Capitol Hill Blue Forums Capitol Hill Blue Opinions CHB Columnists The cowardly monster of hate and violence

In my own Tennessee community, doctors and nurses who advocated wearing masks in schools were targets of screaming, threatening right-wing activists, who told one man, “We know who you are” and “We will find you.”

My own family has experienced terrifying nights and terrifying days over the last several years. We’ve faced death threats, a bomb scare, a clumsy swatting attempt and doxxing by white nationalists. People have shown up at our home. A man even came to my kids’ school. I’ve interacted with the F.B.I., the Tennessee Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement. While the explicit threats come and go, the sense of menace never quite leaves. We’re always looking over our shoulders.

And no, threats of ideological violence do not come exclusively from the right. We saw too much destruction accompanying the George Floyd protests to believe that. We’ve seen left-wing attacks and threats against Republicans and conservatives. The surge in antisemitic incidents since Oct. 7 is a sobering reminder that hatred lives on the right and the left alike.

The tsunami of MAGA threats is different. The intimidation is systemic and ubiquitous, an acknowledged tactic in the playbook of the Trump right that flows all the way down from the violent fantasies of Donald Trump himself. It is rare to encounter a public-facing Trump critic who hasn’t faced threats and intimidation.

The threats drive decent men and women from public office. They isolate and frighten dissenters. When my family first began to face threats, the most dispiriting responses came from Christian acquaintances who concluded I was a traitor for turning on a movement whose members had expressed an explicit desire to kill my family.

But I don’t want to be too bleak. So let me end with a point of light. In the summer of 2021, I received a quite direct threat after I’d written a series of pieces opposing bans on teaching critical race theory in public schools. Someone sent my wife an email threatening to shoot me in the face.

My wife and I knew that it was almost certainly a bluff. But we also knew that white nationalists had our home address, both of us were out of town and the only person home that night was my college-age son. So we called the local sheriff, shared the threat, and asked if the department could send someone to check our house.

Minutes later, a young deputy called to tell me all was quiet at our home. When I asked if he would mind checking back frequently, he said he’d stay in front of our house all night. Then he asked, “Why did you get this threat?”

I hesitated before I told him. Our community is so MAGA that I had a pang of concern about his response. “I’m a columnist,” I said, “and we’ve had lots of threats ever since I wrote against Donald Trump.”

The deputy paused for a moment. “I’m a vet,” he said, “and I volunteered to serve because I believe in our Constitution. I believe in free speech.” And then he said words I’ll never forget: “You keep speaking, and I’ll stand guard.”

In a year with so much political and legal tension, law enforcement is seeing a disturbing trend: targeting public officials with swatting, or false emergency calls intended to draw a heavily armed police response. This conduct isn’t a harmless prank; it’s a symptom of a deeper disorder in American politics. Recent incidents involving officials who have taken stands seen as hostile to Donald Trump and bomb threats in multiple state capitols are signs of a troubling escalation in political violence.

These hoaxes pose real dangers. Sending armed police officers to someone’s home on the ruse that violence is occurring there risks tragic outcomes, including fatalities, as we saw in Kansas in 2017, when swatting led to a police officer shooting an unarmed man. In addition, swatting diverts law enforcement resources from real emergencies. But more insidiously, these tactics are tools of intimidation, designed to silence voices in the political process.

The frequency and visibility of these incidents suggest that swatting and political violence require prosecutors to prioritize their efforts to stop it. Recent targets of swatting include Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is presiding over the federal election interference case and whom Mr. Trump has accused of election interference; the special counsel Jack Smith, whom Mr. Trump has called “deranged” and a “thug”; and Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official in Georgia who rejected Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Justice Arthur Engoron, who is presiding over Mr. Trump’s New York civil fraud trial, received a bomb threat at his home on the day of closing arguments. Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, became a victim of swatting shortly after she removed Mr. Trump from the presidential ballot in her state under the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. She rightly sees these acts as attempts to chill efforts to enforce the law, calling the incident at her home “designed to scare not only me but also others into silence, to send a message.”