Photo by Alan Hardman, Unsplash
Photo by Alan Hardman, Unsplash
Nowadays, not toeing the line for what Trump wants can get you a death threat, a swat team at your house or a pizza delivery for a dead person.
The Republican dominated Senate of Indiana just rejected Trump’s command to gerrymander more districts in their state to preserve the Republican majority in Congress. This is wildly important because it illustrates his loosening grip on the Party.
The picture from Indiana however is even more striking. The majority of Republicans in the Indiana Senate, 21 of them, voted with 10 Democrats to crush Trump’s gerrymandering ambitions in the state. Trump’s mouthpieces of course tried to paint these folks as a rebellious minority. These Republicans however displayed something rare in the party these days: uncommon bravery.
Republicans in Indiana were being threatened to a disturbing degree with a potential (illegal) loss of federal funding for a variety of programs and GOP members of the Senate and even some of their children were receiving threats. These threats included outright death threats and even some swatting attempts at their personal residences.
The use of threats and intimidation against elected officials and representatives has now become a common occurrence. It is happening to Members of Congress who cross Trump in some way and to judges who rule against him or who have cases before them who might rule in a way unfavorable to his “interests.”
We hear some mention of these threats in media reports, sometimes. But even when these occurrences are mentioned, that subject is quickly brushed aside in favor of moving to another subject.
The volume of these threats is not small. Newsnation recently quoted Marjorie Taylor Greene:
The Georgia Republican, who is set to leave office on Jan. 5, took to her X account saying, “My office has reported 773 death threats to Capitol Police, but those were just the threats that came directly into my office via call or email, and don’t include the countless threats online to myself and my family members. We just didn’t have enough people to constantly monitor that.”
“These 773 death threats do not include all of the dozens of swatting calls to myself and my family members and pizza doxxings.”
What is pizza doxxing? CBS News reported it this way:
The top federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., has called the incidents “pizza doxxing”—a spin on “doxxing”—in which somebody’s address or other personal information is maliciously made public, often as a form of intimidation.
In about two dozen cases nationwide, judges have gotten unsolicited pizza deliveries with the recipient listed as Daniel Anderl, the late son of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, the New Jersey judge told CBS News. Anderl was killed at the family’s New Jersey home in 2020 by a disgruntled gunman who was targeting Salas.
Salas called the cases attempts at “psychological warfare” against judges.
Swatting incidents are even worse. Swatting is the act of making a false, serious emergency report to a public safety answering point to trigger a large, armed law enforcement response to a specific address. The goal is often to harass or intimidate a person. Swatting is extremely dangerous, as it can, and has lead, to physical harm and even death to victims.
Imagine your are an elected representative contemplating a vote for or against one of Trump’s unconstitutional actions and you receive a call from your mother that a swat team has surrounded her house.
It is going to take some guts, as it did with these Indiana Senators, to stay on course and uphold your oath of office. But this is now the game.
What’s being done about this? Supposedly there is a unit in the DOJ that is assigned to investigate these incidents of harassment and intimidation tactics. But news reports of any results, arrests or actual cases are nonexistent.
Who are the people doing the death threats, the swatting and the pizza doxxing? No one knows for sure. But two facts are apparent. First, these actions seem to be highly coordinated. Second, 1600 or so people who happily engaged in violence to overturn an election were pardoned by Trump. Are these the usual suspects? Again, who knows for sure.
The DOJ seems to be focused otherwise, since it works directly under Trump’s orders now. The weaponization of the DOJ that Trump accused Biden of has actually been accomplished by Trump. And who knows what these guys think is a threat these days. They decided that a subway sandwich that bounced off a bulletproof vest was a deadly weapon. Luckily for the thrower, the jury disagreed.
What is obvious is that Trump and his faction are somehow using off-the-books operators to do their political pressure campaigns. Lobbying for votes used to be, in the days when we had a Democratic government, a matter of working on representative with the use of political pressure or horsetrading to get a vote. Nowadays, not toeing the line can get you a death threat, a swat team at your house or a pizza delivery for a dead person.
If you want to know what’s coming next, study the history of Germany from 1933 forward.
Marty Kassowitz is co-founder of Factkeepers. As founder of Interest Factory and View360, he brings more than 30 years experience in effective online communications, social media management, and platform development to the site. He is a writer, designer, editor and long time observer of the ill-logic demonstrated by too many members of the species known as Mankind. After a long history of somewhat private commentary on a subject he totally hates: politics, Marty was encouraged to build this site and put up his own analyses as well as curate relevant content from other sources.
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