In light of the devastating attack in Charlottesville, VA this past weekend, in which (among many other acts of violence) a car was rammed into a crowd of people protesting White Supremacists, killing one wonderful woman and seriously injuring dozens of others, I think it is worth remembering that just this past September Glenn Reynolds published a tweet urging his followers to do exactly that.
Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee who I think is not known at all for legal scholarship but is very well known among right-wingers as the far-right blogger Instapundit. The context was a protest in Charlotte, NC against the police shooting of a man named Keith L. Scott. Protestors had blocked off a highway at one point. In response to a news advisory recommending that drivers stay away from that part of the highway, Reynolds published the brief but telling tweet:
Run them down.
His Twitter account was suspended until he deleted the tweet. It turns out that calling for the murder of people you disagree with is a violation of the terms of use. Who knew. But he was back in no time (once he had deleted the tweet), and unapologetic. He claimed what he said was no big deal; he didn’t mean that anyone should try to run someone down, just feel free to try to get out of there if you feel threatened by persons attacking your car. But that was not the context; the context was people non-violently blocking traffic. As as for not trying to hit anyone, again, the phrase was:
Run them down.
So yeah, murder. Just exactly what we saw in Charlottesville. Thank you, Glenn.
This remark is not an isolated incident; it has actually become common on the right. A surprising number of state lawmakers have been introducing legislation to protect drivers who hit protestors from civil liability. Although the bills we have seen so far would not protect a driver from criminal penalty for deliberately hitting a protester, they do seem to signal a political will to make protestor injuries or deaths more likely and make it more likely that a malicious motorist will get away with it, as argued by Gary Kavanagh here.
All of this, plus of course the disgusting “joke” about how hilarious it would be to mow down protestors in this recommended diary,
suggest a troubling, spreading culture of acceptance of murder by our right-wing culture. And now it has exploded into actual murder.
But to me the most troubling of these rhetorical steps is the one by Reynolds. This is a law professor. Telling his many loyal followers they should go ahead and murder a protestor.
I wonder if this weekend’s murderer read that tweet?