Since the widespread protests of family separation policies that landed babies and small children in detention centers and permanently removed from their parents, as well as the protests against the confirmation of yet another alleged sexual abuser to the Supreme Court, Donald Trump and his disingenuous band of GOP cronies have branded Democrats as “mobs” out to commit violent acts against Republicans.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who somehow turned a fistfight with his neighbor over lawn clippings into an attack by Democrats, even worried that someone was going to “get hurt” in today’s divided political climate. He had apparently forgotten the death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville at the hands of a right-wing, neo-Nazi extremist. It’s unlikely, however, that he or Trump will come forward to denounce right-wing darling Ann Coulter for her latest tweet.
The message was undoubtedly supposed to be some sort of comment on how Hillary Clinton, a private citizen who is no longer a political candidate, has said things that hurt the Democratic platform. Making jokes about the death of an American permanent resident and Washington Post journalist killed by a foreign government to silence his dissent, however, is not funny. Neither is gleefully imagining the death of Hillary Clinton.
What’s even more disturbing about Coulter’s tweet were the dark and violent comments from her followers who responded. That is always the problem with comments like Coulter’s, who will certainly insist that Democrats just can’t take a joke and laugh about “liberal snowflakes” if public outcry against her tweet is made public.
Carly Fiorina was only trying to show her pro-life stance when she described a doctored video that an anti-abortion group put together to “prove” that Planned Parenthood was selling mutilated baby parts, but a man named Robert Louis Dear took it quite seriously and killed three people at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, believing he would be saving babies from a mutilation factory.
Alex Jones was just trying to get ratings from his conspiracy theory-loving fans when he ranted about Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C. that Jones told listeners was being used by Hillary Clinton and her friends to traffic children in a pedophile ring out of the pizza shop’s basement. A man named Edgar Maddison Welch, however, took that very seriously and went to the restaurant with a loaded gun, terrorizing employees and customers.
Jones was also just playing to his gun-loving Republican audience when he insisted that the parents of slain children in Newtown, Connecticut were faking their tears after their children were killed in a school shooting, but the grieving families of those children have been forced out of their homes and threatened with death.
The responses to Coulter’s tweet are disturbing and proves that it isn’t just what you say when you have a platform as massive as hers, it’s also about how the people listening will perceive your unfunny and cruel “joke.” Read some of those comments below:
Featured image via Flickr by Gage Skidmore under a Creative Commons license
