Political violence in the US today (1 of 2)

I was recently looking back at some of my posts from the 2010s. And I came across this one that still seems pretty relevant to today’s current events. I originally published in 2015, long before Substack had come onto the scene.

At the time, there was a mass shooting in San Bernadino that came just days after another mass shooting attack on the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood.

The one in San Bernadino involved an attack by two Muslim extremists on a combined training event and Christmas celebration put on by the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health. There were 14 deaths and 22 serious injuries. Both were real instances of political violence. (1)

The Colorado mass shooting was an attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic that killed three and wounded nine. This is a 45-minute retrospective from a decade later: (2)

Political violence in the US has obviously continued to evolve since 2015. Most notably with a sitting American President organizing and inciting a violent, howling mob to make what turned out to be a deadly attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 Presidential election.

History is helpful in thinking about how things might go. But it can also be misleading.

Whenever journalists and political scientists touch on the topic of a possible “civil war” in the US, the main precedent of states – specifically slaveowning states defending their disgusting slave system vs. the federal government – often comes to mind.

The history of the Civil War and the Jim Crow system in the South have given the concept of “states rights” a dubious reputation, at least in terms of general political rhetoric. But the US is a federal system and the Constitution gives the states the responsibility to conduct elections.

But how reckless the Trump regime gets in 2026 and 2028 with its voter-suppression efforts could actually lead to a different kind of state vs. federal violence. In which state and local officials, including police and the National Guard, may find themselves facing off with armed federal officials, including violent, lawless, and generally poorly-trained ICE Gestapo goons. If that kind of conflict breaks out, attempts to fix the elections by having armed federal agents interfere with voting at local polling places is the most easily imaginable triggering event. (3)

In other words, political violence can be initiated by private actors, which is usually what comes to mind when we think about political violence in the US. But state terror is also a form of political violence, and the violent and sometimes murderous behavior of Trump’s ICE Gestapo certainly counts as state terror and political violence.

The eliminationist attitude

Bob Cesca wrote at the time in 2015 about the “eliminationist” attitude that encourages such attacks – and presumably justifies them in the minds of the perpetrators:

We’ve reached a tipping point in America’s political discourse. The shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility is merely the latest in an increasingly alarming series of tragedies connected to political issues, each of which has been notably distorted by conservatives — or in the case of the Planned Parenthood shooting, almost completely ignored — throughout the past year and beyond. So far, attacks have occurred in relation to the following: immigration, Muslims inside the U.S., reproductive rights, LGBT equality and racial justice.

As far-right propaganda grows louder and increasingly divorced from objective reality, it seems as if incidents of violence have escalated accordingly. While there might not be a direct one-to-one correlation, it’s obvious to anyone paying attention that the GOP’s eliminationist rhetoric, intentionally or not, serves to inflame those who are already prone to radicalism and violence. [emphasis added] (4)

Antiabortion zealots and rightwing gun nuts

Ed Kilgore wrote in 2015 about two strains of far-right rhetoric that have facilitated the current outbreak of violence. One strain involves the ways the antiabortion movement talks about their cause:

The first is the comparison of legalized abortion to the great injustices of world history, including slavery and the Holocaust. The first analogy helps anti-choicers think of themselves as champions of a new civil-rights movement while facilitating a characterization of Roe v. Wade as a temporary and disreputable constitutional precedent like Dred Scott. The second follows from the right-to-life movement’s logic of regarding abortion as homicide and treats the millions of legal abortions that have been performed in the U.S. since 1973 as analogous to the Nazi extermination of Jews and other “undesirables.”

Both the slavery and Holocaust analogies for abortion have become commonplace “truisms” in the right-to-life movement and in allied Christian-right organizations (where there is a natural tendency to take on the righteous mantles of religiously motivated abolitionists and of the German “Confessing Church” resistance to Hitler). Conservative politicians have been more circumspect in using these inflammatory comparisons — though George W. Bush pulled off a clever dog-whistle reference to Dred Scott in the 2004 presidential debates, leaving most watchers puzzled while anti-choice activists nodded knowingly. But the white-hot atmosphere of conservative “base” competition in the current Republican presidential nominating contest may be loosening the bonds of self-restraint.

Mike Huckabee is by far the least inhibited presidential candidate when it comes to American Holocaust rhetoric, despite repeated warnings from groups like the Anti-Defamation League. [emphasis in bold added] (5)

More recently, as Trump’s US Ambassador to Israel, Huckabee supported Israel’s genocide against Gazans that began in 2023 and has publicly declared he would be fine with Israel absorbing large parts of the territory of neighboring countries.

The other strain is the right-to-revolution rhetoric that the NRA and other players in the gun-proliferation lobby use:

But there’s a second element of contemporary extremist rhetoric from conservatives that brings them much closer to incitement of violence: the claim that the Second Amendment encompasses a right to revolution against “tyrannical” government. Again, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz have embraced this idea most avidly. ...

It’s not difficult to see how toxic these arguments become when combined. If legalized abortion (and its alleged extension into open infanticide via the “barbaric” practices of government-subsidized Planned Parenthood “baby-killers”) represents government-sponsored mass extermination and/or a perversion of the Constitution comparable to slavery, and there is a fundamental right to violent resistance against this and other acts of tyranny, then it could definitely cross the minds of conscientious gun-owning anti-choicers to emulate John Brown or the conspirators against Hitler. After all, the two greatest wars in American history were undertaken to destroy the Slave Power and Nazism. Why not a small individual war against their contemporary equivalent?

Our political vocabulary has been so poisoned by the kind of actors that Kilgore and Cesca discuss that it's difficult to make straightforward statements and judgments about political violence.

But political violence is a part of our political life. Including the Trump regime using masked ICE Gestapo goons to literally carry out acts of state terror in the US. The ongoing bogeyman (and reality) of Muslim terrorism is also political violence, even if religious motives play a large role in it. We need to understand the nature and roots of it. And we need to understand the larger roots as well as the more technical law-enforcement issues.

But the analysis needs to be realistic. It also means keeping in mind that understanding isn't justifying, explaining isn't excusing. And a realistic understanding of causes and context may not lead obviously and immediately to a clear solution.

For instance, it's often observed that failure to effectively integrate Muslim populations into European societies produces conditions which make some of them open to violence and recruitment by jihadi groups. That doesn't justify resorting to violence or using violence directed at civilians. But it does give policymakers a framework to approach the problem of drying up the pool of potential violent jihadis. How well they approach it presents a whole new set of issues.

Part 2 tomorrow will look at arguments for political violence against tyrannical governments.

Notes:

(1) 2015 San Bernardino attack. Wikipedia 07/13/2026. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_San_Bernardino_attack> (Accessed: 2026-15-08).

(2) 10 Years Later: The Shooting at Planned Parenthood. KOAA 5 YouTube channel 12/01/2025. <https://youtu.be/ZEGTodSBHUA?si=vQNb3KbtcYJZTeGJ> (Accessed: 2026-15-08).

(3) What Happens If Trump Tries to Seize the Ballots? Lincoln Square YouTube channel 08/15/2026. <https://youtu.be/PtLVdFjxpCc?si=yLzeWwbFj7VwEtm4> (Accessed: 2026-15-08).

(4) Cesca, Bob (2015): Wing-nuts have weaponized hatred: How the conservative echo chamber is making us all less safe. Salon 2/01/2015. (Accessed: 2015-03-12).

(5) Kilgore, Ed (2015): Extremist Republican Rhetoric and the Planned Parenthood Attack Daily Intelligencer 11/30/2015. <http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/gop-extremism-and-the-planned-parenthood-attack.html> (Accessed: 2015-03-12).