It could have been a scene from Cape Fear: a quiet evening, an ordinary home, a sudden intrusion by a stranger convinced that the law has betrayed him.
\n\nIn early July 2022, Democratic representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington and her husband were watching television at their Seattle home when men drove past their house screaming threats: vile, racialized, and unmistakably political. They called the police. The men left. Thirty minutes later, one returned, blasting music and approaching the porch. When officers arrived, they found him armed with a loaded handgun, a round already chambered. A neighbor heard him shout, “Go back to India. I am going to kill you.”
\n\nJayapal later described the episode not as an aberration but as evidence of a broader transformation in American politics—a climate in which grievance increasingly functions as permission and intimidation is framed as justified political expression. The threats did not stop. Nor is Jayapal alone. For years, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia lived under constant threat as one of Donald Trump’s most aggressive defenders in Congress. She reported hundreds of death threats, largely from ideological opponents.
\n\nBut when Greene publicly broke with Trump—over the Epstein files, Gaza, and what “America first”…
Original source: https://www.wired.com/