No sooner had I uploaded a post about Donald Trump, JD Vance and whether their promotion of lies about pet-eating immigrants amounted to incitement than we were treated to an example of something closer to actual incitement.
On Sunday, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire posted on Twitter/X: “Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero.” According to NBC 10 Boston, they took the post down a short time later — not because they had any second thoughts, mind you, but because “we don’t want to break the terms of this website we agreed to. It’s a shame that even on a ‘free speech’ website that libertarians cannot speak freely. Libertarians are truly the most oppressed minority.”
The Boston Globe looked into it as well and reported:
In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for the state’s Libertarian Party said the organization “believes that the journalists at the Boston Globe are as evil as rapists or murderers.”
“A proper society would exclude Globe Journalists from residing within it entirely,” Jeremy Kauffman wrote in an email.
Good Lord. I was actually aware of all this Sunday morning but refrained from writing anything because I couldn’t be sure if the Libertarians’ Twitter account had been hacked. Now we know that they’re proud of their hateful, dangerous rhetoric. It will be interesting to see whether there are any legal repercussions given that the threat against Harris comes closer to the legal definition of incitement than anything Trump or Vance said. Then again, it may still fall short of the imminent-threat language contained in Brandenburg v. Ohio.
Also on Sunday, a would-be assassin was taken into custody at Trump’s Florida golf course just two months after he was shot at during a rally in Pennsylvania.
And, finally, the U.S. Justice Department has charged two alleged neo-Nazis of publishing an assassination “hit list” whose potential targets included former U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins.
We are living through a terrifying moment, and it’s not going to end on Election Day.
