This is why people were losing their minds in 2016. Trump had been threatening people all throughout his campaign, and now he’s enabled the worst people.
And the GOP looks upon the monster they created with awe and fear. The status quo is maintained by an angry and confused hoard of rabid zombie sheep, now beyond their control, and unpredictable. Their base can turn on any one of them in response to a single tweet.
The FBI and law enforcement need to make this shit their top priority. Everyone of the people making these threats are breaking the law. There is no free speech protection for threatening people, regardless of their status as public officials, and in fact threatening public officials in order to influence policy is called terrorism.
The people aiding and comforting these nutjobs also need to be held liable.
It would be a real shame if the violent mob turned on their own leaders.
A quick reminder this is the political climate now. This is never going away.
This was the political climate in the 1880s through 1920s too. Tons of kings and presidents were killed and there were bombings in public places. Concealable revolvers and cheap dynamite enabled anarchists and revolutionary groups.
This is why the Nobel Prizes exist. The inventor of dynamite didn’t want to be known as the origin of all this violence, so he sponsored these prizes.
It went away. Things change. That’s the one constant: change.
Never is a long time. Just in the US, about 60 years after the caning of Sumner, we saw a very different political climate at the beginning of World War I. It’ll take time, but I think we can change it for the better
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
As the 2024 campaign revs up – and on the heels of indictments against the Republican frontrunner, former President Donald Trump, who has verbally attacked some of his courtroom adversaries – the ongoing onslaught of violent messages, particularly to federal lawmakers and other public officials, threatens to disrupt the American machinery of government.
That 7-2 decision, with Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett dissenting, reversed a lower court’s ruling based on a less rigorous prosecution standard, which maintained that a threat crosses the line if it puts “a reasonable person” in distress.
John Keller, an official with the election task force established by the DOJ in 2021, told CNN that the hostile message does seem to “meet the definition of a true threat,” but that he couldn’t comment on cases in which charges haven’t been filed.
Instead, the avid collector of assault rifles and other guns went on to post a barrage of detailed death threats – often alongside photos of firearms – against public officials, including Biden ahead of a presidential trip to the Beehive State.
In May, a 60-year-old right-wing conspiracy theorist left a voicemail in the office of a Texas Congresswoman calling her a “tranny and a pedophile” and threatening to “put a bullet” in her face; the suspect, Michael David Fox, pleaded guilty to making a threat.
Reporters combined data from the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center (NCITE), The Prosecution Project, press releases from the Offices of the United States Attorneys and information provided by the Department of Justice Election Threats Task Force.
The original article contains 5,563 words, the summary contains 260 words. Saved 95%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
