Gov. Matt Bevin: 'Whose blood will be shed?' 
 
 “I want us to be able to fight ideologically, mentally, spiritually, economically, so that we don’t have to do it physically,” Bevin said during an impassioned speech at the Value Voters Conference in Washington D.C. Saturday. “But that may, in fa ||||| Speaking at the Values Voter Summit on Saturday, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin alluded to Thomas Jefferson’s famous aphorism about the need to periodically water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants. 
 
 Except in Bevin’s telling, the tyrant is Hillary Clinton: 
 
 Somebody asked me yesterday, I did an interview, and they said, “Do you think it’s possible, if Hillary Clinton were to win the election, do you think it’s possible that we’ll be able to survive? That we would ever be able to recover as a nation?” And while there are people who have stood on this stage and said we would not, I would beg to differ. But I will tell you this: I do think it would be possible, but at what price? At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood, of who? The tyrants to be sure, but who else? The patriots. Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren. I have nine children. It breaks my heart to think that it might be their blood that is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something, that we through our apathy and our indifference have given away. 
 
 Daniel Desrochers of the Lexington Herald-Leader reports that Bevin later tried to clean up those remarks by saying we should construe them as being about military service in the war on terrorism. 
 
 “Today we have thousands of men and women in uniform fighting for us overseas and they need our full backing,” Bevin said in a statement. “We cannot be complacent about the determination of radical Islamic extremists to destroy our freedoms.” 
 
 The text of his actual speech, however, is completely at odds with that — he is very clearly talking about patriots winning back liberty from the tyranny of Democratic Party governance. 
 
 The specific political context is that Kentucky is a state where the national Democratic Party has become deeply unpopular (Mitt Romney won more than 60 percent of the vote) but that has one of the strongest state-level Democratic parties of any red state. Bevin succeeded a popular two-term Democratic governor, and even after the Democrats’ nationally disastrous 2014 midterms the party still holds a majority in the Kentucky House of Representatives, and two of the three down-ballot statewide elected officials are Democrats. 
 
 Consequently, basically anything that raises the salience of national partisan conflict in state-level Kentucky politics is a win for the Kentucky Republican Party. 
 
 The larger political context is the overall rise of what Alan Abramowitz calls “negative partisanship,” in which voters are feeling decreasing affection for the party they usually vote for but increasing alarm and dismay about the party they usually vote against. Bevin is arguing not that Clinton will implement some policies that he disagrees with and hopes will be reversed in a future election, but that Clinton will fundamentally imperil the viability of the American republic. 
 
 Of course, raising the specter of violent resistance to the Clinton regime only servers to further demonize the Republican Party and its supporters in the eyes of non-conservatives — further entrenching the cycle. ||||| “Today we have thousands of men and women in uniform fighting for us overseas and they need our full backing,” he said. “We cannot be complacent about the determination of radical Islamic extremists to destroy our freedoms.” 
 
 As the full context of Bevin’s VVS remarks demonstrate, that’s pure spin. Bevin was clearly suggesting that bloodshed might be necessary domestically in the event of a Clinton victory. (You can watch the speech here.) 
 
 Yet the fact that Bevin is trying to walk it back also demonstrates just how extreme the statement is: a sitting governor suggesting publicly that armed insurrection might be necessary if a legitimate presidential election doesn’t go the way he wants. 
 
 Implications about armed revolt were somewhat common at the height of the Tea Party movement, and at the height of that Jefferson quote’s prominence. Few of the cries for uprising came from elected officials. In 2010, Sharron Angle, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Nevada, said that she hoped “Second Amendment remedies” would not be necessary to deal with a “tyrannical” government—while clearly leaving the option open. Her statement was a huge national controversy; she ended up losing to Senator Harry Reid that November. 
 
 The 2016 election has been so strange that Bevin’s remark may barely register. In August, Republican presidential nominee made reference to the possible assassination of either Hillary Clinton or Supreme Court nominees, saying, “If she gets the pick of her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I dunno.” Trump and his backers tried to play it off as a poorly executed joke. 
 
 Bevin’s comments do, however, underscore the apocalyptic attitudes aroused by this election, which has been unusually marked by fear. It is common for partisans on both sides to declare each new election “the most important of our lifetime” or something similar, but the nominations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have produced similar reactions from each candidate’s fiercest opponents: a sense not just that a loss would be catastrophic, and not even just the worst of a lifetime, but that it would be existentially dangerous to the United States. 
 
 Such sentiments are not unheard of; liberals threatened (and for the most part failed) to move to Canada if George W. Bush was reelected, while Tea Partiers foresaw doom if Obama was reelected, a prediction that has not yet been borne out—except perhaps by voters’ choices in 2016. 
 
 Trump, with his manifest ignorance of the Constitution and disregard for international norms, has been the greatest focus of this worry. Many conservative national-security figures have come out against him, warning that he is not fit to control the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. But as my colleague Molly Ball has written, fear may also be Trump’s most important tool in the election. Bevin’s speech is a reminder that Clinton’s opponents harbor apocalyptic fears too.
– Kentucky's Republican governor said blood might be shed if Hillary Clinton is elected president. Speaking to the annual Values Voter Summit on Saturday in Washington, Matt Bevin said he was asked if the country could ever recover if Clinton were elected president. "I do think it would be possible, but at what price? At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood, of who? The tyrants to be sure, but who else. The patriots," Bevin said, referencing a quote from Thomas Jefferson. "Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren. I have nine children. It breaks my heart to think it might be their blood that is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something that we through our apathy and indifference have given away." Per the Lexington Herald Leader, Bevin continued, "I want us to be able to fight ideologically, mentally, spiritually, economically, so that we don’t have to do it physically. But that may, in fact, be the case." The comments are starting to get quite a bit of attention: Democrats condemned Bevin's remarks, with one candidate for Congress calling for Bevin's impeachment. However, any impeachment attempt would be unlikely, as the heavily Republican state Senate would have to vote to convict the governor. Amid that and other blowback, Bevin's office provided a statement saying he was speaking about the sacrifice required of members of the military: "Today we have thousands of men and women in uniform fighting for us overseas and they need our full backing. We cannot be complacent about the determination of radical Islamic extremists to destroy our freedoms."' But the Atlantic calls that "pure spin," saying Bevin was clearly implying an armed insurrection might be necessary should Clinton be elected. It says his "extreme" comments "underscore the apocalyptic attitudes aroused by this election, which has been unusually marked by fear." Vox agrees: "The text of his actual speech, however, is completely at odds with [his statement]—he is very clearly talking about patriots winning back liberty from the tyranny of Democratic Party governance."