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Ed Pilkington and Sam Levine have been briefing us on US officials facing violent threats as Trump continues to persist with his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.
On December 1, Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official in Georgia, stood on the steps of the state capitol in Atlanta and let Donald Trump tear himself apart.
“Mr. President, it looks like you probably lost the state of Georgia,” he said, contradicting Trump’s increasingly unhinged claim that he had won the presidential race against all evidence.
“Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence,” Sterling continued, referring to a storm of death threats and intimidation that Trump supporters had unleashed against public officials in the state.
“Someone is going to get shot, someone is going to die. And it’s not okay. “
Then Sterling spoke the phrase that instantly entered the annals of American political rhetoric: “It has to stop.”
It did not stop.
Two days after Sterling’s passionate speech went viral, Elena Parent, a Democratic state senator in Georgia, appeared at a hearing organized by Republican leaders to try to question the outcome of the election. Trump’s attorneys, led by Rudy Giuliani, presented at the hearing a series of conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated claims that tens of thousands were killed and other ineligible people had voted.
Republicans had not warned Parent that Giuliani, Trump’s henchman on his mission to undermine American democracy, will attend the event until this week when the former New York mayor took on Covid-19. So I had no idea that a huge crowd of far-right fanatics and the media that feed them lies and untruths would also be on camera.
If you had known, you would have been careful to protect your personal data online. And she couldn’t have sent a nondescript tweet accurately denouncing the event as a “sad farce.”
The bombardment began immediately. “The attacks came from all corners and on all platforms,” Parent told The Guardian. “They were in chat forums, by email, in comments on my Facebook and Instagram pages, on the phone. They covered the whole gamut, from basic insults to ‘We’re looking at you, you have kids, we’re going to go to your house.’
In eight years as an elected politician in Georgia, she had never experienced anything like this. An elected official in Missouri accused her on Facebook of an act of treason “punishable by death.”
“It was surreal. I am not someone who will ever be harassed or bullied into keeping quiet, but I have never had a problem on this scale. “
Read more on Ed Pilkington and Sam Levine’s report here: ‘It’s Surreal’: US Officials Face Violent Threats As Trump Claims Election Fraud
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