Last Friday, I received a threatening phone call from Congressman Jeff Fortenberry’s Chief of Staff, Reyn Archer.
Because I liked a silly photo on Facebook, Archer—who is politically powerful and very well-connected—contacted my employer and then threatened to use his office to make public that I like vandalism, which is clearly untrue.
The implication was that he would work to create a right-wing troll storm, using his platform and his connections within right-wing media outlets.
In the past, such efforts have directly resulted in weeks of threatening letters, voicemails, and email messages to faculty members who found themselves publicly called out in this way (including several of my colleagues at UNL). These have included death threats.
This is obviously a violation of my First Amendment right to free speech. But more than that, Archer’s threat to name me publicly as some sort of evil liberal professor happened on Friday afternoon, right before Shabbat.
Less than 15 hours later, a heavily armed man walked into a synagogue in Pittsburgh in murdered 11 Jews because of a conspiracy theory, shared publicly by prominent right-wing politicians, that Jews are responsible for bringing undesired immigrants to the US.
This horrible act of violence could very easily have happened to me, my family, and my community; *real* violence easily could have been the result of the actions Archer threatened to take against me.
You can read about what happened in this article in today’s Lincoln Journal-Star. Archer tells the reporter that he didn’t threaten me. journalstar.com/news/local/edu…
But I recorded our entire 53 minute conversation and you can listen to his specific threat and the few minutes that preceded it right here:
Archer and Fortenberry know perfectly well that I don’t “like vandalism.” But they wanted to intimidate me, with both the power of their office and with a specific threat to unleash a mob against me. And that’s why I’ve filed a report with the Office of Congressional Ethics.
We deserve a lot better from our elected officials than this reprehensible garbage.
