Today's Press Poodle

To: WaPo Editors, for their outstandingly craven effort to attract eyeballs, and to Both-Sides the thing by inviting the inference: "Hey, maybe those idiot Republicans have a point there."

The story is trying to be an update about the guy who wanted to kidnap, torture and then assassinate Nancy Pelosi, and almost killed her husband in the process because she wasn't home at the time - while the headline is all about pimping a GOP talking point.

At the very least, WaPo could have taken the opportunity to clue people in on the simple fact that most "illegals" are not brown people who are here having "invaded" from the south. Most of them came here on airplanes, or in cars, from some very white, very Christian places, and have just not bothered to renew their visas, no matter how or when they entered this country, and maybe we could drop the bullshit about "The Brown Tsunami".

But no - we have to lede the story with "Illegal Immigrant". And then meander through 9 or 10 paragraphs (some admittedly rather informative) concerning immigration law - and then make a point about "sanctuary states" - before we get back to the part where DHS is still very worried about domestic terrorism swirling around the election, and that we can expect it to increase for 3 months after election day.

(pay wall)

Immigration officials confirm alleged Pelosi attacker was in the U.S. illegally

The man accused of attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer is a Canadian citizen who was in the United States illegally and is facing possible deportation after his criminal cases are resolved, the Department of Homeland Security said late Wednesday.

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lodged an immigration detainer on Canadian national David DePape with San Francisco County Jail, Nov. 1, following his Oct. 28 arrest,” DHS officials said in an email.

ICE, which is under Homeland Security, sends “detainers” to state and local law enforcement asking them to notify the agency before releasing a foreign citizen who could also be deported. Deportations are civil proceedings that often take place after criminal cases are resolved, but immigrants also have been detained after they post bail.

DePape, 42, is facing state and federal criminal charges in the gruesome attack on Paul Pelosi, 82, early Friday morning, and for threatening Nancy Pelosi. DePape has pleaded not guilty and remains in custody.

Relatives have told the media that DePape grew up in British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province, but his trajectory to Northern California has remained a mystery.

Federal records show that DePape entered the United States legally on March 8, 2008, via Mexico. He crossed at the San Ysidro port of entry, an official border crossing that links San Diego County with Tijuana.

Canadians traveling for business or pleasure generally do not require visas, officials said, and he was admitted as a “temporary visitor,” traveling for pleasure, DHS said.

Canadians admitted for pleasure are generally permitted to stay for up to six months. DHS did not say precisely when DePape’s permission to stay in the United States expired.

The Canadian government confirmed this week that they were working on DePape’s case.

“Canadian officials are engaging with local authorities to obtain more information,” said Global Affairs Canada spokeswoman Charlotte MacLeod. “Due to privacy considerations, no further information can be disclosed.”

California, home to millions of immigrants, is a sanctuary state and has passed laws limiting state and local law enforcement’s cooperation with immigration officials, which has frustrated immigration officials seeking to deport immigrants arrested for crimes.

California has exceptions for people with serious criminal histories and it remains unclear how DePape’s case will unfold. State prosecutors have said he poses an extreme safety risk.

Federal authorities on Monday filed attempted kidnapping and assault charges against DePape, alleging he broke into the Pelosi home, bludgeoned her husband with a hammer in front of police, and then said he wanted to break Nancy Pelosi’s kneecaps as a warning to other Democrats.

DePape also was arraigned Tuesday in San Francisco County Superior Court on state charges of attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse, residential burglary, false imprisonment and threatening the life of or serious bodily harm to a public official.

Court records show DePape allegedly used the hammer to break into the House speaker’s San Francisco home early Friday and rousted her husband, who was sleeping upstairs.

“Are you Paul Pelosi?” DePape allegedly said when he confronted Pelosi, court records show, standing over him holding a hammer and zip ties. “Where’s Nancy?”

Paul Pelosi managed to call 911. But when officers arrived and told DePape to drop the hammer, he pulled free and struck Pelosi in the head, knocking him unconscious.

State prosecutors called the attack “near fatal.”

Paul Pelosi underwent surgery to repair a “skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands,” according to a statement issued by Drew Hammill, spokesman for Nancy Pelosi. The speaker has said her husband is making steady progress toward recovery.

DePape allegedly told police he was on a “suicide mission” and had created a target list of state and federal politicians in his quest to quash “lies” coming out of Washington.

DePape also had published hundreds of blog posts in recent months supporting far-right personalities and writing diatribes against Jews, Black people, Democrats, the media and transgender people.

The attack added to the growing concerns nationwide about the threats posed by domestic violent extremists as the Nov. 8 midterm elections approach.

The FBI, DHS and other agencies issued a memo last week warning that extremism could increase in the 90-day post-election period, according to a copy of the document obtained by The Washington Post.

The memo said the most plausible threat “is posed by lone offenders who leverage election-related issues to justify violence.”

Worry about election-related violence prompted President Biden to make a speech in Washington Wednesday night.

“We must, with one overwhelming unified voice, speak as a country and say there’s no place, no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America, whether it’s directed at Democrats or Republicans,” Biden said. “No place, period. No place, ever.”

Turbulence

"Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"

(pay wall)

Only the GOP Celebrates Political Violence

Both parties suffer partisan bloodshed. One glorifies it.

In March 2020, a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives posted a video message addressed to two Democratic political candidates that issued a threatening challenge if they passed laws he did not like. Standing in his Capitol Hill office, Ken Buck of Colorado’s Fourth District gestured toward a rifle mounted on the wall.

“I have a message for Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke. If you want to take everyone’s AR-15 in America, why don’t you swing by my office in Washington, D.C., and start with this one.” At this point, Buck reached for a stars-and-stripes-decorated rifle mounted on the wall. He brandished the weapon, smiled what he must have imagined was a tough-guy smile, and said, “Come and take it.”

At the time the video was released, Biden was the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Normally, the Secret Service takes an interest in threats of violence against potential presidents. I could find no indication that it did so in this case. It probably understood—as most of us would understand—that Buck would never make good on his threat to assassinate political opponents if they enacted gun-control legislation. He was only performing a threat, in a way that has become dully familiar in American politics.

Missouri Governor Eric Greitens resigned in disgrace in 2018 after facing allegations that he had used explicit photographs to blackmail a former lover. He tried to revive his career with a Senate run in 2020. Guns became a major theme of that campaign, culminating in a video ad that pictured him carrying a gun as he broke open the door of a house. Accompanied by two armed goons, he urged: “Get a RINO-hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”

Facebook removed the ad. Greitens said his threat against “Republicans in Name Only” was intended humorously.

And it’s not only marginal Republican backbenchers and embittered ex-officeholders who threaten violence.

In his campaign to become Georgia’s governor in 2018, Brian Kemp released an ad in which he pointed a hunting rifle at a seemingly frightened young man who wanted to date Kemp’s daughter.

Dan Crenshaw—one of the most intelligent Republicans in the House, someone who ought to be a next-generation party leader—in January released a deliberately absurd ad that cast him as a movie superhero. All in good fun, until the final scene that showed him apparently smashing a car windshield to reach and destroy two lurking political adversaries.

I could list many similar examples over dozens more paragraphs. But here’s the point: There’s nothing partisan about political violence in America. It has struck Republicans such as Steve Scalise, who was shot along with four others and nearly killed, as he played baseball in suburban Virginia. The gunman was a Bernie Sanders supporter who had traveled from Illinois with a legally purchased weapon and a target list of Republican members of Congress. It has threatened conservatives such as Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, stalked by a would-be assassin angry about the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And it has struck citizens of very different persuasions as they took part in street protests—as when Kyle Rittenhouse, acting as an armed vigilante, gunned down two demonstrators in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August 2020, and when Michael Forest Reinoehl, a self-described anti-fascist, hunted and killed a political enemy in Portland in September.

But if both Republicans and Democrats, left and right, suffer political violence, the same cannot be said of those who celebrate political violence. That’s not a “both sides” affair in 2020s America.

Juliette Kayyem: The bad and good news about Trump’s violent supporters

You don’t see Democratic House members wielding weapons in videos and threatening to shoot candidates who want to cut capital-gains taxes or slow the growth of Medicare. Democratic candidates for Senate do not post video fantasies of hunting and executing political rivals, or of using a firearm to discipline their children’s romantic partners. It’s not because of Democratic members that Speaker Nancy Pelosi installed metal detectors to bar firearms from the floor of the House. No Democratic equivalent exists of Donald Trump, who regularly praises and encourages violence as a normal tool of politics, most recently against his own party’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. As the formerly Trump-leaning Wall Street Journal editorialized on October 2: “It’s all too easy to imagine some fanatic taking Mr. Trump seriously and literally, and attempting to kill Mr. McConnell. Many supporters took Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about former Vice President Mike Pence all too seriously on Jan. 6.”

The January 6 insurrection is the overhanging fact above all this rhetoric of political violence. That was the day when Trump’s ally Rudy Giuliani urged, “Let’s have trial by combat”—and thousands heeded and complied. That terrible day, incited by President Trump and organized by Trump supporters, should have chastened American politics for a generation. It did not. Armed and masked vigilantes are intimidating voters right now in Arizona and other states, inspired by Trump’s continued election lies, as amplified by his supporters to this very day.

Paul Pelosi is the latest to pay a blood price for the cult of violence. Thankfully, he is expected to make a full recovery, but he won’t be the last victim of the cult. It won’t stop, but it must stop. As Abraham Lincoln wrote to a friend in 1863: “Among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and … they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.”

Overheard - On The Pelosi Thing

Right Wing Media:

Democrat women want the right to kill their babies right after they're born. Sometimes, Democrats kill babies and drink their blood. Democrats are evil, and Nancy Pelosi is their queen.

Also Right Wing Media:

OMG, it's awful, isn't it? We have absolutely no idea why someone would do this.

(pay wall)

The San Francisco Bay area man arrested in the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband filled a blog a week before the incident with delusional thoughts, including that an invisible fairy attacked an acquaintance and sometimes appeared to him in the form of a bird, according to online writings under his name.

David DePape, 42, also published hundreds of blog posts in recent months sharing memes in support of fringe commentators and far-right personalities. Many of the posts were filled with screeds against Jews, Black people, Democrats, the media and transgender people.

During October, DePape published over 100 posts. While each loads, a reader briefly glimpses an image of a person wearing a giant inflatable unicorn costume, superimposed against a night sky. The photos and videos that followed were often dark and disturbing.

He published a drawing of the Devil kneeling and asking a caricature of a Jewish person to teach him the arts of “lying, deception, cheating and incitement.” Several contain lifelike images of rotting human flesh and blood, including a zombified Bill Gates and Hillary Clinton. Others depict headless bodies against bleak, dystopian landscapes.

Before those writings were removed Saturday, The Washington Post reviewed them, as well as gory photos, illustrations and videos on a website that DePape registered under his name in early August and that his daughter confirmed was his. Notably, the voluminous writings do not mention Pelosi. Police say DePape broke into the home Pelosi shares with her husband early Friday, yelled “Where is Nancy?” and attacked 82-year-old Paul Pelosi with a hammer.

Pelosi remained hospitalized Saturday, recovering from surgery to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hand, according to the speaker’s office. San Francisco’s police chief and district attorney provided no update, but on Friday local, state and federal authorities said they were working together to investigate DePape’s motive.

A woman who identified DePape as her “father” said Friday that she was stunned by his arrest even though he was, she said, abusive to other members of the family. “I love my father,” Inti Gonzalez wrote in a statement posted to her website and later removed. “He did genuinely try to be a good person but the monster in him was always too strong for him to be safe to be around.”

“This attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband came as a shock to me,” wrote Gonzalez, who is 21, according to her website. “I didn’t see this coming and there was no sign of the possibility from his end.” Gonzalez wrote she followed her father’s writing online but was not aware of the website he registered in August.

Hold it just a goddamned fuckin' minute, lady - "the monster in him" made you feel it was unsafe to hang out with him, but you didn't think he might pull some shit like this?

Reached by The Post before she issued the statement, Gonzalez declined to comment about DePape.

DePape grew up in British Columbia, a relative told CNN. He briefly drew public attention nearly a decade ago in San Francisco when he participated in a demonstration against a city ordinance banning public nudity. The protest was led by Gonzalez’s mother, Gypsy Taub, an outspoken nudity activist.

Videos posted on YouTube show that DePape was among a group of protesters marching through San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood for the 2013 demonstration.

On his blog, DePape wrote bitterly in recent months of his relationship with Taub, who also promoted debunked conspiracy theories on her own blog, including that 9/11 was an “inside job.” He accused Taub of manipulating her children to turn them against him.

Taub is serving a sentence for felony stalking and attempted child abduction, after prosecutors said she became fixated with a 14-year-old boy and attempted to kidnap him. She could not be reached for comment. Gonzalez told The Post that she had spoken with Taub and that Taub would be making a statement upon her release. She is eligible for parole in January.

Four days before the Pelosi attack, DePape posted on his website what he presented as a 2021 email to Gonzalez. In it, he told her he struggled with the urge to end his life as his relationship with Taub and her children was falling apart. “I was extremely suicidal, Mentally I would beg you guys daily to let me kill myself,” he wrote in the email. DePape cut off contact with Taub and her children after he was he was kicked out of their home and living in a car, according to his online account. He does not say when those events occurred.

The domain frenlyfrens.com was registered Aug. 8 under DePape’s name and to an address in Richmond, Calif., where a neighbor told a Post reporter he lived. The web address uses the phonetic spelling of “friend,” which has become a slang term adopted by many in the far right — a term that is sometimes written as an acronym for Far Right Ethno-Nationalist.

Reddit banned an openly anti-semitic group by the name /r/FrenWorld in 2019, saying it contained postings that glorified or encouraged violence. One cartoon featured repeatedly by members contained pictures of a frog character that has been appropriated by the far right. “Frens, sound the alarms!” one says. “Arm yourselves! The longnose is coming, the longnose is coming.”

Two weeks after registering the site, DePape’s first post was titled “Mary Poppins.” Amid the ongoing feud between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Disney over the company’s criticism of the state’s law known by critics as the “don’t say gay” bill, the violent video depicted a SWAT team firing at Poppins.

Details of DePape’s everyday life in recent months are included in the postings that followed. He played video games at a nearby library and spent hours meditating, according to the writings. In another post, he shared an image of a fantasy miniature salamander he purchased on Etsy. He wrote that he was looking to purchase a fairy house on Etsy but was frustrated that the doors were painted and so could not be used by a fairy. “They have lots of fairy houses but NONE of them are MADE for fairies,” he wrote.

In late August, DePape became engrossed in the decision by Twitter to ban Jordan Peterson for his posts about transgender people. The Canadian psychologist turned conservative podcaster had once said that being transgender was comparable to “satanic ritual abuse.”

DePape published six posts in support of Peterson and then continued with his own caustic takes on transgender people, saying they should not be a protected group. “They were not BORN a freak. They are not INHERENTLY a freak threw no fault of their own. … They are CHOOSING to be FREAKS,” he wrote in one post.

In the last week of September, as the Justice Department filed a motion seeking to compel former Trump adviser Peter Navarro to return government emails, DePape blogged his take: “No evidence of election fraud. Any journalist saying that should be dragged straight out into the street and shot.”

DePape was also active on the message board 4chan, a site notorious for extremist discussion, posting memes and debating other anonymous users about his beliefs, according to his website. In an Oct. 24 post titled “Disinfo Shill Tactics,” he complained that he was a target of law enforcement he described as ‘paid shills’ trying to manipulate the message board. “I would come in and lay out the facts and so all the paid shills would jump on me. To try and suppress it,” he wrote.

That same day, DePape shared images from a construction site where he worked months ago. One highlighted a jackhammer with the number 33 on it, an apparent reference to a conspiracy theory about Freemasons and world control. A co-worker remarked he sounded like the now deceased right-wing radio personality Rush Limbaugh after referring to feminists as “feminazis” during a discussion on feminism, according to the account.

In another post on Oct. 24, four days before the attack on Pelosi, DePape shared images of a wooden birdhouse he said he had purchased for an invisible fairy he communicated with that had begun interfering with his life. “He appears in a form that makes sense in my reality because I can’t see fairies. He’ll do things to let me know its him and he o[f]ten appears as a bird,” he wrote.

Today's Really Scary Thing

I'll be headed down to wherever they're having their little war, so I can volunteer to be the first one shot, hoping my senseless death during a futile attempt to stop dumbfuck-on-dumbfuck violence will eventually get picked up as some kind of rallying cry and everybody can go back to just shit-talkin' each other on social media.

And who the fuck do I think I'm kiddin'?

Jordan Klepper - Civil War, anyone?

Assholes? What Assholes?

Whether it's anti-Semite, anti-Asian, Anti-Muslim, anti-or-pro-Whatever-du-Jour -- incidents of political violence are way up over the last 20 years, and in the last 7 years, they're up by anywhere from about 60% to more than 200%, depending on how you slice-n-dice the data.

on the 405

Revelation 3:9

I will make those who are of the synagogue of Satan, who claim to be Jews though they are not, but are liars - I will make them come and fall down at your feet and acknowledge that I have loved you.

John 8:44

You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

ADL:

During an interview on Revolt TV’s “Drink Champs” series that was posted and then removed on October 16, Ye repeatedly blamed “Jewish media” and “Jewish Zionists” for numerous alleged misdeeds, stating that “Jewish people have owned the Black voice” and that “the Jewish community, especially in the music industry…they’ll take us and milk us till we die.” Referencing Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, he also commented that he was “#MeToo-ing the Jewish culture. I’m saying y’all gotta stand up and admit to what you been doing.”

Ye doubled down on his antisemitism during an October 17 interview with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation, criticizing the so-called “Jewish underground media mafia” and alleging that “every celebrity has Jewish people in their contract.” He also claimed that his life was threatened by his Jewish managers, lawyer and accountant due to his political beliefs. On both “Drink Champs” and “Cuomo,” Ye repeated his previous defense that Black people cannot be antisemitic, stating that “we are Semite, we Jew, so I can’t be antisemite.”

Organizations that have recently dropped Ye:

• Balenciaga: Kering, the parent company of luxury fashion house Balenciaga, told the fashion publication Women's Wear Daily last week that it severed ties with Ye.
• MRC: The film and television studio MRC announced on Monday that it would not distribute a recently completed documentary on Ye over his comments, saying it could not "support any platform that amplifies his platform."
• Vogue: A spokesperson for the magazine told Page Six last week that it and its editor-in-chief Anna Wintour do not intend to work with him in the future.
• CAA: The Creative Artists Agency, a major Hollywood talent and sports agency, confirmed to Axios on Monday that Ye was no longer a client. The Los Angeles Times first reported the agency ended its relationship with Ye over his antisemitic comments.
• Adidas: The German multinational retailer announced Tuesday that it had ended its partnership with Ye, effective immediately, and saying, "Ye’s recent comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous."
• Gap: The company said Tuesday it was "taking immediate steps" to remove Yeezy Gap product from their stores, and said it had shut down YeezyGap.com.

(excerpted from Jan6 Committee testimony)

1. TRENDS IN ACCEPTANCE OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE

According to nearly every measure of both beliefs and actual incidents, political violence is considered more acceptable than it was five years ago before then-President Trump took office.

BELIEFS:

The most consistent survey data comes from scholars Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe, who have been tracking public opinion on political violence using identical questions and methods for the last five years.1 From 2017 when their tracking begins, support for political violence rises across several measures prior to the midterm elections and declines after the elections. It also spikes (especially for Republicans) around then-President Trump’s first impeachment, and again drops afterward. Support for violence from 2017 through the summer of 2020 is generally quite close across parties but somewhat higher for Democrats, though as I’ll show later, actual incidents of violence are far higher for Republicans.

The 2020 election season was an inflection point that led to a step-change in acceptance of violence as a political tool, particularly among Republicans. During the month of the election, Republican support for violence leaps across each of Kalmoe and Mason’s questions. Democratic justifications rise in response to some questions but fall in others, and their support moves after Republican opinion and grows less quickly.

By February 2021, 25% of Republicans and 17% of Democrats felt threats against the other party’s leaders were justifiable, and 19% of Republicans and 10% of Democrats believed it was justified to harass ordinary members of the other party. One in five Republicans (20%) and 13% of Democrats claimed that political violence was justified “these days”.

In each case, support for political violence has doubled for Republicans since 2017 and has grown for Democrats.

To put this level of support into context: In 1973 during the most violent period of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, 25% of Catholics and 16% of Protestants agreed that “violence is a legitimate way to achieve one’s goals.”

The U.S. is fast approaching these numbers.

Other polls trace the same leap in acceptance of violence following the election, particularly among Republicans. For instance, similar questions were posed a year apart by scholar Larry Bartels and the AEI Survey Center on American Life. In January 2020, half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed that “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” By January 2021, this number had risen to 56%, and by June 2021 another poll found 68% support across both parties.

The perception that an election was stolen is known to be a major instigator of political unrest worldwide. Researchers have found that incumbents play an outsized role in shaping whether elections that are perceived as fraudulent (whether that perception is real or imaginary) lead to violent riots or street protests. Political parties can also reduce the risk of violence by channeling anger towards non-violent demonstrations. This is one reason it is so disturbing to note that by late November, 2020: “a significant portion of the online infrastructure” that had been built to support Trump’s reelection had been retooled to promote election misinformation and upcoming protests, according to the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab, which has done a forensic analysis of that cyberinfrastructure.

The consciously propagated false narrative regarding election theft is directly linked to the growing support for violence on the right. Those who believed the election was fraudulent were twice as likely in Kalmoe and Mason’s survey data to endorse a military coup and were more likely to justify armed citizen rebellion. Of the 9% of Americans who agreed that “force is justified to restore Trump to the Presidency” in a separate University of Chicago survey in June 2021, 90% believed Biden’s presidency was illegitimate.6 Throughout 2021, a time during which the Bright Line Watch organization found that 73-74% of Republicans felt that President Biden was not the rightful winner of the election, a separate 22,900 person poll found that almost 1 in 5 among Republican men claimed that violence was justifiable “right now”.

Some experts believe that these numbers are emotional or philosophical statements and thus overstate the acceptance of actual violence. Abstract questions with no definition of violence opens surveys to that claim, and no doubt a percentage of respondents are not serious. Yet there is reason to believe a significant number of respondents mean what they say.

For instance, Bright Line Watch found that when survey respondents were asked about concrete examples and were forced to pay more attention before answering, support for violence reduced – but even with these safeguards, they found in November 2021 that among Republicans who most strongly identified with the party, 17% were willing to endorse violence to usher Trump back into the presidency, 18% endorsed threats, and 9% were willing to justify violence if the other party wins the 2024 election.

Similarly, a month after January 6, 2021, Kalmoe and Mason polled respondents on what they meant when they spoke of violence. When presented with concrete actions, a third of those who initially endorsed political violence picked “none of these options”, suggesting some posturing had been occurring. Of the remaining two-thirds, however, 7% justified “widespread violence by armed groups that kill lots of people”, 17% endorsed “violence by armed individuals that might kill a few people,” and 22% endorsed “fistfights and beating people up”, while 24% intended property crime. Respondents on the right and left justified these forms of violence. When asked: “Do you believe the use of violence to take over state government buildings to advance your political goals is justified?” a quarter of Republicans and 13% of Democrats agreed, while 12% of Republicans and 11% of Democrats agreed that “assassination of opposing political leaders is justified to advance political goals” was justified.

INCIDENTS OF THREAT, HARASSMENT AND VIOLENCE

Another way of measuring the growing acceptance of violence is the rise in actual incidents, which demonstrate the mainstreaming of threats, intimidation, and violence in American political life.

Threats against members of Congress

Threats against members of Congress are more than ten times as high as just five years ago. From 902 threats investigated by Capitol Police in 2016, they leapt to 3,939 in the first year of the Trump presidency, 5,206 by 2018, 6,955 in 2019, 8,613 in 2020, and hit 9,600 in 2021.
Armed Demonstrations

In the 11 weeks between the election and Inauguration Day, armed actors at protests grew by 47% compared to the 11 weeks prior to the elections, and organized paramilitary groups grew by 96%. Stop the Steal demonstrations were more than four times as likely to feature armed actors or unlawful paramilitary compared to other demonstrations. More than a fifth of all Stop the Steal rallies nationally featured armed actors or unlawful paramilitary.

Armed demonstrations are legal in many states; however, they are 6.5 times more likely to lead to violence than demonstrations without the presence of firearms. In 2020, 6.2% of all pro-Trump demonstrations were armed, numbers that climbed to 8.8% in 2021. These rates are not only increasing but are far higher than protests that were not supportive of Trump: from January 2020 to November 2021, only 1.5% of all other demonstrations across the United States involved armed protestors.

Signifying their political intent, armed pro-Trump demonstrations were far more likely to occur at legislative buildings: 47.3% of all armed pro-Trump protests occurred on legislative grounds compared to 12.2% of all other armed demonstrations. Armed protests on legislative grounds increased by nearly 20% between 2020 and 2021 and were also more likely to turn violent. For example, on January 6, in addition to events in Washington D.C., 12 states were forced to disrupt activities and evacuate their capitol buildings and/or faced crowds threatening or breaching state capitol buildings.

Prior to the 2020 election, armed demonstrations occurred for a variety of reasons around the country, from Second Amendment rallies to militias countering Black Lives Matter protests, and in a few instances, armed Black paramilitary groups. Following the election, however, each peak of armed protest coincided with election-related activities that had previously been purely procedural, such as election tabulation, safe harbor deadlines, electoral college results and Inauguration Day.14 Thus, violence was taking on the pattern seen in other countries where popular anger is coalesced by politicians and put to the service of political goals.
FBI hate crimes

Reported hate crimes peaked in the year of the September 11, 2001 attacks at 9,730 incidents. They then declined, hitting a low of 5,479 in 2014. They started growing after that by up to a few hundred annually – but the trend line rose sharply during the former President’s administration. From 2016 to 2017 hate crimes rose by over a thousand cases, and they rose by nearly the same amount again in 2020. In that year (the last numbers the FBI have reported), 8,263 hate crimes were recorded by the FBI, the highest number since 9/11. The rise is especially notable because 452 agencies that had previously reported statistics failed to report in 2020, meaning the actual increase is greater.

White Supremacist Propaganda and Organizing

White supremacist propaganda and organizing have also grown dramatically. As measured by the Anti-Defamation League, the presence of public, openly white supremacist activity rose more than twelve-fold from 421 incidents in 2017 to 5,125 in 2020. While 2021 saw a slight drop, there were still around 13 incidents of white supremacist propaganda occurring every day – compared to just over one incident a day five years ago. White supremacists have also moved from the shadows to the mainstream: in 2021 there were at least 183 incidents where white supremacists hung banners on highway overpasses or other highly visible locations, a 40 percent increase from the year before. Organizing is also no longer clandestine: in 2021 white supremacists held 108 public events, more than double the year before and the most recorded in the last five years.

2. WHY THE STRUCTURE OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE TODAY IS SO DANGEROUS TO DEMOCRACY

The growing acceptance of political violence and the volume of incidents is deeply worrying. However, as problematic is the structure of today’s political violence.

On the right, violence previously the purview of radical, fringe groups is now mainstream: From the 1970s until the mid-2010s, violence remained an activity of extremist groups on the fringes of society. In the late 1970s, for instance, only 6% of Americans justified violence for political goals.

Throughout past decades, political violence in the U.S. operated in the classic, clandestine terrorist cell model. Intensely ideological organizations such as the Weathermen or Operation Rescue pulled recruits away from family and friends to deepen their connection to the violent group. In the late 1960s and 1970s, most political violence was committed by organizations on the far left acting in the name of perceived social justice, environmental, and animal rights causes, generally against property. From the 1980s through the 2010s, violence shifted towards the right with the rise of white supremacist, anti-abortion, and militia organizations, though environmental and animal rights attacks continued. Violent events diminished greatly from the 1970s peak, but lethality grew as targets shifted from property to people: minorities, abortion providers, and federal agents.

Today, the majority of individuals committing spontaneous or organized political violence do not formally belong to any radical group. Instead, violent beliefs and activities have moved into the mainstream. Ideas once confined to hardcore white supremacists – such as the Great Replacement theory – appear on Fox News and even in the halls of Congress.18 White supremacists have become commonplace on popular gaming sites – a 2019 study by the Anti-Defamation League found that 23% of respondents who played online multiplayer games had been exposed to white supremacist ideology and one in ten had encountered Holocaust denial.19 Women stumble into the violent Q-Anon conspiracy via a host of mothering blogs and Instagram yoga wellness pages. Once people begin to consider these violent ideas, a slippery language of memes, slang, and jokes blurs the line between posturing and supporting violence, slipping past mental brakes and normalizing activities and ideologies long viewed as beyond the pale of normal politics.

While desire is bipartisan, violence is overwhelmingly on the right, suggesting a role played by political leaders: Despite similar sentiments regarding violence among Democrats and Republicans from 2017 to pre-election 2020, incidents of violence are overwhelmingly on the right. The Global Terrorist Database (GTD), managed by National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence, is considered the most comprehensive global dataset for domestic, transnational, and international terrorist incidents since the 1970s. It charts a rise in violent far-right terrorist activity that begins in 2013 (possibly in reaction to the reelection of America’s first Black president) but skyrockets in 2016.

As START director William Braniff testified to the Congressional Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in 2019, “Among domestic terrorists, violent far-right terrorists are by far the most numerous, lethal and criminally active. Over the last several decades, they are responsible for more: failed plots; successful plots; pursuits of chemical or biological weapons; homicide events; and illicit financial schemes than international terrorists, including HVEs.”

Similar trends are found in FBI statistics (the FBI’s investigations into white supremacists have tripled since 2017), the Joint Regional Intelligence Center of DHS, and independent counts from organizations such as ACLED. While the Global Terrorism Database is still compiling data from 2020 and 2021, and left-wing violence has risen, the difference appears to remain: in 2020, the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that violence from both sides reached the highest recorded levels since they began collecting data in 1994 – but right-wing incidents were still nearly three times as high (73) as left-wing (25).

This discrepancy points to the role of political leaders. In both Israel and Germany, research has found that domestic terrorists are emboldened when they believe that politicians encourage violence or that authorities will tolerate it from their side of the political spectrum. Trends in U.S. political violence show similar patterns.22 The Oath Keepers, for example, issued a call to action as early as 2016 to “protect” the polls after then-candidate Trump’s claims of potential fraud. Militia groups mobilized in response to Trump’s statements surrounding his inauguration and with his rhetoric on border security.23 At regular intervals they provided security to Trump campaign rallies and events from 2016 to 2020, and in all of these instances there was no negative governmental reaction. At least one Oath Keeper has claimed that she was providing official security at the rally on the mall on January 6, 2020 for VIPs and legislators; Trump supporter Roger Stone appeared to use Oath Keeper militia members as part of his personal security outfit that morning.24 Given that history, it is reasonable that they would assume they were secure from prosecution for their violence at the Capitol on January 6, should Trump prevail in the 2020 election. Indeed, Stewart Rhodes’ statements suggest that he expected lenience directly from then-President Trump – specifically pardons for those arrested for the January 6 riots and money for their legal defense.

The left is growing in anger and violence is inching up: While violent events to date have been overwhelmingly concentrated on the right, early evidence suggests that they rose for the left in 2020 and that partisans on the left are growing increasingly angry. The most recent December 2021 poll by Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe found increased justifications of violence from the left: 21% of Democrats (and 16% of Republicans) thought punching members of the other party was justified, while 13% of Democrats (and 9% of Republicans) justified killing at least some members of the other party. This emotion is not yet appearing in many actual incidents, which global research suggests would require that potential perpetrators feel a greater sense of impunity from prosecution. But these numbers indicate ominous trends were left-wing leaders to encourage violence, given the well-established effects on followers’ actions.

Extremist groups are using mainstream causes to recruit, expanding their membership: In the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, daily internet monitoring showed right-wing violent extremists were encouraging members to use mainstream conservative causes and local rallies to increase recruitment while flying under the radar of national news. For instance, the Proud Boys, a European chauvinist group known for politically violent protest, held a number of rallies using anti-critical race theory to recruit new members. In Oregon, the Proud Boys, People’s Rights (founded by anti-government activist Ammon Bundy), and Patriot Prayer used Telegram to call on supporters to appear at a local school to oppose COVID mask requirements, triggering the school district into lockdown.26 Extremist organizations – particularly the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and Boogaloo Bois, and their respective affiliates, were present at nearly half of all the armed demonstrations carried out for any cause in 2021, an increase from their presence at 1/3 of assorted rallies in the year prior.27 As these examples also demonstrate, violent organizations that are often in competition and which previously focused on different targets and goals are now beginning to collude under a more encompassing, melded ideology.28 Their recruiting tactics build on efforts over the last five years to mainstream violent extremism: the militia movement, which previously focused its violence on the federal government, for instance, mobilized against the Women’s March in 2016 and myriad Black Lives Matter marches in 2020.

As extremist organizations capitalize on mainstream concerns, more people enter a radical world that once required joining secretive fringe groups in-person. These trends are expanding the pool of potentially violent individuals, as well as those who might not be violent normally, but who will act violently when excited by the crowd dynamics of an emotional rally.

Targets are becoming partisan, not just ideological: In past decades, violent actors may have been ideologically left (such as many environmental and animal rights terrorists) or right (such as most militia members and abortion clinic attackers), but they were not overtly partisan. In the previous graph of GTD data showing political violence by ideology, many anti-Semitic, anti-government, pro-gun, and other types of attack were classified in past years as “single-issue”, rather than “right- or left-wing”, because while the ideology may be associated with a political side, the perpetrator showed no partisan affiliation or motivation, or seemed to have a mix of motivations from different sides of the political spectrum. Such violence also did not track the electoral calendar and was not used to affect the prospects of either political party.

Now, individuals committing violence on the right tend to be closely aligned with a political party and can be mobilized for partisan purposes. For instance, In November 2021, Bright Line Watch found that right-wing individuals who felt a stronger connection to the Republican Party endorsed concrete violent actions at significantly higher rates.29 Concerns that were once the purview of very separate extremist groups, or were ideological but not partisan – from policies concerning masks, vaccines, election rules, and school curricula, and encompassing dislike of Jews, Muslims, people of different races, immigrants, and other causes – are all triggers that now reinforce a shared identity that is also connected to a political party. For instance, several individuals who took part in armed counter-protests to BLM events have since been charged in the January 6 attacks. In contrast, Bright Line Watch found that on the left, violent sentiment was higher among respondents who felt more distant from the Democratic Party.30 While violence for causes associated with the left still appear disconnected from the Party and political cycle, post-election violence and intimidation on the right began to align with the political calendar in 2016 and 2018, and in 2020 became highly connected to election dates and procedures.

Globally, democracies facing this pattern see intimidation, violence, and harassment rise and fall around each election cycle when elections are close or contentious. Election day itself is often not violent, though intimidation may take place. Instead, violence tends to ramp up in the months prior to election as politicians try to solidify bases of support within more homogenous political parties by creating distinctions with other racial, ethnic, or religious groups, often using dehumanizing rhetoric that inflames their supporters. Violence also occurs after an election but before the final settlement of power (Inauguration Day, in the United States), as politicians whip up anger and intimidation among their supporters to affect vote tallies or as a tool to jockey for the fruits of power. Violence then subsides until the next close election. What may appear to be spontaneous or mob-led is, upon inspection, closely linked to the electoral calendar and serves a political function.32 This a pattern that previously occurred in America during the rise of the anti-immigrant “Know-Nothing” party and again following Reconstruction among Southern Democrats. For more on this pattern, see my attached article from the Journal of Democracy.

While data for 2021 is not generally available (FBI data, for instance, is generally published in November or December of the following year); incidents appear to have lessened. Given the evidence suggesting that extremist organizing, armed protest, and violent beliefs are all high or increasing, this pattern should not lull anyone into complacency. It is instead a feature to be expected with violence that is encouraged by politicians for a political purpose.

Organized violence on the right is being committed by established community members: Most criminal violence globally is committed by young, unmarried, childless, unemployed men with low levels of education. This is also the demographic profile of the majority of Americans who commit spontaneous hate crimes, who also generally have prior criminal records.

This is not the demographic of those involved in violence and intimidation at right-wing political events and armed demonstrations such as Stop the Steal rallies. These individuals are more likely to be middle-aged, married with children, middle class, and have jobs. The majority of those arrested for the January 6 insurrection belong to this more established demographic.34 They also gained most of their news from the mainstream media, not far-right or social media, and 25% have college degrees.35 Respondents who told the December 2021 Washington Post-University of Maryland poll that violence was justified were also more likely to have college degrees.

The individuals who are taking part in violent right-wing or pro-Trump events and espousing violent political beliefs do not have the profile of extremists, criminals, or hate crime offenders. Indeed, many people arrested on January 6, like the majority of violent extremists today, have no history of violence and aren’t part of a violent group. Instead, America is facing a mainstreaming of violence among people who are well-established in their communities and who seem to view their violence not as a criminal act but as an extension of political behavior. That behavior is clearly influenced by the conspiracy that the 2020 election was “stolen”. In fact, far from being on the fringe, greater community involvement on the right has been found by AEI’s Survey Center on American Life to correlate with greater belief in conspiracies such as Stop the Steal and Q-Anon, as does church membership among white Evangelicals.37 Problematically, this was also the demographic picture as Nazi extremism mainstreamed among regular Germans in the 1930s – in fact, German towns with more civic associations saw a faster rise in Nazi Party membership.

That One Shitty Day

On The Lawn at UVa

Aug 17, 2017

5 years ago.

August 12, 2017 - "...very fine people..."

This one is restricted because of the footage showing the asshole James Fields running his car into a crowd of counter-protesters - viewer discretion is advised:

Hours of video at YouTube

Today's Oddness

Mirror:

Man who carried Vladimir Putin's nuclear controls briefcase found shot at his home

Vadim Zimin, the retired colonel in the Federal Security Service, had been in charge of the briefcase carrying the Russian nuclear controls which always accompanies the Kremlin leader

A secretive colonel who had carried the Russian president’s nuclear briefcase has been found shot at his home near Moscow.

Vadim Zimin, 53, is gravely ill in intensive care, say reports.

The retired colonel in the Federal Security Service had been in charge of the briefcase carrying the Russian nuclear controls which always accompanies the Kremlin leader.

He is known to have performed this role as aide-de-camp to former President Boris Yeltsin.

He continued in the security service rising to the role of colonel under his successor Vladimir Putin, but his precise role for the ex-KGB spy is unclear.

Zimin was found with gunshot wounds in the kitchen of his flat in Krasnogorsk, Moscow region.

At the time, his common law wife - a medic - was away treating the wounded from Putin’s war in Ukraine.

The shooting came as Zimin was facing criminal investigation for alleged bribe-taking after joining the customs service in a senior role, reported Moskovsky Komsomolets.

He was under house arrest over the criminal case.

He had denied any wrongdoing.

Zimin was discovered by his brother - who had been reportedly in the bathroom at the time of the shooting on Monday.

He lay in a pool of blood with a wound to the head.

An Izh 79-9TM automatic pistol was lying nearby.

Only one picture exists of the secretive colonel.

A "Christian Nation"

There will be blood.

Business Insider:

Kinzinger says 'there is violence in the future' after receiving mailed threat to 'execute' him, his wife, and 5-month-old baby

Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger warned of "violence in the future" after he said he received a mailed threat against him and his family.

Kinzinger made the comments Sunday on "This Week" on ABC News while discussing his work on the committee investigating January 6, 2021. His position as one of only two Republicans on the committee has subjected him to threats, he said.

"This threat that came in, it was mailed to my house. We got it a couple of days ago, and it threatens to execute me, as well as my wife and 5-month-old child. We've never seen or had anything like that. It was sent from the local area," Kinzinger, who represents Illinois' 16th Congressional District, said.

He added that he's not worried about his personal safety but concerned about his family.

"I don't worry — but now that I have a wife and kids, of course, it's a little different," Kinzinger said. "There's violence in the future, I'm going to tell you. And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can't expect any differently."

A spokesperson for Kinzinger said his office had reported the threat and was "taking extra precautions for the Congressman's family."

As the House select committee continued to hold public hearings about its investigation into the Capitol siege, a new Ipsos/ABC News poll of Americans found that a majority of its respondents said former President Donald Trump should be criminally charged for his role in the Capitol riot.

During his interview on ABC news, Kinzinger said the Republican party had "utterly failed the American people at truth," adding that Trump "knew what he was doing" ahead of the Capitol siege, Insider's Pocharapon Neammanee reported.

"I certainly think the president is guilty of knowing what he did, seditious conspiracy, being involved in these, you know, kind of different segments of pressuring the DOJ, vice president, etc.," Kinzinger said. "Unfortunately, my party has utterly failed the American people at truth."

Jan6 Stuff

It's going to take a while to tamp it all down, and we're prob'ly going to be pretty busy beating it back, but eventually, the kind of bloodlust that's fueling our divisions will abate.

Good sign: 60% of Americans agree Trump and his Thugs-R-Us minions need to be indicted and put on trial.

Bad sign: plenty of these assholes have been whipped into a rich creamy lather - and it's a major revenue opportunity for the slickers to keep it that way - so the threat of violence is always right near the surface.

BTW - never get comfortable with idea that the Rube Army - our "well regulated militia" - is armed to the teeth.

2016 numbers:

WaPo: (pay wall)

GOP member of Jan. 6 committee warns that more violence is coming

One of two Republican members of the House committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, starkly warned Sunday that his own party’s lies could feed additional violence.

“There is violence in the future, I’m going to tell you,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), on ABC’s “This Week.” “And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can’t expect any differently.”

Kinzinger, who defied party leadership by serving on the Democratic-led committee, described an alarming message he received at home in the mail several days ago threatening to execute him, his wife and their 5-month-old baby.

“I’d never seen or had anything like that. It was sent from the local area,” he said.

Public officials have been inundated with threats in recent months, many spurred by former president Donald Trump’s continued obsession with the baseless claim that his 2020 loss was the result of a vast conspiracy of fraud. The Washington Post last year tracked how election administrators in at least 17 states received threats of violence in the months after the Jan. 6 attack, often sparked directly by comments from Trump.

The violence on Jan. 6 was a logical conclusion given the falsehoods spread by Trump his allies, Kinzinger said. “If you truly believe the deep state owned the election and the democracy was stolen and the election was stolen, that’s the most logical outcome,” said Kinzinger, who voted to impeach Trump shortly after the Jan. 6 attack and is not running for reelection.

He warned that the lies have not ended and could lead to a degradation of the democratic system, pointing to a county in New Mexico where Republican commissioners last week refused to certify the results of a primary election because they did not trust their voting machines. The commission reversed its rejection only after an order from the state supreme court.

A major goal of the committee has been to make clear to Americans that Trump was repeatedly told his loss was legitimate and that his schemes to overturn Joe Biden’s win were illegal but pushed forward anyhow.

The panel will hold its fourth public hearing on Tuesday, focusing on the pressure applied to state officials to reverse Biden’s win. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who received a phone call from Trump on Jan. 2, 2021, urging him to “find” the necessary votes to give his state to Trump, is expected to testify. Other witnesses are expected to include Georgia elections official Gabe Sterling and Arizona’s Republican House Speaker Rusty Bowers.

“The president was told this scheme is essentially something that his own lawyers couldn’t justify. But yet he pressed on, uprooted people’s lives, put their lives and our democracy very much at risk,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who will lead the questioning for the committee Tuesday, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Schiff said too that the committee wants to interview Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Emails and texts show that Ginni Thomas was actively working to upend Biden’s win, even though it was clear the Supreme Court could play a key role in the outcome. (The court ultimately declined to hear a case to overturn Biden’s win in four states.)

“We have a range of questions to ask her,” Schiff said. “Obviously, I think the committee will be interested, among other things, whether this was discussed with Justice Thomas, given that he was ruling on cases impacting whether we would get some of this information.”

The committee last week sent Ginni Thomas a letter asking her to testify. Ginni Thomas suggested to the conservative publication The Daily Caller last week that she is willing to testify voluntarily.

“I can’t wait to clear up misconceptions. I look forward to talking to them,” she said.

On Shitty Politics

Republicans have been working hard to deny going all-in on Replacement Theory, but then they pimp it just as hard in their attempts to 'win' elections.

This has to be the apex of cynical manipulation. Their "platform" - the effects of their constant dabbling in Stochastic Terrorism - threatens them as well as the rest of us. But somehow they think they can stay in front of it without being trampled themselves.

And it's not just the monster they've created that they have to be wary of - there's this whole angle too:

You can prove yourself to be very effective at stirring up trouble and pointing it at your political targets as a means to disrupt and overturn a government - which makes you quite useful to the ones who will ultimately take power. But once they're in those positions of power - when they become the government - they can no longer afford to have revolutionaries in their midst, and you'll be among the first ones eliminated.

Why do you think the founders of this joint - having won their new nation through violent insurrection - why did they then set about designing and engineering a new form government very specifically intended to avoid the need for revolution?

CNN looks at some of the weird shit going on in the GOP

And I really wish the Press Poodles would dig deeper for the people and the dark money that we know has to be working behind the scenes.

Paul Gosar Censured

So, I guess voting for Biden's infrastructure bill is ample reason for GOP Leadership to shit on their caucus members, but putting up a thinly veiled death threat against a colleague is just good clean fun(?)

After the censure vote, Gosar retweeted the offending video, and Kevin McCarthy threatened the Democrats with reprisals if Republicans regain the majority and he becomes speaker.

Pretty fuckin' sick of this "living in interesting times" bullshit.

AP:

The House voted Wednesday to censure Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona for posting an animated video that depicted him killing Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a sword, an extraordinary rebuke that highlighted the political strains testing Washington and the country.

Calling the video a clear threat to a lawmaker’s life, Democrats argued Gosar’s conduct would not be tolerated in any other workplace — and shouldn’t be in Congress.

The vote to censure Gosar and also remove him from his House committee assignments was approved by a vote of 223-207, almost entirely along party lines, with Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois the only Republicans voting in favor.

Gosar had deleted the tweet days ago amid the criticism, but he retweeted the video late Wednesday shortly after the vote.

He showed no emotion as he stood in the well of the House after the vote, flanked by roughly a dozen Republicans as Speaker Nancy Pelosi read the censure resolution and announced his penalty. He shook hands, hugged and patted other members of the GOP conference on the back before leaving the chamber.

Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called the censure an “abuse of power” by Democrats to distract from national problems. He said of the censure, a “new standard will continue to be applied in the future,” a signal of potential ramifications for Democratic members should Republicans retake a majority.

But Democrats said there was nothing political about it.

“These actions demand a response. We cannot have members joking about murdering each other,” said Pelosi. “This is both an endangerment of our elected officials and an insult to the institution.”

Ocasio-Cortez herself said in an impassioned speech, ”When we incite violence with depictions against our colleagues, that trickles down to violence in this country. And that is where we must draw the line.”

Unrepentant during tense floor debate, Gosar rejected what he called the “mischaracterization” that the cartoon was “dangerous or threatening. It was not.”

“I do not espouse violence toward anyone. I never have. It was not my purpose to make anyone upset,” Gosar said.

He compared himself to Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first Treasury secretary, celebrated in recent years in a Broadway musical, whose censure vote in Congress was defeated: “If I must join Alexander Hamilton, the first person attempted to be censured by this House, so be it, it is done.”

The decision to censure Gosar, one of the strongest punishments the House can dole out, was just the fourth in nearly 40 years — and just the latest example of the raw tensions that have roiled Congress since the 2020 election and the violent Capitol insurrection that followed.

Democrats spoke not only of the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection, but also the violent attacks that have escalated on both parties, including the 2017 shooting of Republican lawmakers practicing for a congressional baseball game and the 2011 shooting of former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords as she met with constituents at an event outside a Tucson grocery store.

Republicans largely dismissed Gosar’s video as nothing more than a cartoon, a routine form of political expression and hardly the most important issue facing Congress.

Yet threats against lawmakers are higher than ever, the chief of the U.S. Capitol Police told the Associated Press in an interview earlier this year.

The censure of Gosar was born out of Democratic frustration. Over the past week, as outrage over the video grew, House GOP leaders declined to publicly rebuke Gosar, who has a lengthy history of incendiary remarks. Instead, they largely ignored his actions and urged their members to vote against the resolution censuring him.

Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida said, “I would just suggest we have better things to do on the floor of the House of Representatives than be the hall monitors for Twitter.”

The resolution will remove Gosar from two committees: Natural Resources and the Oversight and Reform panel, on which Ocasio-Cortez also serves, limiting his ability to shape legislation and deliver for constituents. It states that depictions of violence can foment actual violence and jeopardize the safety of elected officials, citing the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as an example.

Gosar is the 24th House member to be censured. Though it carries no practical effect, except to provide a historic footnote that marks a lawmaker’s career, it is the strongest punishment the House can issue short of expulsion, which requires a two-thirds vote.

Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel, the former chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, was the last to receive the rebuke in 2010 for financial misconduct.

It would also be second time this year the House has initiated the removal of a GOP lawmaker from an assigned committee, the first being Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

Gosar, a six-term congressman, posted the video over a week ago with a note saying, “Any anime fans out there?” The roughly 90-second video was an altered version of a Japanese anime clip, interspersed with shots of Border Patrol officers and migrants at the southern U.S. border.

During one roughly 10-second section, animated characters whose faces had been replaced with Gosar, Greene and Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., were shown fighting other animated characters. Gosar’s character is seen striking another one made to look like Ocasio-Cortez in the neck with a sword. The video also shows him attacking President Joe Biden.

Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., whose receipt of repeated death threats has required her to spend thousands on security, said Gosar has not apologized to her. She singled out McCarthy for not condemning Gosar.

“What is so hard about saying this is wrong?” Ocasio-Cortez said. “This is not about me. This is not about Representative Gosar. But this is about what we are willing to accept.”

This is not the first brush with controversy for Gosar, who was first elected in 2010’s tea party wave. He has been repeatedly criticized by his own siblings, six of whom appeared in campaign ads supporting his Democratic opponent in 2018.

Earlier this year Gosar looked to form an America First Caucus with other hardline Republican House members that aimed to promote “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” while warning that mass immigration was putting the “unique identity” of the U.S. at risk. He’s made appearances at fringe right-wing events, including a gathering in Florida last February hosted by Nick Fuentes, an internet personality who has promoted white supremacist beliefs.

He has also portrayed a woman shot by Capitol police during the attack on the Capitol as a martyr, claiming she was “executed.” And he falsely suggested that a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was instigated by “the left” and backed by billionaire George Soros, a major funder of liberal causes who has become the focus of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Something Wrong With Some Of The Cops

Maybe the Vermont cops wanted to stay quiet about tracing the guy's phone number because they want more of these assholes to show their hands(?)

But knowing what we know about certain events - not exclusive to Jan6 and cops murdering black people - and knowing the tendency of way too many cops to close ranks and protect their own, I'll proceed with an increased sense of skepticism about parts of a Law Enforcement establishment that seems a little too willing to get a lot too cozy with the bad guys.

It's all just a little too curious.

Rachel has a rundown:

And here's the Reuters piece:

Nov 9 (Reuters) - In Arizona, a stay-at-home dad and part-time Lyft driver told the state’s chief election officer she would hang for treason. In Utah, a youth treatment center staffer warned Colorado’s election chief that he knew where she lived and watched her as she slept.

In Vermont, a man who says he works in construction told workers at the state election office and at Dominion Voting Systems that they were about to die.

“This might be a good time to put a f------ pistol in your f------ mouth and pull the trigger,” the man shouted at Vermont officials in a thick New England accent last December. “Your days are f------ numbered."

The three had much in common. All described themselves as patriots fighting a conspiracy that robbed Donald Trump of the 2020 election. They are regular consumers of far-right websites that embrace Trump’s stolen-election falsehoods. And none have been charged with a crime by the law enforcement agencies alerted to their threats.

They were among nine people who told Reuters in interviews that they made threats or left other hostile messages to election workers. In all, they are responsible for nearly two dozen harassing communications to six election officials in four states. Seven made threats explicit enough to put a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death, the U.S. federal standard for criminal prosecution, according to four legal experts who reviewed their messages at Reuters’ request.

These cases provide a unique perspective into how people with everyday jobs and lives have become radicalized to the point of terrorizing public officials. They are part of a broader campaign of fear waged against frontline workers of American democracy chronicled by Reuters this year. The news organization has documented nearly 800 intimidating messages to election officials in 12 states, including more than 100 that could warrant prosecution, according to legal experts.

The examination of the threats also highlights the paralysis of law enforcement in responding to this extraordinary assault on the nation’s electoral machinery. After Reuters reported the widespread intimidation in June, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a task force to investigate threats against election staff and said it would aggressively pursue such cases. But law enforcement agencies have made almost no arrests and won no convictions.

In many cases, they didn’t investigate. Some messages were too hard to trace, officials said. Other instances were complicated by America’s patchwork of state laws governing criminal threats, which provide varying levels of protection for free speech and make local officials in some states reluctant to prosecute such cases. Adding to the confusion, legal scholars say, the U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t formulated a clear definition of a criminal threat.

For this report, Reuters set out to identify the people behind these attacks on election workers and understand their motivations. Reporters submitted public-records requests and interviewed dozens of election officials in 12 states, obtaining phone numbers and email addresses for two dozen of the threateners.

Reuters was able to interview nine of them. All admitted they were behind the threats or other hostile messages. Eight did so on the record, identifying themselves by name.

In the seven cases that legal scholars said could be prosecuted, law enforcement agencies were alerted by election officials to six of them. The people who made those threats told Reuters they never heard from police.

All nine harassers interviewed by Reuters said they believed they did nothing wrong. Just two expressed regret when told their messages had frightened officials or caused security scares. The seven others were unrepentant, with some saying the election workers deserved the menacing messages.

Ross Miller, a Georgia real-estate investor, warned an official in the Atlanta area that he’d be tarred and feathered, hung or face firing squads unless he addressed voter fraud. In an interview, Miller said he would continue to make such calls “until they do something.” He added: “We can’t have another election until they fix what happened in the last one.”

The harassers expressed beliefs similar to those voiced by rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, trying to block Democrat Joe Biden’s certification as president. Nearly all of the threateners saw the country deteriorating into a war between good and evil – “patriots” against “communists.” They echoed extremist ideas popularized by QAnon, a collective of baseless conspiracy theories that often cast Trump as a savior figure and Democrats as villains. Some said they were preparing for civil war. Six were in their 50s or older; all but two were men.

They are part of a national phenomenon. America’s federal elections are administered by state and local officials. But the threateners are targeting workers far from home: Seven of the nine harassed officials in other states. Some targeted election officials in states where Trump lost by substantial margins, such as Colorado – or even Vermont, where Biden won by 35 percentage points.

“These people firmly believe in the ‘Big Lie’ that the former president legitimately won the election,” said Chris Krebs, who ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security. Krebs was fired by Trump last year for declaring that the 2020 election had been conducted fairly. By terrorizing election officials, he said, they’re effectively acting as Trump’s “foot soldiers.”

A Trump spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

Representative John Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat, introduced legislation in June to make it a federal crime to intimidate, threaten or harass an election worker. The bill, which has not come up for a vote, followed a Reuters investigation into such threats published the same month.

“I think we’re on a dangerous path,” Sarbanes said last week when told the threats were continuing with little law enforcement intervention. “We want there to be some effective and sustained push back on this kind of harassment.”

YOU'RE 'ABOUT TO GET F------ POPPED'

Only one of the nine harassers Reuters interviewed wouldn’t reveal his identity: the man threatening Vermont officials. Before reporters started examining him, law enforcement officials had decided against investigating, as many other agencies have done in similar cases nationwide.

Late last year, between Nov. 22 and Dec. 1, he left three messages with the secretary of state’s office from a number that state police deemed “essentially untraceable,” according to an internal police email obtained through a public-records request. The man identified himself as a Vermont resident in one voicemail.

Police didn’t pursue a case on the grounds that he didn’t threaten a specific person or indicate an imminent plan to act, according to emails and prosecution records. State police never spoke with the caller, according to interviews with state officials, a law enforcement source and a review of internal police emails.

Reuters did.

Reporters connected with him in September on the phone number police called untraceable. In five conversations over four days spanning more than three hours, he acknowledged threatening Vermont officials and described his thinking.

He soon grew agitated, peppering two Reuters reporters with 137 texts and voicemails over the past month, threatening the journalists and describing his election conspiracy theories.

The man telephoned the secretary of state’s office again on Oct. 17 from the same phone number used in the other threats. This time he was more explicit. Addressing state staffers and referring to the two journalists by name, he said he guaranteed that all would soon get “popped.”

“You guys are a bunch of f------ clowns, and all you dirty c---suckers are about to get f------ popped,” he said. “I f------ guarantee it.”

The officials referred the voicemail to state police, who again declined to investigate. Agency spokesperson Adam Silverman said in a statement that the message didn’t constitute an “unambiguous reference to gun violence,” adding that the word “popped” – common American slang for “shot” – “is unclear and nonspecific, and could be a reference to someone being arrested.”

Legal experts didn’t see it that way. Fred Schauer, a University of Virginia law professor, said the message likely constituted a criminal threat under federal law by threatening gun violence at specific individuals. “There’s certainly an intent to put people in fear,” Schauer said.

After Reuters asked Vermont officials about the October threat, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began an inquiry into the matter, according to two local law enforcement officials.

The FBI declined to confirm or deny any investigation into that threat and others reported in this story. In a statement, the bureau said it takes such acts seriously, working with other law enforcement agencies “to identify and stop any potential threats to public safety” and “investigate any and all federal violations to the fullest."

'I'M A PATRIOT'

Many of the harassers have been radicalized by a growing universe of far-right websites and other sources of disinformation about the 2020 election. Like Trump, they bashed mainstream news outlets and cast them as complicit in an elaborate scheme to steal the election.

Jamie Fialkin of Peoria, Arizona, talked of a grand conspiracy of those controlling the media, the banking system and social media companies. “When you have those three things, you can get away with anything – you can tell people, ‘black is white, white is black,’ and people go, ‘OK,’” Fialkin said.

On the surface, nothing about Fialkin’s biography suggests extremism. A former stand-up comedian from Brooklyn, New York, Fialkin said he has a degree in actuarial science, the study of insurance data. In 2017, he self-published a book marketed as a “survival guide” for first-time older parents. The 54-year-old said he spends most days taking care of his two young daughters and driving part-time for Lyft.

At a 2006 comedy show, he poked fun at his “professional bowler” physique, balding head, and inability to play golf. The self-described Orthodox Jew also took aim at Palestinians and described his political views as “a little more to the right.”

Fialkin said in an interview that he’s no longer in a joking mood.

He believes America is headed for civil war. He endorsed Trump’s false claims that millions of fraudulent votes swung the election to Biden. He said he’s convinced that former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, and progressive philanthropist George Soros bought fake ballots from China, another debunked theory promoted by Trump’s allies.

Fialkin blamed one person in particular for Trump’s Arizona loss: Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the state’s top election official. On June 3, Fialkin called Hobbs’ office and left a message saying she’d hang “from a f------ tree.”

“They’re going to hang you for treason, you f------ bitch,” Fialkin said.

Minutes later, Fialkin left another voicemail in which he recommended a “good slogan” for Democrat Hobbs’ campaign for governor: “Don’t vote for me, for one reason. Back in December, I got hung for treason.”

Fialkin said he never intended to harm Hobbs, but was unapologetic.

“I’m not denying anything,” he said, “because I’m a patriot.”

Fialkin said he changed his Republican voter registration to independent because the party didn’t fight hard enough for Trump.

“I’m like most Americans,” he said. “We’re just waiting to see when the civil war starts.”

Fialkin’s messages were part of a barrage targeting Hobbs. Two others came from Jeff Yeager, a 56-year-old self-employed electrician from Los Angeles, California. Yeager, too, called for her execution.

“When Katie the c--- is executed for treason, what are you f------ traitors going to be doing for work?” Yeager said in a June 17 voicemail left for Hobbs and her staff. Months later, on Sept. 8, he left another voicemail warning she’d be executed.

Yeager acknowledged leaving the messages and said he didn’t care if Hobbs felt threatened. “If she thinks that I’m a threat to her, I’m not,” he said. “But the public is going to hang this woman.”

Yeager said he sees the mainstream media as full of disinformation; he called Reuters “one of the most evil organizations on the planet.” He said he gets his news from “alternative websites that are not censored,” including social network Gab and Bitchute, a video-sharing site known for hosting far-right figures and conspiracy theorists.

“Everything we’re being told is a lie,” he said.

In an interview, Hobbs said the threats by Fialkin, Yeager and others have been “emotionally draining” for her and her staff. The messages from Fialkin and Yeager were sent to the FBI, her spokesperson said. Some threats triggered a security detail, Hobbs said.

Jared Carter, a Cornell University law professor specializing in constitutional free-speech issues, said the threats by both men could be prosecuted under federal law. “In light of the multiple voicemails from the same person, and the overall tone of the messages, a court could find them to be true threats,” Carter said.

Election administrators such as Hobbs are part of a broader array of public officials targeted by Trump supporters. The day before Yeager spoke with Reuters in September, he said, two FBI agents visited him at his Los Angeles home to discuss threats he made to two national politicians: Republican Senator Mitt Romney and Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, both of whom denounced Trump for inciting the January 6 insurrection. He said the FBI agents produced transcripts of his calls to Pelosi and Romney. Yeager said the transcripts quoted him as saying “we will kill you.”

The agents instructed him how to lawfully express his political views, Yeager said, and left without arresting him. “I’m not making any more calls to anybody,” he said. “I may have crossed the line in one sentence, but I’m no danger to anybody.”

Spokespeople for Romney and Pelosi declined to comment on Yeager’s threats.

INSPIRED BY TRUMP

Others who threatened election officials told Reuters they were directly inspired by Trump or his prominent allies, who have denounced specific election offices nationwide for allowing voter fraud, turning them into targets.

Eric Pickett, a 42-year-old night staffer at a youth treatment center in Utah, said his anger boiled over after watching an Aug. 10 “cyber symposium” held by pillow magnate Mike Lindell, a Trump ally who has pushed false election conspiracy theories.

Pickett said he paid close attention as one of the symposium’s speakers, Tina Peters, a Republican clerk in Colorado’s Mesa County, criticized Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat. Griswold has been leading an investigation into Peters over a voting-system security breach in Mesa, one of the state’s most conservative counties. At the symposium, Peters, an election-fraud conspiracy theorist, claimed Griswold “raided” her office to produce false evidence and “bully” her.

None of that was true, according to state officials. Nonetheless, Pickett snapped. He got on Facebook and sent Griswold a message.

“You raided an office. You broke the law. STOP USING YOUR TACTICS. STOP NOW. Watch your back. I KNOW WHERE YOU SLEEP, I SEE YOU SLEEPING. BE AFRAID, BE VERRY AFFRAID. I hope you die.”

A Griswold spokesperson said the August message was promptly referred to state and federal law enforcement. The threat was reported by Reuters in September.

Pickett said in an interview that he “got wrapped up in the moment.” He was surprised Griswold found the message threatening and expressed regret for causing alarm.

“I didn’t know they would take it as a threat,” he said. “I was thinking they would just take it as somebody just trolling them.”

Colorado State Patrol, in response to a records request, said they had no investigative reports on the threat. A spokesperson, Sergeant Troy Kessler, said the State Patrol reviewed all messages it received from Griswold’s office and that no one had been arrested.

Three legal experts said the message met the threshold of a threat that could be prosecuted under federal law. “The whole purpose of the threats doctrine is to protect people from not only a prospect of physical violence, but the damage of living with a threat hanging over you,” said Timothy Zick, a William & Mary Law School professor.

Lindell and Peters did not respond to requests for comment.

TARRED AND FEATHERED

Trump’s stolen-election claims about Georgia, traditionally a Republican stronghold, have sparked some of the most serious election threats.

In a Dec. 10 hearing organized by Georgia Republican lawmakers, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani played a short snippet of surveillance footage from Atlanta’s State Farm Arena, which was used as a tabulation site. He claimed it showed Fulton County election workers pulling out suitcases full of fraudulent ballots in Biden’s favor. State investigators and county officials have said the “suitcases” were standard ballot containers and the video shows normal vote-counting.

Ross Miller, the real-estate investor in Forsyth County, Georgia, saw the video. He left a Dec. 31 voicemail for Fulton County Elections Director Richard Barron, saying he “better run” and that he’ll be tarred and feathered and executed unless “ya'll do something” about voter fraud. Barron forwarded the threat to police, according to a county email.

However, Fulton County Police Chief Wade Yates said his agency did not contact Miller after concluding the message did not constitute a threat under Georgia law.

In an interview, Miller acknowledged making the call.

“I left the message because I’m a patriot, and I’m sick and tired of what’s going on in this country,” he said. “That’s what happens when you commit treason: You get hung.”

Miller, who said he was in his sixties, said he’s been kicked off Twitter seven times for his views. He follows “Tore Says,” a podcast popular with QAnon adherents whose host, Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman, has called for a “revolutionary movement.”

“You've got to stand up,” said Miller. “You're either a patriot for the freedom of this country or you're a communist against it.”

'YOU'RE ALL F------ DEAD'

Some Vermont officials questioned why the man intimidating state officials wasn’t investigated or prosecuted, highlighting a broader national debate over how to respond to post-election threats. In a pattern seen across America, Vermont law enforcement officials decided this man’s repeated menacing messages amounted to legally protected free speech.

The threatener focused on one of the central conspiracy theories promoted by Trump and his allies: That officials had rigged vote-counting technology from Dominion Voting Systems to flip millions of votes to Biden.

“Just let everybody know that their days are f------ numbered,” he said in a Dec. 1 voicemail. “There are a lot of people who are going to be executed.”

Around that time, officials at Dominion’s headquarters in Colorado received three unsettling voicemails. “You’re all f------ dead,” said one message. “We’re going to f------ kill you all.” The caller’s telephone number and voice matched those on the Vermont threats.

The threats to Dominion were referred to the Denver Police Department and the FBI. Denver police failed to identify the caller, a department spokesperson said.

The Vermont secretary of state’s office is located in a historic 19th-century brick Queen Anne-style house in the capital of Montpelier. The staff helps register voters and administer elections in a state with one of America’s lowest rates of violent crime. The voicemails terrified some staffers.

“I had to try to calm people down,” Secretary of State Jim Condos said in an interview. “We were all on edge.”

After the Dec. 1 threats, Vermont Deputy Secretary of State Chris Winters expressed astonishment that police wouldn’t pursue the caller, according to emails between secretary-of-state officials and police obtained through a records’ request.

“I am trying to make sense of this,” Winters wrote in an email to Daniel Trudeau, the criminal division commander of the Vermont State Police. “If someone makes a veiled threat to come to the Secretary of State’s office and execute only the guilty ones on the election team, without naming names, they’ve not broken the law?” Winters added that he wanted to know “who we’re dealing with.”

Trudeau replied that he had consulted with other officers and didn’t see a crime, because the caller did not specify that he would come to the secretary of state’s office and did not say that he personally would execute anyone.

Vermont’s state police intelligence unit tried but failed to identify the caller. Police examined the number, which bore a Vermont area code, but said it was untraceable, according to an email between state police officials. The unit’s commander, Shawn Loan, wrote to Trudeau saying that the threats could be part of a “larger campaign” and the calls “may have been scripted.” He added that the caller used voice-over-internet technology. Two former FBI agents said such calls can be harder to trace than those made from landlines or cellular phones.

Loan was not immediately available for comment, a spokesperson said.

Vermont State Police didn’t pursue the threatener. Rory Thibault, the state’s attorney in Washington County, which includes Montpelier, supported Trudeau’s decision in a four-page Dec. 15 memo to state police. The messages were “protected speech,” Thibault wrote, because they were not “directed at a single person or official.” They were “conditional” on a “perception of malfeasance in the election process,” and the caller didn’t indicate he would personally inflict harm, he said.

Zick, the William & Mary professor, said a threat doesn’t necessarily have to single out a specific individual to be prosecuted under federal law. If someone calls in a bomb threat to Congress rather than to a specific senator’s office, for instance, “that’s still a threat.”

In an interview, Thibault said Vermont laws pose unique challenges for pursuing such cases because they offer greater protections for individual rights than federal laws. He added that the threats and the rise of extremist rhetoric are leading to a push for tougher anti-harassment laws.

Vermont State Representative Maxine Grad said she plans to introduce a bill in the January session aimed at broadening protections for people who have received criminal threats, such as election workers.

On Dec. 16, a day after the state’s attorney ruled out an investigation, the unidentified caller taunted Vermont election officials in a new voicemail. “All the traitors will be punished” in the “next few weeks,” he said. “Kill yourself now.”

This time, the caller used a different number that appeared to be a pre-paid “burner” phone.

Montpelier Police Chief Brian Peete was concerned. “Very disturbing,” he wrote to state police, security and secretary of state officials after reviewing the Dec. 16 threat. “Fits profile of someone who may act.”

Again, state police declined to investigate because the caller didn’t threaten a specific individual, according to police emails.

The phone numbers used by the caller left few clues about his identity. One reverse phone lookup service linked his number to Bennington, a town of about 15,000 people in southwest Vermont. Denver police couldn’t identify the caller, but found “decent information” linking the number to Bennington, according to a Denver Police Department report on the threats to Dominion.

Surrounded by the Green Mountains, the Bennington area is known for its picturesque farm houses, a towering Revolutionary War battle monument and blazing autumn foliage. Less known is that the rural, mostly white town and other parts of southern Vermont have seen a rise in Trump-inspired militia activity in recent years, residents and state officials say.

In April, the town agreed to pay a $137,500 settlement to Kiah Morris, the state legislature’s only black female elected official, who resigned in September 2018, following complaints that Bennington police failed to properly investigate racially motivated harassment against her. Morris declined to comment for this story.

The calls from the still-unidentified man threatening election officials and reporters were referred to the FBI, according to police emails.

Reuters first reached the man on Sept. 17. In a brief interview, he referenced the Dominion conspiracy theory. Asked for his name, he swore and hung up.

A week later, the journalists contacted him again on the same number. He admitted leaving the voicemails to express his “absolute dissatisfaction” in the election. In three subsequent phone interviews on Oct. 6 and 7 that spanned a total of two and a half hours, he opened up about his views.

The man said he believed thousands of fake ballots were cast in Arizona, repeating debunked claims. He said members of the media would face tribunals and be executed like the Nazi leaders who were hung after the Nuremberg trials in the 1940s and that perpetrators of election fraud would be sent to military prison.

He said he lived “in the woods,” and worked in construction. He didn’t own a gun, but said he had “a baseball bat and a machete.” He shared videos from the far-right website Bitchute and said he watched “all kinds of stuff that definitely needs to be investigated.”

Then he turned on the Reuters journalists.

In an Oct. 11 voicemail, he threatened to sue the reporters for obtaining his telephone number from state records. Over the next 25 days, he texted them 91 times, sharing misinformation on the origins of the coronavirus and other conspiracy theories. On Oct. 17, he left the new voicemails at the Vermont secretary of state’s office, including the one threatening that the reporters and election staffers would get “popped.”

The next morning, the caller followed up with more texts to the journalists. “I am going to destroy you and that is a threat.” In multiple texts, he said he would “ruin” the life of one of the reporters. On Oct. 30, he left two more voicemails for them. “You are all going to f------ hang. I’m going to make sure of it,” said one. “Bad s--- is gonna to happen to you,” said the other. “Your days are f------ numbered.”

He also sent the reporters four messages with the same picture: a grainy black-and-white photograph of a public execution that has been shared widely in far-right social media, with a caption claiming it showed “members of the media” hanging in “Nuremberg, Germany.” (In fact, the photo was taken in Kiev, Ukraine, depicting Nazi officers being hung for war crimes.)

The man’s threats and the rise in extremism in Vermont and nationwide since the election are a concern for Peete and his small staff in the Montpelier Police Department.

“It’s something that keeps me and all of us here up at night,” the police chief said.