The Week in Radical Leftism, 01/05/2024

12/29 – ‘GlitterBomb’ Creator Mark Rober Is Doing More To Foil Crime Than Democrat Cities Like San Francisco

I guess that’s the maximum sentence in San Franciso… get farted on.

12/30 – A New Year’s Resolution for 2024?

Perhaps the resolution should be to never succumb to the leftist stupidity no matter how attractive the possibility of agreeing just to shut them up might seem, because they WON’T shut up.

12/31 – ERIN ELMORE: Pro-Palestinian protesters deface Lincoln Memorial with red paint

I was awaiting the news of the perpetrators being caught and charged, but I forget, these are leftists and this crime was committed at night, when all law enforcement is rendered powerless.

12/31 – Don’t Celebrate the Maine Secretary of State Being Swatted

The thought now is that she swatted herself. At any rate, it’s stupid and puts law enforcement lives at risk, not to mention the safety of those swatted. All I waited for was the whiny, crybaby leftists to feign their outrage. For some reason, there doesn’t appear to have been any.

1/1 – Top Twenty Terrible Predictions for 2024

I predict Democrats will continue to get more desperate and shrill, commit more violence and blame Republicans and cheat in November. Dang, am I good or what?

1/2 – Jewish girl attacked for wearing IDF sweatshirt in New Jersey mall

I would think the term “whore” would apply more to those who support known baby murderers and rapists of children, but that’s just me.

1/3 – Year 2024: Everyone Except Paul Krugman Is Wrong

I wasn’t aware there was a Nobel Prize for Dumbassery.

1/3 – Five signs of hope in 2024

The corrupt leftist media is the #1 threat to this country. Without their complicity, none of the rest of the leftist agenda would have a chance of success. It’s good that the general public is finally getting tired of being lied to and treated like foolish morons.

1/4 – Trump Totally Should Pick Nikki Haley for His Veep

I don’t view Haley as all that vapid and stupid and wouldn’t it be great to be able to brag that we have a female VP of color (and she is just as “of color” as Kamala) that can actually form a thought and put a sentence together without the same word making up 45% of the comment.

1/5 – ISIS-K Just Dragged Iran Into Afghanistan’s Jihadist Civil

Well, if there is a war there, I hope it happens after Robin Ware/Robert L. Peters/JRB Ware/Pedo Peter/idiot Biden is gone so he won’t be sending aid and weapons to both sides.

01/02/24 – How death threats get Republicans to fall in line behind Trump – The insidious way violence is changing American politics — and shaping the 2024 election.

In early 2021, Richer was an Arizona Republican official who regularly attended local party events. At the time, he was the newly elected county recorder of Maricopa County. The job was a new level of prominence — he was now the most important election supervisory official in the state’s largest county — but going to Arizona Republican events was routine: the kind of thing that Richer, like any state politician, had done hundreds of times before.

But at one event, the crowd heckled and harassed him. When he tried to leave, they dragged him back in, yanking on his arms and shoulders, to berate him about the allegedly stolen 2020 election. He started to worry: Would his own people, fellow Republican Party members, seriously hurt him?

There was a clear reason for the madness. Many of the Republican faithful had recently decided that Maricopa County had been the epicenter of “the steal,” Joe Biden’s theft of Arizona from Donald Trump — and the entire presidential election with it. This wasn’t true, obviously. Richer tried to tell them it wasn’t true, hoping his long track record in the state Republican party would give him some credibility.

It did not. What happened instead reveals a pattern that is quietly reshaping American politics: Across the board and around the country, data reveals that threats against public officials have risen to unprecedented numbers — to the point where 83 percent of Americans are now concerned about risks of political violence in their country. The threats are coming from across the political spectrum, but the most important ones in this regard emanate from the MAGA faithful.

Trump’s most fanatical followers have created a situation where challenging him carries not only political risks but also personal ones. Elected officials who dare defy the former president face serious threats to their well-being and to that of their families — raising the cost of taking an already difficult stand.

As a result, the threat of violence is now a part of the American political system, to the point where Republican officials are — by their own admissions — changing the way they behave because they fear it. For Richer, the price back in 2021 was high — and enough to prevent him from safely participating in his own party’s politics.

The more he tried to convince people that the 2020 results were legitimate, the more hostile the audience became — and not just at this one event. He recalls people at Republican meetings getting in his face, grabbing him, and even banging on his car windshield in the parking lot. Richer kept attending party meetings for three months, hoping that the attendees’ behavior would go back to normal.

But they didn’t. The once-friendly events were emotionally exhausting — and, worse, potentially even dangerous.

“I was a Republican activist. That’s what you do: show up to events,” Richer recalls. But eventually, “you don’t feel comfortable.”

By 2022, when Richer was presiding over the November election’s ballot tally, his office was fortified like a military base: surrounded by armed police deployed to protect him and his staff from threats. He recalls numerous staff members quitting on the spot after heated confrontations — and he was personally targeted by credible threats. When we spoke, he was about to testify in one of three federal cases against people who had vowed to kill him.

“You need to do your fucking job right because other people from other states are watching your ass,” the man allegedly said in a voicemail. “You fucking renege on this deal or give them any more troubles, your ass will never make it to your next little board meeting.”

It’s been well over two years since Richer attended the kinds of Arizona GOP grassroots events where he was once welcome. Today, the institutional Arizona Republican party is dominated by politicians who have embraced Trump’s lies about the election — people like Kari Lake, Blake Masters, and Mark Finchem. The harassment and threats from the MAGA faithful was one weapon in the extremist takeover’s arsenal, working to push voices of sanity out of key party events — breaking even determined ones like Richer.

In Arizona, the Trumpist threat of violence worked. And it worked for reasons that should worry all of us at the beginning of an election year that could decide the fate of American democracy…

Brave Republicans at all levels of government, from local officials like Richer to Sen. Mitt Romney (UT), have been warning us of the dangers going into 2024. They have seen the recent rise in right-wing political violence, most notably on January 6, and seen how comfortable Trump is with openly directing his supporters to hurt people.

“Violence and threats against elected leaders are suppressing the emergence of a pro-democracy faction of the GOP,” writes Rachel Kleinfeld, an expert on political violence at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Absent threats, Kleinfeld argues, a move to Trump from inside the party — perhaps a more serious challenge in the presidential primary — might have had a better chance of getting off the ground…