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In order to form a more perfect Union

Barry Dredze
4 min readNov 7, 2023

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Political discourse at the local level. (photo by the author)

There are some very important elections coming next year to the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Labor Day weekend in Florida this year saw an alarming amount of loud and proud fascists on public display.

About 15 members of neo-Nazi groups Order of the Black Sun, Aryan Freedom Network and 14 First demonstrated outside the entrance to the Disney Springs shopping center and 50-some bigots from the Goyim Defense League and Blood Tribe marched to Cranes Roost Park, a waterfront area in suburban Altamonte Springs near Orlando. Meanwhile, that holiday Monday, residents of Wellington in southeastern Florida found over 100 antisemitic flyers in zip-lock bags in their driveways with some kind of pellet-like ballast to weigh them down.

The story rang a bell from back around the beginning of the year. That group calling itself the Goyim Defense League dropped leaflets in plastic bags, weighted with some manner of pellets, in a Chicago area suburban neighborhood in DuPage County, Illinois, not far from the government campus where the County Board met to discuss a statement by Sheriff James Mendrick pledging to ignore a freshly signed statewide gun regulation act banning semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines, among other provisions. Meanwhile, a Second Amendment advocacy organization and Facebook group called Illinois Gun Owners Together, with some reported connections to self-proclaimed militias and fascist gangs, like Proud Boys and Three Percenters, had urged followers to pack the County Board meeting.

Mendrick won the office in 2018 with the endorsement of his Republican predecessor and on a promise to oppose immigration policy, while drawing on fears of undocumented workers and other “illegals” streaming into DuPage County from Illinois’ largest sanctuary city of Chicago. But little more than a year into his first term, the world was hit hard by the covid-19 pandemic. Like most states run by responsible adults, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker responded by issuing executive orders, including mask mandates and the closing of highly trafficked public places vulnerable to the spread of the virus, such as schools, as well as many private businesses, such as bars and restaurants.

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Barry Dredze
Barry Dredze

Written by Barry Dredze

Just another mortal, tweaking my cognitive map on the fly.

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