Amidst free speech debates following the recent purges of Trump critics from entertainment and media, I couldn’t help but remember a time I played my own role in damaging the career of someone I disagreed with politically.

Back during the first Trump era, I spent significant time working with rural anti-fascist organizers in the Pacific Northwest. These were people in small towns who conducted valuable community work, despite very real danger. It’s important to remember that many Oregon counties maintain little police presence and sheriffs often take open right wing political stances. Folks who organized in support of immigrant rights and even simple voting registration drives could frequently only rely on community defense groups for their safety.

Soaking up death threats is just part of being a visible leftist. I’ve been fortunate that most of mine were online observations that people like me should be hung from trees or pushed out of helicopters. Still, my daily hazards are minimal. I’m privileged being a fairly anonymous butchy white man in Portland, Oregon, a city which earned its reputation as a hot spot where fascists committing violence sometimes got beat down or shot for their trouble. 

But out in rural areas, menace arrived more personally. People who stood up against local law enforcement illegally collaborating with federal immigration agencies found their lives in constant peril. I remember one activist showing me a message she received containing information about her children’s grade school and boasting that they would sexually assault her in front of the kids before murdering her whole family. This wasn’t an uncommon example.

Such explicit threats generally came without names attached. However, in 2018, one fascist got careless. A particular small town Oregon activist received a Facebook message from an individual who identified themselves as a school bus operator and stated that if another anti-ICE demonstration took place, they would drive their work vehicle onto the sidewalk and crush every participant. This violent threat came from an authentic social media profile, its author presumably forgetting they hadn’t logged into a burner account. 

It wasn’t hard identifying the bus company and soon I dialed them up, demanding to speak with a supervisor. I expected a brief conversation, probably with someone unwilling to confirm the operator even worked there. Instead I was quickly connected to the individual’s boss, who acknowledged they had recently learned about their employee making murder threats using company property and suspended them. We had a very pleasant conversation about politics for ten minutes and at the end, they actually asked what punishment I felt their driver deserved. 

I was taken aback by this, but as a longtime warehouse foreman myself, naturally had opinions. I explained how if one of my forklift operators got caught, for example, threatening to drive their Daewoo over Americans exercising their 1st Amendment rights, they shouldn’t expect to keep their job. It was obviously much worse that someone entrusted with children’s safety had proposed an explicit terrorist attack, therefore I recommended they be fired. 

The difference, of course, between this individual and the many people terminated from jobs who simply made disparaging remarks about fascist figurehead Charlie Kirk following his assassination, is that speaking ill of the dead is a free speech right, while death threats are not. I remember when the popular leftist historian Howard Zinn died in 2010 and his NPR remembrance contained an embedded rebuttal by the conservative activist David Horowitz who stated that nothing from Zinn’s long legacy deserved “any kind of respect.” This was obviously tacky, and many listeners sent NPR strongly worded e-mails in protest. Yet nobody got fired and Horowitz continued his career umphased. 

The lack of consequences for fascists has only increased since. I don’t care if right wing trolls disrespect Howard Zinn or George Floyd (as Charlie Kirk famously did) after their deaths and I don’t hate fascists because they’re tacky. I hate them because they threaten my children, shoot down my friends, and support politicians openly turning America into an authoritarian state. It’s not much, but I may have taken part in getting one dismissed from their job and that’s a small act of resistance at least.