Arizona Lunatic Paul Gosar did what?
He tweeted a doctored anime video that shows him killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, haw haw, very normal healthy sensible behavior.
Twitter attached a hateful conduct warning to Gosar’s tweet, which also showed the sword-wielding congressman appearing to threaten Joe Biden and was also posted to Instagram.
It’s not just “hateful” conduct though. That would be less alarming. It’s “get people killed” conduct. It’s incitement conduct.
The roughly 90-second video is an altered version of a Japanese anime series, interspersed with shots of border patrol officers and migrants at the US border with Mexico.
Because migrants at the southern border are a reason to get very very racist.
In one section, characters whose faces are replaced with those of Gosar and fellow extremist Republicans Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado are seen fighting other characters.
Again with the palliative language. “Extremist” is soothing; what they are is violent. This isn’t the stupid kind of “violent” like saying feminists are “violent” because they don’t think men can be women, this is the genuine kind of violent that incites people to perform actual literal physical lethal violence. This isn’t a game. January 6 was no game.
The Yale historian Joanne Freeman, author of The Field of Blood, a well-regarded history of violence in Congress before the civil war, wrote: “Threats of violence lead to actual violence. They clear the ground. They cow opposition. They plant the idea. They normalize it. They encourage it. They maim democracy. And run the risk of killing it.”
The US is in very deep trouble.
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12 responses to “Preparing the ground”
But of course people are overreacting, right? From The Washington Post’s story:
Oh, well, it’s all a joke. Ha ha.
The left doesn’t understand meme culture? Have they ever accessed the wacky left, the TAs? Of course, they aren’t really “left”, they are oppressive, but they are considered left by nearly everyone.
The left have no joy? I heard this from a friend who pitied me because as an atheist, I had no joy. While the left can get too intense, and does a lot of the time, I have seen plenty of joy. And there are few as joyless as Mitch McConnell or Donald Trump.
Wow. I’m glad to hear that! Before she said that, I assumed it was all really really real!
Sorry, violence is violence whether done on foot with swords/guns, or from the air with light sabers.
So he’s outed himself as childish, hateful, and violent. By all means double down, it’s harmless fun. No need to do the right thing now and delete it, there are copies of it everywhere. Yeah, the sun was in his eyes.
Um, that’s a quick way to annoy fans of Shingeki no Kyojin (進撃の巨人).
Even more racist than it seems at first glance. The migrants replace “titans” (kyojin), which are mindless, ravening monsters whose forms are twisted, sexless mockeries of the human body. Every person cowering within the walls of the single remaining human city lives in constant terror of the titan threat.
Watch the real thing. What’s so moving about that particular opening sequence is the imagery of powerless humans rising e pluribus unum into the sky to do hopeless battle against an implacable, unstoppable, apocalyptic enemy. It’s humanity refusing to go gentle into that good night.
Is he going for the anime fan’s votes or what? Maybe his kids put him up to it, you know, the ones that are too young to vote. :P
My teenage son made me watch the show with him (but he still hasn’t held up his end of the deal: watch LOTR with me). I don’t know if he knows who Gosar is, but I’m pretty sure he’d be on AOC’s side.
How did you not get him to watch the animated versions of Tolkien when he was little? The Rankin-Bass adaptations were and are absolutely wonderful for children. It’s just too bad we never got Fellowship or Two Towers installments in the same watercolor storybook style, because the art design was genius. Gandalf’s voice will forever be John Huston’s for me, and I still find myself singing Frodo of the Nine Fingers.
Lazy parenting, I guess. (Our father read the books to each of the five of us when we were kids; that tradition ended when I decided to start taking showers rather than baths.)
Identifying as Eren is a bit like identifying as Shakespeare’s MacBeth. It demonstrates that Gosar fundamentally didn’t get what the story was about.
#1 WaM
Ohhhhh, okay then. I’m sure the right has the same idea when there is any violence presented in a fictional setting against conservative figures.
Oops of course not. They are without shame in their willing and even enthusiastic lack of consistency.
@Holms,
Well, it’s a complex issue, and clearly you’re missing the complexion of it.
;)