by Justin Rosario
This past weekend, The Proud Boys headed to Portland. The fascist group of white nationalist put out the call to their members all over the country to head to what is essentially Ground Zero for American civil unrest for yet another attempt to get their long-dreamed race war going.
It did not go well.
There were, in a positive sign of democracy, more people on line in Fairfax County, VA. for the first day of early voting (Hint: they weren’t there to vote for Trump). One gets the feeling the enthusiasm for conflict wasn’t quite there.
Not So Much Fun When They Shoot Back
The right was super jazzed up about Kyle Rittenhouse murdering two people in Wisconsin so you’d think their Brownshirt marches would be growing. After weeks of escalation, in which various white nationalist terrorist groups began showing up with weapons (both lethal and otherwise) to confront protesters, Rittenhouse finally fulfilled the fantasy of every fascist and pulled the trigger.
Trump humpers were ecstatic and crowed in delight that a mighty blow had been struck against the evil forces of Antifa or BLM or George Soros or pedophiles or whatever bad guy their conspiracy theory-addled brain conjured. Sure, Rittenhouse was arrested the next day but that night? The police might as well put a badge on him. The fascists knew they had an ally in law enforcement.
But then, just a few days later, one of their own was shot and killed in Portland. And the next day, someone allegedly opened fire on a Trump caravan antagonizing people in Los Angeles. No one was hurt and the car whose tires were blown out allegedly wasn’t part of the caravan but bullets only randomly fly around LA in the movies.
The message was loud and clear: “You have guns? So do we.”
It’s important to take note that for all their tattoos and body armor and guns and posturing, white nationalist terrorists are, at their core, utter cowards. Motivated by a deep and inescapable fear, they engage in cosplay as fearsome warriors and rove in mobs looking for small groups to attack. But it’s one thing to shoot unarmed protesters, it’s another to know you can get shot in return. Just because you dress like you’re in the military doesn’t mean you have the training or you’ve seen actual combat.
Even though most of the terrorists masquerading as “patriots” are cowards doesn’t mean they can’t be motivated to violence on a massive scale.
Their Master’s Voice
It’s no secret that Trump expects to steal the election. Specifically, it’s no secret because Trump keeps telling us that’s what he plans to do. A large part of this plan hinges on the courts but a not so small part will rely on his army of red hats attacking, quite literally, the election. This is not a new tactic for Republicans.
In November of 2000, while Florida was struggling with a messy recount, the Republican Party did not have a mob of useful idiots to do their dirty work. Instead, they flew dozens of Republican operatives to the Miami-Dade polling headquarters and had them launch a physical assault on the officials rechecking the ballots. The “Brooks Brothers Riot” stopped the recount long enough for the Republican-controlled Supreme Court to hand George W. Bush his presidency.
But that was a single recount in a single location; a bottleneck that will not be reproduced again. The 2020 election will require a much larger effort spread across several states and that’s where groups like the Proud Boys come in.
Republicans have been feeding their base a steady diet of lies about mail-in voting for months. We know for a fact Republicans know they’re lying because according to the Washington Post, they’ve been telling their voters that absentee voting is safe but mail-in voting is totally corrupt:
“President Trump needs you to join him in voting absentee this year,” says Guilfoyle, adding that “absentee voting is safe, secure and supported by President Trump.” But, she adds, vote-by-mail is “filled with fraud, abuse and mistakes.”
Similarly, on her robocall, Lara Trump claims that vote-by-mail is rife with fraud, but also stresses that Trump supports absentee voting, because it is “safe and secure.”
There is, of course, no difference between “mail-in voting” and “absentee voting.” That’s like the difference between soda, pop, and coke. But for the MAGA Moron Mob, it’s very real and nothing in the universe can dissuade them.
That means millions of functionally insane people are 100% convinced, to the core of their being, that Democrats are somehow going to rig the election with mail-in voting. And voting in general.
The obvious solution is Brooks Brothers Riots, but this time in camo with guns, in dozens or hundreds of locations around the country on election day to keep people from voting and to destroy as many mail-in ballots as possible before they’re counted. In a state where Biden and Trump are neck and neck, burning down a polling headquarter in a Democratic stronghold and destroying forty or fifty thousand (or more) uncounted ballots might just be enough to tip the vote to Trump. Remember, most states do not start counting mail-in ballots until after election day.
Now who do you suppose will be egging them on to such actions and providing them with the precise locations to go to? Your average MAGA Moron doesn’t know where ballots are counted but you can bet the Trump campaign does. All it will take is an email or tweet:
“DEMOCRATS RIGGING ELECTION AT MILWAUKEE POLLING HEADQUARTERS RIGHT NOW!!! WE CAN’T LET THEM STEAL ELECTION WITH FAKE BALLOTS!!! VERY BAD!! PATRIOTS NEEDED NOW TO STOP THEM!!!”
An hour later, the building will have armed terrorists at the front door, ready to murder everyone inside and set the place ablaze.
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Worse, it’s not clear the police will do anything to stop them. Over the past few months, American law enforcement has made it painfully clear that they have chosen a side in this conflict and it’s not the side of law and order. They allow armed terrorists to roam the streets while attacking unarmed protesters. They shoot and kill black men for minor crimes (or no crime at all) while allowing white murderers to walk away unmolested. They’ve started wearing “thin blue line” masks and spew their hatred of the public at every opportunity.
Given a choice between allowing white nationalist terrorists to tip the election in Trump’s favor and facing a Biden administration that will place them under scrutiny again, how can we trust the police to protect and serve? They barely obey the law now.
And If That’s Not Enough?
Trump is losing so badly that even with all of the voter suppression, election rigging, and outright violence Trump and the GOP have planned, it might not be enough. But as we learned last week, under no circumstances will Trump peacefully leave office and on Sunday, we found out part of the reason why.
Trump is somewhere between half a billion and slightly over one billion dollars in debt and bleeding money. A lot of this debt will be due in 2022 and Trump will have no way to pay it, meaning it is highly likely he will be ruined. Worse, his taxes show a pattern of fraud that could well land him jail should the IRS investigate it without the benefit of a friendly Attorney General running interference.
The world’s greatest businessman is profiting from being president but he’s also safe as long as he can hide behind the Resolute Desk. Once he’s back in Mar-a-Lago, he’ll have to hope he can fundraise the money to pay his lawyers. Or catch a plane to Moscow in the middle of the night.
To avoid this, Trump will set the country on fire. If the election results are too overwhelming to change with a few well-placed “riots”, Trump will, without a doubt, declare the entire election fraudulent and order both his new secret police and his eager Brownshirts into the streets to “take back” America.
I’m not entirely sure what this attempted coup would look like but I imagine having tens of thousands of armed terrorists running rampant as a distraction while unmarked vehicles with unmarked federal agents try to arrest Democratic leadership for “treason” or “insurrection” might be a start. Don’t be super surprised if you find the major news networks shutdown and the internet interrupted as well. It’s hard to organize when no one knows what’s happening or where to go.
This is precisely the kind of thing the Proud Boys and their fellow terrorist organizations are praying for. The official go ahead to wage a bloody war on everyone they hate would embolden them, quite possibly enough to overcome their fear of being shot by a resisting public. Even better, there wouldn’t be an organized resistance because people wouldn’t know it was coming.
In Nazi Germany, they called this Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass”, in which 100 Jews were killed and over 30,000 arrested and sent to the concentration camps to die. The American version will see far less people arrested but thousands dead because the right is not really interested in locking us up. They’re eager to spill blood and get away with it. They’ve been a death cult for decades and the bloodlust is barely concealed.
If you don’t think it could happen here, you’re running out of time to wake the hell up.
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I do think it can happen here, but in 2024 if we're not paying attention now.
We'll waiting for the civil war. USA at it's worst. The whole world is laughing at you. Trump wih
See Trump's "know-how" ruining America - how he incites citizens against each other - and these fools don't even notice......