US experts once again highlight connections between the radicals of the Republican party, extremist movements and disinformation platforms
MADRID, 6 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
In mid-October, the group of experts Soufan Group warned in a report about the possibility of a new outbreak of political violence during the November legislative elections in the United States thanks to the situation of “hyperpartisanship” that the country is going through, in particular the fed by ultra-right social networks like Gab or Truth Social.
This state of tension reached its maximum expression in the attack suffered on the 28th of that month by Paul Pelosi, husband of the Democratic president of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, at the hands of the conspiracy theorist David DePape, who in his day already reject the electoral defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 elections.
Pelosi, 82, had to be admitted after DePape, who was really looking for the top leader of the Democratic party in the lower house with the intention of “breaking her knees”, gave her several hammer blows that caused her a fracture of skull.
The reactions within the Republican rivals were mostly characterized by their immediate condemnation of the event and have denied that this attack was the product of their rhetoric against the Democratic Party since the arrival of Joe Biden in the White House, as they were about to introduce shortly after a more or less hidden attack against the president of the United States.
Beneath the public reactions, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) revealed through one of its studies, published last Friday, the close link between the new American extreme right, the most radical elements of the Republican party and the prevailing disinformation on conservative platforms and media such as The Gateway Pundit or the Santa Monica Observer, which have spent the last few days spreading false information about the attack.
The South African tycoon Elon Musk, brand new “head of Twitter”, came to spread a false news from the ‘Observer’ that linked Paul Pelosi with his aggressor; a lie also spread by the extremist Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who expressed her rejection of the attack before blaming Biden for the proliferation of violence in American cities, and a lie that also circulated on the Truth Social platform of former President Donald Trump, who expressed himself about the attack in practically the same terms as the congresswoman.
All this, taking into account that Pelosi is one of the Democratic figures most demonized by the conservative movement. Former President Trump has shared doctored videos of the Democratic leader designed to question her state of mind, retweeted accusations that she was “drinking alcohol on the job” and addressed her as “Crazy Nancy,” “Nervous Nancy,” or “Nervous Nancy.” Nancy Antoinette”.
In 2018 and 2019, Taylor Greene “liked” a Facebook post suggesting that “a bullet to the head” would be the most convenient way to end Pelosi’s presidency, and claimed in a video of Facebook that Pelosi was guilty of treason, and recalled that it is “a crime punishable by death.”
The result: “By the time the week of the attack was over, hardly anyone on the American right, whether an outspoken extremist or an ostensibly respectable conservative commentator, acknowledged that the attack was an act of political violence,” according to the SPLC’s findings.
At the time, the Soufan think tank described the current situation as the result of many issues of contention between Democrats and Republicans during the first two years of the Biden administration, such as the conservative Supreme Court’s decisions against abortion, the fight against pandemic, the economic crisis derived from the war in Ukraine (especially the rise in inflation), the legal proceedings against the participants in the insurrection of January 6, 2021 in the Capitol or the open investigation against the former president.
A speech, in short, that, according to the group, is translating into a cultural and ideological war fueled by the “increasing threat of Christian nationalism”, an identity that “welcomes conspiracy theorists, apocalyptic and members of armed militias” united by the specter of a second civil war in the country.
“By the end of 2022, talk of a possible civil war in the United States is already a completely normal issue,” the group warned in its report, “and those who call for calm or try to present moderate rhetoric have been marginalized.”
