Minneapolis is becoming a preview of what Americans will do if they have to. The video of what the people of Minneapolis did to the right-wing “influencer” Jake Lang ought to show Trump and MAGA what decent Americans think of their ideology, and what decent Americans will do if that ideology goes beyond the toleration of free speech to violent troops in the streets:
The right-wing comments on the New York Post video are interesting. For example: “Ah yes … the peaceful and tolerant left at it again.”
They still don’t get it if they think that there is no limit to what Americans will tolerate.
The true believers in the White House don’t seem to see the risks in Trump’s threat of new tariffs to punish Europe over Greenland. Greenland increasingly looks like the red line. Buy Greenland? They’re not selling.
If Trump actually sends American troops into Greenland, then how does he expect to stay in power with all the forces that would then be allied against him? — the American people, in the streets; Europe and Canada, with damaging economic sanctions; and, if we’re lucky, the American Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court actually enforcing the Constitution.
What would it take for the American military to stop taking orders from Trump? The true believers in the White House have already shown that they’re terrified that the American military might not take illegal orders.
I was just a young whipper-snapper journalist when I read Wallace Carroll’s Persuade or Perish (1948). The book was based on his experience as head of the U.S. Office of War Information from 1942 until 1945. The book’s theme is that even wars cannot succeed without persuasion.
I don’t think that we Americans have forgotten what we learned from the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement of the 1960s. People in the streets can do a lot, but there’s also a lot of persuading to be done. Think Woodstock. And today we have more options than just protest songs. The Greenland video below is a fine piece of persuasion — both persuading people that they have the power to resist, and warning Trump and MAGA that trying to impose fascism and own the hemisphere definitely will not be a cakewalk.