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The Angry Mob Goes America All Over Everybody's Ass

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | October 8, 2018 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | October 8, 2018 |


charliegoesamerica.jpg

In the wake of the protests and the outrage expressed at the GOP over the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation, Trump and the Republicans are taking a new approach against the Democrats ahead of the midterms, referring to the left as an “angry mob.” “In their quest for power, the radical Democrats have turned into an angry mob,” Trump said at a rally in Kansas on Saturday. Mitch McConnell referred to the tactics of the “virtual mob”; Chuck Grassley suggested the left was being controlled by “mob rule”; Orrin Hatch suggested that protesters were a “paid mob”; Marco Rubio called us an “angry mob”; the WSJ called out the “Twitter mob on the political left”; Laura Ingraham implored, on Twitter, that her followers “STAND WITH COLLINS AGAINST THE MOB,” and Lindsay Graham accused Democrats of “mob rule.” Susan Collins even cited the mob tactics of the left in her decision to vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh.

I don’t know what to say to that. In fact, I’ve spent the better part of the morning trying to come up with some kind of rallying piece in the wake of Kavanaugh’s confirmation, but like a lot of folks out there, I’m feeling dispirited. And angry. And worried. And concerned that November 2018 will become another November 2016. That rather than turning that disillusionment and anger into action, some may turn it into apathy. I mean, look: We gave it all we could out there — we called our Senators, we raised millions of dollars, we protested. We went to Senate offices. We protested at the Capitol. People showed up in airports. They protested in front of Senator’s homes. We did everything we thought we were supposed to do. It just wasn’t possible to marshal any more resistance to the Kavanaugh nomination, and not only did we lose, but the Republicans reframed those efforts as “mob rule.”

And when we lost, they spiked the football. They laughed their asses off. That SNL cold open wasn’t too far from the truth.

We got our asses handed to us by a bunch of old white dudes and Susan Collins. We could not convince them. They chose not to believe Christine Blasey Ford. They chose to believe Brett Kavanaugh, because he is one of their own. The truth is, the people in power will always choose to side with one of their own, and it would not have mattered how many millions of dollars or protests or phone calls we threw at them. Powerful old white dudes stick together, and had Kavanaugh lost, they’d have seen the loss as a threat to their own power. It would have been a blow to Donald Trump’s “deny, deny, deny” strategy.

The only consolation prize here for the “angry, paid mob” is this: We did the right thing. We stood up for Christine Blasey Ford, and for Deborah Ramirez. We stood up for sexual assault survivors, and for the rights of women to control their own bodies. We stood against rape culture. The angry mob mobbed against entrenched power structures, and we made them uncomfortable. We shook those foundations, and the cracks that were already forming have spread.

We did the right thing, and we can’t stop doing the right thing simply because we got our asses handed to us. Those in power will always side with their own, and so it is our duty to change the people in power. To vote into office people who support the right thing, who are more interested in protecting survivors than abusers.

So, you know what: Round up the angry mob. Collect your checks from George Soros on your way to the polls, and let’s institute mob rule all over America, because this motherfucking mob is ready to send some old, rich, self-serving, self-protecting white assholes back to their mansions and their think tanks and their consulting gigs and their law firms, so that we can get to the business of Making America a Helluva Lot Better Than It Is Right Now. Let’s take that angry mob and go America all over their asses.



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