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As gun sales in this country soar " another 43 million weapons bought in 2020 and 2021 alone " while the possession of military-style weaponry is normalized, whether in mass killings or everyday life, American politics, too, is becoming weaponized. If you doubt that, then you weren't in that Comfort Inn room where, on the night of January 5, 2021, a group of Oath Keeper militiamen stored their weapons so that a "quick reaction force" could potentially transport them to the Capitol the next day.
In the end, as far as we know, none of those weapons made it that January 6th, but others certainly did, as the House January 6th committee made all too clear in its recent hearings. Worse yet, the president of the United States knew perfectly well that some of those he was encouraging to march on the Capitol to protest (or even reverse) his election loss were armed. In political terms, red states have been easing gun laws even as some blue states are cracking down. In California, which has among the nation's strictest laws (especially when it comes to assault rifles), deaths from guns are approximately 40% below the national average " not that such figures, it seems, matter to most Republicans.
The result: an unequally armed nation at a moment where the weaponizing of our political system seems on the rise. As right-wing extremism grows and guns become ever more commonplace in American life, while the death toll from them soars, the idea that arms, not votes, might someday define the endpoint of an American election is also being normalized.
Oh, and my mistake, I forgot to include in the above description one of the ways in which this country is weaponizing big time. Fortunately, TomDispatch regular Stan Cox didn't. So, sit back, watch out for the smoke and fumes, and let him explain. Tom
Three Tons of Fascism with a Bull Bar
Fuming at the Rest of Us, Democracy, and the Earth
By Stan Cox
In the United States during 16 months in 2020 and 2021, vehicles rammed into groups of protesters at least 139 times, according to a Boston Globe analysis. Three victims died and at least 100 were injured. Consider that a new level of all-American barbarity, thanks to the growing toxicity of right-wing politics, empowered by its embrace of ever-larger, more menacing vehicles being cranked out by the auto industry.
And keep this in mind: attacks on street protests are just the most recent development in fossil-fuelized aggression. Especially in the red states of America, MAGA motorists have been driving our quality of life into the ground for years. My spouse Priti Gulati Cox and I live half a block south of Crawford Street, the central east-west artery in Salina, Kansas. Starting in the early Trump years, and ever more regularly during the pandemic, we've been plagued by the brain-rattling roar of diesel-powered pickup trucks as they peel out of side streets onto Crawford, spewing black exhaust and aiming to go from zero to sixty before reaching the traffic light at Broadway. By 2020, many of these drivers were regularly festooning their pickups, ISIS-style, with giant flags bearing slogans like "Trump 2020" and "Don't Tread on Me," as well as Confederate battle flags. Some still display them, often with "F*** Biden" flags as well.
If you live in flyover country as we do, you come to expect such performances. And don't think that I'm just expressing my own personal annoyance about an aesthetic affront either. Fueled by diesel or gasoline, and supercharged by what political scientist Cara Daggett has labeled "petro-masculinity," those men in big, loud vehicles serve as the shock troops for a white-right authoritarian movement that threatens to seize control of our political system. Recall the "Trump caravan" that tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas just before Election Day 2020. Or the "Trump Trains" of pickups carrying men with paintball guns, one of which attacked Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon.
Long forgotten now by most of us, those hapless North American truck convoys, some of which converged on Washington, D.C., last spring, might as well have been scripted by the writers of Seinfeld. To all appearances, they were protests about nothing " other than a vague sense of grievance personified (or truckified). Still, the drivers did manage to cause serious mayhem, assaulting the residents of two capitals, Ottawa and Washington, with diesel fumes, daylong horn blasting, and bellicose conduct. They paralyzed downtown Ottawa for almost a month (and cost the government there more than $36 million). Some drivers in the cross-country U.S. convoys physically assaulted counter-protesters, cyclists, and motorists. There was one bright spot, though: one day, a man on a cargo bike got in front of a line of semi-cabs and pickups and slow-pedaled through Washington's narrow side streets, leaving the invaders no alternative but to creep along behind him for what seemed like forever and a day.
The convoy truckers, however, paid little price for the havoc they caused. Indeed, vehicular aggression and violence increasingly goes unpunished. On June 24th in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a man aimed his pickup truck at a group of women protesting that morning's Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v. Wade. When his vehicle first came into contact with them, the women stood fast, and grabbed its bull bar " the steel armoring designed to protect the grille against livestock, but used more often these days to intimidate humans. With a yell, he plowed ahead, driving over one woman's ankle and giving another a concussion. When the police arrived, they interviewed the driver, but they have yet to charge him or even identify him publicly. He was probably shielded by a law the Iowa legislature passed in 2020 immunizing drivers who run into or over protesters, if they simply claim to have been fleeing in fear. Ominously enough, Florida and Oklahoma have passed similar laws essentially encouraging such acts.
Are You What You Drive?
Here in the heartland, white nationalism feeds on gas, gunpowder, oil, and testosterone. Ranchers, wheat-growers, oilfield roughnecks, firefighters, loggers, hunters " in short, the very kinds of guys who populate today's ads for pickup trucks " are widely viewed as the real Americans. Most pickups today, however, are found not out on the range but on city streets and Interstate highways, sporting empty beds and clean tires, with their drivers settled into cushy captain's seats. For many of them, big pickups are no more than a non-utilitarian cultural statement and, in today's culture, that means a political statement, too. (With so many luxury options on offer, a new truck can also be an extravagant statement, since their average price now exceeds $60,000.)
When I was reading High and Mighty, Keith Bradsher's classic book on SUVs, in the early 2000s, there was as yet no correlation between the supersizing of personal vehicles and political preferences. It was mostly about armoring up against crashes and crime. A few years later, when even more bloated trucks and SUVs with abundant creature comforts started being advertised as "living rooms on wheels," they still had no strong political associations. Over the past few years, however, manufacturers have begun capitalizing on MAGA-world belligerence by pumping up the road-ruling mystique of those vehicles. On this topic, I won't even try to match the bracing prose of Angie Schmitt, the author of Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, who wrote for Bloomberg News last year:
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