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Flamethrower, Comments About Book Burning Ignite Political Firestorm in US

A longshot candidate for governor in the U.S. state of Missouri and his supporters describe his use of a flamethrower at a recent “Freedom Fest” event outside St. Louis as no big deal. They said it was a fun moment for fellow Republicans who attended, and that no one talked about burning books as he torched a pile of cardboard boxes.

But after the video gained attention on social media, State Sen. Bill Eigel said he would burn books he found objectionable, and that he’d do it on the lawn outside the governor’s mansion. He later said it was all a metaphor for how he would attack the “woke liberal agenda.”

“From a dramatic sense, if the only thing in between the children in the state of Missouri and vulgar pornographic material like that getting in their hands is me burning, bulldozing or launching (books) into outer space, I’m going to do that,” Eigel said in an interview with The Associated Press. “However, I would I make the point that I don’t believe it’s going to come to that.”

Experts say Eigel’s use of the flamethrower is a sign that rhetoric and imagery previously considered extreme are now being treated as normal in American politics. While Eigel didn’t actually destroy books, his later statement about burning ones he deemed offensive ratcheted up fears that the video’s circulation and his words on social media could help take the U.S. to a darker place.

“The slippery slope is that everything is a joke — everything can be kind of waved away,” said Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor of public communications at American University in Washington. “Everything can be seen as just rhetoric until it can’t anymore and people start using it as an excuse to actually hurt people.”

The 30-second video that put Eigel at the center of a social media storm is from a Sept. 15 event for Republicans at a winery near tiny Defiance, Missouri, about 48 kilometers west of St. Louis. He and another state senator shot long streams of flame onto a pile of cardboard in front of an appreciative crowd.

The video posted on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter, caught the attention of Jonathan Riley, a liberal activist in Durham, North Carolina, who posted Sunday that it showed “Missouri Republicans at a literal book burning,” though he’d later walk that statement back to a “metaphorical” book burning.

“It fit a narrative that they wanted to put out there,” Freedom Fest organizer Debbie McFarland said about claims that Eigel burned books. “It just didn’t happen to be the truth.”

Some of Republicans’ skepticism over the online outrage stems from Eigel’s status as a dark horse candidate to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Mike Parson. The best known candidates for the August 2024 GOP primary are Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe.

The Ashcroft campaign declined to respond to the video, the uproar it caused or Eigel’s follow-up statement. Kehoe’s campaign had no official comment, but Gregg Keller, a Republican consultant working on Kehoe’s campaign, said Eigel’s promise to burn objectionable books is “typical electioneering hyperbole.”

He added, “I would challenge you to find me any non-psychotic Republican who has actually burned” a book deemed objectionable by conservatives.

Eigel posted on the X platform that his flamethrower stunt was meant to show what he would do to the “swamp” in the state capital of Jefferson City, but “let’s be clear, you bring those woke pornographic books to Missouri schools to try to brainwash our kids, and I’ll burn those too — on the front lawn of the governor’s mansion.”

Republicans across the U.S. are backing conservative efforts to purge schools and libraries of materials with LGBTQ+ themes or books with LGBTQ+ characters. The issue resonates with Republicans in Missouri. An AP VoteCast survey of Missouri voters in the 2022 midterm elections showed that more than 75% of those voting for GOP candidates thought the K-8 schools in their community were teaching too much about gender identity or sexual orientation.

The outcry also comes after Missouri’s Republican-supermajority Legislature banned gender-affirming health care for transgender minors and required K-12 and college students to play on sports teams that match their sex assigned at birth. Eigel has sponsored measures to ban schools from teaching about gender identity or gender-affirming care and to make it a crime to perform in drag in public.

Aggressive and even violent imagery have long been a part of American politics. It can sometimes backfire.

Large guns have been a popular prop for some Republicans. Last year, a Black candidate seeking the Republican nomination in an Arizona congressional district aired an ad in which he held an AR-15 rifle as people wearing Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods tried to storm a home. He finished last.

In Missouri in 2016, Republican candidate and ex-Navy SEAL Eric Greitens ran an ad featuring him firing 100 rounds from a machine gun on his way to winning the governor’s race. After a sex and invasion-of-privacy scandal in 2018 forced him to resign, he attempted a political comeback in the state’s 2022 U.S. Senate race, running an ad featuring him with a shotgun declaring he was going hunting for RINOs, or Republicans in Name Only. He finished third in the primary.

Flamethowers also have popped up previously. In 2020, a GOP congressional candidate in Alabama showed her support for then-President Donald Trump by torching a mockup of the first articles of impeachment against him. She finished third in the primary. And in South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem’s staff gave her a flamethrower last year as a Christmas gift.

Experts who study political extremism said images involving fire or bonfires have long been associated with extremist groups. Eigel’s critics quickly posted online images involving the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi book burnings before World War II.

Evan Perkoski, an associate political science professor at the University of Connecticut, said it’s been “traditional” for extremist groups to use images of fire to “simultaneously intimidate people and signal their intentions to destroy what exists and to rebuild or start over.”

“We’ve seen this time and time again from groups across countries where groups will burn effigies, crosses and other items, or even just film themselves around large conflagrations,” he said in a email to AP. “A large part of their motivation is the symbolic, frightening nature of fire.”

Experts continue to worry about how social media can spread extreme or violent images or words to potentially millions of people, increasing the chances of a single person seeing the material as a call to violence.

Javed Ali, a former senior FBI counterterrorism official who’s now an associate professor at the University of Michigan, said law enforcement agencies struggle with thwarting homegrown political violence. He said the sheer volume of social media postings means, “Sometimes, you almost have to get lucky in order to stop it.”

Braddock, the American University professor, said that after portraying a flamethrower as a weapon against “the woke agenda,” Eigel’s supporters don’t need “that big a leap of logic” to see it as a tool for settling actual political grievances. Talking about book burning enough can plant the idea in people’s minds so that “people think it’s actually a righteous thing to do.”

Ali added: “That’s a pretty dangerous game to play.”

Eigel said he’s not worried the video will inspire violence in “reasonable, everyday Missourians,” which he said is the majority of people. But he said he’s concerned about the number of threats he, his family and his staff have received as a result.
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US Joins List of Top 50 Conflict-Ridden Countries

The United States is the only Western nation among the world’s 50 most conflict-ridden countries, according to new research that measures political violence around the globe.

The U.S. ranking is driven by rising levels of political violence and a proliferation of far-right groups in the country in recent years, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, or ACLED. 

ACLED, a data collection, analysis and crisis mapping nonprofit based in the U.S. state of Wisconsin, gathers data for more than 240 countries and territories around the world. In the 12 months to early September, it recorded more than 139,000 incidents of political violence worldwide, an increase of 27% over the prior year.

The ACLED Conflict Index ranks every country and territory according to four indicators — deadliness, danger to civilians, geographic diffusion and armed group fragmentation — using data collected for the past year.

While most countries saw at least one incident of political violence over the past year, 50 were ranked the highest in terms of their levels of conflict, receiving ratings of “extreme,” “high,” or “turbulent.”

Myanmar, with the highest number of armed groups in the world, topped the list with a rating of “extreme,” followed by Syria and Mexico.

The U.S. was rated as “turbulent,” along with 19 other countries, mostly in Africa and Asia, including Libya, Ghana and Chad.

Sam Jones, head of communications at ACLED, said the U.S. placement on the list shows that political violence is not confined to poor or nondemocratic countries.

“The U.S. is in the same turbulent index category as other countries that might be more traditionally understood as ‘conflict-affected’ like the Central African Republic … though, of course, it has a much lower overall ranking than such countries, which is important to note,” Jones said in an email to VOA.

Jones said a deterioration in two indicators — danger to civilians and armed group fragmentation — was largely responsible for the U.S. ranking.

“Danger to civilians” represents the number of violent incidents targeting civilians and includes acts of violence such as police shootings.

The “armed group fragmentation” indicator is equally important. It indicates the number of armed groups such as militias involved in political violence.

In the American context, it means that “non-state armed actors, such as far-right militia groups … have increasingly proliferated and splintered, which is correlated with higher risks of violence and creates additional obstacles for violence prevention efforts,” Jones said.

While the U.S. is the only Western nation in ACLED’s list of the top 50 conflict-ridden countries, it is not the only country in the West that has seen an increase in political violence and unrest.

France was wracked by violent anti-police riots this summer after police shot and killed a teenager in a Paris suburb.

Canada has seen a small but noticeable uptick in anti-LGBTQ demonstrations in recent years, a spillover from larger U.S. protests organized by far-right groups.

Thomas Zeitzoff, a political violence expert at the American University in Washington, noted that recent elections in both France and Canada have been marked by vitriolic rhetoric.

“It’s not the same level of violence [in France and Canada], but I think in general the U.S. is not isolated in that there is definitely … across the Western world … increased political contention,” Zeitzoff said.

Zeitzoff cautioned that the ACLED data might be subject to a “reporting bias” because the U.S. has a free press that reports on violence while many countries with high levels of violence have less press freedom.

“We have a pretty good idea when violence happens in the U.S., but we don’t have a very good idea about when violence happens in rural Mexico or in northern Nigeria or in rural parts of Afghanistan,” Zeitzoff said in an interview.

Asked about this criticism, Jones said data collection in countries which restrict media is a challenge ACLED has tried to mitigate by relying on verified “new media” and its network of more than 60 partner organizations around the world.

“There are no perfect solutions — and we certainly don’t purport to be perfect; our data represent estimates and we encourage users to take all of these caveats and methodological limitations into consideration when working with the data — but we are always trying to improve and account for any such challenges and potential biases as best we can,” Jones said.

ACLED has been tracking U.S. political violence since 2020, a year marked by a perfect storm of crises — a deadly pandemic, social justice protests and a divisive presidential election.

“Those three things made the U.S. really kind of explode in terms of demonstrations, but also political violence,” said ACLED President and CEO Clionadh Raleigh, who created ACLED as an academic project in 2005.

Whether the trend of rising conflict continues into the 2024 U.S. presidential election remains to be seen, Raleigh said during a Tuesday webinar on ACLED’s latest findings.

“But what we can say is that the U.S. has reached a level of demonstrations, including riots and potential mob violence, that it’s managing to sustain rather than decrease from even in nonelection years,” Raleigh said.

“And that is, I think, unsettling quite a number of people because it’s highly localized … and it has a lot [of] fuel to keep it going with the U.S. political system.”
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Senate Confirms Chairman of Joint Chiefs

 The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, putting him in place to succeed Gen. Mark Milley when he retires at the end of the month.

Brown’s confirmation on an 83-11 vote, months after President Joe Biden nominated him for the post, comes as Democrats try to maneuver around holds placed on hundreds of nominations by Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville over the Pentagon’s abortion policy. The Senate is also expected to confirm Gen. Randy George to be Army Chief of Staff and Gen. Eric Smith as commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps this week.

Tuberville has been blocking the Senate from the routine process of approving military nominations in groups, frustrating Democrats who had said they would not go through the time-consuming process of bringing up individual nominations for a vote. More than 300 nominees are stalled amid Tuberville’s blockade and confirming them one-by-one would take months.

But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, reversed course on Wednesday and moved to force votes on Brown, George and Smith.

“Senator Tuberville is forcing us to face his obstruction head on,” Schumer said. “I want to make clear to my Republican colleagues — this cannot continue.”

Tuberville did not object to the confirmation votes, saying he will maintain his holds but is fine with bringing up nominations individually for roll call votes.

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said that Brown’s confirmation, along with expected votes on Smith and George, is positive news. But “we should have never been in this position,” he said.

“While good for these three officers, it doesn’t fix the problem or provide a path forward for the 316 other general and flag officers that are held up by this ridiculous hold,” Kirby told reporters.

Brown, a career fighter pilot, was the Air Force’s first Black commander of the Pacific Air Forces and most recently its first Black chief of staff, making him the first African American to lead any of the military branches. His confirmation will also mark the first time the Pentagon’s top two posts were held by African Americans, with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin as the top civilian leader.

Brown, 60, replaces Joint Chiefs Chairman Army Gen. Mark Milley, who is retiring after four decades in military service. Milley’s four-year term as chairman ends on Sept. 30.

Tuberville said on Wednesday that he will continue to hold up the other nominations unless the Pentagon ends its policy of paying for travel when a service member has to go out of state to get an abortion or other reproductive care. The Biden administration instituted the policy after the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to an abortion and some states have limited or banned the procedure.

“Let’s do one at a time or change the policy back,” Tuberville said after Schumer put the three nominations up for a vote. “Let’s vote on it.”

The votes come as a host of military officers have spoken out about the damage of the delays for service members. While Tuberville’s holds are focused on all general and flag officers, they carry career impacts on the military’s younger rising officers. Until each general or admiral is confirmed, it blocks an opportunity for a more junior officer to rise.

That affects pay, retirement, lifestyle and future assignments — and in some fields where the private sector will pay more, it becomes harder to convince those highly trained young leaders to stay.

The blockade has frustrated members on both sides of the aisle, and it is still unclear how the larger standoff will be resolved. Schumer did not say if he will put additional nominations on the floor.
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