One Nation Under a Threat

 

Nothing like taking your kids to Philadelphia for the 4th & running into literal Nazis. These scumbags belong to the group Patriot Front. That may or may not be my kids & I joining a growing crowd yelling at the spineless dickholes & chasing them away from City Hall. #fucknazis pic.twitter.com/bqYviUq1Bd

— Not Today (@SunnyDelight888) July 4, 2021

Sometimes people talk shit about what the price of freedom is, with some people (and I'm not casting judgment on them, only their home-training) saying that it's the blood of patriots. Fuck no. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. If Jefferson didn't actually say it, it's still gospel to me. You have to be on the look-out for signs that freedom could be slipping. 

Like bully-boys thinking they can parade down the streets of a not especially white city demonstrating I don't even know what. That they exist, I guess. They weren't there to recruit. Well, it wasn't appreciated here, I can tell you that much. But why did they come to get rousted? (Did they think anything else would happen?) Were citizens in the birthplace of the US gonna look at these suburban mall-ass wannabees as something to get scared of? 

 Here's the thing, Philadelphians will fight anything. If you're a hitchhiking robot or Santa Claus, we've pretty much kicked your ass. We've even tried to excommunicate Columbus and Frank Rizzo--and they were both very much our kind of shit at one time. Maybe they came to get their asses kicked in to report that some cities in heathen America really needed to get fucked over, eventually. Because fascists love martyrs. Love them. Why else would "Who shot Ashli Babbitt?" be something Trump even echoed Saturday night?\

This is their American Horst Wessel--almost. Except, Babbitt was likely killed by a member of the Capitol Police or maybe a member of the security detail of the VP. (Although it greatly helps she was a white woman, which we can break down in at least fourteen words if we have to.) Trump doesn't see this as bas optics--he demonizes FBI directors, ambassadors, whistleblowers, his own Attorney Generals, as easily as breathing, but regular people don't connect to that.  Also, it isn't a great narrative that their martyr was a potential terrorist killed by law enforcement. Yet. So maybe the poor pitiful Nazi wannabees still are waiting for their "real" martyr--because Andy Ngo can't create this fable fast enough himself.

There's words for what they want--the provocation. They want a time, a place, a neighborhood, they can run riot in. Or even dramatically fail in, to show how some places are lost and in need of reformation. Kulturkampf.  They want a war.

This incident had me on high alert because of Mike Flynn and what he's saying to Qanon right now: "The call" is something tea partiers and theocrats are familiar with because of Lou Engle's thing.  And I also notice "Hammurabi Lobby" advertising for a "Nation Under God" just a minute ago: there is a Christian element to Trumpism and the fascist threat the the US. And they love their martyrs too, they love to see themselves as Christians amongst lions who do awful things like, I dunno, mostly ignore them unless they try to cancel our shows or  deny us bodily autonomy or try to kill doctors and stuff and blow up government buildings or whatever?

I guess what I'm saying is: we aren't the land of the free, unless everyone commits to being a home of the brave, where we stick up for the oppressed and alienated and face down bullies and fashies as they crop up. And that means also sticking up for the accurate treatment of history. And freedom from religion as well as of religion. We all have to be on alert to the subtle ways our freedoms get screwed away--criticism of journalism gives way to demonizing the act of journalism and the allegation that all are liars. The projection that if any party is corrupt, all are equally corrupt, to undermine belief that systems can work. The idea that the law should be for some but not all. They would have you hating those who are oppressed and loving those who are doing the oppressing.

We are better than this, I have to believe. We can have faith in our institutions, if we give trustworthy people the support they need, if we believe in the power of conviction and know that right makes right, not any might. If we trust but verify. If we dare to know. 

I think there will be a sequel to Jan. 6, and I wish I did not think that. I think the books the extremists have studied ordain it.  I hope they are turned aside like chino-wearing doofuses strolling in the wrong damn city, but I can't be sure. 

But of such individual, even stupid moments, movements can be made.