Last night, while my wife and I sat down to eat at a local restaurant, I had the opportunity to listen in on a conversation a patron was having with one of the owners. I'm being polite when I say listen in because neither man was making any effort to keep what they were saying to themselves. If anything, they took great pains to make sure that everyone within earshot heard them loud and clear.
The patron had some choice words for Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Anthony Fauci, the latter, in particular, earning most of his scorn. I won't go into detail, but it was clear that both were Trump supporters. I did take some comfort that at least they had their masks on while they were pontificating. Many Trumpers don't.
I looked over at my wife and remarked, "Good thing they're shy." Naturally, I was being sarcastic. Ever since 2016, we've heard a great deal about the "shy" Trump voter. I thought it was a myth then and I still do. The very term itself is an oxymoron. There were many reasons why Hillary Clinton lost, but none of them had anything to do with shy or hidden Trump voters. These people hide themselves the way I pass up a fudge brownie.
Witness what took place in Texas yesterday. While en-route to a campaign stop in Austin, a Biden-Harris bus was almost forced off the road by a caravan of Trump supporters. There was nothing particularly "shy" or "hidden" about what these people were doing. Indeed, had they'd been any more "shy" someone could've been killed.
Earlier this month, the FBI arrested several members of a white supremacist militia group who were plotting to kidnap and kill Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. Dr. Fauci, whose unwillingness to betray his oath to support Trump's idiotic gibberish, needs armed protection because he and his wife have received death threats. Do you know any Biden supporters who are this shy? Neither did I.
Yes, Trump supporters have often been subjected to ridicule on social media and in the press. And to be honest, most of it has been deserved. But deserved or not, it is one thing to ridicule someone; it is quite another to threaten harm to them. What is happening here is evil and deliberate. Spurred on by a would-be autocrat, these people have made their intentions perfectly clear. Anyone who challenges their cult leader is fair game, be they a governor, a doctor or political opponents.
Trump has so ginned up his base that I am extremely worried about what might happen next week. Should he start to fall behind in the vote tally as the mail-in ballots are counted, we could see violence break out in several states. Already, authorities are warning businesses to board up their windows just in case. This is the sort of thing that goes on in countries like Belarus, but not since the Civil War has it happened here.
As we speak, Texas Republicans are asking a federal judge to throw out 117,000 drive-thru ballots in Harris County. It is a blatant attempt to keep Biden from possibly winning the state in November. Two days earlier, a federal appeals court in Minnesota ordered the state to set aside any mail-in ballots that might arrive after election day until it rules on whether they will count. And before that, the Supreme Court denied a fast-track appeal by Pennsylvania Republicans to toss late-arriving ballots. It reserved the right to hear the case AFTER the election. The state is likewise segregating those ballots just in case the Court decides to void them.
Between a conservative judiciary threatening to toss ballots, an attorney general willing to go to any lengths to keep this president in power and street thugs threatening to kill people, we are way past the point of a Constitutional crisis. We are on the verge of a complete collapse, the likes of which hasn't been seen since the last days of the Weimar Republic.
If that's your definition of shy, I suggest you get yourself a new dictionary.
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