Saturday, October 29, 2022

13 million Americans believe violence is justified to make Trump President

Something I heard on television last night sounded very improbable, so I went to the source, and guess what, it turns out to be true.

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a well-regarded think tank based at the University of Chicago, estimates, based on their demographic-matched surveys, that some 13 million Americans (about 5% of the adult population) agree that "the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the Presidency". And that is NOW, and it is a lot less than the 26 million Americans (about 10%) would have agreed with that eye-popping statement a year ago.

Note that this is not just people who believe that Donald Trump was cheated out of the Presidency in 2020, but people who believe that January 6th-style violence is justified in order to rectify it. Now. Nearly two years after the election. You can see why I found it improbable. What a country!

UPDATE

And, if you are still not convinced that political violence from the far right is a real prospect, look no further than yesterday's attack by a hammer-wielding neanderthal on Nancy Pelosi (or at least, in her absence, on her 82-year old husband).

And, unfortunately, violence, or at least the threat thereof, is not all on the alt-right side. Some Republican politicians and candidates have also received threat of violence and death (unless these were spoof "false flag" events, which wouldn't entirely surprise me), so it is hard for the Democrats to claim sole occupancy of the moral high ground.

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