A violent turn right
The imagery is violent and bizarre: A shotgun-toting man in civilian clothes leads a team in military gear as they break down the door of a home. They’re on the hunt, he declares, for Republicans, and there’s no bag limit.
This isn’t some twisted fantasy video posted by an unhinged Democrat. It’s a twisted campaign commercial for an unhinged Republican U.S. Senate candidate, Eric Greitens, who is running in a GOP primary in Missouri.
And it ought to be the latest warning to Republican leaders and voters that the vitriolic rhetoric from too many of their politicians and leaders, and their indulgence of radical, violent groups, is getting increasingly out of hand — turning outward against the very institutions of our democracy, and turning inward on the party itself.
Mr. Greitens, a former Missouri governor who resigned after less than two years amid allegations of sexual assault, and whose wife accused him of domestic abuse, is running in a 21person primary field vying for the GOP nomination in a race to replace retiring Sen. Roy Blunt. In the ad, he invites people to “hunt” Republicans in Name Only — RINOS — a pejorative term for moderates whom hard-line conservatives see as not far enough to the right.
Twitter flagged the ad as a violation of its standards but kept it up in the name of “the public’s interest.” It drew criticism from both sides of the aisle; Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Democrat, called it “sociopathic” and warned, “You’re going to get someone killed”; Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who has been branded a RINO and threatened with violence for criticizing Donald Trump, called Mr. Greitens “a very bad man.”
Whether Mr. Greitens suffers for it remains to be seen. He is running, after all, in a party whose leaders still stand with Mr. Trump even after his incitement of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters stirred up by his lie of a stolen election. A party whose congressional caucuses largely still support Mr. Trump and his false claims, and refused to hold him accountable through impeachment. A party whose Number Three leader in the House of Representatives, Rep. Elise Stefanik of Schuylerville, adopts the language of racist “great replacement theory” and repeats Mr. Trump’s disproven allegations of widespread election fraud. And still, corporate money rolls in for her and others who stand by Mr. Trump, and, as North Country Public Radio recently reported, she retains a board seat on, ironically enough, the The National Endowment for Democracy — a group that promotes democracy abroad — even as she continues to support Mr. Trump’s attacks on democracy here at home.
Certainly there has been violence and violent rhetoric on the left, but it has not attained the almost-institutional acceptance America is witnessing in the Grand Old Party. We are watching as prominent figures in a major political party abandon one societal norm after another — the acceptance of the results of fair democratic elections, the shunning of leaders and politicians who openly lie, the abhorrence of even the suggestion that violence has a place in our politics. Mr. Greiten’s staged home invasion, we fear, may not even yet be the worst of it.