Standing in the North Carolina woods, Chris Arthur warned about a coming civil war. Videos he posted publicly on YouTube bore titles such as “The End of America or the Next Revolutionary War.” In his telling, the U.S. was falling into chaos and there would be only one way to survive: kill or be killed.
Arthur was posting during a surge of far-right extremism in the years leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He wrote warcraft training manuals to help others organize their own militias. And he offered sessions at his farm in Mount Olive, North Carolina, that taught how to kidnap and attack public officials, use snipers and explosives and design a “fatal funnel” booby trap to inflict mass casualties.
While he continued to post publicly, military and law enforcement ignored more than a dozen warnings phoned in by Arthur’s wife’s ex-husband about Arthur’s increasingly violent rhetoric and calls for the murder of police officers. This failure by the Guard, FBI and others to act allowed Arthur to continue to manufacture and store explosives around young children and train another extremist who would attack police officers in New York state and lead them on a wild, two-hour chase and gun battle.
Arthur isn’t an anomaly. He is among more than 480 people with a military background accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2017 through 2023, including the more than 230 arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Bolding added, archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/OOU0a
e; added a final period to the AP’s headline because it looks weird without one
I was saying that just because politics featured some violence at some point, does not necessarily mean that we should associate it with violence. Violence is a thing that exists. Politics is a thing that exists. They can exist independently, or together, it varies. In some places very heavy repression is used, and the process is extremely violent very regularly. In other places at other times, the process is peaceful and people agreeably settle their differences. It just depends.
In America, where I am, the process is usually nonviolent. It does not have to be nonviolent, but we really have nothing to gain from adding violence to the mix. We’ll get the same varied sorts of results, except people will die in the process. No gain, just loss, since violence in no way ensures you will get some leader or system that is superior to another leader or system. I point to the large number of times a revolution has ushered in yet another shitty dictator who years later ended up hated by his people and eventually deposed as evidence of this principle.
And yea np.