What Can We Do About Political Violence?
The possibility of political violence is currently high. I do not write this to sound alarming, but let's look at a few things that have happened in the last week. Eric Greitens is running for Senate in Missouri and felt it necessary to make this ad where he holds a shotgun and joins a SWAT team while talking about how it is open season for RINO hunting. Greitens sees no problem in suggesting that killing Republicans In Name Only is acceptable because they are "corrupt." Helpfully, the Fraternal Order of Police in Missouri issued this statement where they "condemned in the strongest possible terms" the video and its message.
The Greitens ad is gross by itself, but shortly before the ad was released, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of IL, who you may remember voted to impeach Trump after the Jan 6 insurrection, tweeted out a letter his wife received. The letter claims Kinzinger will be executed for his crimes against God and country and that Kinzinger's wife and child will be joining him in hell.
And before we think this is just a national politics issue, this weekend, the Texas GOP voted to add to their platform a rejection of the 2020 election results. In Oklahoma, the wife of a state congressman has won a protective order against five individuals for sending threatening messages to her phone. Four of the individuals work with the Oklahoma Council for Public Affairs and appear to be targeting this particular state congressman because of his pro-public education stance.
None of these developments take into account Tuesday’s Jan 6 Committee testimony of Shaye Moss or Ruby Freedman, who recalled how their lives have changed since the 2020 election because of false claims that they committed election fraud. At one point, the FBI told Ms. Freeman to avoid her home.
Writing for his Dispatch newsletter, The French Press, David French suggests three things we can do to alleviate political violence, peaceful or otherwise. First, we must stop whataboutism. If our party does something wrong, we need only to call it out as wrong. To do anything else is divisive. Second, French suggests we must fight selective outrage. This is where seeing each other's shared humanity is helpful. People are not their political beliefs. They are people. Threats are wrong whether they are against people in your party or not. Third, we must reject selective curiosity. Here French mentions how many of us only want to hear about one side of a story when we get our news. He notes that many Republicans are ignorant of some of the basic details of Trump's part in attempting to overturn the 2020 election because they only get their news from one partisan source. Our news diets should, like our actual diets, be varied to ensure that we are healthy.
In short, we need to reject partisan extremism altogether. Hyper-polarization encourages even peaceful individuals to view the opposing side as the enemy. It makes us stop seeing our shared humanity and instead see pawns trying to destroy us. Politics should first be about how we work together to solve our collective problems, not a zero-sum game where there are winners and losers.
3 More Things
1) You would not think that the election race for a county coroner would be taken over by a focus on denying the 2020 election, but that is precisely what has happened in El Paso County, Colorado. In a video report (content warning: the video begins showing the work of a county coroner), VICE news tells the story of how election deniers are trying to take over the local Republican party in El Paso County, including the county coroner's race showing how dangerous things could get if election deniers win these kinds of granular level political positions.
2) Joel and Mary Rich, parents of Seth Rich, gave an interview to NPR about their settlement with Fox News and how they were taken advantage of by folks looking to push conspiracy theories about the reasons for their son's murder. The story shows how the Richs were taken advantage of by people offering help who held ulterior motives and how Fox News amplified a wild conspiracy theory and has yet to fully admit their role in spreading misinformation or apologize to the Rich family.
3) In an op-ed for the Sturgis Journal, Shayne Looper, pastor of Lockwood Community Church, traces how Christian Nationalism only takes root because the true gospel of Jesus Christ has been truncated. Looper's powerful argument is that the gospel of Christian Nationalism competes with the Gospel of Jesus Christ because both offer answers for injustice, poverty, ending oppression, and more. Looper says that "the willingness, even eagerness, of some evangelicals to embrace nationalism betrays a lack of confidence in, and even knowledge of, the gospel of Christ."
Event
Paul Miller, Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Georgetown University, will talk about his new book, The Religion of American Greatness: What's Wrong With Christian Nationalism.
Jun 30, 2022, 12:00pm Eastern