THE DANGEROUS LURE OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE

JUST DOWN THE street from the Reason offices in D.C., protesters recently built a guillotine. No necks were harmed that night; it wasn’t fully functional. But they did it in front of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ house, and the message was clear: While we aren’t going to do violence to you personally right now, we want you to know that we think capitalist billionaires like you are so terrible that some violence may, in fact, be justified. Another iteration of the guillotine had popped up a couple of weeks earlier in front of the White House, with similar implications for the president and his allies.

The question, which has taken on increasing importance as Election Day draws near, is how seriously (or literally) to take