"These acts and threats of violence are not associated with any one set of partisan or ideological views."
Seriously: Say what?!?
It's totally understandable that the Attorney General and the Department of Justice want to appear even-handed in their administration of the law, particularly after Bill Barr lied about and then redacted the Mueller Report and used the DOJ to punish Michael Cohen when he "ratted out" Trump, among other things.
And Garland presides over a DOJ that probably has as many Republicans as Democrats working for it, including a significant number of Trump administration holdouts.
But to suggest that political violence and an effort to end our form of government - the topic of his speech given in the runup to Sedition Day - was "not associated with any one set of partisan or ideological views" is the most tragic form of both-siderism.
Perhaps it's because what Betsy Woodruff Swan is reporting for Politico is right: that nobody in the Justice Department is seriously looking at Trump and his inner circle.
I had hoped that Garland would have the courage to call out the rightwing white supremacist violence specifically associated with Donald Trump and his followers in the Republican Party, and condemn it. His own FBI, after all, has already identified it as America's number one terrorist threat.
I tweeted about this yesterday:
I can't believe I just heard Garland say, essentially, that political violence is a problem on both sides. This "both-sides-ism" is a cancer in our political & media arenas that simply gives more license to neofascists who advocate, threaten & use violence. I'm astonished.January 5th 2022
627 Retweets2,516 LikesThe avalanche of trolls who attacked me were almost uniformly trying to conflate the January 6 attack on our democracy with the "BLM/Antifa" outliers who engaged in local vandalism to protest police violence.
The two are completely different issues, but clearly this is now the Trump faction of the Republican Party's strategy.
Whenever patriotic Americans mention the Sedition Day effort to end our form of government, Trump apologists will shout about protests against police killing unarmed Black men as if the two were identical or even similar.
They are not.
Garland has a tough job. Our nation is under attack not just by neofascists within but by several foreign governments giving them encouragement and online support through armies of trolls on the outside. They're working together to bring down democratic governments across the world, and aren't shy about it.
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