One sure sign of a country in turmoil is political violence. And we’ve experienced our share of it this year thanks to the thousands of antifa and Black Lives Matter thugs who’ve taken to the streets to vandalize and intimidate and burn and bludgeon and wreck and loot and murder. Oh, and the odd assortment of 13 anti-government types who plotted to kidnap Michigan’s Democrat governor a few weeks back.

But when our elected representatives themselves, rather than being voices of calm and reason, resort to calls of physical violence against their political opponents, we’re getting into dangerous territory. And so it was earlier this week with Michigan State Representative Cynthia Johnson.

As Craig Mauger reports in The Detroit News, “On Dec. 2, the House Oversight Committee took testimony from Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney. Johnson pushed back on Giuliani’s unproven [sic] claims of voter fraud and accused witnesses presented by the former New York City mayor of ‘lying.’ Afterward, Johnson, who is Black, received violent and racist threats, including one in which a person left a message telling her: ‘Your time is coming … from the (expletive) gallows you’ll be hanging.’”

Clearly, Johnson started all this with her idiotic and ill-advised smear of citizens and eyewitnesses who, under penalty of perjury, have sworn affidavits to the electoral fraud they saw. But when angry, anonymous partisans responded to her with threats of violence, she should’ve turned the matter over to law enforcement. And that should’ve been the end of it. Instead, though, she took to her Facebook page to post a video with an ominous call to violence against “Trumpers.”

“This is just a warning to you Trumpers,” Johnson says. “Be careful. Walk lightly. We ain’t playing with you. … And for those of you who are soldiers, you know how to do it. Do it right. Be in order. Make them pay.”

Reaction to Johnson’s sickening comments was, rightly, bipartisan. There’s no room in our politics for bile like that. Her fellow Michigan Democrats condemned the statement, and she’s been stripped of all her committee assignments.

As Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff noted, “It reminds me of the Black Panthers, except those thugs weren’t elected officials. … Johnson’s defenders suggest that she was only talking about hitting ‘Trumpers’ in the pocketbook. It’s true that she mentions that. But the phrases ‘we ain’t playing with you’ and ‘those of you who are soldiers’ undermine the ‘pocketbook’ defense. Even Johnson’s fellow Dem legislators aren’t buying it.”

One elected official who might be buying it, though, is the one who has the greatest reason not to: Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. As we mentioned above, Whitmer herself was the target of a kidnapping plot not long ago, so it’d seem that she, more than anyone else, should have zero tolerance for this sort of behavior. And yet there she was just yesterday, saying that Michigan House Republicans, who are in the majority and therefore control the legislative body’s committee assignments, have gone “too far.”

“I think this is a woman who has been through a lot,” Whitmer said. “And I think it’s important that every single one of us give one another a little bit of compassion and grace.”

Strange, though. We don’t recall any “compassion and grace” from Whitmer during her recent “Meet the Press” interview in which she proudly displayed her “8645” sticker — as in, “86” our 45th president.

The Left, as we know, is also The Mob. And it’s historically the political faction that resorts to violence. The rest of us should always be mindful of that reality, and ever vigilant against it.