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Assuming that anyone made such a treat limited it to just that one person, not their family, friends and neighbors ... as for “in public”, in public means that the media would have to report the story in the first place, thereby placing that reported on the same list.
Fox News’ Bret Hume is a case in point. Way back, he was very outspoken in his views, to the point of pissing powerful Clinton people off. Then suddenly, his son commits suicide (as I recall), Bret immediately begins to morph into the kinder, gentler, wishy-washy guy we see today. Coincidence?
These outspoken, threatened people would just disappear, have accidents, die of natural causes, commit suicide, and so on. The public would never hear nor know what it was they were revealing. What might leak out would be a confusing mess, easily dismissed as kook conspiratorial theory, and roundly laughed at in the media.
You must be a time traveler living in the America which ceased to exist by 1980.
Doing this at the side of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck and the Brietbart people at a massive rally couldn’t be dismissed so easily.
And if I were in such a position, bad things happening to my family and friends would just mean I’d have all that less to lose.