The Pelosi Attack Is Political Violence, It's Intensifying, & We Can Counter It
A Coordinated National Movement Can Counter Authoritarian & Fascist Movements - We're Set Up To Build It
The shock and alarm has already started, but we shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not a surprise that the Speaker of the House was targeted in an attack on her husband at her home in California — the Speaker was not there.
Speaker Pelosi is the single most targeted and reviled individual in the world of US domestic violent extremism (DVE) driven by right-wing extremism, the Trumpist MAGA movement, and the right-wing media empire. That’s a fact.
The attack shouldn’t be a surprise because the threats are and have been widespread. Threats against members of Congress jumped 144% from 2017 to 2021 (source: MSNBC live broadcast), which is why US Capitol Police now have field offices around the US — which they didn’t need before Trump ran for president.
This attack on Paul Pelosi is political violence. It’s an attempted attack on the third-most-powerful position in the US Government, as the House Speaker is second in the order of succession for the US presidency after the Vice President. The attacker was looking for the Speaker:
The attack may well have been an assassination attempt. That’s a possibility, and also not a surprise: clear threats on Speaker Pelosi’s life are on video during the 1/6 insurrection, and all over the place online in radicalized hotspots.
Speaking of radicalized hotspots, this attack happened literally just in time for extremists on Twitter to freely lose their minds in excitement about it… as Elon Musk took over Twitter overnight Thursday/Friday as the self-proclaimed “Chief Twit.” He has declared that “the bird is freed.”
The reported attack on Mr. Pelosi has already been dismissed by many on the political right as made-up and as a conspiracy; by the same extremists who push for just such attacks. Jeff Tiedrich on Twitter asked if Republicans will invite the attacker to CPAC:
Tiedrich is right to ask. The current Republican party is now known for celebrating pale, violent, dangerous guys such as Kyle Rittenhouse. They martyred Ashli Babbitt; an insurrectionist who was shot by law enforcement when she became a direct threat to an elected official under police protection.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Donald Trump pops up on Twitter with a restored account any moment now proclaiming his newfound admiration of hammers. He’s reportedly expected to have his account fully restored by Monday; given this violent development and Elon Musk’s zeal it could totally happen earlier.
If Trump does anything like that — it is stochastic terrorism. Regardless, Elon Musk will allow and embrace it on his now privately owned major social media platform.
What we should be doing is condemning political violence. That’s the right move. We should be de-demonizing humans. We should be re-humanizing humans.
The Lincoln Project is right that the GOP should be disarming this spreading extremism fire — but they won’t.
Authoritarians gain power through threats, violence, and fear. That’s also all they’ve got. There’s no other vision on offer. It’s a feature not a bug. It’s empowering and addictive to those who are in it. For real: it’s physically addictive. De-radicalization takes years; and it’s not going to happen fast.
Expect more violence and escalation — not less.
There’s no move, sign, or momentum from the Republican party and their corresponding giant media machine to de-escalate. That’s not the move.
The moves they’re making are escalatory. The rhetoric is. The empowering is. The dehumanization, desensitization, and demonizing and “othering” of humans is.
The Overton window has shifted. Threats, political violence, and institutional damage that would have been completely unthinkable and unacceptable prior to Trump’s presidential run is now being actively planned, championed, and talked about out loud by those on the political right. Some state legislatures are codifying it. At one right-wing conference attendees asked in all seriousness, “When do we get to use the guns?”
The pundit class tends to scold Republicans… and hope they’ll see reason. Reason isn’t the driver of it, folks. Not that they’re listening to me.
Power is the driver. Violence, threats, and aggression help powerful people get more power. The followers of the power-mongers love that they’re empowered and encouraged to be aggressive, bullying, intolerant, bigoted, misogynistic, and just plain mean. And to have guns! And to carry them around threateningly! Again, the violence is a feature not a bug.
Hope isn’t going to cut it.
We’re going to need to work on de-escalating it ourselves. It’s going to take years.
You counter authoritarian and even fully fascist movements with a coordinated, active movement pushing against it and driving an aggressive agenda and vision of a different path for the country. We don’t have that yet in the US, but we could.
This very new nonprofit, Shift the Country, was totally set up to help do that.
Lots of folks are writing about the threat. We’re fixing to help us all collectively solve it.
The Key Right Now Is Obviously To Vote
Clearly, the voting is key, critical, urgent, and threatened. So let’s do what we can over the next week and a half to help. We can help by talking to absolutely everyone we know about voting. We can help them vote. We can drive them to the actual polls since so much about voting is under attack and under question.
We can help provide sanity, support, and solidarity to poll workers, voters, and to other volunteers over the next week and a half as we get to and through this election.
After The Election We Can Hold The Line
We can hold the line. We can be anchors in the storm. We can be steady, strong, and resolute. We can not lose our ever-loving minds in the midst of chaos, threats, and violence. We can check and report disinformation. We can educate about the election process. We can de-escalate and de-fuse and diffuse and disarm.
We can be non-violent, and we can advocate for non-violence.
Part Of The Mess & Stress Is The Government Not Working Properly
This is all a huge big mess partly because our government should be helping us through this crisis better.
It isn’t, because part of the problem is coming from the people who run and ran government. The government isn’t working the way it should.
Our collective problem-solving isn’t working the way it should. We’re either going to let it atrophy and fall away in a spectacular blowout of a failed superpower… or we’re going to turn the damn thing around. Going to be a long haul, but I’m convinced we can Shift the Country.
Here are at least some of the things we should be seeing from government (and politics) that we’re not:
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and US Department of Justice (DOJ) including the FBI should be doing a whole lot more publicly and behind the scenes to help us collectively counter the threats to the 2022 election… whether through cybersecurity (which they’re probably doing some of), or because of voter intimidation, or because of threats to poll workers. Threats to the 2022 election are as publicly clear as the threats to the peaceful transfer of power were prior to 1/6/21 — yet we aren’t seeing a forward-leaning, proactive response from the national security and homeland security mechanisms that should be helping to protect us. Where is the entire Biden Administration on this?
Law enforcement (LE) at every level is a mess for various reasons; part of which are because some in LE are sympathetic to the very domestic violent extremists (DVE) and MAGA advocates who present some of the threats. Part of why the 2022 elections will be critical is to keep extremists from further infiltrating and eroding very old institutions meant to help uphold democracy — and everything else we need to keep society going.
The Trump Administration deliberately weakened post-9/11 domestic national security intelligence monitoring and sharing capabilities beginning in the spring of 2017. They ramped up this weakening in the summer and fall of 2020 after protests following the LE murder of George Floyd.
Many Trump Administration political appointees have continued to run agencies and departments in the US government even as their actions have been demonstrated to weaken homeland security and national security overall. President Biden has not aggressively pursued the removal of Trump Administration political appointees or burrowed-in federal employees (which is more difficult but could be justified if there are national security threats). The public, the media, and Congress have not pushed for these removals either except in a few rare cases that happened to get a lot of coverage — particularly in DHS’s US Secret Service (USSS) and Office of the Inspector General (OIG).
There is no joint national problem-solving conversation on the rise of the domestic violent extremism threat to include threats on members of Congress, the insurrection, the attempted coup, or today’s attack at the Pelosi household. That’s partly because at least some of the political leaders are also purveyors and instigators of threats of violence. At the very least, they’ve refused to condemn racism, bigotry, misogyny, and intolerance for years and at this point have made it clear that they condone it.
The January 6th Committee has not been the appropriate vehicle for post-insurrection, post-January 6 government-wide problem-solving and to drive a national conversation… but it’s the only thing we’ve got.
There’s no obvious or known internal government-wide review or effort within the Executive Branch to fix the erosion of the institutions that are supposed to be monitoring, sharing, and getting us ready for domestic violent extremism threats.
The US Capitol Police remain underfunded and under-resourced. Republicans have voted against increasing budgets and capabilities; even as the risk landscape the USCP need to cover has expanded.
With no problem-solving or conscientious, intentional fixing of what went wrong before and on January 6, 2021…. why would we think we’d be doing anything much differently now?
And so here we are with threats to the election in all kinds of ways… and the US government bumbling along. State and local governments are in many cases doing their own thing because of the lack of a coherent direction or mitigation plan. In extremist states, the state government is actively making voting more difficult or actively suppressing the vote by arresting voters (see: Florida).
We Need To Advocate For Government To Function
The thing is: we’re not on our own, and our government hasn’t collapsed. Lots of folks get big followings by declaring that all is lost; that the US is collapsing. It’s fear, and it contributes to disengagement and disempowerment. We need less of that, and more empowerment and engagement. Shift the Country is here for both.
Our government hasn’t collapsed, but it is it in serious risk.
We need to stop hoping DOJ or some politicians or magical hero that doesn’t exist are going to hold the democracy together.
We all have to hold the democracy together, it’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s not going to happen by doing the same things we keep doing.
I’m not just talking about voting this fall.
Time To Build A Movement To Counter Authoritarianism
I’m saying we need to do things differently. We need a coherent, coordinated national movement to counter this extremist, authoritarian movement. That’s what defeats authoritarianism.
Such a movement doesn’t exist yet in the US. Shift the Country has been getting established as a new non-profit this year to help do exactly that. Our 5-Part approach is set up specifically to counter this threat.
The moment is here; in this intensifying time. Sign up here to volunteer, and here to donate.
We’ll be posting events (by Sunday) to get this shift going seriously on our Eventbrite wall (or we’ll miss the Facebook political advertising window for the foreseeable future) and here on Substack. Check out the Eventbrite page for more — events start Monday. Events may get re-named, but the dates/times will stay the same (with more to come).
We’ll be setting up events through November to help build out the 5 Things that can help make shift happen (also I’ll actually finish writing the 5 Things, as two of the Things are still in draft).
This shift is iterating fast. As I’ve said — flexibility is an asset.
Don’t panic. Counter fear. Terrorists do fear to get power. That’s what this is.
In a democracy, we keep power by uniting and empowering the majority. That’s what Shift the Country is here for — because we need to seriously up our game in the US.
This democracy and the whole damn world order is at stake. Who hurts the most if the US falls? Those in the US and already around the world who are already underserved, struggling, and oppressed.
Authoritarians help their friends. If we want to help the greatest numbers of people, we’ve got to do things differently.
Really an excellent piece. Keep it going. You represent the best of citizen activism. And you have all the right ideas. Thank you for your work.
Lots to chew on in this piece, Vanessa. There's so much happening--all at once and from so many directions--that sometimes it's head-spinning. But we can't afford that. We need to keep our heads in place, eyes forward and figure out how we can stop the onslaught.
Here's something you wrote that I think needs to be circulated far and wide:
//We all have to hold the democracy together, it’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s not going to happen by doing the same things we keep doing.
I’m not just talking about voting this fall.//
Clearly, we all MUST vote. In large numbers. And just as clearly, that isn't nearly enough. "We all have to hold the democracy together...." Let's hope when we wake up on November 9 that we still have one. And then let's pour our all into ensuring that it continues.