A classmate’s lecture asserted Trump’s encouragement of self-appointed armed vigilantes, militias, and MEGA toughs, filled with racism and hostility toward rules of law and order, would blow over. But those guys think they’ve the right to use weapons to make the rest of us to do what they want. Once tasting power people don’t lay it aside easily. Adding prejudice poisons the land. Add weapons and official encouragement, watch out.
FBI Director Christopher Wraytestified that political violence is nearly a daily phenomenon. The FBI itself has been targeted. Threats against the FBI have spiked, “includ[ing] a bomb threat at FBI headquarters … calls for ‘civil war’ and ‘armed rebellion,’” and a nail gun was fired into one FBI office. The FBI erected additional barriers around its Washington headquarters because of the threats.
Attacks on the courts threaten fair and impartial justice – like the 2020 murder of U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas’s son and the shooting of her husband in their family home in New Jersey. Recent violence includes an attack on Justice Kavanaugh’s life and the murder of a retired circuit judge in Wisconsin. Threats against federal judges and their families are “a disturbing trend” and “on the rise….” Some 1,100 serious threats were leveled against one judge for a temporary order on Trump’s first travel ban. 60 Minutes reported a 400% jump in threats to federal judges over five years.
Members of the Congress, governors and other state officials have been attacked and threatened.
- Since 2011, Representative Gabby Giffords was shot and suffered severe brain injury from an assassination attempt; Representative Steve Scalise was shot and seriously wounded by a terrorist; and Representative Rand Paul was tackled from behind, fracturing five ribs.
- Threats to members of Congress doubled since Trump’s 2020 election defeat and continue to soar. One anonymous video showed a man with a gun following Rep. Torres saying “I got something for you.” Another left “a dead rat with a noose around its neck and a brick with a family member’s name” on Rep. Tom Reed’s doorstep.
- On the very morning he was interviewed, Republican Representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota reported “one of my offices received a threat against my life” among other threats. “My address, a picture of my home where my family lives was posted on kind of an anti-Dusty Facebook page.”
- Others described their fear of threats to CNN.
- Just a decade earlier, Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Tom Daschle of South Dakota received letters with anthrax spores.
Replacing law, order and democracy, with fear, violence and intimidation endangers everyone. Official encouragement or support aggravate it. Authorities in Franco’s Spain stole children from their parents for money. Drug lords in Columbia and Mexico absorbed forces of law and order. Gangs demand payments or force children to join. Authorities disappeared 43 students in Mexico. Families run away only to be turned down at the US border and forced back. Breakdown of law and order is serious business. Authorities’ ability to act with impunity, as if rules were irrelevant to them, makes everyone slaves. When society gives up on law and order, no funding of police solves the problem.
Storming the Capital disempowers the people. Force, violence and intimidation make us surrender everything that’s precious. That’s where officially encouraged mob violence leads.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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