A Focus on Violence and Fear of the Other

 #"Theunis Bates, Managing editor, "Elite's letters," found in TIME, February 1/February 8, 2021. - "Up to 750,000 died during the fratricidal Civil War, and nearly 4,000 African Americans were lynched by white mobs in the Jim Crow South from 1877 to 1950. Today, violence remains a fact of American life. The U.S. has the highest rate of mass shootings in the Western world, and a gun homicide rate 25 times higher than those of similarly developed countries."

#"In September 2020, Adam Dean, a professor of political science at George Washington University, co-authored a study in "Health Affairs," showing that unionized nursing homes were associated with a 30% lower mortality rate at the height of the first coronavirus surge, compared with nursing homes without unions."

#In the wake of the riot at the Capitol on January 6th, a Washington Post/ABC poll among those who consider themselves to be Republicans, 33% said the Party should stop following Trump and take a new direction, and 12% said he should be criminally charged for his actions.

#Nancy Gibbs, "America's moral vacuum," TIME, February 1/February 8, 2021. - "The battle cries of Jan. 6 rhymed with America's insurrection past: the white supremacy, the bloodlust of mobs, the defense of indefensible means to achieve unworthy ends." "Maybe Jan. 6 was more a failure of moral imagination of grasping what people are capable of. And the failure reflects the collapse of moral leadership that we have seen in the past year, not just in our politics, but in what should have been the shared purpose of fighting a pandemic that threatened us all."

#Madeleine Albright, "Our destructive cycle of us-vs.-them thinking," TIME, February 1/February 8, 2021. - "The impulse to choose sides is inherent in our species. Psychologists point to our desire to be safe by joining groups with which we have affinity, our fear of the unknown, and our vanity: we want to think of ourselves as better or smarter than the other. These traits are ingrained." "Many of us would prefer to live in a country where there is no place for the rest of us, i.e. 'them.' Confronted with this reality, many citizens are tempted either to retreat more deeply into their respective group identities or to insist piously that such categories are irrelevant and should not matter."

#Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted on February 4, 2021: "The DC swamp and the fake news media are attacking me because I am not one of you. And they hate me for it." Sen. Mitch McConnell said of Greene: "Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancers of the Republican Party and this country." Yet half of the Republican Caucus gave Greene a standing ovation when she appeared before it to try to save her committee assignments.

#Ken Klippenstein, "Security Blanket," The Nation, 2.8-15.2021. "But despite this sprawling network -- by the DHS's own count, there are currently 79 fusion centers in operation -- DC's Capitol police claimed to have received no warnings about the Capitol riot." "Far from the lofty justification given for their existence -- securing the hundred and so-on -- the titles of the reports they've produced suggest a focus on criminal activity (supposed or otherwise) so mundane, at times comical. Perhaps most surprising is the astonishing umber of incidents labeled 'suicide by cop' -- cases in which a suicidal person attempts to provoke a deadly response from law enforcement."

#Kali Holloway, "Time for Accountability," The Nation, 2.8-15.2021. - "And the portrayal of Trump supporters as a monolith of uneducated, small-town rubes duped into 'voting against their own interests,' as the saying goes, is a classist projection of those who imagine that racism afflicts only poor whites. We knew even before the 2016 presidential election that the median household income for Trump supporters outpaced that of the average American home. That violent manifestation of white backlash has been threatening to consume the rest of us for years."

"The actions of the rioters belied the law-and-order rhetoric trumpeted by Trump supporters throughout his administration." "There are many more examples of heat-packing Trump supporters and other fascists menacing society, but suffice it to say that the normalization of right-wing violence demands that accountability for the Capitol rioters be a national priority."