A Kentucky Newspaper Just Published Calls to Murder Trump and Federal Agents

This wasn’t a hack. It wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t an algorithm that let something slip through. A newspaper editor at the Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Kentucky looked at reader submissions calling for the murder of federal law enforcement officers and decided to publish them. In print. With their name on it. That distinction matters enormously and is being consistently blurred in coverage of this story. The “Speak Your Piece” section is an editorial choice, not a public bulletin board. Every submission that appears in print went through someone’s hands. Someone read it. Someone decided it was fit to publish. And what they decided was fit to publish included a reader calling for Trump administration officials to be buried “10 feet deep in concrete and Quicklime” and calling on readers to “start hunting down the rest of the cultists.”

It reads: Get that Nazi pedophile traitor out of the White House

and take his entire corrupt administration with him. Put them all 10 feet deep in concrete and Quicklime and then start hunting down the rest of the cultists.

The online version — sitting behind a paywall, apparently to limit who sees it — went further. A submission encouraged readers to kill federal law enforcement agents who appeared at polling places on Election Day: “Whatever their body count reaches on Election Day, double it if you find them at your polling place. No argument, no discussion, just put them down.”

Put them down. Federal law enforcement officers. At polling places. Published by a newspaper. In Kentucky.

The double standard writes itself and deserves to be stated plainly every single time. A rodeo clown wore an Obama mask in 2013 and lost his livelihood. The media covered it for days as a national scandal. A newspaper publishes explicit calls to murder federal agents and it barely registers in the mainstream press. The same media that spent years warning about the dangers of political rhetoric — that blamed conservatives for every act of violence regardless of evidence — has nothing to say when a print publication platforms murder fantasies directed at the other side.

This isn’t theoretical. Kerry Sheron was a 69-year-old veteran in California who

displayed Trump flags and signs in his yard. He was beaten to death on Memorial Day by a 32-year-old attacker his wife believes was politically motivated. The rhetoric that calls Trump supporters “cultists” to be hunted and federal agents to be killed at polling places doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in the same cultural environment where a man can be beaten to death for flying a flag in his own yard.

One commenter noted something worth amplifying: fewer Trump signs in neighborhoods isn’t evidence that support has dropped. It’s evidence that people are afraid. They’ve watched what happens to people who display their beliefs publicly and calculated that the risk isn’t worth it.

That’s what this rhetoric produces. Not just the immediate threat of violence — though that’s serious enough — but the slow suppression of political expression through fear.

The Mountain Eagle made an editorial choice. The DOJ should make one too.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *