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is no the same as advocacy. My sentiments align with James Howard
Kunstler on this subject entirely:
“I’m
in the peculiar position of not being a partisan of President Trump,
and yet being a publicly avowed enemy — if there’s any doubt —
of the Resistance, especially these days its institutional branch
known as the Democratic Party. What a ragtag and bobtail of
mendacious cowards it has become.”
New
American Civil War? Some people think it’s already begun
RT,
26
June, 2018
From
celebrities calling on citizens to take to the streets, to members of
Congress calling for the public harassment of White House officials,
to mob justice at restaurants — is the US heading toward a new kind
of Civil War?
Well,
some people think the seeds of a new Civil War have already been sown
— and in a recent article, University of Tennessee Law Professor
Glenn Harlan Reynolds argued in a USA Today column that this new war
is indeed “well
underway.”
Reynolds
was echoing similar comments from political scientist Thomas Schaller
who wrote in a recent Bloomberg column that America is “at
the beginning of a soft civil war,” and
author Tom Ricks who agreed that the country seems to be“lurching” in
that direction.
Much
of the recent disquiet has been spurred on by the Trump
administration’s “zero
tolerance” immigration
policies and the decision to separate children from their parents at
the US-Mexico border, but things have been bubbling up since Trump
took office 18 months ago.
1. ‘God is on our side!’
©
Mike Segar / Reuters
Representative
Maxine Waters (D-California) caused a huge stir last week when she
encouraged critics of the White House’s immigration policies to go
out and harass members of the Trump administration in public. Waters
made an impassioned call for citizens to ensure there would be “no
sleep, no peace” for
White House officials.
"If
you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department
store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. You
push back on them. Tell them they’re not welcome anymore,
anywhere," she
said.
But
her comments were so extreme and incendiary that it prompted a former
secret service agent to call them “dangerous”and
warned they “go
beyond breaking the norms” of
civil discourse and criticized her for “endorsing
mob-rule to satisfy a political goal.”
Not
long after Waters’ comments, White House Press Secretary Sarah
Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant in Virginia because she works
for the Trump administration.
2. ‘Surround their homes and schools in protest!’
Celebrities
are getting in on the action, too, encouraging Americans to take to
the streets in the millions to protest the Trump administration.
Last
week, comments by actor Peter Fonda put the secret service on
alert when
he suggested that Trump’s 12-year-old son Barron should be taken
from his mother Melania and put “in
a cage with pedophiles” and
that citizens should “surround
the schools” of
administration officials’ children in response to the
child-separation policy.
Somewhat
less dramatically, other Hollywood figures have called for protests
and change. Actor John Cusack accused the Trump administration
of “fascism” and “torturing” children
— while musician Serj Tankian wrote on Instagram that the US is in
a state of “utter
regression” and
that it is time for a “peaceful
revolution.”
3. Confederate monuments controversy
©
Bryan Woolston / Reuters
The
fierce debate over the removal of confederate monuments and symbols
across the US epitomizes the current political and social divide and
the competing interpretations of American history, with one side
believing the monuments revere figures who fought to maintain slavery
while the other side believes they honor great patriots.
When
white supremacist Dylann Roof killed
nine black
Americans attending a prayer service in Virginia in 2015, it prompted
a movement to have Confederate monuments removed from public spaces
across the country. More than 100 publicly-supported monuments and
symbols have been removed since 2015 — but not without controversy
and counter-protests. While monuments are being removed across the
US, other groups are pushing for new ones to be erected.
Last
year a ‘Unite the Right’ rally called in protest at the planned
removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia
turned violent when a protester drove a car through a crowd of
counter-protesters, killing activist
Heather Heyer.
4. Media wars, polarization of opinion
All
of this social discord is playing out, magnified, on Americans’ TV
screens in a way that appears to be exacerbating the problem. Eager
to up their ratings, news networks invite the most polarizing of
guests for daily screaming matches to be beamed into people’s
homes. Far from the days of simply favoring one news channel over
another, now if Americans don’t like how something is reported, it
instantly becomes “fake
news” or “propaganda.”
In
his article, Reynolds wrote that news media which “promote
shrieking outrage in pursuit of ratings and page views, are making
the problem worse” and
reminisced about a time when Americans could disagree with each other
without hating each other.
5. Stratification of society
©
Orlando Ramirez - USA TODAY Sports / Reuters
While
all this is being played out on TV screens and social media, those at
the fringes of society are feeling the effects of a sick system
perhaps more than anyone. The socio-economic stratification of
American society appears more obvious than it has at any time in
recent years.
Inequality
and rampant police violence against African-Americans prompted the
NFL kneeling protests, which turned into a nationwide controversy
between Americans who are proud of their flag and national anthem and
all they stand for — and those who believe true freedom and justice
have not yet come to America.
A devastating opioid
crisis,
one of the highest child poverty rates in the world, and a strict
adherence to policies which make the poor poorer and the rich richer,
have all helped take anger in America from a simmer to a boil.
Reynolds
wrote that part of the problem now is that Americans don’t feel
social ties which transcend politics. It’s all us vs. them — and
nothing in between. He argues that churches, fraternal organizations
and neighborhoods used to cross political lines, but that this
America has “shrunk
and decayed” and
people are increasingly finding their identity only in politics.
Marriage
counselors, Reynolds explains, say that a relationship is doomed to
fail when the couple begin to view each other with contempt — and
in America today, there seems to be nothing but feelings of contempt
felt on both sides of the political spectrum.
This is what is coming out from the conservative Right
BREAKING! A MAJOR EVENT TO OCCUR TO START WAR IN AMERICA
But it is not all on one side
Milo
Yiannopoulos has started issuing reporters threatening messages when
asked to comment for stories.
“I
can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists
down on sight,” the right-wing nationalist told Observer over text
message, in response to a longer feature in development about an
Upper East Side restaurant he is said to frequent.
When
asked to elaborate on who specifically had upset him, Yiannopoulos
explained that the statement was his “standard response to a
request for comment.”
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