Keith Olbermann calls for the arrest of Marjorie Taylor Greene for threatening Biden (video)

Tan, khaki, close enough

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Yeah, feels a little like wishcasting to me. If he gets some actual legal experts with solid track records to back him up then we should talk then.

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Oh shit. I can’t keep up with my presidential crimes.

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Keith Olbermann rants and raves in a deranged manner on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis just as much as any MAGA personality.

I disagree with your interpretation of this and the deflection of what he was saying.

MTG isn’t crazy, she’s a fascist. Stop making excuses for fascists and stigmatizing people with mental illness.

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He doesn’t sound like he’s supporting the violent overthrow of the government or threatening to shoot people or that next time it will be bullets, not ballots.

Is there another Keith Olberman that I’m not aware of?

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All I’m saying is that Keith Olbermann is the kind of person who does his side more harm than good by constantly shouting over-the-top, hyperbolic, histrionic statements into his camera lens. His picture could easily replace Grandpa Simpson’s next to the “Old Man Yells At Cloud” headline, and thus, he shouldn’t be treated as a serious person.

I googled Keith Olbermann controversy and all I found was that he was fired for donating personally to dems and not declaring it at work.

And nothing else.

Not insurrection, not child trafficking charges, not calling for civil war, not threatening people’s lives…

but it’s just the same I guess because of the “type of person” he is.

Now, honestly, I also don’t think anything will be done to keep MTG from conspiring openly online about assassinating other politicians and killing US citizens. She may get implicated if some one directly quotes her in a manifesto at worst.

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"This is not a threat. This is a promise. I will fuck you up.”

The problem is that he said if you force me to vaccinate, I will F you up. That’s not a threat per se, but more of a conditional statement. In my experience that type of “threat” doesn’t usually rise to the level of being prosecutable as a crime. Now had he said “I will F you up for even considering to force me to take a vaccine,” well then you’d have a straight up threat you can successfully prosecute and convict, at least in theory.

I hope so, but as we can see from this thread, there are plenty of people absolutely willing to do the heavy lifting for the fascists and both sides this shit into a collapse of democracy. They show up here and claim that someone like Olberman (who I’m not a huge fan of), is the real problem. It’s the politics of distraction and nothing more.

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I believe it has been misunderstood. They seem to really want “freedom from medicine”
(until it personally affects them and they are afraid and demand it free, fast and from the government for some reason)

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Your judgement about “his side” is irrelevant given it’s basically concern-trolleying.

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… sounds very concerning :roll_eyes:

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I don’t think it’s legal to try to influence government policy by conditional threats to the President. That’s even less of a thing than flag-fringe magical thinking.

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Now that you mention it, it looks like the threat could be a federal crime under this statute:

“Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.”

Which is interesting in contrast to a state charge where you might have to prove that Biden reasonably believed the threat would be carried out.

While that would also fit, you don’t have to overcomplicate things. It was a direct threat of physical harm against the President of the United States. Putting an If/then statement in front doesn’t change that.

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I think a federal court would likely rule that it was protected speech. There is a statute that criminalizes threatening to kill the President, but the Supreme Court ruled in this case:

that the Defendant was allowed to say this, for instance:

“If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.”

So likely not a “true threat,” as the Court refers to. IMO the bigger problem here is MTG’s stochastic terrorism, amplifying the original message as a sort of incitement to violence to her followers. That I’d like to see prosecuted.

That precedent lacks context. Just as the tone and context of the threat in this video make it both a specific threat and a true threat, those factors also pretty clearly establish that the “if” statement is cursory at best. The threatener doesn’t actually care whether the administration mandates vaccinations. Like many of his peers, he’s presuming that they are going to do so. He’s phrasing it not as a firm condition that would make him resort to violence in desperate objection to the policy but rather as a pre-emptive excuse for violence he’s already considering; a “look what you made me do - I told you this would happen” type of mentality.

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