Former TV star John Schneider who played Bo Duke on the hit show "Dukes of Hazzard" ran afoul of the criminalization of hyperbole when he posted the following to X: "Mr. President, I believe you are guilty of treason and should be publicly hung. Your son too. Your response is…?" Schneider wrote.
The tweet has since been removed, probably because someone told Schneider the Secret Service takes things like that very seriously even when doing so makes them look like morons.
John Schneider is not going to try and "hang" President Biden. I think anyone who would waste taxpayer money getting the Secret Service to investigate the "threat" seriously needs to be hung from the highest yardarm.
Oh, wait. can't say that. Even though most people couldn't find a yardarm on a ship if it came up and bit them in the butt, I am probably inciting violence, or threatening violence, against the president of the United States.
The purpose of siccing the Secret Service on Scheider is not to protect the person of the president. Biden is in greater danger from his own dog than he is from Schnieder. The purpose of the Secret Service investigating non-threats is to stifle passionate speech or hyperbole.
Can you think of another politician recently active who may have received a hyperbolic threat or two from the left?
Schneider’s call for Biden’s execution comes after years of left-wingers calling for violence and even the assassination of then-President Donald Trump.
A report in 2017 from the left-wing Mashable found more than 12,000 tweets calling for Trump’s assassination. The report ran just several days after Trump’s inauguration. It remains unclear if anyone was held accountable for those tweets.
Some Hollywood celebrities have called for violence against Trump, usually without negative repercussions to their careers. In 2020, Bette Midler encouraged Joe Biden to kick the then-President Trump “in the nuts” during the first presidential debate, adding that Biden should pummel the president.
In fact, the Supreme Court recognizes hyperbole as legitimate political speech.
While the doctrine primarily appears in defamation cases, the concept occasionally arises in true threat cases.
This traces back to the Supreme Court’s initial true threat decision – Watts v. United States (1969). A young draft protester was prosecuted for violating a federal anti-threat law for saying that “the first person he would put in his scope is L.B.J”, referring to President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed his conviction, reasoning that he had engaged in “political hyperbole” rather than a true threat.
It's doubtful the Secret Service would arrest and charge Schneider for a crime. But the mere fact of investigating Schneider's speech is part of a process of chilling our First Amendment right to get angry at politicians as well as the opposing side. Critics are right to point out that political hyperbole coarsens the dialog, makes it harder to communicate and bridge the gap between the two sides of an argument.
But hyperbole as protected speech has always been a traditional safety valve where people let off steam. They scream at each other instead of trying to kill each other.
The Secret Service no doubt has several ways to gauge the seriousness of a threat using sophisticated computer programs and other means. Run the program and leave the rest of us alone.
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