Donald Trump has effectively deputized a “mob” of vigilantes who are intimidating elected officials and civilians across the country, according to one conservative.
Armed extremists have threatened citizens arrests of public officials and others in various states in an intimidation campaign that bears strong similarities to the Jan. 6 insurrection, and The Bulwark’s Mona Charen said that’s no coincidence.
“Stories of threats and violence aimed at ordinary Americans who are simply serving on school boards, supervising elections, holding public office, opening a mobile vaccine clinic, or having the effrontery to be elected as secretary of state are not new,” Charen wrote. “It’s a mashup of pandemic-induced mania, social media misinformation, Trump-incited disinhibition, and something in the water.”
“It’s not enough to see these people as revolutionaries or criminals or dupes,” Charen said. “Some may be all of those things, but there is a substrate of perverted patriotism here. The frequent invocation of the citizens’ arrest signifies a wish for legitimacy. They yearn to be responsible citizens, upholding the law and the Constitution and the duties of the individual. They have been corrupted, but that’s all the more reason for the rest of the American people to assert their uncorrupted patriotism more boldly.”
She ends with quite the warning:
“They must get active and defend the election workers, health care workers, school board members, journalists, politicians, secretaries of state, and anyone else who is being intimidated, hounded, or abused by the mob,” she added. “If patriotism animates only the worst among us, we are lost.”
(I have nothing to add to this oldie fragment from 2021. Mona is reborn, and that is good enough for me.)
The Illogical Seminary 