As rhetoric escalates, so do threats, violence
The armed attack this past week on an FBI office in Ohio by a supporter of former President Donald Trump’s who was enraged by the bureau’s search of Trump’s private residence in Florida was one of the most disturbing episodes of right-wing political violence in recent months.
In the year and a half since a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, threats of political violence and actual attacks have become a steady reality of American life, affecting school board officials, election workers, flight attendants, librarians and even members of Congress, often with few headlines and little reaction from politicians.
In June, a former Marine stepped down as the grand marshal of a July 4 parade in Houston after threats that focused on her support of transgender rights. A few weeks later, the gay mayor of an Oklahoma city quit his job after what he described as a series of “threats and attacks bordering on violence.”
Even the federal judge who authorized the warrant to search for classified material at Mar-aLago, Trump’s beachfront home and club, became a target. On pro-Trump message boards, several threats were issued against him and his family, with one person writing, “I see a rope around his neck.”
Although this welter of events may feel disparate, occurring at different times and places, scholars who study political violence point to a common thread: the heightened use of bellicose, dehumanizing and apocalyptic language, particularly by figures in right-wing politics and media.
Several right-wing or Republican figures reacted to Monday’s search of Mar-a-Lago not only with demands to dismantle the FBI but with warnings that the action had triggered “war.”
“This just shows everyone what many of us have been saying for a very long time,” Joe Kent, a Trump-endorsed House candidate in Washington state, said on a podcast run by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief political strategist. “We’re at war.”
Even before the search at Mar-a-Lago, some of Trump’s most vocal supporters had been casting the political stakes as existential, suggesting that the country was already embroiled in an end-of-times clash between irreconcilable foes.
“This is truly a battle between those who want to save America and those who want to destroy her,” Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona, told the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas early this month. “That’s where we are at the moment. My question to you is: Are you in this fight with us?”