The Violence Is the Point — That’s Why the Fascists Keep Escalating
Image: CNN Screenshot
The Attempted Assassination of Nancy Pelosi Should Be a Turning Point for Us All
by umair haque
By now, you might have heard what happened. A man broke into her house, tied up her husband, proceeded to beat him with a hammer, shouted “Where’s Nancy?!” Luckily, at that point, the police arrived. Paul Pelosi is now undergoing brain surgery.
What just happened here? Media’s already struggling for words, to both-sides it yet again, but the truth is obvious, isn’t it?
It seems there was an assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi.
How do we know? Well, facts about the assailant have already emerged. “The man who allegedly attacked Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s husband early Friday posted memes and conspiracy theories on Facebook about Covid-19 vaccines, the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 attack.” In other words, a textbook MAGA Republican, in simpler terms, a Trumpist. Someone who believes all the Big Lies — the election was stolen! Vaccines don’t work! Jan 6th wasn’t a violent coup attempt!
What we already know about the assailant appears to provide ample evidence of the motive here. And it was political. Over the coming days and weeks, I’m sure that media will trot out the usual things they do when a far right wing extremist commits brutal violence — he was a “lone wolf,” or “isolated,” or he was “mentally ill,” deliberately obfuscating the simple fact that 99.999999% of solitary people with mental illness aren’t out there trying to kill Nancy Pelosi with a hammer…because they believe in Big Lies…spread by one political side…in the name of undoing democracy.
So let’s establish a fact up front. This was, by all appearances, an assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi. Maybe every single news outlet to have confirmed the assailant’s identity is wrong. Sure, could be. But how likely is that, really? How long do we keep on pretending obvious truths aren’t true — and who does that help?
Nobody should minimize what just happened here, so let’s keep going. This wasn’t just an assassination attempt the way that, for example, John Hinckley tried to shoot Ronald Reagan. That was an isolated event — because, if you’ll recall, nobody much on the center or the left was calling for Reagan to be assassinated.
But now? Now things are different. The calls from violence from the GOP are open. They’re proud of it. They flaunt it. Kevin McCarthy “joked” about hitting Pelosi on the head with a gavel. And now a MAGAt tried to kill her with a hammer, beating her husband brutally with one, putting him in the hospital with brain surgery. Afterwards, Virginia’s Governor, the mild-mannered, sweater-vest wearing Glenn Youngkin…joked about it. Wait…remind me, someone. Is attempted murder funny?
Of course not. That’s a wink and a nod. A form of licensing violence. Encouraging it. Hey, don’t worry pal — we’ve got your back. It’s funny to us — no Big Deal. And when we joke about it? We’re not really kidding, either. The double entendre here — the subtext — is very much part of the approach. Hey, we’ll look the other way, after we kid about you guys actually doing it. Then we’ll say we didn’t mean it, with a wink and a nod. What do we call this strategy?
Just yesterday, a certain billionaire bought Twitter. And within moments, hate speech had exploded. The vilest kinds of hate. Posts just saying the N-word, over and over and over. Anti-semitism. Threats of extreme violence. It’s shocking enough when I say it — but go ahead and look for yourself, because I need something from you. To tell me what you feel.
I want to discuss what all this — all of it — really is.
The answer to that is very simple. It’s fascism.
But I need us to explore it together for a moment, because I think that yet, America, and much of the world, don’t really understand the problem here, at least not viscerally enough. It’s easy to say, oh, the bad guys are egging on the little guys, and they’re beginning to do real violence, and democracy’s under threat. Yes, but. You need to grasp all that in a much, much deeper way to really fully understand it. I promise that when you do, you’ll have something of an epiphany — and if you don’t, by the end of this essay, go right ahead and tell me.
What do you feel when you read hate like that? Serious, real, extreme hate? You probably feel repulsed, disgusted, and revolted. That’s because you’re a normal person.
The problem in our societies is that they are now being overrun by fascism, and fascists are not like us. They may look like us, and even chat politely with us — just as Pelosi’s alleged assailant was able to do. And yet they’re very, very different from us. They are capable of brutality, suddenly, in shocking ways, like the assassination attempt on Pelosi, or Jan 6th, or soccer moms shouting death threats at teachers and so forth. They are different from us. Something has made them different. What something is that?
They don’t feel the same way about hate and violence. You see, to normal people like you and me, hate and violence are abhorrent. If I see little Snowy barking at another dog, or growling, I’ll try to stop him, and teach him. We do it with our kids, to one another. We try to restrain hate and violence, to stop it, to limit it to a necessary evil, in the small doses that are necessary for civilization to prevail.
For us, for normal people, hate and violence are anomalous. They are temporary. They are revolting. That means: they should only exist, if at all, for very short amounts of time, which cause pain, and because causing needless pain is wrong, we, as normal pain, want to stop hate and violence.
Let me make that a lot clearer.
What do we normal people do? Want? We want to laugh and love and live and relate and know and grow. We want peace and freedom. Not just for ourselves, but for everyone. We have absolutely no desire — none — to inflict violence on anyone, or to hate anyone. Maybe once in a while, a demon whispers to us — but by and large, we desire peace and violence for ourselves, and for others.
But there’s another kind of person, too. Now. More of them than there used to be. And their emotional lives, their psychological lives, are completely different to ours. I want you to really consider that point, because it’s the key to really grasping why our societies are so broken.
It’s profoundly abnormal to sit around hating all day. To spew hate and then wish violence. Isn’t it? After all, it’s not something that anyone should want to do. Nobody sits there as a kid and thinks to themselves, I want to grow up and hate. We’re not born with that thought. We end up that way. Something happens to us.
Let me say it again.
It’s profoundly abnormal to sit around hating all day. To start out in small ways — hating “libtards,” then women, then Jews, and before you know it, all you do is hate, all day long. You sit there, and vent your spleen, with others just like you, whose only purpose is to hate. Then, together, you begin justifying violence on people. Then wishing it. Maybe even planning it — first, in jest, and then, someone crosses the line. The spiral isn’t the point. I want you to see how abnormal this is, to sit there and hate and wish violence all day long.
Now, media insists there are two “sides” here, and they’re equivalent. But they are not. Normal people, like I said, don’t sit around hating all day, or wishing violence on anyone, needlessly. If we think, “Jesus, those guys need to be in jail!”, that’s not an expression of hate, it’s a wish to prevent more hate and violence and pain in the world. The other side, though, wants to cause more hate and violence and pain in the world. We are not the same.
The fascists are not like us. They are very different. Because their lived experience has become profoundly alien to us.
Try to put yourself into the shoes of someone who’s entire life now hinges around hate. A MAGAt. Can you do it? Can you even spend an hour wrapped up in hate? Can you really say — I want that person to die a brutal death! — and mean it? Most of us can’t. We can’t do it, because, like I said, we’re normal people. Our moral senses still function, so we’re revolted, and then we’re exhausted by pretending not to be.
So what’s going on here? How do you drive people into this profoundly abnormal psychological state of wishing hate and violence and pain all the time? Well, we know the answer to that, too: bombard them with Big Lies, that make them feel paranoid about being under the constant threat of annihilation. The fear of annihilation is the greatest, most primal fear a human being has, limited, frail, mortal things that we are. Trigger it — and you can control person for life. With hate.
This is what fascism is.
What do I mean by that? I want you to really get it. Not at an intellectual level, at an emotional one. To step into this weird alien fascist state — because only then, I think, do you have the tools to really fight it. You need the epiphany of what it’s like for them being them.
What is fascism, on this level?