This nation is heading for terrible trouble if we cannot stop these ever-increasing incitements to violence. We must all speak up against them and condemn them before it’s too late.
Examples abound, most recently on some American campuses when groups of some students were protesting, calling for the death of Jews or Palestinians following the Hamas-Israeli war.
Other examples:
The FBI is investigating death threats made against four Colorado Supreme Court justices who ruled against placing Donald Trump’s name on the state ballot because of his alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection attempt. Vicious online threats against the judges included horrific words describing drownings, hangings, shootings. One said this: “What do you call 7 justices from the Colorado Supreme Court on the bottom of the ocean?” Answer: “A good start.”
Radio trash-talker Alex Jones insisted repeatedly for years that the Sandy Hook grade-school massacre was a hoax, that parents were just “actors” in a charade in order to bring people’s wrath down on the possession of guns. Grieving parents were verbally accosted and threatened, including death threats made against them. Jones was sued, successfully, but the “hoax” theory continues in the minds of many.
During the wave of anti-vaxxers and Covid-deniers, many doctors and nurses received various kinds of harassment, intimidation and even death threats.
In the past couple years, book banners, moral custodians and those warning about the two big bogeymen scapegoats (Critical Race Theory, LGBTQ people) intimidated school boards, teachers and librarians. Fears and hatreds are riled up among parents about the so-called smutty books when more likely the real agenda is to weaken and unravel – if not destroy – “godless” public education.
Some years back, six members of a militia group called the Wolverine Watchmen militia hatched a plot via Facebook to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and use violence to overthrow Michigan’s government. Fortunately, their demented plot was foiled.
Attorney Rudy Giuliani defamed two Georgia election workers, claiming the mother, Ruby Freeman, and daughter Shaye Moss cheated on ballots to favor Biden. They sued and won. But they were hounded, harassed and threatened by those who believe the lies. “I was afraid for my life,” Moss said. “I literally felt someone would attempt to hang me and there was nothing anyone could do about it.”
Attacks against and murders of trans people, especially Black trans people, have increased drastically in recent years, again mainly because of incitements on social media by people who demonize them as dangerous “others” – threats to other groups’ imagined exclusivity.
And that is what leads to so much violence these days – the process called “othering,” which ostracizes and villainizes anyone who does not adhere to the norms established by predominant social groups. That “othering,” fueled by paranoia and irrational fears, is what led to the witch hunts in Salem, Mass. (1692-93) during which 14 women and five men were convicted of witchcraft and hanged.
In recent weeks, that Inciter-in-Chief Donald Trump used the fascist Hitlerian trope of claiming Africans and Asians are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Then he went on to say this: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections. They’ll do anything, whether legal or illegal, to destroy America.”
Hey, wait a minute. Did he say root out “fascists?” What about himself? In Trump’s megalomaniacal head, where he is Numero Uno, everybody else is the “other” – to be used, discarded, thrown under the bus or otherwise gotten rid of.
Trump is fond of making his vitriolic pronouncements on his own social-media platform, ironically called “Truth Social.”
Voters, beware!
To think such an inciter of violence could become again our president ought to make everyone’s blood run cold. He is an imminent danger to democracy, to the rule of law and to human decency.
Better to vote for Biden on life support.
