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The Long Race War for the Soul of America

Barry Dredze
6 min readJun 28, 2021

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Frame of video as Trump fans assault a Biden–Harris campaign bus on a Texas interstate on Oct. 30, 2020. (Eric Cervini from Twitter)

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” reads the Declaration of Independence near the beginning of the document we celebrate every Fourth of July. Americans have historically demonstrated a necessity to issue bold proclamations of the plainly obvious.

On the approach to this coming Independence Day holiday in 2021, lawsuits have been filed in federal court invoking the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 over a documented assault by Trump fans against a Biden-Harris campaign tour bus on a Texas highway, days before Election Day, in October of 2020. The plaintiffs charge that a caravan of Trump supporters surrounded the campaign bus, tried to run it off the road and that police “turned a blind eye to the attack.”

Meanwhile, MSNBC news host Chris Hayes noted a spark that caught some air within the Republican culture war mongering in the panic over critical race theory, rising in the polls like a flair in the evening sky. “They think the key to getting back control of Congress is the backlash to critical race theory,” Hayes reported on June 25.

“If you are a political adviser to Donald Trump, or Republicans,” Hayes said, “and you survey the American populace at this moment in the 21st century, and you look out at all the issues, all the things going on, and you decide that indeed white backlash and…

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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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