Rhetorical Devices
“Pipe bombs were sent to former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as to CNN’s offices in New York, sparking an intense investigation on Wednesday into whether a bomber is going after targets that have often been the subject of right-wing ire.” From the NYT: Pipe Bombs Sent to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and CNN Offices. There’s no doubt that the constant sowing of political, racial, and gender-based hate has taken a toll on the collective American psyche. Now we need to ask ourselves if that same fear and resentment mongering is directly leading to hate crimes and today’s intercepted pipe bombs. It’s a question that’s no longer merely rhetorical.
+ “Recently, Donald Trump blamed Soros for the protests against Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, when asked if he believed that Soros was paying the protesters, said, ‘I tend to believe it.'” The rank anti-semitism that has fueled the alt-right’s George Soros obsessions didn’t come out of thin air. As you can see from the quotes above, it comes right from the top. The New Yorker: The Bombs Addressed to Obama, Clinton, and Soros, and the History of Anti-Soros Hate-Mongering.
+ “If political rhetoric in this country continues on its current trajectory, people are going to start getting killed, and then inevitably, the violence will escalate. Perhaps last year’s shootings at the congressional baseball game and today’s apparent assassination attempts on the Clintons and Obamas were the isolated acts of deranged individuals. But with many thousands of people distraught and despairing over politics in a nation as heavily armed as ours, the metaphorical ‘mobilization’ already under way could become literal more easily than we might normally imagine.” Ed Kilgore: Violent Political Rhetoric Can Feed Political Violence.
