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Take stock, for the landscape has changed. [1]

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Date: 2022-10-30

I’d had my first reaction to the horrific blugeoning of Paul Pelosi, husband to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and who obviously was a stand-in for her in the attack. I wanted to post, and thought, No, let’s sit on this for a moment. Sometimes expressing strong emotion solidifies it, so I wanted to try to locate this somewhere—this being this slice in time, and somewhere being located in the chronology we know as history.

I may have been a bit ambitious, because my first impression is still quite strong, despite two days’ worth of distance, if that can be any distance.

I did say this at the time, a spontaneous outburst:

They’re conditioning each other. There’s little other reason for John Cardillo to admit what he [did] publicly. They’re seeking to encourage each other to be as callous and hardhearted as possible. There’s no reason to say something so base at this particular hour, where Mr. Pelosi is literally on the operating table.

What disturbed me most, to be absolutely frank about this, was the state of mind that this assailant, David Depape, must have inhabited (both before the attack and during it, which took place in front of police who witnessed the whole thing).

I mean, months ago, I had written with quite a bird in my throat about how Fox News, and really the whole GOP project, seems to be coarsening its audience. I’ve written more than one story about people who’ve been arrested for planning to assassinate President Biden, one of whom was undeterred even in custody. Nothing, he said, was going to stop him from carrying out the attack. As soon as police released him, he promised them, he’d be back on his way to finalize his mission.

But this guy. DePape. The way that things played out, that he told police that they were going to “wait for Nancy” before being taken into custody, presumably so he could see her reaction when she came upon the scene. He wanted his reward. He had a fantasy and he wanted some bit of that fantasy realized: to see pain streak across Nancy Pelosi’s face.

The depth of addled thinking I don’t think can be conveyed adequately. Some commentators made him out to be like Jack Nicholson’s character from The Shining:

And I can understand that, because his use of “Where’s Nancy?” echoed the exact language that the insurrectionists used in their mob violence at the Capitol.

However, in all likelihood, the man’s thinking probably ran like this scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

Thompson’s lawyer: When it comes to that fantastic note, when the rabbit bites its own head off, I want you to throw that fucking radio— —into the tub— —with me.

What do I mean by this (because I don’t mean to be humorous)? I’m saying that the man intent on murder was so far gone that he saw the police as his audience and that they were helping him fulfill a fantasy. “Nobody’s going anywhere until Nancy comes through the front door. We’re going to stay— right here.”

And my point is, he is not the first. We had the previous assassination attempts that I mentioned before. We had the Cincinnati FBI Headquarters guy.

What we have here, in my estimation, are people (RW politicians, other RW braintrusts) trying to foment an entire swath of people into a frenzy, just short of actual “unleashing”. They want their constituents snarling mad. However, some of those followers seem to be waiting for a signal of some sort (more than one person here at Daily Kos has mentioned something like this, some sort of coiled tension).

But what we have here is someone going Leeroy Jenkins. They are popping off too soon.

That’s my estimation, one I cannot back up with concrete anything, so take that for what you will. Here’s what I scratched together about where we are now, though.

Things have changed.

I don’t want to be dramatic about this. But I did sit back and take stock of a major shift in some of the contours of our situation. Just a recap:

I warned back in March that these folks were trying to transform the nation, and that it would get ugly. Whether or not the media covers this story from this perspective, we must recognize that this assault was used in real-time to harden the hearts of MAGA/QAnon/GOP followers. When you have someone posting something like this

x Ron DeSantis invited this guy to dinner to celebrate the anniversary of January 6th. pic.twitter.com/yUomOBz3D7 — Christian Vanderbrouk 🇺🇸🇺🇦🌻 (@UrbanAchievr) October 28, 2022

the very hour that Paul Pelosi was in surgery, for skull and brain injuries, you have a movement dedicated to driving their adherents to the point of depravity. Smashing someone in the head with a hammer is depraved, and so is declaring indifference to the attack, in the very hour of mortal danger, when Mr. Pelosi was on the operating table.

What those influencers were trying to do was to prevent their followers from developing empathy. Such fellow feeling must be short-circuited for their movement to survive.

Michael Beschloss, on MSNBC’s The Beat Friday evening, said that Friday was a dark day in this nation’s history. Katie Phang, who was sitting in for Ari Melber that evening, asked Beschloss if he could locate such an attack in American history, and he went for Charles Sumner being beaten on the Senate floor back in 1854; he also brought up armed terrorists holding four Congresspersons hostage a century later. But, he said, this attack is unprecedented because of the surrounding environment:

(pertinent conversation begins around 15:00)

Beschloss: But what’s unusual about this time, unlike those times, there is social media. So, a sick person can look at social media and be aggravated by all sorts of conspiracy theories that are crazy. He or she can connect with other people who feel the same way, or he or she can use social media to aggravate others. And the result is, we are in a situation such as we have never seen before in American history.

What I would say is that we have seen something like this in living memory, at least for some.

On October 24, 1963, a woman named Cora Lacy Frederickson confronted Adlai Stevenson, renowned public figure and the American ambassador to the U.N. at the time, outside of a public venue where he had just been speaking, and bashed him with a picket sign. This shocked the national conscience at the time. Four days later, a concerned citizen wrote to the White House, in an attempt to dissuade President Kennedy from visiting Dallas, as he was scheduled to that next month.

The attack on Paul Pelosi obviously goes further than that enraged middle American woman six decades back. But it’s the loosening of social strictures that I mean to highlight here. These people are becoming blind to the consequences of their actions. Instead, they are being encouraged to indulge in their immediate impulses, even those that are grisly, those that draw blood.

Beschloss: We are before an election which a substantial number of Donald Trump wannabes and others think the route to what they want in politics is violence. All I’m saying is that we should all be absolutely vigilant the next two weeks and beyond the midterm election, because this is a time of maximum peril.

We are in a new environment. Take a deep, long look.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/30/2132343/-Take-stock-for-the-landscape-has-changed

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