Over the weekend, Republican Senator and Trump sycophant Lindsey Graham said, “And I’ll say this, if there is a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information after the Clinton debacle … there will be riots in the street.” Leaving aside why these two cases aren’t alike at all, the implicit threat of violence is obvious.

Imagine if Senator Warren or Sanders were to say, “If Donald Trump isn’t found guilty, then there will be riots in the street*.” Actually, since Graham is supposed to be one of the more reasonable Republicans (I know…), this would be like Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar talking about riots. Democrats, despite their many sins, do not use the implicit threat of violence, backed by allied paramilitaries, to influence the political system. Jacobin, the socialist journal, doesn’t call or hint at violence to achieve its policy goals (by the way, Republican assholes, you actually can call Jacobin socialists. They are socialists. Also, protests are not violence).

Yet the political press corps threw a hissy fit over Biden’s correct use of ‘semi-fascist’ to describe part of the Republican Party, when that is an accurate description of a political movement that implies violence, even implicitly. The inability of our political press corps to call things by their proper names (to use Confucious’ aphorism) will get people hurt or dead.

As we often do, we’ll end with Comrade Thers:

Anyway, what we have here is a situation where a relatively small minority of Americans are claiming the right, ultimately backed up by their possession of weapons, to define the True Nature of American Freedom…

How this differs in any important philosophical regard from the position, of, say, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, I cannot say.

How it differs in any practical sense, well (McVeigh cough) who knows.

*Not sure where else riots happen, but we’ll go with the phrase.