A few months back my wife and I decided to stroll down 1960’s political memory lane with a string of movies. “The Best Man” and “Advise and Consent” were prestige pictures for their time. Gore Vidal’s “Best Man” asks the age-old question what good is having values in politics if you don’t have the will and the instincts to protect those values at any cost? It’s a film that I suspect will echo down through the ages and feel surprisingly relevant even hundreds of years from now. Provided of course our quaint little democratic experiment — as some Republicans like to see it — survives.
“Advise and Consent” is more off a recognizable knife fight, especially in the wake of the Kavanaugh nomination fight. A contemporary viewer will recognize all of the elements, pompous grandstanding, petty personal rivalry and party loyalties tested with every weapon from bluster to blackmail. Every element but one. Where, a modern viewer would ask, are the death threats? Dr. Ford, the first of three women to accuse Justice Kavanaugh of abusive sexual behavior while a teenager received death threats from the judge’s supporters and Trump trolls. The threats, the doxxing - the practice of publishing all of an opponent’s personal information online so that perverse and dangerous people can easily find them at the hands of these supporters contributed to her having to move out of her home. The Judge complained loudly at his hearing that he too had been threatened by radicals, though to date he has not said that he or his family has been forced to leave their home. Law school classmates of Judge Kavanaugh who contradicted his Senate testimony in op-ed pieces have been threatened. Other accusers have recounted being threatened with Swatting, a practice of calling in a false report of hostage activity at someone’s address, causing the police to send a SWAT team that in one case killed an innocent man.
It should be obvious to anyone reading this that potential Supreme court judges and the witnesses opposing their nomination should not be threatened with violence, let alone murder. And despite the fact that one Senator, Cory Gardner of Colorado, a Republican, reported that his wife had received beheading e-mails and had been doxxed this weekend after the Kavanaugh vote, it should be obvious to all but the intentionally blind that this new normal arrives courtesy of one politician and his followers, the President of the United States, Donald Trump.
Trump was notorious for normalizing the idea that political violence is acceptable. At recent rallies he has “winked” while noting he would never actually call for violence against Dr. Ford, but nevertheless misses the days when that would have happened. During his 2016 campaign, he was cautioned for crossing the line when he suggested that there was a “second amendment solution” to a Clinton victory. During that election, the Conservative National Review published an article claiming that hundreds of reporters breing targeted for trolling, even late-night incidents at their homes. One media celebrity hired private security in response to targeting by the then presidential candidate.
It is disturbing enough to think that the President and his followers are in favor of this violence, but with all of the evidence of support for White Supremacist groups in plain sight, isn’t it reasonable to wonder whether the campaign and even the White House did not have some hand in targeting people?
In a climate poisoned by violence against predominantly critics of the President or his agenda, it’s a fair question to ask.
No one in America deserves death threats for expressing their political opinions.