Teha Delaruelle sat in front of a dry-erase board. On it, in block letters: "Kill your local Republican." Delaruelle pointed at the board, looked into the camera, and said the quiet part: "We're going to make this the moderate position for the state of Wisconsin."
The transgender activist, who volunteered on the congressional campaign of Democratic Socialist candidate Katrina DeVille in Wisconsin's 8th Congressional District, posted the video along with a second clip declaring "We are doing trans jihad." The target, according to Delaruelle: "the oppressor, the bigots, the animals that make up MAGA."
DeVille, also transgender, is a musician seeking the Democratic nomination in the August 11 primary to challenge Republican incumbent Tony Wied in WI-08 — a district that went R+8 and voted 57% for Donald Trump in 2024. The campaign's website features a "Queers for Palestine" flag.
The rhetoric wasn't limited to TikTok clips. Delaruelle also posted on Substack, writing "Society desires nothing less than our total extermination, therefore we must destroy their society." Another post read: "We must answer this call to an existential struggle, our jihad, our trans jihad." Additional social media posts included the phrases "Left Wing Death Squads" and "Smash MAGA."
In one video, Delaruelle laid out the operational goal with remarkable specificity: "We're gonna make it so that they walk down the streets with fear, anxiety, and worry, and we're not gonna make this, like, oh they gotta do this for like a week or something where they get really scared. No, this is their new reality."
DeVille eventually fired Delaruelle, saying the volunteer was "deeply troubled" and had been on the campaign for a "very short while." In an email, DeVille stated: "I do not accept or condone violence or threats toward anyone and do not encourage violence, hate, or threats of any kind." DeVille also blocked Delaruelle from all social media accounts "because they were actively creating a dangerous situation around my campaign."
The condemnation from the candidate landed with a thud, because it came only after the videos went viral. We've spent years being told that conservative speech is "stochastic terrorism" — that a meme, a rally chant, or a podcast joke creates a "climate of violence" that reasonable people should condemn. The standard was never about direct threats. It was about proximity. Tone. Implication. A Republican didn't have to say "kill" anyone. They just had to be within three degrees of someone who sounded angry.
Delaruelle didn't leave anything to implication. "Kill your local Republican" was written on a whiteboard in marker. "Trans jihad" wasn't a metaphor buried in a Substack footnote — it was a declared campaign, complete with a timeline and a stated objective of permanent psychological terror against political opponents.
The one-month deadline Delaruelle set is still running. The unfollow is still the only response from the Democratic gubernatorial frontrunner. And "kill your local Republican" is, apparently, the kind of statement that gets you quietly removed from a campaign rather than loudly reported to law enforcement.
When the standard changes depending on who's talking, it was never a standard. It was a weapon.
