Whether Ilhan Omar has increased threats against her or not, she is a public figure with strong opinions and deserves no special dispensation from debate.
Democrats have spent the past two-plus years accusing the president of the United States and his allies of seditiously conspiring with our enemies to destroy “democracy.” For the most part this fairytale has been cynically deployed by politicians to undermine the legitimacy of a Republican presidency, yet millions of Americans now believe their votes were upended by a foreign power. There is no more serious charge against an elected official than treason.
Then again, for decades before the 2016 election, Democrats argued that Republicans were literally killing their fellow Americans when cutting taxes, murdering the sick when rejecting nationalized health care, and sentencing the poor to death when rejecting socialist schemes. Not to mention suppressing the minority vote when asking for ID, engaging in Nazi-like actions when enforcing existing border laws, and destroying the world when failing to embrace a takeover of the economy. And so on.
This overwrought rhetoric is embedded in the everyday arguments of the mainstream left, and its intensity is only growing.
The same liberals are now demanding that conservatives stop quoting and posting video of progressive Rep. Ilhan Omar belittling the 9/11 attacks because doing so puts her life in danger. That’s quite the deal they’ve cooked up for themselves. Nearly every presidential candidate and major Democratic leader has argued that Donald Trump’s criticism of Omar is out of line because of increased death threats against her. I do wonder how many death threats Trump or Mitch McConnell or Steve Scalise receives every week. I imagine it’s considerable.
But, as usual, most of the media took up the Democrats’ cause, trying to infantilize a 38-year-old woman. “Trump clearly unmoved over increased concerns raised by Dems over Omar’s safety,” noted The Washington Post’s Manu Raju after Trump attacked Nancy Pelosi’s handling of the Minnesota representative. One wonders if Raju had similar apprehensions when he published a story with two alleged sources giving him the same exact incorrect information falsely accusing Donald Trump Jr.
