Beware the Ides of March... Now More Than Ever

Could the Ides of March be more than a mere footnote from ancient history, and instead, a mirror reflecting the precarious nature of our modern political climate? I'm Jesse White, and this episode cuts to the heart of political violence in America, drawing unsettling parallels with the assassination of Julius Caesar. We dissect the ways in which such violence, spearheaded by far-right factions as Pennsylvania data suggests, not only intimidates but actively suppresses potential political contenders. And as we scrutinize a disturbing event in Kansas where violence against a representation of President Biden was almost celebrated, the question looms: What does this signify for the future of political discourse and democracy itself?

As the dust settles on the Ides of March, we confront the chilling embrace of extremist rhetoric within Republican campaigns. With a GOP nominee in North Carolina making waves for endorsing radical measures, we must ask ourselves about the ripple effects on our political system's integrity. This episode is a crucial listen for anyone vested in safeguarding civil discourse and our institutions' foundations, dissecting the alarming trend of aggression as a political tool and its potential to dangerously reshape campaign strategies moving forward. Join me on this vital exploration as we confront the stark reality of political radicalism and its implications for the political landscape we thought we knew.

Learn more about the Keystone Reckoning Project at www.keystonereckoning.com

Chapters

• 0:30 Political Violence in America
• 8:31 Republican Extremism in American Politics

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:30

Beware the Ides of March, words that carry just as much meaning today, if not more so, than they did 2068 years ago. Good afternoon, my name is Jesse White and you are listening to the Keystone Recording Podcast. It is March 15th 2024, as previously referenced the Ides of March, so let's do a quick history lesson. The Ides of March what does it mean and why does it matter? So the Ides of March obviously refers to the day of March 15th and it goes back to the day that Julius Caesar was assassinated on the floor of the Roman Senate by Roman senators. It was initially designed or conceived to be a move by the Senate to save the flailing Roman Republic, mainly because Julius Caesar had become increasingly autocratic. He started to make himself a state that he was above the law. He started rejecting or approving all candidates for local elections. He was putting his face and image on money. He was declaring himself to be bigger than the state. Sound like anybody we might know. I don't know. I mean that's crazy, right. You would never have somebody like that in the state age.

Speaker 1: 1:51

So the Senate thought that they had to kill the dictator on the rise before he claimed absolute power. Interesting fact, the term dictator actually comes from the Roman Empire, the Roman Republic, and it was actually an office that could be given to somebody in the Roman Republic, where they were allowed and encouraged to take absolute power for a period of generally 10 years, the idea being that, unlike the console position in the Roman Republic, the dictator would be able to take the reins in times of great crisis where decisive action was needed, and they would be able to do what needed to be done without the typical bureaucracy, which is kind of exactly what we view a dictator to be now. But it was by design. So Caesar is assassinated. Instead of saving the Republic, it effectively ends the Republic. The people rise up because at that point, they had been so indoctrinated that they believed that Caesar was their guy, and there was a split, a civil war, to discern who was in power, ultimately culminating in the second triumvirate, of which emerged from there Octavius, which was Julius Caesar's nephew. Octavius becomes the first emperor of Rome, takes on the name Augustus, ushers in an era of what they call Pax Romana 200 years of peace and prosperity.

Speaker 1: 3:32

So I don't know if we want to take the analogy all the way to the end, because I don't think in this instance, of what we're facing in America here today. It's going to have the same quote happy ending that we're looking at in terms of the Roman Empire, but it goes back to the idea and let's reclaim the narrative here. It goes back to the idea of political violence, and political violence is something that we've all seen firsthand on January 6th 2021. That was obviously a very dramatic example of it, but it is out there in ways and places that we don't even see. I think so. For example, I went to there's a site called the arm conflict location and event data project and it's a nonpartisan, data driven site. It says their tagline is bring clarity to crisis, and I went and looked on there and they chart using data visualization. They chart political violence of various kinds.

Speaker 1: 4:35

I looked at just Pennsylvania. Since the 2020 election through today, there have been 77 acts of political violence in Pennsylvania. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean straight up attacks, but it means hate groups, it means riots, it means things of that nature. Of those 77, 75 of them have been attributed to far-right groups, including protests, riots and other strategic developments. So it's ironic because the big thing that we heard going back to 2020 was Antifa and they're violent and they're in the streets and whatever, but the data bears out what we already knew to be true, right, that it is the Republicans, the far-right wingers, who are the ones who are ready, willing and let's not kid ourselves eager, in a lot of instances, to resort to political violence.

Speaker 1: 5:40

Why so? There are a couple reasons for this. I think the biggest one is obviously intimidation, but not in the way that we may commonly think. To me, it's a good way. By making our political environment so dangerous, it's really what it is, right, we're making it dangerous. It drives away good candidates for office, undeniably, right. We talked about it in yesterday's podcast, with Brian Cutler and Magga Crazy showing up at his house when his kids were there, and he is a conservative Republican, so you can imagine how, what they feel about Democrats. So they don't hesitate because the idea is they can bully their way into control, right, and the best way to win an election is to keep a good candidate out, and that's what you see.

Speaker 1: 6:44

Now, obviously, there's no way to quantify that, because you can't base, you can't do a data analysis on people that don't run for office, but I think it's fairly obvious, right. I mean, I think back to you know, I had some experience with threats and insanity that went around during my tenure in office. My experiences were not typical, but I look back on that and you know, having kids there's no way I would have put up with any of that. No way, it wasn't worth it. So it matters. It matters a lot.

Speaker 1: 7:21

So let's talk about the current state of political violence in this country and in the state. But there were a couple of stories that came out just in like the last 24 hours that I think are relevant and really kind of encapsulate what we're trying to talk about here. The first one is comes out of Kansas, where there were two top Kansas Republican Party officials are facing internal calls to resign over a viral video online showing people at a fundraiser kicking and beating a mannequin wearing a mask of Joe Biden. And why? Why, I mean is that if that's what you need to do to get your party fired up is to beat the living daylight out of a mannequin with the mask of an 81 year old man on it, like what the hell are you doing? Like, honestly, what the hell are you doing? And you know, and the thing that matters here is that it was a county party in Johnson County, kansas, the county party fundraiser.

Speaker 1: 8:31

And the thing that I think you really need to know here is that when it became, when it came out, nobody rushed to condemn it. There was a lot of finger pointing and, oh, you're creating a false narrative to try to make me look bad and divide the party or whatever. But, like, talk about bearing the lead, they totally went into cover, their own butt mode and they decided to just try to downplay the important part, which is they were having a fundraiser based upon physical violence against the President of the United States. So, and to give you an idea, like to give you an idea of what this event was like, it says the Friday fundraiser featured 70s rocker Ted Nugent. So you know, right there it's like it's a high end affair, right, like if Ted Nugent rolls in. You know, like you're rolling out the red carpet, like the red red carpet. Let's see, there were tickets ranging from $90 for students which is nice, you know, I like that. They're making it affordable for the young people to $300 for premier seats.

Speaker 1: 9:46

The man had given with the Biden mask also worried, let's go branded T-shirt using a slogan that's become conservative code for a vulgar insult directed at the present. Well, obviously, you know that is so that is. You know, that just falls into this idea of you. Know it's funny, right? Oh, we're gonna beat the crap out of Joe Biden, and then you know, when they get questioned on it, it's the oh well, no one would ever really do it, except that's not even a dog whistle, that's just like a whistle whistle, right, like you're putting the party stamp of approval on violence against the president. So that's bad. This one is worse. Okay, so North Carolina the GOP nominee to run the North Carolina school system. Let this one sink in for a second. The North Carolina school system. They elect a superintendent there. The school system has an $11 billion budget.

Speaker 1: 10:51

A woman by the name of Michelle Morrow, conservative activist, last week upset the incumbent superintendent in a Republican primary, expressed support in 2020 for the televised execution of Barack Obama and suggested killing then president and elect Joe Biden. She's also made disturbing suggestions about executing prominent Democrats for treason Now, and, of course, she doesn't say why they committed treason. They just they committed treason because she doesn't like them, and those people included Ilhan Omar, governor Roy Cooper, hillary Clinton, chuck Schumer, anthony Fauci, bill Gates. I mean, she was like she didn't really discriminate, to be fair. I mean, she wanted like to just execute everybody. She said, quote, in a tweet I prefer a pay-per-view of him in front of a firing squad. I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.

Speaker 1: 11:49

She didn't just want to kill him, she wanted to televise it, presumably to get ad revenue. I don't know, I don't know what I mean. Would that be like the MAGA Super Bowl? Right? Like, oh, we need to tune in to the execution to see what the cool commercials are. Right, like I don't know, in 2020, december 2020, she suggested killing Biden, saying that he would, because he would ask Americans to wear a mask for 100 days. Never, quote, never. We need to follow the Constitution's advice.

Speaker 1: 12:23

And now we're all caps, cause. You know we're serious. Now. Kill all traders. Now, what's interesting there, though? If I could just be a Gramer-Snob for a minute. Kill all traders, but kill isn't all caps, all is all lowercase. And then, traders is all caps, again, with three exclamations. Point hashtag justice for America. I gotta know why all was in lowercase. I mean, okay, again, I guess I'm getting off the pointer, but I gotta know that that's really interesting, but the point being that she was endorsed by conservative school boards. She's called Public School Socialism Centers and indoctrination centers. She advocated for a constitutional amendment to abolish the State Board of Education to set policies and procedures for public schools. Do we not see a problem here that you know? She promoted QAnon, all the I'm not even gonna keep going into all the things. Right, because we get what she is. She won. North Carolina is a reliably red state. She's probably gonna win the general, one would think. So what are we saying here?

Speaker 1: 13:41

People like this who and we alluded to yesterday run to the far right in a Republican primary in reliably Republican areas, are generally rewarded for their conduct. And the fact that this woman has already won one election and has poised to win another on the back of, you know, such hateful, violent rhetoric, the problem there is. It is now the template for future Republican success. People are going to look at that and say, oh well, that's how she got elected, that's how I'll get elected. And what you've done is you've taken the bar. You've not lowered the bar, you've just eviscerated the bar. The bar is gone and it is a race to the bottom. You will be rewarded the way you are rewarded, the way that you rise up in the party, is by being the most extreme, the most violent.

Speaker 1: 14:45

You're seeing this in the North Carolina governor's race right now. Mark Robbins, I believe, is his name. We'll talk about him another day but the point is it's only getting worse because, unfortunately, it works and it's because the people at the top, from Trump on down, who calls the January 6th insurrection as heroes and paints them out to be victims, and they push that narrative all the way down because they know that the more violent and the more poised to spring into action these people are, the better it is for the people at the top. They are useful idiots, but they are useful violent idiots. It's going to get worse before it gets better and the only way it gets better is if the people at the top on the Republican side actually do something to call it out and stamp it down, because when the Democrats do it, it's playing into what they want. Obviously, you have to denounce the violence. I'm not saying not to, but it plays into what they want. They have dehumanized Democrats to the point where it just doesn't matter. They are not opponents, they are enemies. They are enemies of the state in their mind and you read it right there in that tweet Democrats do what the Constitution says and execute these people.

Speaker 1: 16:24

I do have a degree in political science. I do have a law degree. I don't seem to remember the passage in the Constitution that says that you should execute the President of the United States. I don't even remember the conditions under which that would be cool. This is where we're at and unfortunately it's a blueprint for where we're going and that should, quite frankly, scare the hell out of all of us. So on this, the Ides of March, as we look back and we like to think that we have evolved so much over the past 2068 years, you have to wonder have we? This has been the Keystone Recording Podcast. Have a great weekend. We'll see you again on Monday.