This morning, Sen. Rand Paul thanked Capitol Hill police for arresting a man who threatened to chop up his family with an ax:

Thank you to the US Capitol Police for their arrest of the man who recently threatened to kill my family and me. — Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) July 2, 2018

WBKO published a story naming the man in question and offering some other details but, for some reason, that story is now only available as a Google cache.

Sen. Paul’s Bowling Green office received two calls from Huffman last week. On the first call he was reported as having said something to the effect of “the Senator is f****** dead” and that he “will take an axe and chop his (Paul’s) family.” The following day Sen. Paul’s office said Huffman called back and made other statements regarding a plot to kill Obama and that he would again take an axe and chop Sen, Paul’s family.

The revised version of the story is here and now says at the bottom “Some details previously reported in this story have been removed and were unable to be independently confirmed.” So take those details with a grain of salt I guess. In any case, the revised version confirms the gist: “A man has been arrested after threatening to ‘chop up’ Sen. Rand Paul and his family with an ax.”

During a speech Monday, Sen. Paul said, “It’s just horrendous that we have to deal with things like this.” In fact, these kinds of threats seem to be something of a trend. Just last week the DOJ put out a press release about the arrest of a California man who threatened to kill FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s children because he was upset with the rollback of net neutrality rules. That threat came by email and included a list of preschools in the area where Pai lives along with a photo of his family.

Last summer a man was arrested for making threats against Rep. Martha McSally. Steve Martan allegedly told McSally he couldn’t wait to “pull the trigger” if she returned to Tucson. Another man, E. Stanley Hoff made death threats against Rep. Steve Stivers and his family over Obamacare. Hoff was sentenced to 40 months in prison in May.

Of course, this isn’t happening in a vacuum. Since President Trump was inaugurated the far left has been mounting a resistance campaign which coincided with various threats against lawmakers and a few violent confrontations around the country. The most serious of those confrontations took place last year at a baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia. Rep. Steve Scalise was shot by James Hodgkinson, a man who had spent time bashing the Trump administration online and who had volunteered for the Bernie Sanders campaign.

The desire to confront the right seemed to ratchet up a notch recently when Rep. Maxine Waters prompted people to harass members of the Trump administration wherever they go. This is not a good trend, as even the Democratic leadership seems to acknowledge.