“I have covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world throughout my career. I have never encountered a more nihilistic, dangerous and despicable political force than the Republican Party of today. Nothing close to that,” an editor at the newspaper wrote on Twitter last week. British Financial Times.
“I agree. And I was director of the CIA,” replied, on Wednesday (17), retired Air Force General Michael Haydenwho ran the country’s intelligence agency between 2006 and 2009 — appointed by a Republican, George W. Bush — and, before that, the National Security Agency, between 1999 and 2005.
There is exaggeration in the initial statement, but the military man’s reply, which shocked some US political commentators, sets the tone for the moment of political tension the country is going through.
For a while it seemed that the investigation of the Capitol Hill attack in January 2021 and the accountability of the invaders who tried to steal Joe Biden’s election had lowered the boiling point of radical groups in the country. Until the unprecedented operation of the FBI against former President Donald Trump on the 8th, turned social media around, stirred up extremists and alarmed American institutions.
The most serious episode took place three days after the operation, when a man with an AR-15 rifle tried to break into an FBI building in Cincinnati (Ohio), exchanged fire with agents and was chased until he was killed.
The assailant was a prolific Trump supporter on Truth Social, the social network created by the former president, in which the speech against institutions finds echo. But other platforms, like Telegram and TikTok, are also full of calls to arms.
This Friday (19), Twitter banned from the network a Republican candidate in the Florida primaries who said that his project is literally to allow the population to kill public servants. “My government plan is for all Florida citizens to be allowed to shoot agents of the FBI, the IRS, the gun office and any other federal force in sight,” wrote Luis Miguel, who is seeking to be a candidate for a vacancy. in the House for a district in the southeast of the state.
Faced with mounting threats, leaders of two House committees on Friday took action on eight social networks, including Twitter, TikTok and Facebook, as well as right-wing websites such as Gettr, Rumble and Trump’s Truth, demanding “immediate action” against threats. made to federal agents.
Such was the alert that went up in Washington that federal intelligence distributed a memo to law enforcement agencies across the country that said that “the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have observed an increase in violent threats posted on social media against federal agents and buildings.” .
The document reported a dirty bomb (a radiological weapon that combines radioactive materials with common explosives) outside FBI headquarters, as well as “general appeal for ‘civil war’ and ‘armed rebellion'”.
Bruce E. Reinhart, the judge who authorized the operation, saw his address made public on far-right websites, received a barrage of death threats and increased police escort. The synagogue he attends canceled ceremonies after receiving anti-Semitic messages.
Shannon Hiller, executive director of the BDI (Bridging Divides Initiative), a group linked to Princeton University that monitors political violence in the country, says the FBI attack in Cincinnati showed that rhetoric comes at a cost in real life.
“I hope it’s a wake-up call that this isn’t a game, they’re really playing with fire. If you talk about violence against institutions, people will take it seriously,” he says. BDI has released guides on how to lower tension in conflicts, broken down by profession and by state.
In the guide for people working in elections, there are guidelines for recording any threats, creating physical separations from groups that may come into conflict, and seeking to familiarize yourself with local laws on guns and militias.
The guide also guides ordinary individuals: calming down, listening to the other side, recognizing valid points in other people’s speech and trying to respond as much as possible are some of the tips. The last guideline is capitalized: “If appeasement isn’t working, STOP AND GET HELP.”
Political violence isn’t exactly new in the US, a country that once struggled with civil war after separatist forces rose up against the federal government’s anti-slavery policies in the 19th century.
Even before the Civil War, the country had the Know-Nothing party, which was notable for mobilizing Protestant masses in violent acts, especially against Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants more inclined to the Democratic Party.
Even 19th-century white supremacism had a strong partisan component, recalls Rachel Kleinfeld, one of the country’s leading experts on political violence, in an article in the Journal of Democracy.
“Democratic Party politicians [que no século 19 tinha grupos pró-escravidão] used racial rhetoric to amplify anger and allowed violence to occur, to convince poor whites that they shared more in common with rich whites than with poor blacks, preventing populist and progressive parties from uniting poor whites and blacks in a single campaign,” he wrote, adding that lynchings of blacks were increasing at the door of elections in competitive districts.
Internal attacks also threatened the country’s security throughout the 20th century, including the assassination of then-President John Kennedy in 1963 and the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981.
More recently, episodes have become frequent that show that the US is not free from political violence. In June, for example, the FBI arrested a gunman who admitted to planning to kill Conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, citing anger at his anti-abortion and anti-gun-control views.
Today, according to a statement from the federal police, “the greatest terrorist threat to the homeland is posed by lone actors or small cells that usually become radicalized on the internet and seek to attack soft targets with easily accessible weapons.” According to the institution, the number of investigations of extremists in the US has doubled since 2020, and the attack on the Capitol last year led to unprecedented efforts in the matter, with the arrest of more than 850 involved.
Jealous of the risk of encouraging such attacks, high-ranking Republicans like Mike Pence — who was Trump’s deputy and an enemy of the Trumpists since he opposed the attempt to avoid Biden’s 2021 inauguration — and Mike Pompeo, a former secretary of state. , went public to urge supporters to focus their anger on running the institution, not on agents on the front lines.
“You can easily confront the FBI leadership without defaming these people [agentes comuns] who are trying to keep our streets safe and keep us safe from crime,” Pompeo told Fox News.
