Cesar Sayoc's style of online harassment is instantly familiar to anyone who has ever gone viral saying anything that pissed off the right wing in any way.
I know at least one person personally who he's sent death threats to on Twitter, and I assume the number is higher.
I didn't get around to checking my own timeline before his accounts were scrubbed, so it's possible I'm on the list too. If I were, searching would be the only way to know—death threats are common enough that I don't remember them, much less track them.
Part of the problem is Twitter, of course—someone's already posted a threat he made against her a few weeks ago that Twitter said didn't violate their TOS. Part of it is just how the internet works.
But part of it is specific to right-wing social media, too. Threats of violence are far more common from certain kinds of trolls than others, and the MAGA far right really likes threatening to kill you.
When I piss off certain especially stupid corners of the left, they call me ugly, or old, or claim I sleep with my students, or take the G out of my first name.
The far right threatens to kill me.
The far right threatens to kill me.
Political violence—violence intended to suppress political dissent—is far more common on the right than the left in the US. It's far more common as a rhetorical device, and it's far more common as a practice.
And the fact that it's habitually accepted and explained away and whataboutted and bothsidesed and falseflag!ged and winked at is part of why it's so common.
There isn't a right-wing pundit or celebrity or politician who's more than three handshakes away from someone who has called for the murder of their political opponents.
(Milo has been mostly unpersonned, but nobody who used to pal around with Milo back in the days before he became inconvenient has suffered any reputational consequences as a result.)
It's not partisanship to point all this out. It's not point-scoring. It's an acknowledgment of the reality that's staring us all in the face.
Violent rhetoric is metastatic in the grass-roots of the American right wing in the Trump era, and rhetoric breeds action.
And if we're lucky enough to make it past Trump, the violence will get worse. Probably far worse.
(And everything I've just described is far far worse if you're not a cishet white guy, which is precisely why us cishet white guys need to be talking about it. Because we can.)
Congressman Steve King endorsed a literal Nazi for mayor of Toronto weeks ago. No Republican elected official has yet repudiated him.
Everyone in the GOP knows Steve King is a white supremacist. Nobody in the GOP is willing to even pretend to care.
At this point it’s hard to even imagine, even as a thought experiment, what a GOP repudiation of white supremacy would look like.
