Ignore Eric Greitens’ violent threats to other GOP Senate candidates? Not an option

When children throw tantrums to get attention, it’s often the best bet not to give them what they’re after. But Missouri can’t afford to ignore Eric Greitens’ latest stunt.

The strategists behind his campaign for Roy Blunt’s seat in the U.S. Senate were surely delighted Monday when just hours after they released a repulsive new video depicting him leading a military-style raid on Republicans he deems insufficiently conservative, Twitter flagged it and Facebook removed it. If depicting literally taking up arms against your political rivals doesn’t constitute a violation of the platforms’ rules against advocating violence, nothing does.

“Censorship!” came the immediate whines. As usual, wrong: Social media companies are private enterprises. They are free to police the content their users post. Only governments can censor. And as of this writing, Greitens’ obscenity is still streaming on YouTube and elsewhere on the internet.

The impulse to avert our eyes and hope this will all go away won’t work as a political strategy against the Greitens outrage machine. Many serious conservatives thought the best way to defuse Donald Trump’s clownish rhetoric in the 2016 presidential primary was to starve it of oxygen. After he lost the 2020 election, many hoped that simply not acknowledging his false screams about voter fraud would make him give them up. We know how those stories played out.

Even if Greitens drops out now, that won’t change the fact that he’s debased GOP politics to levels even lower than 25 years of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News’ worst punditry have brought them to. Missouri voters wisely avoided a catastrophe by keeping Todd Akin away from the Senate in 2012 after his ignorant comments about “legitimate rape.” We’re confident that if Greitens holds on in his shameful campaign, they’ll soundly reject him and his vile threats of violence, too.

This story was originally published June 20, 2022 at 2:24 PM.