« If institutions and individuals do more to make it unacceptable in American public life, organized violence in the service of political objectives can still be pushed to the fringes. » New York Times Editorial Board, it doesn’t matter how “unacceptable” political violence is in American political life if it is the only thing which works
it is unsurprising that people who work in media would place an outsized importance on the role of rhetoric, but our current crisis is not the result of savvy Republicans using strong language to get votes, but the fact that many Americans do not see a future for themselves in this country, and some segment of them believe that through fascism that state of affairs can be changed
you have to do the work of building for them an alternate future if you want them to take a different stance. simply negating their current position is not enough
the opinion of many Americans, whether they are fascists, climate activists, leftists, or antiracists, is that the US Government does not currently have the capacity to enact that alternate future
responses to this vary, but of course the fascists respond with fascism
political violence is a symptom of a failing democracy, not its cause