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When the right equates protest with violence, it opens door for threats to liberals like Jayapal [1]
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Date: 2022-07-12
According to Sara Jean Green at the Seattle Times, the man turned up outside Jayapal’s home on Saturday night at around 11 p.m., driving past the home in his car three times, shouting at Jayapal. She reported him to Seattle Police, who showed up at 11:25 p.m., whereupon the man—who by that point was out of his car and in the street outside the home, put his hands up in the air and surrendered. He was carrying a .40-caliber handgun.
KOMO News identified him as Brett Allen Forsell, who turns 49 on July 18. Green reported that a man with that names lives about a half-mile from Jayapal in the same Seattle neighborhood.
Neighbors said they heard Forsell threaten Jayapal: “Go back to India, I’m going to kill you,” is how one of them described the epithets. He also was calling her a string of obscenities.
After police arrested him, he reportedly told them he wanted to pitch a tent on Jayapal’s property. He was charged Monday with malicious harassment, Washington state’s version of a hate crime. A judge ordered him held on $500,000 bail, but refused a request by prosecutors to issue an anti-harassment order to protect Jayapal.
“Congresswoman Jayapal confirms that incidents occurred at her Seattle home on Saturday night when she was present. The Congresswoman and her family are safe and appreciate the many calls and good wishes she is receiving from constituents,” spokesperson Siham Zniber said in a statement. “She is very grateful for the swift and professional response from the Seattle Police Department, the U.S. Capitol Police, and the FBI investigators who are working together diligently on the investigation and ensuring that she and her family stay safe.”
Jayapal is chair of the House Progressive Caucus. The first Indian American woman elected to the House in 2016, the 56-year-old was born in India and became a naturalized citizen in 2000.
Kavanaugh did experience a man with a gun outside his home on June 8—though Nicholas John Reske never shouted any threats and called police on himself. But well before that, when protesters upset with the forewarned ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade protested peacefully outside his and other justices’ homes, the Republican governors of Virginia and Maryland demanded that Attorney General Merrick Garland ban all such protests. After Reske’s arrest and a flurry of hysteria about the case, legislation was swiftly passed to provide security to the justices and their families, led by Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
It’s unlikely he’ll demand bolstered security for members of Congress now, however. Nor will any other Republicans. Typical responses on Twitter to news of the threat outside Jayapal’s home accused her of hypocrisy: “Wow, so who didn’t see that coming, when lefty’s want to ‘protest’ in front of Conservative SCOTUS Justice’s homes that’s A-OK, but if someone wants to protest in front of a liberal Congress woman’s home namely Pramila Jayapal they are promptly hauled off to jail, 2 tiered system,” wrote one right-wing respondent. “Funny how it's a problem when it's one of their homes,” said another.
The wailing and gnashing of teeth over the protesters who sent Kavanaugh fleeing out the back door of a steak house—which included a spokesman for the restaurant chain complaining that the protesters trampled Kavanaugh’s “right to congregate and eat dinner,” and Fox News’ Peter Doocy trying to turn the incident into a “gotcha” moment at a White House press conference—reached absurd new heights this week after Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was interviewed on Fox News Sunday and opined that no one should be immune from dealing with peaceful protest.
"When public officials go into public life, we should expect two things. One, you should always be free from violence, harassment, and intimidation. And two, you're never going to be free from criticism or peaceful protests, people exercising their rights," Buttigieg said. "Protesters are upset because a right, an important right that the majority of Americans support, was taken away."
This seemingly sensible answer was then twisted around at Fox News to claim that Buttigieg was justifying violence. Laura Ingraham’s Monday program featured a segment in which she denounced him, with a chryon reading, “Mayor Pete: Political Violence Is Actually Good.”
Ingraham went on to describe Buttigieg as “a radical” who is “encouraging the threats against Supreme Court justices” and “wants to change the face of this country, and for the worse.”
That was how the Fox response ran all day Monday. Jonathan Turley claimed on America Reports that “there's no middle ground here, you either have to stand with or against the mob,” suggesting that Buttigieg had failed a “test of leadership.”
Fox News host Sean Hannity suggested that Buttigieg had said that Kavanaugh “should expect” assassination attempts. Lara Trump, a Fox contributor, suggested he supports “domestic terrorism.”
So far, Fox News has not even mentioned the threats directed at Jayapal.
This is how the world works in right-wing Alt-America, where any kind of liberal protest, peaceful or otherwise, is portrayed as horrific political violence against America itself, while an attempted insurrection by a mob at the U.S. Capitol is portrayed as a patriotic exercise in their free-speech rights. This is what the phony “antifa is an existential threat” narrative was always about: Concocting a nonexistent Enemy whose agenda and behavior is the mirror image of their own as a way of not only justifying their own violence, but creating permission for it.
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