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Mob Rule -- Mob Fools |
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By John Freivalds
Growing up in Washington, DC I always thought that the United States was that wonderful village Camelot high on a hill where the words “don’t ask what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” always rang true.
Yet here we are living through the aftermath of a mob attack that ransacked the US Capitol reminding us that there is a dark underbelly in our society. Former President Trump refers to it as “his” base while others have called it the “deplorables.” Hillary Clinton said this of the 25% of Trump’s base, “They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic." Her statement was one reason she lost the 2016 election.
For you mob rule challenged, mob rule is the government by a mob of people and the intimidation of legitimate authorities. It is derived from the Latin term mobilus vulgus, meaning fickle crowd, from which the term mob come from.
Alas, those recent events in the US once again remind us that we cannot escape mob history and our human nature. One of the first examples in the US were the Salem Witch trials. Here the unified belief of townspeople overpowered the logic of the law as an example of mob rule. It is as American as apple pie, sorry to say.
Then in 1837 Abraham Lincoln wrote this about lynching and “the growing disregard for law which pervades the country and the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgement of courts and the worse than savage mobs for the executive ministers of justice.” 2021 or 1837? The country has not changed much.
We constantly witness mobs at large sporting events as an example of mob herd mentality. Where else do beer-bellied men deem it ok to stand screaming, half naked with their faces and torsos covered in paint. Think about that horned half naked shaman during the Capitol riots, he would have fit in perfectly at an NFL game. Most sports fans would not do these things on their own yet once they are in a crowd, they take on collective mob mood and action. Think about those Black Friday mobs attacking retail stores trying to be first for the advertised bargains.
There are sectors of society that will never advance, and most are uneducated. Will Clifton Forge be any different in twenty years than it is now? These are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them and they are desperate for change and the change will come only at the hands of white people. Trump seems to hold out hope that their lives will be different. Even West Virginia and Virginia coal miners in Pocahontas and Grundy there are miners who believe that Trump can reverse the trends of natural gas, wind and solar power usage and cheaper coal from Wyoming from taking away their jobs. The Washington Post reports that most of the people arrested from the Capitol riots had a history of financial trouble.
And they long for a day when America would return to a place where Blacks, immigrants, Muslims, East Indians, Mexicans would know their place and only speak “American.“ Did you notice anyone other than whites who stormed the capitol building. The Hechinger Report noted that “mob violence is only legitimate when exercised by white people.”
And House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said of the January 6th mob violence that it is un-American and is dead wrong. American history is full of mob violence. Historian Jonathan Rotham notes that failure to recognize the mob history of the United States, “leaves us unprepared and in a position to be surprised over and over again when we do not recognize that the attempted insurrection of January 6th are very much part and parcel or our country’s past and present.”