Indeed Saturday night’s a good time for violence against democracy:

The guy on the left is under indictment for trying to overturn our government. He’s also the frontrunner to be the GOP nominee in 2024. The guy on the right is openly advocating for violence to win back power. And this isn’t even news. It’s just normal… We are in a bad place. https://t.co/Kjsv3xGGnS

— Daniel Miller (@DanielMillerEsq) August 12, 2023

Political consultant Trygve Olson, and senior advisor with The Lincoln Project, in an interview published last week at Salon, notes the violence abundant with T-Rump and the Republican brand:

I have found that universally, autocratic actors – and Trump is one – use six tactics to gain and maintain power. They are Big Ideas/Big Lies, Misinformation/Disinformation, Marginalization of Opponents, Dependency of Allies, Divide and Conquer, Threats, Repression and Violence.

The assumption is that autocratic actors resort to violence often. Yet in reality, they do so only when they are most vulnerable in order to send a message about the consequences of crossing them. That is why Mike Pence was the target on Jan 6. No one was more loyal to Trump than Mike Pence, so if Trump was willing to send the mob to get Pence, what message did that send to lesser and lower-level appeasers?

We are witnessing Trump telling America that if he doesn’t get his way — regardless of democratic norms like elections or the rule of law — then you will get violence. While it isn’t exactly the same as what Putin was saying to Ukrainians, it is the same principle and concept at work. In both cases, we need to take them at their word, be vigilant and united in standing up to their attempts to overturn norms. Whether they are international in the case of Putin or domestic in the case of Trump.

And apparently, if you keep running your mouth about this shit, violence comes — from the Guardian at the end of last month:

“The indictment is radicalizing support for Trump, but that’s not the only source of radicalization,” said Robert Pape, a University of Chicago professor who led the research. “You’re seeing growing anger and radicalization on the left as well.”

The number of Americans who believe the use of force is justified to restore Trump to the White House increased by roughly 6 million in the last few months to an estimated 18 million people, according to the survey conducted by the university in late June and shared exclusively with the Guardian.

Of those 18 million people, 68% believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and 62% believe the prosecutions of Trump are intended to hurt his chances in 2024. An estimated 7% of Americans now believe violence could be necessary to restore Trump to the presidency, up from 4.5%, or 12 million people, in April.

But over the same period, Trump’s general favorability slightly decreased among Republicans, the survey found.

The university’s Chicago Project on Security & Threats (CPost) research center has been conducting Dangers to Democracy surveys of American adults on political violence and attitudes towards democracy since shortly after the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

The most recent report marks the first increase in radical, violent support for Trump since April 2022, according to Pape, who directs CPost.

“The public is more radicalized than it was in April and it’s really quite significant,” he said. “We’ve been tracking this quite a while, and this is a really big bump.”

Still, a radicalized public isn’t enough for actual violence to occur, Pape said. He compared the support to kindling, but said Trump would have to give a speech or rally inciting people to act at a certain time to light the fire, as he did in Washington DC on 6 January 2021.

Democrats, however, expressed support for political violence for a different purpose. The survey found support for the use of force to coerce members of Congress to “do the right thing” grew from 9% in January to 17% – an estimated 44 million Americans – at the end of June, with the sharpest rise among Democrats. Support for violence to restore the federal right to an abortion also increased during this time.

Everyone’s a little jumpy, but MAGA hatters are beyond frog-like.
And this the night for it:

Mad, or crazy, or insane, or not, yet here we are once again…

(Illustration out front found here.)