You Have Disturbed Our Peace

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Goons on parade. Reuters photo. On front, MAGA in Vancouver, WA. Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty

Whew. Bleak, crazed days. Trumpster thuggery has now escalated to MAGA goons swarming the Biden bus in Texas – which “patriots” Trump celebrated with “I LOVE TEXAS!”- and Sunday’s freak-and-Confederate-flag-flying “Trump trains” of yahoos clogging highways, and sometimes blocking emergency vehicles, in New York, New Jersey, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Texas, Arizona and more to deliver cogent political messages like, “WHOOOO, we shut it down baby! and “You suck, you suck – everyone on the right lane sucks.” There were assault-rifle-toting Trumpsters in Louisville, KY. at a high school – which lawyer and school board member James Craig found “beyond the pale….If you feel the need to bring an assault rifle to a public school to demonstrate your support for a politician, there’s something seriously wrong with both you and the politician” – and stories of MAGA supporters spitting at, cursing out, and threatening residents of Westchester, N.Y. who had Biden signs. And in a key North Carolina county that could decide the state legislature make-up, 200 diverse voters, clergy and kids on a peaceful “March to the Polls” got pepper-sprayed by cops who found “the assembly reached a level of conduct….deemed unsafe and unlawful,” maybe when marchers paused quietly to mark the time it took George Floyd to die. After teargassing kids as young as five (who later threw up), at least one elderly woman in a wheelchair, and the people who tried to help her – as documented by the kids of political analyst David Frum – cops arrested 8 people. They included march organizer Rev. Greg Drumwright, who was also ordered out of town for 72 hours – WTF? – but declared, “We plan to stay relentless.” “We came in peace,” Drumwright said. “You have disturbed our peace.”

After all that’s come before, Trump’s latest transgressions affirm “democracy as we know it is already imperilled,” warn 80 historians in an open letter, arguing “whether Donald J. Trump is a fascist, a post-fascist populist, an autocrat, or just a bumbling opportunist,” he poses a grave danger. There is alarming agreement on the subject. Said Third Reich historian Eric Cervini, who posted a video of MAGA hooligans in Texas waiting to ambush Biden’s bus, “This is how a democracy dies.” Holocaust historian Steve Silberman echoes him: Trump and Fox praising the brutishness is “straight-up fascism. It’s not ‘like’ fascism. It’s fascism.” To be clear, it’s been a long time coming. Wallace Shawn writes mournfully, piercingly of a country that “has been brutal for a very long time”; with Trump, “the rhetoric began to mirror reality.” He cites the decline of the “ethical aspirations” of JFK and Obama – though their reality didn’t match their rhetoric either – because “it spoke of a compassion that (many Americans) knew they didn’t feel.” “Trump has liberated a lot of people from the last vestiges of the Sermon on the Mount,” he writes. “A lot of people turn out to have been sick and tired of pretending to be good.” For them, he suggests, “the face of America has always and forever been the face of Donald Trump.” For the rest of us, we can try to do better. John Lewis, on his deep belief in his lifetime of struggle: “Nothing can stop the power of a committed and determined people to make a difference.” Besides, there are hopeful signs. Activists in North Carolina just sued the pepper-spraying cops, Dixville Notch voted 5-0 for Biden, and the possible troll who chooses the often illegal, ill-advised songs at Trump’s rallies – “Everybody Hurts,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” – hit the jackpot at the last few: Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” – the theme from The Titanic.

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Pepper-spraying voters. Photo by News Observer

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Terrorizing the bus. Screenshot.

Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty

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