Four years ago this week MAGAmerica was feeling a lot of heat coming from the left. Though the economy was doing pretty well because of the ongoing recovery Trump had inherited from Obama, the Mueller Investigation still loomed over the White House, as did the public backlash from their quasi-genocidal abuses of migrants on the southern border. Democrats were crushing it in generic congressional ballot polls and turnout was on its way to hitting then-historic levels for a midterm election, while Russian trolls and right wing media were working around the clock to hype up the “caravans” of migrants headed through Northern Mexico toward the border and those lame #JobsNotMobs and #WalkAway hashtags in a desperate bid to avert electoral catastrophe. Trump, in his panic over realizing that a Dem House meant impeachment (he was right), had even said he wanted to end birthright citizenship, as if he could just abrogate the 14th Amendment.
In the midst of this high tension came the MAGA Bomber. First one to George Soros. Then the next day to Hillary Clinton. Then Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Maxine Waters, CNN, so on and so forth as an incompetent right wing terrorist who couldn’t even build a working explosive sent at least 16 packaged bombs to the targets he meant to kill. Or just wanted to scare them. Who knows.
Of course the fanboys didn’t want the bomber to be one of theirs. Breitbart went so far as to bitch in an article titled “Twitter Lets #MAGABomber Conspiracy Theory Rise to Top of Trending Topics” as if the pre-Musk Twitter was supposed to stop people from concluding the obvious. Only two days after that article’s publication on October 24th, 2018, police and FBI agents arrested a 56 year old Florida MAGA hatter who lived in a van covered with Trump stickers (pictured above).
Just an hour after news first broke of the arrest, Trump tweeted “Republicans are doing so well in early voting, and at the polls, and now this ‘Bomb’ stuff happens and the momentum greatly slows – news not talking politics. Very unfortunate, what is going on,” complaining correctly that one of his fans trying to blow up his enemies was inconvenient for him and his party politically.
The next day was uglier. Anti-semitic Pennsylvania madman Robert Bowers, driven over the edge by the “caravan” bullshit on Fox News and believing it to be a sinister plot by Jews to replace white Christian Americans with brown people, posted on Gab that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” He then walked into Saturday services at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and opened fire on the congregation, killing 11 worshippers – several of them elderly Holocaust survivors – before being shot by cops and taken into custody.
That Bowers was not a Trump fan was met with a sigh of relief on the right. Easy enough for them to ignore that he only wasn’t a Trump fan because Trump wasn’t extreme enough for him and he was 100% still motivated by all the shit about Soros being behind the caravans that was being played around the clock in the right wing media. They were happy to wash the blood off their hands.
Now here we are four years later, the proverbial shoe on the other foot politically in the broadest strokes: A septuagenarian president with unified control of Congress and approval ratings mired in the 40s facing down the other party in the midterms threatening his agenda amid heated rhetoric. It’s not a mirror image in the polls as there’s no clear lead for Republicans like there was for Dems in 2018, but more likely than not at least one chamber is going to flip.
Sarcastically feigning naivety and asking why a liberal living in a van covered with Dark Brandon stickers hasn’t been caught sending bombs to Fox News headquarters, Mar-a-Lago, Senator Ted Cruz, and others or killed 11 worshippers at an Evangelical MAGAchurch might have worked in this paragraph. A lame, predictable rhetorical question, sure, but it still would’ve gotten some laughs.
Too bad there was actual violence this week with that QAnon-pilled MAGA freak smashing Paul Pelosi’s head in while he was looking for Nancy – just the latest disgraceful episode in a long campaign of savagery with no end in sight. A lot of observers linked the Trump fanboy’s crazed “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?” to similar chants from his brethren during the Capitol riot.
They weren’t wrong at all to do so, but it’s much more an echo of the week that was in late October four years ago than of the January 6th insurrection in DC. The Capitol riot was a sui generis event and about as organized of a call from the top of MAGA World down and response from its dregs as you’re going to get. Much longer going are the individual acts of violence carried out by lone wolves in response to far less direct but just as malevolent and hateful shit voiced by the right.
The worst part might not be that the attack on Paul Pelosi happened but the lack of shock and surprise that we collectively felt when it did. The MAGA bomber generated breathless coverage as it was arguably the first sustained campaign of politically motivated domestic terrorism in decades coming amid an ultra high tension political environment. Now four years later, despite that things are undeniably light years better as far as our presidential leadership is concerned, we’re still stuck in this shitshow of a violent right wing that has somehow managed to get worse. All we can do is cover it and write “No shit” pieces like this, lamenting the predicament and hoping there’s going to be something that gets these assholes to become disengaged from politics and go back to the hole from which they came. Good luck to us with that.
kaveman • 4 years ago
️All these explosives and suspicious packages and yet not one of them exploded ?? LMAO
Vegas odds on demonrats doing this to themselves for last minute sympathy votes? 100%?
Wed, 10/24/2018 1:13 PM on ‘Scarborough links explosive devices, Khashoggi’s death to ‘unrelenting hatred’ churned up by Trump’