Palin’s Civil War Threat Underscores MAGA World's Insanity

Since she burst on the scene when John McCain tapper her as his vice presidential running mate - and likely sealed his election loss - Sarah Palin has embodied the insanity and embrace of constant lies and ignorance that now define much of the Republican Party base. Ignorance is celebrated and the truth and objective reality simply do not matter.  Michelle Bachmann's - another utterly insane and unhinged individual (who is now appropriately encamped at the late Pat Robertson's Regent University) - short-lived rise to prominence continued the race to the bottom intellectually and morally within the GOP and set the stage for Donald Trump, a shameless pathological liar who could not even admit his own obesity when booked in Atlanta this week.  With Trump headed to likely convictions on numerous felony counts both at the federal level and in Georgia, his acolytes and those like Palin who are struggling to regain some small part of the media limelight are pushing increasingly dangerous language that seems intended to set the stage for violence no matter how guilty Trump may be.  Meanwhile, morally bankrupt evangelicals and those living in the bubble of Fox News and its imitators continue to worship Trump, a man who embodies everything moral and decent people should reject.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the MAGA world insanity and race towards violence.  Here are highlights:

As a phenomenon in itself, Sarah Palin’s pithy comments about Donald Trump’s arrest in Atlanta this week were neither surprising nor terribly significant. Her rant and rave, as the Daily Beast reported, were characteristically over the top:

Sarah Palin responded to Donald Trump’s arrest in Georgia on Thursday night by talking up the possibility of civil war. Speaking to Eric Bolling as the former president was booked at the Fulton County Jail on election interference charges, Palin slammed “those who are conducting this travesty and creating this two-tier system of justice.” “I want to ask them: What the heck?” the former Alaska governor said. “Do you want us to be in civil war? Because that’s what’s going to happen. . . . .

It’s unlikely that the perpetually overrated pol last seen losing two congressional races in Alaska to a Democrat last year is going to lead the kind of violent insurrection she is not-so-subtly threatening. But it’s a sign that the many, many, many attention-starved MAGA straphangers in or at the periphery of national politics are going to have a new mantra going forward. Having burned through more conventional measures to “take our country back” via normal electoral or legislative activity, Trump’s surrogates are embracing their leader’s increasingly incendiary talk about past, present, and future setbacks that must be avenged or prevented by any means necessary.

Jack Smith’s federal indictment of Trump sparked a lot of fiery rhetoric, as Insider reported in June:

Right-wing Trump supporters are indignant and using “violent rhetoric” online after a federal grand jury brought criminal charges against former President Donald Trump. “We have now reached a war phase,” Republican congressman Andy Biggs menacingly tweeted on Friday. “Eye for an eye,” said the Arizona Rep.

More recently, the threats have been more specifically aimed at the alleged persecutors, notes Time:

Trump has repeatedly been warned by federal officials to refrain from rhetoric that could “incite violence or civil unrest.” Yet as he faces a fourth criminal indictment within a matter of months, he is only stepping up his attacks on prosecutors and judges. And within minutes of his attacks, his acolytes respond.

Here’s the scary thing that ensures this rhetoric will only escalate: By labeling his multiple indictments “election interference” (the very crime of which he is charged by both federal and state prosecutors), Trump has now made his “rigged election” claim for 2024 well over a year in advance.

In the view from the MAGA fever swamps, it’s now impossible for Trump to have a fair shot at regaining the presidency. If he wins despite the massive “election interference” he faces, he is fully justified in unleashing the vengeance that is so prominent a part of his 2024 message. If he seems to lose … it’s clearly grounds for whatever extra-constitutional redress he and his supporters choose.

But with this terrible miscarriage of justice underway before our eyes each day in Washington and Manhattan and Florida and Georgia, why wait for the preemptive theft of the presidency to be consummated? Why not demand it stop right now on pain of nation-rending violence (or as some hard-core conservatives like to put it, a “Second Amendment Solution”)?

Trump’s 2024 campaign is already infused with the smell of gunpowder and the clamor of insurrection. More conventional thinkers may believe his endless misconduct and his ever-more-relentless extremism will convince Republican primary voters to dump him in favor of some safer substitute who doesn’t terrify half the electorate. But the MAGA take on the nomination contest is that doing anything other than sending Trump back out into battle represents complicity in a “rigged election” that happened in 2020 and that is already fully underway for 2024. That makes the rhetoric of civil war, and at some point a significant risk of something worse than rhetoric, not only inevitable, but certain to get worse and worse as the various legal proceedings against Trump run their course.

Be very afraid of what these insane people are capable of doing.  January 6, 2021, may prove to be a mere dress rehearsal.