Amid all the recent concern about the display of nooses, an incident from 1996 is worth remembering.  As I recounted at the time in The Weekly Standard (subscription required):

THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE’S site on the World Wide Web (http://www. democrats.org) recently invited computer users to take part in a high-tech lynching of Speaker Gingrich. In this Internet version of the game of”hangman,” the player would guess letters of the alphabet to spell a word. For each correct guess, the site added a new part to a stick figure and displayed a different quotation from Gingrich. At the end of the game, the screen showed the stick figure hanging from a gallows, above the game’s magic word: EXTREMIST.

The game’s final image looked very much like a death threat, just at a time when death threats had prompted Gingrich to increase his security detail.  The game also appeared just as the TV series Homicide ran a two-part episode about a serial killer who left clues based on “hangman.”

Curiously, there was very little notice in the media.

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