On Monday, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) received a death threat in the form of a package filled with white powder and a message on the outside of the envelope: “I’ll finish what your neighbor started, you motherf**ker.”
“I take these threats immensely seriously. I have been targeted multiple times now, it is reprehensible that Twitter allows C-list celebrities to advocate for violence against me and my family. This must stop. Just this weekend Richard Marx called for violence against me and now we receive this despicable powder-filled letter,” Senator Paul said in a statement released on Monday.
What Paul’s neighbor “started” back in 2017 was a violent assault upon the senator, the son of former presidential candidate Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas). Paul was merely mowing his front lawn in Bowling Green, Kentucky, when his next-door neighbor, Rene Boucher, a 60-year-old supporter of socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, attacked him from behind, slamming him into the ground so hard that Paul suffered six broken ribs. Paul later developed pneumonia as a result of his injuries, and eventually had a portion of his lung removed.
Boucher later pleaded guilty in the assault and was sentenced to eight months in prison.
The death threat package was apparently motivated by Paul’s response to a question in an interview he had with Cats Roundtable host John Catsimatidis on WABC-AM radio, which is based in New York City. In the interview, Paul was asked about his decision to not get a COVID-19 vaccine. “Until they show me evidence that people who have already had the infection are dying in large numbers or being hospitalized or getting very sick, I just made my own personal decision that I’m not getting vaccinated because I’ve already had the disease and I have natural immunity,” Paul said.
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Paul added that it should be up to individual Americans to decide whether or not to get the vaccine, and that there should be no fear of repercussions or shame from the government. “In a free country you would think people would honor the idea that each individual would get to make the medical decision.”
Paul then explained what having government dictate people’s medical treatments would lead to. “Are they going to tell me I can’t have a cheeseburger for lunch? Are they going to tell me that I have to eat carrots only and cut my calories? All that would probably be good for me, but I don’t think big brother ought to tell me to do it.”
Apparently not everyone agrees with Paul’s concern about individual liberty. Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), for example, said of Paul: “So brave … Such a leader …. So manly…” Kinzinger was one of the handful of Republican members of the House of Representatives who voted to impeach President Donald Trump, since which time he has become a darling of the American Left.
Then, on Sunday, aging rock star Richard Marx published his own response on Twitter: “I’ll say it again: If I ever meet Rand Paul’s neighbor [the one who almost killed Paul in a violent assault], I’m going to hug him and buy him as many drinks as he can consume.”
For all its self-righteousness in banning former President Trump from its platform for allegedly advocating violence (which he did not), Twitter apparently has less concern about Marx’s comments, as they were directed against one of the most conservative members of Congress, Rand Paul. At the time this article was being written, Marx’s incendiary remarks were still up on Twitter.
After Marx’s comments on Sunday, the package arrived for Paul. In addition to the suspicious powder and the profanity-laced comments, the package included an image of Paul, heavily bandaged, with a gun pointed at his head.
Paul placed blame for the death threat on Marx and Twitter. “Just this weekend Richard Marx called for violence against me and now we receive this despicable powder filled letter.”
Marx then tweeted that it was all a joke and a “wisecrack,” and that his comments were not intended as an “incitement to violence.”
While certainly the 2017 attack upon Paul was the most serious assault he has endured, he was also surrounded by an angry mob in Washington, D.C., last year as he and his wife were walking back to their hotel after President Trump’s Republican National Convention acceptance speech inside the White House. “First, there were a handful of people,” Paul recalled, that surrounded him and his wife, Kelley. “Then 30, then 60, then over 100, screaming and out-of-control lunatics. One person in the mob violently slammed into a policeman just behind me.”
Fortunately, police forced their way through the leftist mob and got Rand and Kelley to their hotel.
The media and even the FBI do not take these events very seriously. One can only imagine how big the story would be if a U.S. senator who was a progressive Democrat was assaulted on his or her own property by a Trump supporter. The FBI even dubbed the near-fatal shooting of Republican Representative Steve Scalise at the Republican baseball practice (before the annual Democratic vs. Republican baseball game) by a Bernie Sanders supporter as a “suicide by cop.”
But there were no cops around — only plainclothes security for Scalise sitting in a car. The Sanders supporter had images of Republican members of Congress in his possession, and only started shooting after he was told that it was the Republican baseball practice. Would the FBI have called the shooting “suicide by cop” if it had been a Democrat baseball practice and the perpetrator was a supporter of Donald Trump or any other prominent Republican?
We all know the answer.
