Pat McAfee talks about sports for a living. That is the whole job. And by his own account, here is how a sports talk host ends up needing FBI snipers at a college football show.

It started with a clipped quote. McAfee talked about the Algerian Olympic boxer, and by his own telling, the platforms that headline quoted him left out the long, empathetic part of what he said. What was left made him a bigot in a headline, and the label stuck. He was targeted from that day on.

Then, in August, he showed up at the Patriot Games final in Ohio, a high school competition built around the Presidential Fitness Test. He greeted President Trump on the tarmac and posed for a picture with him. The next day’s coverage called him “Pat MAGAfee,” and the outrage went to another level. A man already carrying a label was now photographed next to the one person you are not allowed to stand near.

Last night McAfee posted what life looks like now. Death threats in his mentions and DMs, constant enough that he stopped reading them. People telling him what his wife and his kids “deserve.” People saying, in so many words, that they want him “Kirked.”

Read that word again. A man was assassinated in front of a crowd last year, and his name is now a verb in the inbox of a guy who talks about football.

He also described last year’s Tennessee GameDay, days after the Kirk assassination, when security feared a copycat. The FBI sent snipers. Disney security, Tennessee State Police, Knoxville PD, campus police, all working one job: making sure a pregame show did not get shot up. Somebody in that circle floated a bulletproof vest. For a punter. At a football show.

And this month, after the New York Times ran what McAfee calls a “we are allowed to and should hate this guy” piece, a university used its own page to mock him as a corny creep on his way to their campus.

Here is where I keep landing. I am told, constantly, that the threat of political violence in this country runs one direction. Then I watch the pile-ons stack up: a quote clipped into a label, a photo next to Trump treated as a confession, threats against his family treated as background noise, and respectable institutions joining in instead of saying one word against it.

It is getting harder and harder to defend people who preach tolerance while answering a photograph with threats. Disagree with McAfee all you want. Argue with him. Turn him off. But when the response to “he stood next to the President at a fitness event for high school kids” is threats against his wife and children, you have told the rest of us exactly who you are.

He ended his post by apologizing to the people who despise him. Think about that. The man getting the threats is the one apologizing.