A man in the US state of New Mexico has pleaded guilty to helping a defeated Republican candidate carry out drive-by shootings at the home of Democrats.
The defendant, Demetrio Trujillo, says the candidate, Solomon Peña, hired him after failing to win a seat in the state legislature in November 2022.
Over the following weeks, the residences of several Democratic officials were attacked in Albuquerque.
In Germany, they can ban extremist parties as a result of historic events. That’s what under consideration with the AfD. The US could persue the same route, although it is probably harder in a two-party system.
Especially since we’d effectively have to ban Republicans which would seem to be going a fascist route. As ironic as that is…
The paradox of tolerance is only a paradox when all context is removed.
“Banning a political party” completely and utterly forgets the, “… that uses more and more stochastic terrorism and acts more and more like evil groups from history that committed great atrocities” part.
Exactly. Unfortunately I don’t think most people would understand that and see banning one of two political parties are extreme overreach.
Not only would they not understand. The opposition will purposefully spread misinformation and try to confuse people. Add that people are fallible and all it takes is one shady Democrat and the whole thing backfires.
I don’t really see how that could work on its own. So the party is banned, so what? All the deplorables are still around and now they’ve got one more grievance to get riled up about. By fracturing the party you nullify their political power and that’s obviously a good thing, but it might increase the likelihood they resort to terrorism. The only solution I can see working is fixing our education system, but that doesn’t help in the short term.
The thing is, the active fascists are an extreme minority in most cases. They only have support because of the methods of disinformation and populism they use.
The majority of their base aren’t horrible people who want to see the world burn down around them. They’ve just been told that’s whats best for them by charismatic politicians.
They would have limited power when their party doesn’t have any votes.
That would be massively illegal under US law, specifically the first amendment.
True. It may have to be done in a different way.
Germany has free speech similar to the first amendment in the US, but they also have strict laws against hate speech and extremism. That is different from the US, where the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is often protected by the first amendment.