It would be foolish to dismiss the speaker as a lone crackpot. We need to reflect carefully upon his words. What he said out loud, others are thinking.
The man stood up during a question and answer session at a conservative rally in Idaho.
“When do we get to use the guns?” he asked earnestly. “How many elections are they gonna steal before we kill these people?”
Think about this carefully. Read the words again.
The speaker believes that the 2020 election was stolen. No evidence supports this conclusion, and all legal claims of election fraud were dismissed in court often by conservative judges, but this person believes that it’s true nonetheless.
The speaker also believes that “they” (the people who allegedly stole the election - which, again, was not stolen) are poised to steal more elections in the future.
Finally, the speaker believes that a reasonable solution to this imagined but unsubstantiated voting crisis is to “use the guns” and “kill these people.”
This is horrifying. An American citizen expressed in all sincerity that he would consider killing other citizens over an election dispute that is not based in fact or reality. The man assured the audience that he was “not joking.”
It’s not clear who the man wants to murder - election officials, politicians, his brother-in-law who voted for Joe Biden - but he is absolutely convinced that political violence up to and including assassination is justified and that the time to employ such violence is coming soon.
This is the United States of America, not Somali or Sri Lanka or El Salvador. Political violence of the most extreme, brutal, and senseless variety is on the verge of becoming a grim reality right here in the USA.
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