Feb 4, 2022 4 min read

Perhaps it’s a reflection of how deeply the board game Monopoly has permeated our culture, but right now a lot of people seem to want other people to go to jail, and probably not pass Go or collect $200, for that matter.

Last weekend, former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich gravely intoned on Fox News that members of the House Committee investigating the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, “face a real risk of jail” if Republicans retake the majority in the chamber next year.

Gingrich didn’t lay out in precise detail why members of the committee merit time behind bars, and odds are very good that the committee’s members are fully operating within the parameters of the law. But, hey, the members of Congress on the committee are Gingrich’s political opponents. Throw ’em in jail.

Other figures on America’s right have recently expressed similar enthusiasm for penal servitude. A whole procession of elected officials, including U.S. Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, have called for the imprisonment of White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci. Some GOP lawmakers have thrown out the idea that teachers and school librarians should be sent to the slammer. Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, a former television news anchor, has called for members of the “corrupt media” to be locked up, along with “anybody who was involved in that corrupt, shady, shoddy election of 2020,” even though there is not a shred of evidence that the election that brought Joe Biden to the White House was anything other than free and fair.

Lake isn’t the only person peddling election misinformation who has visions of mass incarceration dancing in their heads. Mike Lindell, the “My Pillow” guy, has suggested that as many as 300 million people belong in jail for election fraud, even though that’s 145 million more people than voted in the 2020 presidential election, and would sweep up almost every American over the age of 10.

Ironically, the figures who most fervently wish to see others doing hard time are also vehement opponents of mask or vaccine mandates or any other coronavirus restrictions on the ground that they restrict freedom. How strange, then, that they are so keen to strip others of their freedom.

An argument could be made that some of this is just harmless, overheated rhetoric, a way to whip up audiences, get clicks or anger liberals. But it’s not something we should just shrug off. It’s chilling and it’s dangerous. Do we want to live in a country where you could end up in jail if a governor or president doesn’t like you? Do we want to be a country where dissenters are put away, or citizens are jailed because they have deviated from some aspect of the prevailing dogma? Do we want to be a country where civil servants, educators and doctors are routinely hauled off?

There are places in the world that have done, or are doing those kinds of things. Places like China, Cuba, Iran, Russia and North Korea. We have held ourselves up as an alternative to these types of authoritarian or totalitarian societies, where the wrong action or the wrong statement could lead to a trip to a prison camp.

U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the Jan. 6 committee, had this to say about Gingrich’s threat: “A former Speaker of the House is threatening jail time for members of Congress who are investigating the violent Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and our Constitution. This is what it looks like when the rule of law unravels.”