Over the weekend, someone firebombed the Orange County Republican Party’s headquarters in Hillsborough and left graffiti that read, “Nazi Republicans leave town or else.” No one was hurt, but it was nonetheless a shocking act of political violence. (We later learned that the Orange County Democratic Party’s headquarters, in Carrboro, was tagged with the words, “Death to Capitalism,” though there was no other damage.) Donald Trump immediately responded by blaming, sans evidence, “animals supporting Hillary Clinton” and boasting that it happened because “we are winning” (not in Orange County, Donnie); Democrats responded by raising $12,000 on GoFundMe to help the Orange County GOP out. Sure, this had more value as a PR stunt than anything else, but it did make us feel a little bit better about the world.
A quick word to the folks behind this (Anarchists? Bored teenagers?), should they be reading this wildly popular column, as all good anarchists and bored teenagers do: you’re not helping. Yeah, the Trump campaign sometimes invites comparisons to, if not Nazi Germany, other authoritarian regimes. But all you’re doing is allowing them to deflect from the violence that has surrounded Trump and his rallies; just this weekend, The Boston Globe reported on Trump supporters saying—openly!—that Clinton should be shot and Syrian and Mexican voters need to be intimidated. This incident gives Trump die-hards license to say that both sides do it.
All of which is to say: stop it, you idiots.
