One moment in the "column" (if by "column," you mean, "The pathetic bullying of a bully-adjacent loser") has stuck in my craw. It comes after Lord quotes Chutkan's order. After discussing the truly fucked-up shit that Trump has said, she wrote that "once an individual is publicly targeted, even revoking the offending statement may not abate the subsequent threats, harassment, or other intimidating effects during the pretrial as well as the trial stages of this case."
And Lord, who I need to remind you at this point is an actual elderly adult, writes in reaction, "To which I can only say: Oh boo-hoo." Which might be the most bitch-ass moment I've seen in a while, and that includes Elon Musk's whiny twerp tweets. Lord explains, "The moment anyone steps into the world of 'public service,' they are putting themselves out there for others to ridicule, scorn, and, yes indeed, threaten them. A situation multiplied endlessly by both the internet and television." Then he asserts that all the public workers who don't want to get nonstop streams of rape and death threats, as well as antisemitism, sexism, and more just because they're doing their goddamn jobs "clearly have no business whatsoever being in public service."
Obviously, being a judge is one thing. You always face the possibility of crazy and violent people taking shit out on you. But Trump's game is not to just go after the people at the top. He wants to wreck the system by hacking away at the foundation of it, too. So, yeah, he still goes after the former FBI agents he regularly attacked while president. He derides the work of election workers. And, more to the point here, he's accused the clerk of Judge Arthur Engoron of being Chuck Schumer's secret lover or some such shit.
Engoron, who is on the bench for Trump's civil trial on being a big fucking fraud, and the clerk (who I will not name because I fucking won't) have suffered a barrage of constant threats from Trumpist goons and fucknuts. These were detailed in a filing by lawyers for Engoron and the Attorney General's office asking for the reinstatement, fully, of a gag order on Trump. In a children's sampler of the 275 single-spaced pages of transcribed threats and disparaging phone calls and messages, you can see how much shit anyone involved here has to deal with.
Since the transcriptions were done by software, the curse words are just a string of stars. But I'll try to fill in the blanks by using my awesome powers of profanity. Here are just a couple of the hundreds and hundreds of voicemails left for Engoron about him and his clerk, who is a woman:
"Honestly, you should be assassinated.You should be killed...You should be executed. Put on trial. Executed for your crimes. You sick [fucking] pig."
"Arthur, you are a corrupt Nazi and one of the ugliest people to ever walk the face of the earth. And your clerk, who's also a corrupt Nazi, is a fat [bitch] who blew Chuck Schumer and everybody knows it." The clerk is Jewish, by the way, and the number of references to her weight is pretty stunning, like that's the only thing they know how to insult.
"We are going to get you and any one of you dirty, backstabbing, lying, cheating Americans. You are nothing but a bunch of communists. We are coming to remove you permanently."
"Do you think being a judge changes the fact that you're a pathetic little [fucker]? You little [fucking] dork with little [fucking] Jew girl [fucking] helper [bitch]. You [fucking] stupid [shit]. God, I hope you [fucking] die. I hope they [fucking] come for you and [fucking] string you up."
I know that most of these threats aren't real threats. Nearly every one of these troglodytes is too dumb and lazy to get off their couches to make the effort to kill anyone. But it only takes one, of course. And there's always one.
That aside, why the fuck should the price of getting up and doing your fucking job be getting doxed and maligned? The clerk has said that "she has been receiving approximately 20-30 calls per day to her personal cell phone and approximately 30-50 messages per day." Imagine that shit. Imagine just trying to catch up on your regular email while you're getting a few hundred messages a week telling you you're going to suffer or die and, oh, hey, you're also unattractive.
Let's not even think about the wave of horror that New York Attorney General Letitia James and her staff must deal with.
So, yeah, despite what Jeffrey fuckin' Lord and the death threat apologists of the right say, this shit is exactly what a gag order is meant for. Trump inspires all of these mongrel idiots, chewing on their own asses until they come up for air long enough to click out some bullshit. Shut him the fuck up already. Stop acting like it's just Trump being Trump and we all just have to fucking deal with that.
And don't fuckin' talk to me about Trump's freedom of speech. That clerk has freedoms, too, and she's not free as long as Trump puts a target on her back. She's not the one on trial. But she's the one who's been put in a kind of prison.
