The best explanation I’ve seen of how politicians like Trump feed violence

[DonViejo]

“When you shout BREAKING POINT over and over again, you don’t get to be surprised when someone breaks.”

by Dara Lind on June 17, 2016, 2:30 p.m. ET

If you’re worried about the effect Donald Trump’s brand of xenophobic populism is having on America, you should be paying attention to what’s going on in Britain right now. On Thursday, Jo Cox, a 41-year-old rising star in Parliament who was known for her support for Syrian refugees, was murdered by one of her constituents.

-snip-

Alex Massie, a columnist for the Spectator (a conservative British magazine), wrote a beautiful column in the wake of Cox’s murder. Massie explains, better than any commentator I’ve read, the relationship between apocalyptic rhetoric and panic-induced violence:

When you encourage rage you cannot then feign surprise when people become enraged. You cannot turn around and say, ‘Mate, you weren’t supposed to take it so seriously. It’s just a game, just a ploy, a strategy for winning votes.’

When you shout BREAKING POINT over and over again, you don’t get to be surprised when someone breaks. When you present politics as a matter of life and death, as a question of national survival, don’t be surprised if someone takes you at your word. You didn’t make them do it, no, but you didn’t do much to stop it either.

Sometimes rhetoric has consequences. If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their problem is they’re too slow to realise any of this is happening, that their problem is they’re not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place, something or someone is going to snap. And then something terrible is going to happen.

We can’t control the weather but, in politics, we can control the climate in which the weather happens.

-snip-

full article
http://www.vox.com/2016/6/17/11962618/right-wing-violence-politicians

[Salviati]

1. Stochastic terrorism - the script is all too familiar...

Ratcheting up the rhetoric, increasing the pressure until some unstable nutjob who's been mainlining the hate and bigotry snaps and goes on a rampage, at which point most of the right wingers, nationalists, and bible thumpers will reign it in for a few days, barely managing to eke out desires to pray for the victims, before the accusations of politicizing the tragedy.