Opinion | The violent threats against Adam Kinzinger make one thing clear: the MAGA cult must be burned to the ground

There are a lot of hard and thankless gigs these days.

But one of the hardest must be “intern for Adam Kinzinger.” The congressman from Illinois, and Air Force vet who served in Iraq, is now flying a different combat mission: truth bombing. As a key member of the Jan. 6 Select Committee — the next must see hearing is Tuesday — Kinzinger sacrificed his political ambitions to be on the right side of history.

The man deserves a Nobel Prize for bravery and honesty.

It has come at a tremendous cost. For the mortal sin of condemning Donald Trump’s attempted coup, Kinzinger is persona non grata to the frothing MAGA cult. He’s seen as a traitor, a liberal secret agent, a heretic, a disgrace, a treasonous scumbag who deserves to rot in hell for all eternity.

Some of his own relatives have said as much.

On Tuesday, Kinzinger released a truly bone-chilling comp of voice mails that have turned his answering system into a rated R rage machine. He prefaced this with an important reminder to the uninitiated: “All voice mails and phone calls are received by my interns, high school or college level, attempting to learn about the legislative process.”

Sigh. What they are learning about is death threats.

On any given day, an enraged MAGA cultist vows to assassinate Kinzinger and his family. The callers say they know where he lives. They make disparaging remarks about his mother, his wife, his infant son. They pray he dies a painful death. They promise to “get” him and make that so.

Listening to these messages is a crash course in crazy: “You backstabbing son of a bitch. You go against Trump, y’all know y’all motherf—ers” are sitting up there lying. Like a damn dog.”

Hillary Clinton deserves an apology. She was rebuked in 2016 for referring to some Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”

As it turns out, she was being euphemistic.

Now, obviously, not all Trump supporters are lunatics who inhabit the Upside Down. The reasonable ones signed on for tax cuts, tougher immigration and an anti-globalist agenda. Fine.

Make America Great Again was always code for isolationism.

But the MAGA cult is so far detached from reality that policy is now the least of it. It’s why Kinzinger and another sane Republican, Liz Cheney, keep getting death threats for their outrageous fidelity to the Constitution and not wanting to live in a banana republic ruled by a conman and reality TV host.

How dare Liz and Adam uphold the rule of law!

How dare they criticize Dear Leader after he tried to steal an election!

Kinzinger’s release of nasty voice mails was a stroke of genius in advance of Tuesday’s hearing. The facts are steamrolling Trump’s criminal mendacity. That he is a pathological liar who tried to cling to power is beyond debate.

You’d have an easier time arguing the Whopper is a vegan delight.

But after listening to the Kinzinger tapes this week, and after hearing from thousands of deplorables over the years, I do have a question for them: Is this seriously how you want to be remembered? You want to be on the side of death threats? You’re attacking an honourable man like Kinzinger when your party has less honour than Ikea has Renaissance masterpieces?

Kinzinger is standing up for American democracy. He is forfeiting his career for the truth. I want to reach out and ask if he might consider becoming the godfather to my daughters. That is how much I respect this man.

Meanwhile, the deplorables keep falling down by standing up for Trump.

A couple of years ago, an interviewer asked me what I would identify as the biggest problem with the MAGA cult. That’s simple. Trump brings out the worst in the people who love him the most. He greenlights horrible impulses.

Have you ever heard of a Trump supporter who rescues puppies or raises money for refugees from the developing world? Have you ever heard of a Trump supporter who volunteers in a soup kitchen? Trump supporters are only animated by their undying love of Trump. Everything else creates cognitive dissonance.

Until it got too depressing, I used to maintain a file of MAGA cultists acting badly in public. Racist meltdowns. Vulgar rants about Nancy Pelosi. To stare into their eyes was to realize they’ve been swallowed alive by anger.

There’s no point in sugar-coating. Those video clips were much like the voice mails Kinzinger released on Tuesday: a showcase of misguided “patriots” who don’t know squat about the country they claim to love, or the system of government they recklessly endangered because the results of a free and fair election gave their lost and brittle souls a terminal boo-boo.

The emails I get from MAGA cultists these days might as well be ghost written by violent flat-earthers. All they’ve got left is lashing out at reality. The truth could set them free. But they remain self-shackled in the chains of lies and the tragic hero worship of a false idol.

Adam Kinzinger never got sucked into this vortex of partisan idiocy. He sees Donald Trump for what the former president is: a threat to democracy.

And now the congressman needs a security detail.

It’s time to identify and destroy the lives of everyone who has threatened to take his. Really. It’s time for the MAGA cult to be burned to the ground.

Adam Kinzinger is an American patriot.

His critics are the treasonous scumbags who should rot in hell.

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