Government - Trump Encourages Armed Violence
There's a term for what Republican Party presidential candidate and fascist demagogue Donald Trump did at a rally, beyond words like appalling, despicable, and evil. Trump said if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, gun owners would still be able to stop her. The implication was crystal clear.
"If (Hillary Clinton) gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don't know," Orange Hitler said to a crowd in South Carolina on Tuesday. The first sentence refers to the US President's responsibility to nominate justices for the Supreme Court; The Second Amendment to the US Constitution establishes the right to bear arms.
So for the first time in the modern era, the nominee for one of the two major political parties just called for "Second Amendment people" to "do" something about his political opponent's judges. This is called Stochastic Terrorism, a term that has been around for only about a decade and a half. It means using language and other forms of communication "to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable".
In other words, Trump isn't directly ordering a specific actor to shoot at his political opponent or the judge; but he knows there might be a so-called "lone wolf" with gun who will hear those words and take it upon himself to take violent action. Trump has repeated demonized Hillary Clinton as "Crooked Hillary", a criminal who needs to be jail, and has encouraged his mobs to chant "Lock her up!" at his rallies and at the Republican National Convention last month.
Stochastic Terrorism has occurred in the US plenty of times in the recent past. On a Sunday morning in 2009, and following a series of stories about "Tiller the Baby Killer" on The O'Reilly Factor show on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, an armed moron stalked and murdered Dr. George Tiller at his church. Tiller provided reproductive health services to women in the Kansas City area. Triggerman Scott Roeder is serving a 50-year prison sentence; the right-wing who repeatedly demonized Tiller claimed innocence.
In 2010, Byron Williams raided his mother's assault weapons collection and rolled down out of their home in California's Sierra Nevada mountains with the intent of attacking the Tides Foundation in San Francisco, an obscure non-profit progressive group. Instead, he got into a gunfight with cops on the 580 freeway just across the San Francisco Bay in Oakland, California. Luckily, the cops won and Williams was eventually sentenced to 401 years in prison. But Williams admitted he targeted the Tides Foundation because he heard about it on the right-wing media, including the Glenn Beck Show which was also on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel at the time.
In 2008, Jim David Adkisson also heard the call to murder people he perceived as "Liberals". He brought a shotgun into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, killing two people and wounding seven others during a children's music performance, before congregants subdued him. Adkisson wrote a manifesto before the attack, in which he said he wanted to target the people listed in the book "100 People Who Are Screwing Up America" by Bernard Goldberg, a former news reporter who turned to right-wing demagoguery when he was passed over for big anchorman gig at the network. Adkisson wrote he'd never be able to get to the politicians and celebrities listed, so he chose to murder at the Unitarian church because of its liberal teachings. He's serving a life sentence; Bernard Goldberg is a frequent guest on Fox News, including the O'Reilly Factor.