Wendy Davis and others have sued Trumpists for their dangerous conduct last October when they disrupted Biden campaign rallies and harassed a campaign bus as it attempted to travel on public roads.  One suit is against 7 people who drove their flag festooned trucks dangerously close to the bus and even attempted to run it off the road.  The suit was filed in federal court and claims the Trumpists violated the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act that made it a federal offense to obstruct, intimidate, or harass to stop political activities.  The defendants were identified through their own social media posts including live video.  Two of the defendants were also identified at the US Capitol during the January 6 insurrection.  Here’s a good recap of the attack on the campaign bus:

A second suit was filed against the San Marcos Department of Public Safety and the San Marcos Marshal’s Department for failing to respond to desperate 911 calls begging for assistance.  You’ll recall during the time that a Trump Train of trucks chased and harassed the Biden campaign bus the entire time they were touring South Texas and police were nowhere to be found.

This kind of behavior by political conservatives has been going on for years; I remember Nick Lampson being harassed years ago by thugs at his announcement event when he ran for Tom DeLay’s old seat.   That was nothing compared to today where intolerance and hate are raised to an art form after 5 years of Trump’s influence on his party.  Add that to the continuous stream of bile flowing out of social media, Fox Noise, OAN, and other propaganda sources and the result can be literally explosive.  When the police stand aside during these events the result can be deadly.

The real tragedy here is that we have to depend on the federal courts in many of these cases since local and state courts in Red States can no longer be trusted to enforce laws against political allies.  Hopefully the federal courts will give the plaintiffs a fair hearing.

Republicans are flogging their latest fake outrage about “critical race theory”, turning a long used academic term into a boogeyman using their normal tactic, which is accusing others of doing precisely what they’re doing, which is dividing people by race.  In recent years, they’ve weaponized academic terms to politicize any thought that might vary from their narrow views, like “critical thinking”, last year’s boogeyman.  We’ll talk about critical race theory in a future post, but for now, let’s talk about their latest focus, critical FLAG theory.  During Trump’s 2016 campaign, he sold all kinds of cheesy crap from China with his name plastered all over the items, but there were two big sellers: MAGA hats and Trump flags.  Both really caught on, but the flags were the item that Trumpists LOVED.  They would put them on their trucks and race around in what they termed “Trump trains”, blocking traffic and doing their best to piss off everyone around them, which is usually the goal for most of them because “owning the libs” is a key tenant of Trumpism.  They also do Trump Boat Parades, which famously sank more than a few boats on Lake Travis last summer.  They seemed to believe that the more flags they have on their truck or boat, the more likely he would win the election, so Critical Flag Theory was born which translates as: Trump’s electoral win probability is directly correlated to the sum of the flags flown per vehicle multiplied by the number of said vehicles.  I’m not making this up.

This year, as Trump speaks of being “reinstated” to the Oval Office in August and Mike Flynn talks at a QAnon conference of a military coup to do that, the TRUMP WON flag parades have already started in an effort to increase the probability of it happening.  Trump’s reinstatement has been predicted through the latest devised Critical MyPillow Theory, promulgated by none other than Cheap Chopped Foam in a Bag founder, Mike Lindell.  Lindell announced last week on Steve Bannon’s HateCast that he has evidence that the election was stolen and when he takes it to the Supreme Court they will oust Biden and reinstate Trump.  Never mind that there is no mechanism to actually do that, even if it was remotely true; all the Trumpists have jumped on board:

Clearly based on the photo above, Trumpists are attempting to raise the value of Critical Flag Theory by squaring the total of flags flown.  Yep, that’s the ticket.