<!–

–>

September 1, 2022

Recently, former CIA director Michael Hayden implied on Twitter that former President Donald Trump should be executed for violating the Espionage Act.  After MSNBC contributor Michael Beschloss suggested in a tweet that Trump should be executed like the Rosenbergs for giving U.S. nuclear secrets to Moscow in 1953, Hayden retweeted: “Sounds about right.”

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609268089992-0’); }); }

It was a year ago almost to the day that Hayden retweeted a meme comparing Trump-supporters to the Taliban in Afghanistan.  The retweet occurred at the same time the Taliban were overrunning Kabul in August 2021.  This helps to explain a lot in terms of Hayden’s total lack of self-awareness on Twitter, but it fails to help us understand exactly what’s behind the retweet that suggested that Trump should be executed.

Beschloss and Hayden were both responding to a Washington Post report that claimed that the purpose of the raid at Mar-a-Lago was to retrieve nuclear documents.  To be sure, the question about whether or not Trump was in possession of said documents, and the question about the lawfulness of the FBI’s raid, are legitimate.  Yet there is a greater question looming high above these inquiries: “How did we get to the place in this country where a former CIA director thinks it’s okay to publicly imply that a former president should be executed?”

There is much irony here when you consider that a congressional select committee is currently investigating whether or not the words of President Trump instigated the “insurrection” that followed his speech at the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6. 

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609270365559-0’); }); }

Apparently, the irony is lost on the likes of Beschloss, Hayden, Liz Cheney, and others.  It is not lost, however, on most of the American people who will soon be casting their ballots to make their voices heard in an unmistakable way.  Elections are the modern democratic equivalent of a sacrificial rite, and a much more civilized way of dealing with one’s political rivals.

So how did we get here? 

In order to answer this question, we need to understand that Beschloss, Hayden, and the Twitterati are actors in a political drama that is similar to narratives found throughout much of the history of literature.

Consequently, these twenty-first-century tweet elites are like second-century Apollonius encouraging the mob in Ephesus to hurl stones at the blind beggar he identified as “the enemy of the gods” and the cause of the deadly plague ravaging the city.  After initial reluctance, the Ephesians stone the man so thoroughly that they can’t tell if he is a man or dog.  As Rene Girard observed, the word plague at that time was used in both a sociological and medical sense.  In this instance, however, if it referred to a medial plague, then the stoning would have had no effect.  As it turns out, the plague in Ephesus was stayed, and social order ensued.  The beggar, or the “plague demon,” as Apollonius called him, was a convenient and unfortunate scapegoat.

As a prelude to this horrible event in Ephesus, it’s hard not to hear an echo of Jesus’s words to the crowd when the Scribes and Pharisees brought the adulterous woman before him.  As John Halton noticed, in Ephesus, the crowd had to be talked into stoning the beggar, but in Jerusalem, the crowd had to talked out of stoning the woman.  Jesus says to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”

Jesus’s words are more than just rhetorical flair.  His entire emphasis is on “the first stone.”
The first stone, as Girard argued, is the most decisive.  “It is the most decisive because it is the most difficult to throw.”  It is the most difficult to throw “because it is the only one without a model.”