by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Yet another sign that we may be careening towards an actual shooting civil war is how the MAGA Right jumps at any chance to turn one of their own into a martyr for the cause. Their latest effort is with Ashli Babbitt who was shot and killed when she attempted to crash through a door that stood between members of Congress and her angry mob.
I saw this event the day it happened and the guy who shot her did the right thing — it was either her or the potential murder of the political figures he was assigned to protect.
And, yet, that’s not how MAGA sees it. They see Ashli Babbitt as a brave member of the MAGA movement who was unjustly murdered. When they’re not conflating things they are focusing on very specific demands: they want the name of the officer who shot her so (I presume) they can sue the hell out of him and potentially hunt him down and hurt him in the name of MAGA. (Or something.)
But the broader significance of this the two sides now live in such different echo chambers — that don’t even overlap — that we’re lurching towards a situation where all this overheated rhetoric is finally going to cause even more political violence. I’m not so sure I would say some sort of MAGA-themed Second American Revolution (ugh) but it is possible that should Cyber Ninjas “prove” Trump “won” Arizona that the conditions are there for some sort of “decertification” crisis that turns into a nullification crisis that turns into a secessionist crisis.
MAGA has come to glorify political violence to such an extent that the Republican Establishment may be shocked when the same dynamic that happened Jan. 6th happens on a national level and states begin to leave the Union. That sounds hyperbolic, but it’s a lot more possible than you might think.
The United States is far less politically stable than you might think. But it’s very possible that we’ll just peacefully slip into an autocratic managed democracy in the 2024-2025 timeframe and that will be that. And then people like me have to start worrying about getting pushed out of windows by ICE because we won’t fucking shut up about MAGA being American Nazism.
