| Barbaric violence encouraged from on high is all the rage these days. Within the past week, we’ve seen the savage attack on Salman Rushdie and an attempted attack on the FBI’s Cincinnati office by a Trump follower brandishing an AR-15. The Rushdie attacker was attempting to carry out the death sentence pronounced on Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini for passages he deemed sacrilegious in Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. The FBI assailant was acting out the Republican right’s and Donald Trump’s rage at the Mar-a-Lago document search, which included Breitbart’s decision not to redact the names of the FBI agents that appeared on the search warrant, and the pro-Trump social media that deemed them to be "traitors."
The American Fatwa-er in Chief, of course, is Trump himself. Courtesy of the January 6th hearings, we’ve learned that he knew many members of the crowd that turned out to hear him and then march to the Capitol that day were
armed; that his vilification of Mike Pence led members of that mob to attempt to attack Pence (or worse); and that it took the physical restraints of his Secret Service detail to stop Trump from joining his mob. Trump, of course, is not alone in encouraging the neofascist core of his supporters to intimidate with the threat of violence his opponents, though going beyond encouraging violence to actually directing it—something we saw as early as his 2016 campaign, when he told his crowds to beat up hecklers—is still largely confined to Trump himself.
Our homegrown parallels to
Ayatollah-istic conduct aren’t confined to death sentences, of course. They’re apparent in the kinds of thought control mandated by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who recently signed legislation that bans history professors from expressing or relating an analysis that "espouses" or "promotes" anything that a student may consider making themselves feel guilty about some aspect of our nation’s record on issues of race and gender. One ayatollah’s "sacrilegious" is another ayatollah’s "woke."
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