The guilty verdicts against Trump have “spurred a wave of violent rhetoric” targeting the prosecutors, judge, and jurors, NBC News reported on Friday, May 31, 2024 (see story here).
A nonprofit research group is seeing a “high volume” of social media posts “containing violent rhetoric,” some containing the purported home addresses of the judge and jurors, “although it is unclear if any actual jurors had been correctly identified.”
Especially disturbing, “The posts, which have been reviewed by NBC News, appear on many of the same websites used by Trump supporters to organize for violence ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. … ‘Dox the Jurors. Dox them now,’ one user wrote.”
Is doxxing illegal? Not always. The group Sedition Hunters in essence doxxed Jan. 6 rioters by identifying them and giving the information to law enforcement. That’s legal. But doxxing is a federal or state crime if done with intent to harass or intimidate the victim, or it would cause a reasonable person to fear for their or family’s safety (see article here).
Even more concerning than some Trump supporters’ disrespect for the legal system, propensity to swallow false conspiracy theories (see example here), and rejection of facts and reason, is their mindless devotion to an unscrupulous leader without morals or decency. This is what leads to violence.
Most of the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2020 aren’t like this, although surveys show a large majority rejected the election results against facts and reason. But there’s a hardcore group of Trump fans who blindly follow the leader, do his bidding without question, and are willing to attack our societal institutions.
Until now it hasn’t been not chic to compare Trump to Hitler, or MAGA to Nazism (although those inhibitions are increasingly melting away, see article here), but it’s hard to see much daylight between those people and Hitler’s brownshirts.
