Paul Campos is right that the media framing of the attack on Paul Pelosi is better understood as an attempted assassination of the Speaker of the House and calling it an attempted murder hides what's really going on here. It will be natural for GOP leaders to dismiss the guy who did it as a mentally ill person, and there is no doubt that he is not 100% rational or mentally stable. The problem is that the constant ad hominem demonizing of Democrats finds really fertile soil among the conspiratorially minded fringes and brings them into the GOP fold.
GOP leaders have (for the most part) condemned the attack, but they will deflect from their role in creating the conditions that led to it. The GOP's transition to the GQP seems pretty complete.
Campos notes Robert Paxton's definition of fascism in his piece:
A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
That's pretty much the GOP.
If there is a hidden reservoir of Democratic voters who aren't being picked up in the polls, and Democrats overperform next week, the GQP will say that this was a "false flag" attack to bolster support for Socialists. Bank on it.
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