Our Uncivil War

Trump inviting followers to march  on the Capitol on 1/6/21  

 on the Capitol on 1/6/2                

Resulting attack on the Capitol

Militia at Michigan  Capitol trying to kidnap the governor (10/20)

   Military occupation of DC                                                            

Our Uncivil War

Toxic Labels that Divide Us Further, Preventing Reconciliation and Peace

“I’ve been shot at in Iraq, led convoys through deserts scarred by war and spent nearly five years of my life on operations in the Middle East. Through it all, what unsettled me in those places was the fragility of trust between armed patrols and the civilians around them — the uneasy sense that one spark could undo any tenuous stability. I never expected to feel that same fear, not for myself, but for our society, while riding the D.C. Metro.”

Command Army Sgt. Maj. Eric Chastain (Ret.) on the deployment of federalized Nat. Guardsmen in DC

“[W]hen the President does it, that means that it is not illegal, by definition.” 

 President Richard Nixon David Frost interview

“We’re dealing with a radical left group of lunatics, and they don’t play fair and they never did….

My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.” 

Trump before and after the Kirk assassination.

"Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It's a crime… For far too long, we've watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over." 

AG and Trump’s personal attorney, Pamela Bondi, in a 9/16 morning post on X.

“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…” Winston Churchil, November 11, 1947

Donald Trump takes great pride in his current focus on reducing “crime” in blue cities (some in red states where the governors support him), but it really depends on how you define “criminals.” If you describe those who invaded the Capitol on January 6th as “patriots” and pardon approximately one thousand convicted felons in that group – whose violence injured and killed Capitol police officers as members of Congress huddled in fear in their respective chambers, as the Secret Service whisked away Vice President Mike Pence who face a hanging mob – you get to play with words. Brazil’s “Trump of the Tropics,” ex-President Jair Bonsonaro, denied his lost election and likewise provoked violent attacks on government buildings, was tried and convicted for his “insurrection” and sentenced to 27 years and 3 months. Our response: we reelected the perp!

As much as I decry every act of political violence – from the failed effort to assassinate Trump to the successful assassination of Charlie Kirk – trying to pin all that on Democrats as leftist radicals is astonishingly misplaced. I’ve always maintained that folks, who rely on anecdotal evidence (vs accurate statistics) or who must wildly fabricate those statistics, are most likely perpetrators that merit extreme scrutiny. You can always find horrible anecdotes to support almost any position, and no one is saying, “we back criminals” (like murders, kidnappers, robbers and thieves, carjackers, thugs breaking into homes, etc.), but labeling your political opponents as “criminals” based on Trump’s wording and anecdotal evidence is sheer hypocrisy when you look at the “justified” violence and provocations perpetrated by the Trump administration on US citizens.

Fighting words, even if inaccurate, rile up those who believe them, amping up even more violence. And Trump knows that, even as he claims to be against political violence, while in the next sentence, blames it all on radical leftists (embracing all Democrats) with a promise to root them all out bring them to justice. What do we gain and what do we lose with such words and efforts? Indeed, individual liberty (“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”) and the need to prevent crime, especially where politicians simply define their political opponents as criminals, are indeed uncomfortable trade-offs. But we have made that balance work for centuries.

Our Founding Fathers believed that those elected to office would “men” of good character, and they assumed that such elected officials would thus protect the tenets of the US Constitution. How wrong they were, but we still keep trying to make the system work. And right now, the political right is hell-bent on controlling what we say, what we can read, what we think, what our governing religious beliefs should be, what medical facts should be (but aren’t), what media we are allowed to watch and even what history books and those institutions we have to remember the past are allowed to say, however accurate. Is that the “freedom” envisaged by our Founding Fathers? That was what King George III wanted, and what revolutionary Americans were willing to do to end.

When the President says local police find kinship with those military occupiers, he fails to mention that he defunded federal support for local cops and, in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, shoved troops, untrained in police work, to invade cities that he did not carry in the last election. What an insult to the local cops. Our untrained National Guardsmen/cops can do a better job than you have. Is the FBI still that bastion of the best investigative police agency in the country? When inexperienced ideologue and Trump “yes man” Kash Patel pulled 20% of FBI field agents focused on complex criminal activities and pushed them into most inappropriate immigration enforcement… firing seasoned agents because they did their jobs when ordered in connection with Trump investigation before he was reelected, did that reaffirm FBI excellence? Where loyalty to Trump supersedes protecting the Constitution?

Look at the photographs of the “heroes “ pictured above. Some are most honorable, pressed into service in a role for which they were never intended to fulfil and for which they have not been trained. Others, unlike the vast majority of deported undocumented workers, are violent criminals anointed as “patriots” and “heroes” and thus excluded from Trump’s definition of “violent criminals.” Provocateurs are elevated to positions of power. Trump is heavily focused on recruiting his own private police force, lowering standards and increasing bonuses and pay levels, to entice the recruitment of a further 10,000 ICE agents. Is this the America we really want?

I’m Peter Dekom, and as long as we allow Trump to define who is a hero and who is a criminal, then perhaps he will be allowed to destroy our democracy, our system of checks and balances, with a simple and oft-repeated phrase, “only I can fix it.”