent behavior is OK. Look at the rise during his tenure.

Need a bit more evidence of the insidiousness of the “conservative” movement in the United States?

Did you know Republican leaders invited Victor Orban to speak at the CPAC conference in Dallas and, in so doing, endorsed/embraced the views of a racist autocrat?

Antisemites are so emboldened by Trump and the GOP that they have gone public about their use of technology to incite violence against the Jewish population. If you’re not familiar with the Boston Mapping project you will be shocked.

FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in a hearing on threats to the homeland:

From our perspective, we see the Jewish community getting it from all sides. Not only have they long been a target of foreign terrorist organizations…but then, in addition to that, they’re of course the target of domestic violent extremists.

Matt Malone, a Roman Catholic priest and editor in chief of the Jesuit magazine America, and John Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri and an Episcopal priest, published an article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch titled: “America's clergy must denounce Donald Trump and antisemitism.” It came in response to Trump’s dinner at Mar-a-Lago with the infamous antisemites Kanye West and Nick Fuentes.

Faithful people hold a wide variety of opinions on parties, platforms and candidates, and we honor our differences. But when politics marches beyond the range of what is debatable, when it presents itself in direct opposition to what faith teaches us to be, then it is our obligation to stand for what we believe. This is what we failed to do in Germany 90 years ago. It’s what we must do in America today.

This is precisely what we need to hear from the leadership of the GOP.

But it's not just the hard right that endangers us — it's also the progressive left.

The response from progressives in America to the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, only highlights how deep this insidious hatred runs. We've allowed this to fester for too long.

In an interview with the Stanford Classical Liberalism Initiative (it's a fascinating interview on many levels), Alan Dershowitz said something that is interesting and worth considering when discussing the "woke" progressive movement and the associated "anti-colonialist" framing of Israel. He said:

One of the causes that woke has is that they are totally against meritocracy.

Why does he say that? He continues.

Who have been one of the biggest beneficiaries of meritocracy of the world? …. The Jews. Jews were without privilege, without any opportunities. They made it in America on the basis of meritocracy. Israel became a scientific superpower and a military superpower. So Jews in Israel stand for meritocracy. Stand for the ability to rise up. And that's exactly what the woke people don't like. So Jews fit that paradigm in so many different ways, colonialist, meritocracy, rejection of identity politics. After all Israel is one of the most diverse countries in the world, it has a significant Black population, a very significant Brown population The majority of Israelis are not European by background, they're from North African and Arab countries by background. So meritocracy, that's the bane of the woke progressive movement

I want to make the point once again that it's not the right or the left, it's both. It's the vocal minority on the extremes in both parties that are currently controlling the narrative. But know this: This insidiousness doesn’t happen overnight. It’s like the old metaphor of the frog in the boiling water.

To give some context, here is a chronological overview of the history of the Jewish community of Berlin through the end of World War II.

Jan. 30, 1933: Seizure of power by the National Socialists. At the time, 160,000 Jews live in Berlin, accounting for one third of Germany’s total.
April 1, 1933: First boycott call against shops owned by German citizens of the Jewish faith or heritage.
Oct. 27-28, 1938: “Operation Poland” results in arrest and expulsion of 15,000 Jews from Eastern Europe.
Nov. 9-10, 1938: State-organized pogrom against Germany’s Jewish population. In the so-called “Kristallnacht” (night of broken glass), almost all of Germany’s synagogues are either burned or ransacked, shops are plundered, their windows are smashed, and many Jewish citizens are arrested, beaten and murdered.
Sept. 1, 1939: World War II begins; 236,000 Jews have fled Germany.
Oct. 18, 1941: First deportation of 1,000 people from Berlin to Lodz.
Jan. 20, 1942: Wannsee Conference convenes on the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Deportations to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt begin.
1945: Liberation of Berlin by the Red Army. Of Berlin’s one-time population of 160,000 Jews, 55,000 were murdered, 7,000 committed suicide, 90,000 emigrated, 8,000 were liberated.

Again, don’t lull yourself into a false sense of security. It can happen here!

Bottom line: It can be a vicious circle or a virtuous circle between the base of a party and the leaders of that party.

On the Republican side: Over the last 30-40 years, as the conversation has gotten more and more heated, as right-wing radio and right-wing extremism have found more and more quarters, it has gotten to the point where GOP leaders and officials seem to feel that they are no longer in charge. It seems they no longer have the power to denounce hate because Trump’s MAGA movement was not just politically potent, it was electorally successful — and it seems the leaders of the GOP became afraid to stand up to their base.

On the left, it's been brewing since the mid-1980s and has become a dominant strain of Democratic politics thanks to the prominence of woke progressivism.

We must be vigilant, we have to get into the little bit of daylight we are starting to see, and push to make that space bigger — not just because it's going to help us defeat extremism, but because that's how, over the coming years, we can begin to go in a better direction. There has to be a way out of this!

Never-ending wars

U.S. military involvement in various parts of the world, particularly the extended conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, represent another significant issue. There is yet another major war in Europe, one we are heavily financing. The United States has been involved in prolonged military engagements in the Middle East and elsewhere for several decades. These conflicts have resulted in significant loss of life and immense financial cost, and have often led to complex, unintended consequences.

The appropriate role of the U.S. in global conflicts, the balance between military and diplomatic strategies, and the process for making decisions about military engagement are all important issues that often do not receive the consistent attention they deserve. This is a significant issue that needs to be addressed. Balancing national security interests with the desire to avoid drawn-out conflicts and military entanglements is a complex problem with no easy solutions. The public debate and political will needed to address these issues can often be lacking.

The war in the Ukraine

I am not an expert in geopolitics, so I do not have the credentials to debate whether we should be defending Ukraine against Russian aggression. My instincts tell me that we are doing the right thing to keep Russian aggression in check, but the intent of this paper is to discuss how our politics shape our policy.

Once upon a time, the political roles were truly reversed.

Democrats were, if anything, skeptical of foreign intervention. Many, especially in the liberal and progressive wings of the party, saw war as inhumane, policing the world as folly and the Pentagon as bloated. Humbled by failure in Vietnam, the party that gave us Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern and Jimmy Carter pursued cooperation rather than conflict as the order of the day.

Republicans, on the other hand, were more unabashedly hawkish — willing to flex U.S. military muscle and project power in support of an American-led world order. For the most part, they believed that if you gave the Soviets, the Chinese or Islamic states so much as an inch in Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East or elsewhere, dominoes would begin to tumble. Peace through strength was the mantra.

But now, Republicans are increasingly divided over American support for Ukraine: The party's traditional hawkish voices face a loud array of anti-war voices from the MAGA wing of the party led by former President Trump.

In an interview with Fox News in February 2023, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis echoed isolationist rhetoric and cast Biden as spending more time on foreign affairs than domestic challenges. "He's very concerned about those borders halfway around the world. He's not done anything at home to secure our own border here at home," DeSantis said.

"The fear of Russia going into NATO countries and all that, and steamrolling, that has not even come close to happening," DeSantis added. "I think they've shown themselves to be a third-rate military power."
Trump, who has led the anti-war charge within the GOP, wrote on Truth Social: "If you watch and understand the moves being made by Biden on Ukraine, he is systematically, but perhaps unknowingly, pushing us into what could soon be WORLD WAR III."
Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.), a leader of the Senate GOP's isolationist wing, declared that "our foreign policy isn't working" and called for "a truly nationalist foreign policy" that would cut off aid to Ukraine in favor of focusing squarely on the threat from China.

But be careful not to be spun here. For example, on March 12, 2023, Fox News published the results of a questionnaire it presented to every leading Republican presidential candidate about their position on Ukraine. Specifically, Fox asked, "Is opposing Russia in Ukraine a vital American national strategic interest?"

DeSantis drew the strongest reaction and the most headlines. Here is his response:

While the U.S. has many vital national interests – securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party – becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.
The Biden administration’s virtual “blank check” funding of this conflict for “as long as it takes,” without any defined objectives or accountability, distracts from our country’s most pressing challenges. Without question, peace should be the objective. The U.S. should not provide assistance that could require the deployment of American troops or enable Ukraine to engage in offensive operations beyond its borders. F-16s and long-range missiles should therefore be off the table. These moves would risk explicitly drawing the United States into the conflict and drawing us closer to a hot war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. That risk is unacceptable.
A policy of “regime change” in Russia (no doubt popular among the DC foreign policy interventionists) would greatly increase the stakes of the conflict, making the use of nuclear weapons more likely.
Such a policy would neither stop the death and destruction of the war, nor produce a pro-American, Madisonian constitutionalist in the Kremlin. History indicates that Putin’s successor, in this hypothetical, would likely be even more ruthless. The costs to achieve such a dubious outcome could become astronomical. The Biden administration’s policies have driven Russia into a de facto alliance with China.
Because China has not and will not abide by the embargo, Russia has increased its foreign revenues while China benefits from cheaper fuel. Coupled with his intentional depletion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and support for the Left’s Green New Deal, Biden has further empowered Russia’s energy-dominated economy and Putin’s war machine at Americans’ expense.
Our citizens are also entitled to know how the billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are being utilized in Ukraine. We cannot prioritize intervention in an escalating foreign war over the defense of our own homeland, especially as tens of thousands of Americans are dying every year from narcotics smuggled across our open border and our weapons arsenals critical for our own security are rapidly being depleted.

I would suggest that you read this report by Isaac Saul, the publisher of Tangle. In a vacuum, DeSantis’ statement seems smart and might resonate with you. But, whether you agree with DeSantis or not, it’s important to note that his top points — like opposing sending weapons, F-16s or U.S. soldiers to Ukraine, opposing "blank checks," and opposing "regime change" — are all identical to Biden's positions, so DeSantis is disingenuously framing his position as different.

Given that we live in a partisan media bubble, and since the end of the Fairness Doctrine, you might say that you agree with him and ignore the fact that the man is a master manipulator.

Again, I’m not saying all successful politicians are pathological manipulators … but many are! His version of authoritarianism threatens to continue the MAGA movement’s dominance of the Republican Party after Trump leaves the stage.

We must unrig the system!