San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
ATTACK EXAMPLE OF RISE IN VIOLENT POLITICAL RHETORIC, NEW THREATS
Experts: Language by officials, media more apocalyptic
The armed attack this past week on an FBI office in Ohio by a supporter of former President Donald Trump who was enraged by the bureau’s search of Trump’s private residence in Florida was one of the most disturbing episodes of political violence in recent months.
But it was hardly the only one.
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 late June, a former Marine stepped down as the grand marshal of a July 4 parade in Houston after a deluge of 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-a-lago, Trump’s beachfront home and club, became a target. On protrump 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 and to different types of people, scholars who study political violence point to a common thread: the heightened use of bellicose, dehumanizing and apocalyptic language, particularly by prominent figures in right-wing politics and media.
Several public 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 Trumpendorsed House candidate in Washington state, said on a podcast run by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief political strategist. “We’re at war.”
On Thursday, a 42-yearold Ohio man, identified as Ricky Shiffer, showed up at the Cincinnati field office of the FBI with an Ar-15-style rifle and was subsequently shot to death after firing multiple times at police during a standoff. There is no evidence of what prompted Shiffer to act. But Shiffer’s social media posts later revealed that he was full of rage about, among other things, the search at Mar-alago — and that he wanted revenge.
“Violence is not (all) terrorism,” he wrote on Trump’s own social media app, Truth Social. “Kill the FBI on sight.”
Despite that threat, one day later, when media outlet Breitbart News published the warrant underlying the Mar-a-lago search, it did not redact the names of the FBI agents on the document. Almost immediately afterward, posts on a protrump chat board referred to them as “traitors.”
According to the FBI, there are now about 2,700 open domestic terrorism investigations — a number that has doubled since the spring of 2020 — and that does not include lesser but still serious incidents that do not rise to the level of federal inquiry. Last year, threats against members of Congress reached a record high of 9,600, according to data provided by the Capitol Police.
Nonetheless, it is exceptionally rare for most adults to willfully inflict harm on other people, especially for political reasons, said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the democracy, conf lict and governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
There is little evidence that some media figures have tempered their rhetoric, even as Congress and the Justice Department investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.
But the use of violence and violent language is not solely a problem on the right.
Some recent studies have found that a roughly equal percentage of liberals and conservatives agree that violence against the government is either “definitely” or “probably” justifiable. Others have shown that although support for political violence has doubled among Republicans since Trump took office, it has also increased — albeit more slowly — among Democrats.