The Trumpers have commandeered the label “patriot” to justify illegal, violent, criminal activity, while providing cover for a corrupt dictator-wannabe who would replace government by the people with a fascist dictatorship (while keeping himself and his criminal associates out of jail and raking in the dollars from his cultists). The Trumpers are still talking about a violent overthrow of the Biden Administration, a la Myanmar.

This was the first time in American history that there was not a peaceful transition of presidential power. The January 6 insurrection by Trumpers would have overturned the foundations of what it means to be the United States of America – a democracy in which free and fair elections decide our elected representatives and those who lose accept that.

Trump wanted to imprison or shoot anyone who desecrated monuments to Confederate generals, installed well after the Civil War to assert White Supremacy, claiming that these protesters for justice were not patriots, they were the rebels who should be deprived of their civil rights. 1776 was a commitment to the formation of the United States of America, replacing rule by a faraway monarchy with rule by the governed the Confederacy was a revolt intended to cleave the nation, less than a century old, into two based on a notion that some were not entitled to the same “inalienable rights” of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but were chattel, not human beings. January 6 insurrectionists chanted “1776” but carried Confederate flags.

That word has been politicized as much as a COVID19 mask to protect others from a lethal disease, as much as “public health” or “parental leave” or “climate change” or “gun rights” or now, the perversion of the term “critical race theory” which chillingly mimics 1930s Nazi propaganda.Īpparently “brave” doesn’t cover “risking” the discomfort of getting the COVID-19 vaccination, even if it protects family, community and country.

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