This is behavior modification in action, even as it’s a bit of a crawl-down from inflammatory rhetoric blaming a segment of the population for something that it turns out never happened.

BUT DON’T YOU FORGET IT COULD

CNN tries to work both ends against the middle here, as it is obligated to report that the Colorado Supreme Court justices – the ones who summarily bumped the Trump off the ballot there – had been “threatened” and that the FBI was investigating. You can read it pretty clearly in the chyron under the anchor.

The inference, of course, being that the jurists themselves had received a barrage of frightening and dangerous threats. If you glanced over this NBC News piece five days ago, you would have figured phone lines, emails, offices, etc, were on fire from enraged and insane Trump followers threatening all sorts of death and destruction upon their heads in retribution for their pretty controversial decision.

I mean, just look at the headline – these Trumpistas are homicidal keyboard ninjas.

Colorado Supreme Court justices face a flood of threats after disqualifying Trump from the ballot
The latest round of threats fits a familiar pattern: Trump faces a legal setback, and officials face threats.

In the 24 hours since the Colorado Supreme Court kicked former President Donald Trump off the state’s Republican primary ballot, social media outlets have been flooded with threats against the justices who ruled in the case, according to a report obtained by NBC News.

Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that conducts public interest research, identified “significant violent rhetoric” against the justices and Democrats, often in direct response to Trump’s posts about the ruling on his platform Truth Social. They found that some social media users posted justices’ email addresses, phone numbers and office building addresses.

“This ends when we kill these f–kers,” a user wrote on a pro-Trump forum that was used by several Jan. 6 rioters.

…Posts — whose images and links were included in the report — noted a variety of methods that could be used to kill those perceived as Trump’s enemies: hollow-point bullets, rifles, rope, bombs.

“Kill judges. Behead judges. Roundhouse kick a judge into the concrete,” read a post on a fringe website. “Slam dunk a judge’s baby into the trashcan.”

And granted, that is some berserker Schlitz scribbling.

…“We are seeing significant violent language and threats being made against the Colorado justices and others perceived to be behind yesterday’s Colorado Supreme Court ruling,” Jones, a former FBI investigator and staffer for the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NBC News in a statement.

But a funny thing happened in the middle of the online bloodbath. As the CNN anchor notes, kind of in contrast to the point of the chyron, for all the digging the FBI’s rightly done into the explosion of vitriol, the Denver police have had to respond to:

“…what they said was a ‘hoax’ report at one of the justices’ residences. No specific threats to the justices in those forums, from what we understand.

So, no specific threats at this time…”

CNN uncomfortably admits the FBI haven't identified any actionable threats against Colorado Justices.

— “No specific threats”
— Denver PD responded to a single “hoax report”
— Feds are now just combing through social media for “any threat of violence” pic.twitter.com/qzGcEGncNF

— Bill D'Agostino (@Banned_Bill) December 26, 2023

Wait, whut? The FBI’s got bupkiss.

It’s all been smack-talking online and thank God.

If you go back over the NBC article? It’s all smack-talking online with the inference of something more sinister.

Did they ever cover prog and AntiFa chatrooms like this? After Dobbs, say?

I don’t think so.

But you Trump-types – oh, yeah. You’re making the crazy pages with your venting.

The CNN report above continues to warn:

…Those are very non-specific threats at this time. There has also been, generally, law enforcement looking into the discussion about these justices in online forums. Particularly some general discussion among extremists and people who are pro-Trump…”

Notice how she leaves “online forum” wide-open? Is it secret chatrooms, Reddit or even a thread on X? They all qualify for such a broad definition. That’s convenient.

And how about tying “extremists” and “pro-Trump” together in a neat package like that?

Smooth as silk, no?

One of the discussions in the comments here would easily qualify.

Please believe they want you to know they’re watching you everywhere, all the time.

The self censoring aspect is the goal. They WANT citizens to think twice, or three times before voicing their displeasure with slothful, corrupt, malevolent gov't apparatchiks.
A lot of people will weigh the risks of angering the Party's Stasi and simply keep their mouth shut.

— Cruadin (@cruadin) December 26, 2023

The government will determine and designate who the “extremists” are, what constitutes a “threat” (specific or otherwise), and maybe, if they get really lucky, even manage to give them a little shove.

It’s all so obvious.