OPINION:
A version of this story appeared in the On Background newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive On Background delivered directly to your inbox each Friday.
In response to a post on X asking whether Sen. Tommy Tuberville should be removed from his committee assignments because he is using the procedural remedies available to a U.S. senator to protect human life, retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden said he should be “removed from the human race.”
Mr. Tuberville later characterized the comment as promoting “politically motivated assassination.”
Just another day in America, right? Well, unfortunately, it’s against the law to threaten a government official. In fact, it’s a felony.
The good news for Gen. Hayden is that he’s a former four-star general in the Air Force, a former director of the National Security Agency and a former director of the CIA (thank you, Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush). As such, we all know he is above — way, way, way above — the law by which the rest of us have to live.
If you are not going to be prosecuted for the mass and literally unwarranted surveillance of Americans, including media and political leaders, you are probably not going to be prosecuted for calling for the assassination of a sitting U.S. senator.
The other bit of good news for Gen. Hayden is that a few weeks ago, former President Donald Trump, as he is known to do, muddied these very waters by suggesting that a slightly more rational society would have executed Gen. Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for a phone call he made to China in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
For the record, the phone call was approved by administration officials at the time, but no matter. Nowadays, calling for the death of one’s political adversaries is apparently routine and needs no explanation.
Mr. Trump also promised “death and destruction” were he to be prosecuted in New York. Before entering Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene advocated a “bullet to the head” of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. A volunteer on the Bernard Sanders campaign shot Rep. Steve Scalise. Former Rep. Lee Zeldin was nearly stabbed while giving a speech during his run for governor of New York.
There are lots of other examples, but you get the point.
Perhaps it’s for the best that neither Mr. Trump nor Gen. Hayden will be prosecuted. If we start prosecuting current and former officials for the dangerous or careless things they say, there might be no room left in the jails.
But when you get two otherwise rational men who have both lived full and successful American lives talking openly about killing government officials, you know that we are close to the edge of something that will not be very good.
Most of us look at Israel today and wonder how people can rape and maim and kill and desecrate other human beings who, for the most part, they don’t know and who have done little or nothing to them.
The answer is that going from normalizing the conversation about killing your “enemies” to actually killing them is a pretty short step, and it usually happens slowly over time as things that were once way out of bounds — like calling for someone’s death in public — becomes routine.
Here in these United States, those who were and want to be our leaders are dangerously close to — and seem insistent on — taking that short, awful step into the abyss.
• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is president of MWR Strategies.
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