Political threats and intimidation have no place in civilized society

Sunday, Nov. 21, 2021 | 2 a.m.

Here’s a question to right-wing America. What if the Sun started publishing editorials on a regular basis calling for specific conservatives and their supporters to be executed?

Would that be acceptable? Would you consider our kill lists a mere form of political free speech, or maybe laugh it off as parody? Would you take offense to us calling for right-leaning individuals to be hanged, or shot by a firing squad, or slain with swords, or tortured to death?

How about it? Any objections?

Of course, the Sun has no intention of doing this.

But we ask because what we’re describing is exactly what’s happening increasingly on the right.

You saw it with Arizona GOP Rep. Paul Gosar’s fantasy anime video in which he slays Rep.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. You saw it with Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene liking Facebook comments calling for the execution of Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. You saw it when One American News Network’s Pearson Sharp called for the executions of Americans whom he claimed, without evidence, had carried out a coup against former President Donald Trump. You saw it when New Hampshire state lawmaker Al Baldasaro, the co-chair of Trump’s national veterans’ coalition, said during a talk-radio interview that Hillary Clinton should be shot for treason. You saw it when a young man stood up during an event featuring right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and asked when it was time to start using guns against progressives.

You even saw a version of it with former President Donald Trump saying it was “common sense” for the Jan. 6 crowd to be calling for the hanging of Mike Pence as a traitor to the “Stop the steal” effort.

And it keeps coming, fueled by a party populated with members who either have a taste for the hateful rhetoric or are too weak to call it out and put a stop to it. This is telling: Only two Republicans in the House voted to censure Gosar.

As Ocasio-Cortz said Wednesday on the House floor, “The example we set matters,” and the example the Republican leadership is setting is ugly. These leaders are now living in a world where threats are part of the political discourse. They won’t talk about bipartisan legislation to improve America, but these leaders and their followers sure are eager to make death threats.

Naturally, those calling for the killings say they don’t actually intend to hurt anyone. They claim they’re joking, or making a figurative political statement, or using violent animation as a way of speaking to younger people in their own language, or some such phony justification for their dangerous words and actions.

But regardless of how they explain it, what they’re really doing is lowering the social guardrails that discourage a civilized society from making threats and intimidation. They encourage their followers to imagine political assassination as part of daily political life in America.

Maybe the target of their threats is the president, or members of Congress, or a local school board member, or a neighbor, or a guy a few seats down at the corner bar. It doesn’t matter to the right’s increasingly militant extremists: Anybody who doesn’t support the Big Lie, isn’t opposed to coronavirus safety precautions, etc., is fair game as the target for a terroristic threat.

Party affiliation doesn’t even matter. Witness the death threats that the Republicans who supported President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package got from extremists in their own ranks.

This is grossly irresponsible. It emboldens violent individuals to take action, weakens public discourse and pushes Americans further and further apart. And eventually, as Pence and the congressional supporters of the infrastructure act have already discovered, the normalization of violence makes anyone fair game over perceived acts of disloyalty.

Ocasio-Cortez was spot-on in addressing this issue on the House floor: “Our work here matters. Our example matters. There is meaning in our service. And as leaders in this country, when we incite violence with depictions against our colleagues, that trickles down into violence in this country. And that is where we must draw the line, independent of party, identity or belief.”

So again, what if the Sun or some other moderate publication like us were to start putting out kill lists? How would that go over?

We’d never do it. But it’s a hypothetical that the far-right should reflect upon.