Republican calls for violence are going to get people killed

It’s already happened:  Heather Heyer, 32, a civil rights activist born and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia, was killed on August 12, 2017, by James Alex Fields Jr., who drove his car into a crowd of people protesting the Unite the Right rally that had been held the night before on the campus of the University of Virginia.  Fields, who drove to Charlottesville from his home in Maumee, Ohio, to attend the white supremacist rally, hit Heyer with his car and killed her as she stood on a street talking with other protesters.  Twenty-four other protesters were injured in the incident.

I raise this seven-year-old murder because of statements made recently by two prominent Republicans calling for violence and vigilantism.  On Sunday, Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake told a crowd in Lake Havasu to “strap on a Glock” to ready themselves for the upcoming election in November because “they’re going to come after us with everything.”  Lake also urged her followers to “put on our helmet or your Kari Lake ball cap. We are going to put on the armor of God.”

On Monday, fist-raising insurrectionist macho-man Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton responded to reports of pro-Palestinian protestors blocking the streets of multiple cities by putting out a tweet calling for political violence against protesters: “I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.”  He also tweeted a video of a man dragging protesters off a street and throwing them to the ground with the comment:  “How it should be done.”  Later the same day in an appearance on Fox News, Cotton told an interviewer that “if something like this happened in Arkansas on a bridge there, let’s just say, I think there would be a lot of very wet criminals that have been tossed overboard, not by law enforcement but the people whose road they’re blocking.”

It's tempting to use the cliché “I don’t know what planet these people are on” to describe these kinds of calls for political violence by Republicans, but I know all too well what planet we’re all on.  On this planet, when prominent people call for violence in public comments, such rhetoric sometimes leads to violence and even death.  When Donald Trump urged a large crowd of his supporters gathered on the Ellipse on Jan. 6 to “fight like hell,” enough of them took him at his word that five people lost their lives in the hours immediately following Trump’s call for violence at the Capitol that day.  Responding to the violent Unite the Right rally that ended in the death of Heather Heyer, instead of denouncing the violence, Trump claimed that “there were good people on both sides.”

In a country with more guns than there are people, telling a crowd at a rally to be ready to “strap on a Glock” to prepare for an election isn’t just irresponsible, it is a statement intended to provoke gun violence, of which we already have more than we can handle.  There was evidence that mass-shooters in Walmart stores in Texas in 2019 and Ohio in 2023 were motivated by what the FBI in the Ohio case called “racially violent extremist ideology.”  The Ohio shooter wounded four before killing himself.  In El Paso, the shooter killed 23 people and wounded 22 others.  It was discovered after the shooting that he had posted a manifesto adhering to the “great replacement” theory that was prominently promoted on Fox News by Tucker Carlson and others. 

Words have power.  If they didn’t, Republicans around the country would not be engaged in an all-out campaign to ban books from public schools on subjects they do not like such as the experiences of LGBTQ people and the history of systemic racism in this country. 

I have to stop here for a moment to exclaim, can you imagine this shit?  A book is a collection of paper pages with words printed on them.  It’s not a sharp object like a knife or a big wooden club that can be wielded to hurt someone.  God only knows a book is not a gun that shoots bullets that can kill.  And yet the Republican Party doesn’t want to ban guns or knives or clubs.  In fact, Republicans have loosened the laws all around the country on possessing and carrying guns in public.  In several states, including Oklahoma and Florida, Republican-controlled legislatures have passed laws providing various kinds of immunity to people who drive cars into groups of protesters and injure someone.  In Oklahoma, a law passed in 2021 releases a driver from liability if they hit and even kill a protester if the driver is “fleeing from a riot ... under a reasonable belief that fleeing was necessary to protect the motor vehicle operator from serious injury or death.”

So, lawmakers in Republican-controlled states are convinced that the words printed on the pages of a book have so much power to influence young minds that they want to remove them from public libraries, but at the same time they want to give you the power to “strap on a Glock” if you want to and walk around the public streets and enter public places – in some cases, even college campuses – while armed with deadly weapons.

Tom Cotton was caught on a Capitol security camera running across a hallway from a group of Trump supporters who were heading for the floor of the Senate chamber, out of which Cotton had just escaped.  This man was so frightened of insurrectionists carrying Trump flags and wearing camouflage outfits that he ran away from them, and yet he is counseling people who encounter peaceful protesters who are blocking streets to “take matters into your own hands to get them out of your way.”

I hardly need to say it, but I’m going to say it anyway:  this is madness, and it is madness being perpetrated by the Republican Party in a desperate attempt to win elections they cannot win with votes cast at the ballot box.  I’m also going to say this:  people were not killed on the day of the last presidential election, but people are going to be killed in the one coming up in November. 

Republicans will walk over dead bodies if they can’t get their votes.  Mark my words.