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Aleksandr Malchik's avatar

Very important work. Great.

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CharleyCarp's avatar

I agree with all of this.

I'd add that it's a sign of weakness, not strength, of the White Nationalist movement that its coalition includes believers in secret Jewish space lasers and the "Q Shaman." The coalition as currently formed can certainly lead to the deaths of handfuls of people, and lots of performance art. A take-over of the government requires something else entirely.

I probably said this last time, but it was the Q Shaman who saved democracy. Trump had set the thing in motion and was watching it play out, waiting to see if he could safely use the insurrection. Certainly that was the insurgents' plan: they were just a side show, and Trump himself was supposed to reveal the evidence/arrest the traitors/ declare martial law. That's why they didn't know what to do when he didn't do his part: because there wasn't anything to do.

The appearance of the Q Shaman, and others, dispelled Trump's fascination with, and interest in leading the thing. If the only people on TV were athletic men in full tactical gear, he'd have felt differently about it, and who knows what he might have gotten various federal agents to do.

It probably still wouldn't have worked, because the election wasn't close enough.

In the longer haul, we really have to do the same kind of thing we do with Al Qaeda and its wannabees. Infiltrate and arrest. But keep in view a sense of proportionality. Weaver and Koresh may have been nuts, and there may have been legitimate law enforcement objectives in arresting them, but deaths of innocents at the hands of the state doesn't (and shouldn't) end well. [Obviously there is a racial dimension to this, but the proper corrective isn't that deaths of innocent white people should be shrugged off, but that the deaths of innocent people of color should not be shrugged off.]

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