The media’s heated rhetoric is bearing fruit.
A man has been arrested for threatening to kill Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), per the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia.
According to NBC News, Sean Patrick Cirillo of Macon, Georgia, called Greene’s office twice on Wednesday with threats to kill her. He was arrested and is expected to appear in federal court on Monday.
“You don’t think it’s going to happen when you are out of power?” Cirillo was heard saying in a recording of the call. “You don’t think you are going to get payback?”
On Friday, Greene released a statement thanking law enforcement for having “acted swiftly in response to this murderous threat.”
“From Rome City Police, the Floyd County Sheriff’s Office, U.S. Capitol Police, the House Sergeant at Arms, and ultimately the FBI who made the arrest, every official acted quickly to put this man behind bars,” Greene added.
The lawmaker went on to condemn political violence regardless of affiliation:
Threats to murder elected officials should never be tolerated. I’m not the only victim with this threat of violence. My family is threatened. My staff is threatened. I even had to close my district office due to the potential of violence. It’s wrong and never should happen.
… Threats of violence must be taken seriously. And that’s exactly why I take my Second Amendment rights seriously.
The threat comes at a time when Greene has been in the headlines again for filing impeachment articles against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
It also comes at a time when heightened media rhetoric is brewing fears of right-wing insurrection and authoritarianism. Ironically, by stoking the belief that conservatives want to commit violence against those the media identifies as “victim” groups (nonwhites, Muslims, homosexuals, etc.), they are incentivizing violence against right-wingers.
After all, once conservatives have been demonized as evil insurrectionists who would enslave and murder liberals if they could, those leftists who have been sufficiently radicalized will have no qualms about committing acts of violence against them. It is the process of otherism — using rhetoric and propaganda to dehumanize a particular group. In this case, the mainstream media, in collaboration with Democrats, are deliberately dehumanizing American conservatives.
This process has been going on for years now, and has already resulted in high-profile violent acts. The most prominent, of course, was the 2017 shooting of Republican lawmakers at the annual Congressional Baseball Game in Alexandria, Virginia. James Hodgkinson — a socialist Bernie Sanders supporter and anti-Trumper — shot six people that day, including then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise.
The 2020 George Floyd riots, which resulted in several murders — including of law enforcement — and widespread looting and property damage, were likewise the violent consequences of a mainstream media that convinced many American blacks, by means of a carefully crafted and incessantly replayed narrative, that whites in America are trying to subjugate and kill them.
This dangerous style of propaganda is in full force nowadays, emboldened by the Jan. 6 Capitol protests (played up as an “insurrection” by the media) and by Democrats’ control of the Department of Justice.
For example, one recent Politico piece describes what it claims to be Donald Trump’s plan to install himself as a dictator, after which he will allegedly use the levers of government to politically persecute and round up all his rivals.
The piece claims: “… Trump intends to turbo-politicize the Department of Justice and order prosecutions of his former aides and officials who have criticized him. Perhaps he thinks the country won’t let him go buck wild on the rule of law without a stink, so he wants to be ready to sic troops on the inevitable protestors.”
“Authoritarianism” has become a common descriptor by the mainstream media to incite violence against Republicans.
A Vox article titled “Call it authoritarianism” claims Republicans’ election reform efforts are about rigging elections in their favor to create a one-party system similar to Venezuela’s.
An op-ed at Kentucky’s Courier-Journal states that “Two Kentucky historians agree the GOP is steering the US straight toward authoritarianism.”
Fair Planet published “Study: US Republican Party Is Embracing Authoritarianism,” in which the authors say the GOP is guilty of a “total disregard of democratic norms,” including of accepting political violence.
And over at The Bulwark, Benjamin Parker writes of “The GOP’s Telltale Signs of Authoritarianism.”
Joe Biden himself has dipped into the fearmongering; in multiple speeches he has warned against the supposedly existential threat posed to Americans by the “Ultra MAGA” movement.
“There is an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy: the MAGA Movement,” Biden said while speaking at the Tempe Center for the Arts in an event honoring the late Senator John McCain in September.
Sadly, history has repeatedly shown what that manner of divisive rhetoric leads to. The threat on Rep. Greene’s life may be only the beginning of more threats against conservatives on the horizon.
