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Politics & Policy

Sen. Scott Wiener blames Charlie Kirk tweets for bomb threat

Sen. Scott Wiener speaks in front of members of the LGBTQ+ community in San Francisco on Nov. 20, 2022, following the massacre at Club Q nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado. | Justin Katigbak for The Standard

State Sen. Scott Wiener has blamed a Tuesday morning bomb threat on his life on conservative YouTuber Charlie Kirk’s recent tweets.

The Standard received the death threat via email and reported it to the police and Wiener.

San Francisco police responded to Wiener’s home at roughly 6 a.m. on Tuesday morning. Officers searched Wiener’s home but did not locate any explosive devices.

The email was sent by a person using the name Zamina Tataro, the email said that they placed bombs at Wiener’s San Francisco home and threatened to shoot up his Sacramento office “in 20 minutes, I am willing to die.”

The subject line read “Scott Wiener will die today,” and the author called him a pedophile and accused him of grooming children.

Wiener said that Kirk has smeared him on Twitter using homophobic language.

Charlie Kirk, founder of conservative organization Turning Point USA, attends the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 24, 2022, in Orlando, Florida. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Charlie Kirk’s tweets triggered several of the death threats,” Wiener told The Standard. “His tweets were completely false and defamatory, but they were very specific, and so we got a pretty quick death threat after what he said, and another threatening to come bash in my head, and now this.”

Wiener went on to say that rhetoric from right-wing conspiracists is more harmful than just the words they say.

“People get brainwashed and eventually somebody does something about it,” Wiener said. “It’s very, very dangerous.”

Over the past year, threats to Wiener have been taken to court after an East Bay anti-vaxxer threatened to kill him over a bill he introduced to allow teens to get vaccinated without their parents’ consent.

Another bill, this one aimed at protecting out-of-state access to health care for transgender kids, drew online attacks from Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Sophie Bearman can be reached at sophie@sfstandard.com