Meet the parents of the Idaho mass shooter, who lit a forest fire so he could shoot firefighters as they bravely ran into danger.
The most striking aspect of living in America is how atrocities have become a daily occurrence. One day it’s a car bomb outside a fertility clinic; the next day it’s a man shooting a Black church or Jewish temple; another day it’s a man shooting a Latino grocery store; the next day it’s a group firebombing the Pennsylvania governor or trying to kidnap the governor of Michigan.
School shootings alone have become near-daily tragedies in the US, whereas they are so rare in other countries that some countries with millions of residents that have existed for hundreds of years have never suffered a school shooting. Australia infamously had one tragic school shooting and within weeks passed the most comprehensive gun safety bill in the Western world.
One would be forgiven for thinking perhaps the spirits of the 80 million indigenous and First Nations people who we robbed of this land are paying us back for the historic crimes we committed against them.
500 years after landing on this continent, 250-some-odd years after the nation’s founding, and we have not yet learned to coexist without targeting one group or another for extermination.
Have you heard the story of the fish who can’t recognize the existence of water? The allegory, as told by author David Foster Wallace, among others, highlights how easily we overlook the most fundamental and ever-present aspects of our reality.
The most ever-present reality of living in the United States is the daily acts of right-wing terrorism committed against innocent civilians.
This week it’s Idaho; last week it was Minnesota. And before that, Charleston. Charlottesville. Columbine. Oklahoma City. El Paso. Buffalo. Pittsburgh.
A gun. A bomb. A car.
The places change. The weapons change. The victims also range from middle class to working poor, immigrants, Black people going to church, Black people shopping for groceries, Jewish people at synagogue, and kids in school. But the perpetrators are always the same. According to the FBI, 100% of extremist acts in 2022 were committed by right-wing operatives. In any given year, the figure fluctuates between 95% and 100%.
There is a war going on outside that no one is safe from. And it’s being waged simultaneously by one of the two major parties, the White House and Congressional Republicans—as well as their most ardent supporters. Foreign governments correctly identify the Proud Boys as a terrorist group, while the White House gives them pardons, a bank robber mask, and an ICE vest. MAGA supporters are so violent and unstable one even shot at their Dear Leader last summer.
The most infuriating part is that acts of right-wing terror have become so commonplace that a man with a latex mask can kill a lawmaker and her family and nearly kill another lawmaker and their family, and the media passes over the story in two days. No follow-up. Nothing more to see. No problems left unsolved.
Make no mistake, these are acts of terror. And if they were committed by any other group, it would be front-page news 24-7 until justice was done. If this were any other identifiable organization, they would be labeled terrorist operations. The corporate media and every politician in DC would stop everything they are doing until they put an end to the group immediately and permanently.
But because of the color of the perpetrators, because of the color of their hats, because they come from ostensibly nice families, because they don’t ‘fit the description,’ and because a century ago and today many are rewarded for their violence, not only are these atrocities never stopped, they are never reported as part of a vast, criminal network of terror cells.
We have to say it out loud and clearly because the media absolutely refuses: MAGA is a domestic terrorist group.
This is a group with specific ideologies and worldviews, specific language, clothing, and grievances, who use violence to accomplish their objectives, whether that’s the anti-abortion bombers, school shooters, or forest arsonists. The current right-wing members of the Supreme Court were funded, groomed, and selected by the same right-wing groups who murdered abortion doctors. The same people who fund Heritage Foundation also funded the January 6 insurrectionists.
It’s not a random coincidence that the same groups the White House is targeting are the same people these domestic terrorists are targeting. It’s not a random coincidence that these shooters come from hardcore MAGA families who have groomed their kids to become violent, hateful mass murderers.
This is the water around us. And our enemies are nurses. They are doctors. They are veterans. They are obviously cops. They have guns, hate communism, and gorge themselves on a diet of grievance, bigotry, and ignorance. Instead of therapy, they seek guns. Lots of guns.
Columbine happened when I was in High School, and it was the first school shooting that really shook the nation. At the time, all of us were told it was because these kids were bullied as ‘trench coat mafia’ or because they listened to Marilyn Manson. Even if we knew some of these stories were absurd, the official line was that these boys were kind of victims in their own right. The grim reality is that both these boys were minors from right-wing families who idolized the Third Reich and were able to easily obtain guns. This reality was censored from us.
Thirty years later, and not one single corporate media program has connected the dots.
They can’t see the water through the water.
It’s not accurate to say the United States is entering a new civil war; the new civil war began more than 30 years ago in Oklahoma City, Ruby Ridge, and Waco. At the time, these child abusers, pedophiles, and armed right-wing lunatics were portrayed as victims; Janet Reno had to step down, and the government was forever painted as the ‘bad guy.’
That was their first of many right-wing victories. But the major cognitive battle was won long ago. The right-wing has a political party that singularly controls the US government, and they have a mass movement of people, many of whom are willing to mass murder innocents on a daily basis and pay no consequences. In fact, Republicans Mike Lee, JD Vance, and others celebrated the Minnesota shooter and mocked his victims.
Imagine trying to convince someone you live in a functioning democracy where the sitting Vice President celebrates acts of terrorism against lawmakers…and not a single major media group thinks that’s worth covering for a few days.
Not a single lawmaker in DC has stated unequivocally that stopping these acts of terror should be a national priority above all else.
Trump’s political movement has captured the energy of the most unhinged and violent people among us, and sadly there are tens of millions of them. Not every Trump voter is a MAGA terrorist, but nearly every damn MAGA terrorist is a Trumpster. Those are facts; you can take it up with the FBI if you have a problem with that data.
And yet, the corporate media has spent the last week in agony over the threat—not from right-wing terrorists—but from an NYC Mayoral candidate named Zohran Mamdani who wants to have affordable rent, free buses, and cheaper groceries. This is the threat the corporate media *will actually spend a week or two obsessing about*.
You don’t live in a democracy. You live in a militarized oligarchy where the 40 richest people, who could fit on a bus, have more wealth than the bottom 60%. The government no longer has the consent or legitimacy of the people. It is now held together by masked thugs, some of whom work for the federal government, while others are free agents. Both are committed to the centuries-old cause of expulsion, extermination, and extinction.
The ‘inside team’ is building concentration camps while the ‘outside team’ targets the same people but does the job faster without courts, rules, or delay.
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