How conservatives use sloppy rhetoric from anarchists and right-wing troll accounts to try to justify violent attacks on Democrats
Arizona House Rep Paul Gosar has been falsely accusing Democrats of violence to try to rationalize a more violent police response from liberal protesters.
Republicans are currently engaged in a propaganda campaign to portray Democrats who are protesting the Supreme Court's recent striking down of the precedent in Roe v. Wade as violent insurrectionists. This behavior mimics when conservatives spread accusations of violence committed by liberal protesters during the George Floyd protests in 2020. In this essay, I will use Arizona House member Paul Gosar's Twitter feed as an example. I will provide several examples of the kinds of claims that Gosar is circulating, compare statements by Gosar and other conservatives to Joseph Goebbels admonition to "accuse your enemy of what you are most guilty of", and describe the likely sources of this violent rhetoric.
One of Gosar's tweets is so comical it's hard not to laugh. Gosar, a guy who insisted that the smashing of windows at the US Capitol building and violent attacks on Capitol Police were "legitimate political discourse", tries to characterize people standing politely outside a wall of glass windows with signs as "political violence".
This method is effective though because the average FOX News viewer is going to see this crowd of protesters and immediately label them a "violent mob" and "liberal thugs". They won't take the time to compare Gosar's comments about people standing outside the large glass windows with signs to his reaction to people breaking into and occupying the US Capitol building on January 6th. The obvious hypocrisy of Gosar's characterizations should be obvious to any rational person, but many people are not rational.
The "horseshoe theory of politics" is the belief that the political spectrum between right and left isn't linear, but more like a horseshoe. By this theory, center-left and center-right moderates represent the front center of the horseshoe and have a great deal in common, and as you progress out towards the end of the political spectrum, you get to radicalized individuals until eventually you get to the gap in the horseshoe, which is populated by the "free radicals", individuals who have no real consistent political affiliation or ideology, and who tend to bounce back and forth between a variety of political labels. One week they tell people they identify with the Green Party, two weeks later they claim to be a Libertarian Anarchist. Individuals who fall into that "free radical" gap, regardless of whether they're claiming to be Greens or Libertarians in any given week, have far more in common with each other than than they do with the moderates. Tendencies of the "free radicals" include a propensity towards authoritarianism and violence. In his book The True Believer: thoughts on the nature of mass movements, Erik Hoffer provided an excellent example of the horseshoe theory when he described how for Nazi leaders like senior propagandist Charles Goebbels, there was no effort to recruit Nazis from the Social-Democrats, who were the moderate party of the time. Nazis had no trouble however recruiting new party members from the Communist party, which represented that country's "far left" element. Likewise, the Communists wasted no time trying to convince Social-Democrats to adopt their more radical ideas, but found the Nazi Party membership to be a fertile recruiting ground. It should be noted that there are quite a few conservative libertarians on the payroll of dark money groups who have written essays deriding the horseshoe theory, because they don't like how an understanding of the horseshoe theory undermines conservative propaganda efforts.
A common tactic of Republican propagandists is to take comments from the "free radical" element and falsely insist those comments come from mainstream Democrats. Examples of this tactic may be found on Gosar's twitter feed. I encourage the reader to go through the accounts of other Republican lawmakers and look for the characteristics that I describe below.
Below is an example of an account that most likely originated from a troll farm. If this were 2016, I'd say it's probably Russian, but in the years since conservative dark money groups have set up their own troll farms and they share an overwhelming number of characteristics. The first sign of a troll farm account is a juvenile fascination with bodily functions and sexual acts. The messaging here is pretty much a textbook example of Russian and conservative dark money messaging. The ultimate goal of conservatives is to characterize liberals as violent so they can then use that characterization to rationalize violent responses to protesters by police, and acts of violence against liberals by right-wing extremists. Based on my own experience as an information warfare analyst, I will say that the person who posted this tweet is most likely a Russian military officer working out of the "tower" troll farm on the Kremlin campus which Robert Mueller described in his indictment of 13 Russian operatives, or it's someone who works at the Turning Point USA troll farm managed by Charlie Kirk.
A review of the @drschwavy account reveals a relatively new account (November of 2021), with less than 100 followers, and numerous calls for political violence. Relatively new accounts with few followers are typical of political agitators, as the comments they make tend to lead to frequent suspension from social media sites.
Here's another textbook example of the types of accounts that Russian and conservative dark money troll farms like to create. This account has already been terminated for violating Twitter's policy against violent threats.
Accounts with black avatars that speak in "ebonics" are a favorite of Russian trolls. The Senate Report on Russian interference in the 2016 election found that Russian troll farms had created a variety of Black identity protest groups on social media, and even managed to remotely manage several protests, with the goal of either boosting the Presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, or discouraging voters from going to the polls. One immediate red flag on this particular post which suggests it did not originate from the US is the use of the Euro symbol in place of the "e" on the word "assassinate". On European keyboards, the Euro symbol replaces the dollar sign, it's a simple shift key combination. On a standard American keyboard, the method for creating the Euro symbol is to hold down the Alt-key and then enter alt-code "0128". The key combination to do this on an Apple or Android phone is even more complex. It seems unlikely an American user would choose to make such a commplex letter substitution on the fly, and supports the thesis this comment came from overseas. Once again, the goal is to delegitimize liberals, and to try to rationalize violence against political opponents, by falsely insisting those political opponents are calling for violence themselves.
While there will be a handful of Americans who claim (at least temporarily) to be liberals, and who espouse calls for political violence, it is important to remember that those individuals occupy the "free radical" span of the horseshoe of American politics, and attempts by right-wing extremists like Paul Gosar to paint that sentiment as the view of mainstream Democrats is absolutely false. The accounts that are telling people that voting is useless, and that only violence will solve America's political problems are run primarily by Russian and conservative dark-money troll farms. Many of them are also likely to be sock-puppet accounts owned by Boogaloos or Proud Boys. A tiny handful will be run by socially frustrated individuals who fall into the "free radical" gap of the horseshoe of politics. What you will not find, are large numbers of moderate Democrats insisting that elections are useless or that political violence is a viable solution.
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