Even on social media, Culp’s call for a lynching was greeted mostly with morbid curiosity. “Are you suggesting lynchings, Loren?,” asked one commenter.
Seems deadly clear to me. “Get a Rope!” is not a dog whistle, or some sophisticated thought that might have an alternative explanation. We don’t have the death penalty here anymore, so he can’t be referring to that. Culp is a former police chief so he surely knows how toxic speech like this can be in the criminal justice system.
Now when this first came up, I’ll admit that some of us at The Seattle Times expressed weariness. Oh God, another story about another candidate saying another unhinged thing. Each time, we debate whether writing about it makes us dupes — if we’re simply serving to broadcast and propagate the unhinged thing.
Except that’s what’s happening anyway. If a candidate keeps saying extreme and hateful things, and isn’t disowned by his party, and meanwhile everyone else starts shrugging because we think he’s a nut or we’re worn down or we just can’t keep pace with the firehose of lunacy, well, that’s a case study of how something as rancid as a call for a lynching becomes politically normal.
Culp got 1.7 million votes when he ran for governor in 2020 — the most ever by a GOP candidate for the office. He was recently endorsed by Donald Trump.
Where is the state party on this, or GOP elected officials, or county party organizations? You all OK that one of your Trump-backed candidates is out there publicly calling for a lynching and for executing court officials?
It’s your party: You can’t mutely pass it off on the Anti-Defamation League to say from afar that this is terribly, horribly wrong. If we don’t hear much it sure seems like our politics is going terminally round the bend down a dangerous road.
