Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.

-GK Chesterton

Members of the US House of Representatives will now receive up to $10,000 to upgrade security at their homes in the face of rising threats against lawmakers, the House sergeant at arms announced last week, in yet another sign that American politics has entered a dangerous, violent new phase.

The announcement over increasing security for people in Congress came days after a man attacked Lee Zeldin, a New York congressman and Republican gubernatorial candidate, with a sharp object during a campaign event.

Two weeks before that, a man was arrested outside the home of Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, for allegedly shouting racist obscenities and threatening to kill her. Last month, authorities filed federal charges against a man who they say traveled from California to Maryland with the intent of murdering the supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh.

According to a mega-survey conducted by researchers at University of California, Davis, and released this month, one in five US adults say political violence is justified at least in some circumstances. A much smaller portion of survey respondents, 3%, believe that political violence is usually or always justified.

“There is simply no place for political violence in a healthy democracy. The increase in threats and harassment being leveled at people across our government is deeply concerning,” said Jennifer Dresden, policy advocate for the group Protect Democracy.

The acts of political violence carried out in the US are also unevenly distributed across the ideological spectrum. According to a study conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, rightwing extremists have committed about 75% of the 450 political murders that occurred in the US over the past decade. In comparison, Islamic extremists were responsible for about 20% of the murders, while leftwing extremists were blamed for 4% of the killings.

Expert argue the frequency of rightwing violence compared with leftwing violence can be partly explained by Republican leaders’ failure to condemn threatening rhetoric. “We see justifications for violence that are similar on the left and right,” said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies political conflict. “But we see incidents of violence that are vastly higher on the right and that has to do with all of the normalization of violence from leaders on the right.”

Last year, House Democrats, over near-unanimous Republican opposition, voted to strip the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments, after it was discovered that she had previously expressed support for assassinating Barack Obama and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. In November, Congressman Paul Gosar received the same punishment, as well as a House censure, after he shared an animated video depicting violence against Joe Biden and Ocasio-Cortez. Only two Republicans supported the censure.

They spit in your eye, lie to your face, and cry victim.

here is the ADL's list of 450 "political murders" if anyone is interested in it, but as expected it is useless.

It only lists 2021 incidents (so, sadly, can't go back and see if all the BLM and CHAZ deaths are included in the total - I highly doubt it), but quite a few of their "political murders" are just absurd. There's literally one case where a guy strangled his wife and it's on the list because the guy "has a white supremacist past". And another guy who drove his kids to Mexico and murdered them because he was an insane conspiracy theorist who thought "his wife had passed on 'serpent DNA' to their children, who would grow up to be monsters." But since he listed to QAnon stuff, it was an evil right wing murder event.

I still remember when Alex Stein called AOC a big booty latina and she died for the second time on the Capitol steps. This has to stop now.

Is anyone surprised? Politicians stopped pretending to represent their constituents long ago.

For some time the Democrats' game plan has been to get a permanent majority and then force their will on everyone else- hence their laser focus on "voting rights".

Their mistake is believing that when they have 51% of the vote with no chance to ever flip it back the other way, the remaining 49% are just going to shrug their shoulders and say "aw shucks I guess I just have to do whatever you want now."

The Constitution and our legal system are not suicide pacts, and if the majority seeks to oppress the minority, the minority will simply stop honoring the laws and rules being distorted to oppress them. That's one thing I never understood about the Democrats- they don't seem to fully grasp that if you take away all legal avenues for someone, they will then step outside the law.

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Awww, what a shame.

God I hope so.