 Over the weekend, we have seen Donald Trump supporters increasingly ramp up their efforts to intimidate voters across the country with the most high-profile case being this viral video where Trump supporters in multiple vehicles literally ran a Biden campaign bus out of the state of Texas. I'm about to run out of gas, which I'm sure some of you would love. Shit! Look at that! Now the Biden campaign, because of this, literally had to cancel an event in Texas. Now if this was just some like impromptu protest when they saw the Biden campaign bus, I think that that's fine, right? Nobody cares if you're going to protest politicians. In fact, we should be protesting politicians, but this was a coordinated effort to intimidate the Biden campaign to get them to leave the state of Texas. That is something very different, something much more nefarious than protesting politicians. This is intimidation, suppression of the opposition forcibly. And this isn't a new phenomenon, as this Twitter user points out, saying, I'm in East Texas. Since about September, we've been subjected to these tactics. For instance, every weekend, they have a MAGA parade through town. They drive to the areas that are predominantly black with their flags and guns on full display. It's designed to intimidate us. And he's 100% correct. This is specifically designed to intimidate voters, intimidate people who don't fall in line and support Donald Trump. And it's not something that's unique to Texas. As you can see from this tweet here, there are cars in New York driving around with an anti-fascist on their hood to signify them, I guess, running over anti-fascists. So you know, this is them signaling their support for violence of the opposition. And also in New York, Trump supporters literally blocked and completely shut down Mario Cuomo Bridge. They shut it down completely. These are the same people who tell us that we should run over protesters who block traffic. But now, they're literally shutting down a bridge. And in New Jersey, Trump supporters completely shut down Garden State Parkway. So it's okay for them to shut down highways. They're just being patriotic and showing their love and appreciation for the president. But when Black Lives Matter protesters do that, they celebrate when cars drive through them. This is what we're dealing with now. Now in this next video that I'm going to show you, we don't have the context as to why this altercation happened, but basically a group of Trump supporters circled a 20-year-old girl and what happened was horrifying. They're blocking me in. That's fine. They're blocking me in. The patriots followed me. This is their true colors. I want everyone to know they came. This is a hate crime. They're coming up to my car right now. I'm not scared. If I was scared, I would have left. I need everyone to see this. That's why I'm chilling right here. For what? You call me? What? Yeah, you are me. I got all of you. This is a kid. For you, myself. Oh, my God. What the hell? Ew. You came strapped up like that for a 20-year-old female? You are a big man. For a female, bro. For a female. Oh, an old man. Get up to us. Come get it. Come get it? Are you saying come get it? For a female. Hey! What? She's a female? Right here. No, so you guys can jump me, so you can jump me? It's a toast for me. What the fuck, then? They fucked that bitch up. They fucked her. What the fuck? On my phone. They fucked your fucking phone right on your fucking hand, bitch. They boxed her in. They yelled at her. They called her racial slurs. They were trying to get her to come out of the car. They were confronting her. I mean, presumably they were trying to fight her. Now, I don't know, again, what happened, what led to this. Maybe she yelled something at them. You know, one of them was saying, I want to talk to you about what Black Lives Matter means. So maybe she yelled Black Lives Matter when she saw the trucks. Maybe she flipped them off. I don't know. But whatever she could have done, would that really warrant them trying to box her in to a parking lot so where she can't leave? And they confront her and they can seem as if they're going to physically harm her. Is that really warranted? Is there anything that she could have said to warrant this type of behavior? Now, the reason why Trump supporters are doing this is because Donald Trump is encouraging them to do this. Whenever they do something like this, he cheers it on. So in response to the Trump convoy driving a Biden campaign bus out of Texas, he tweeted out that video and he said, I love Texas. And he also then joked about it facetiously at a campaign event. It is something. Do you see the way our people, they, you know, they were protecting his bus yesterday because they're nice. So his bus, they had hundreds of cars, Trump, Trump, Trump and the American flag. That's it. You see Trump and American flag. Do you ever notice when you see the other side? I don't even see much of the other side. They were just protecting his bus. I mean, if that were anti-fascist protesters driving out someone, you know, with a Trump flag out of an area, he would call them Antifa terrorists. But because it's his supporters and they're intimidating other voters and they're also trying to forcibly suppress the opposition at the behest of Donald Trump, well, he loves it. And it's not just Donald Trump who's cheering on this type of behavior. It is other Republicans who openly celebrate this as well. Listen, I saw yesterday a video of these people in Texas. Did you see it? All the cars on the road with the. We love what they did. But here's the thing. They don't know we do that in Florida every day. We love it. We love what they did and they do it in Florida every day again. If the left were doing this, we know exactly how Republican Party politicians would react. We see the way that they act whenever they think that protesters aren't being civil enough. But when they have their people literally driving the opposition party out of a state intimidating the campaign bus of the Biden campaign, shutting down highways, it's fine. There's a double standard here. When they do it, it's not violent. When we do it on the left, when we protest, well, by definition, we're bad because our protest is illegitimate and anything that they do to promote Donald Trump is good. So you have to understand that this isn't just like some unique phenomenon that will only occur because of Donald Trump and the 2020 election. Even if Donald Trump is defeated, fascism isn't just going to disappear. It's going to be here for a while because the Republican Party isn't just a far right party or a proto-fascist party. They have become officially a fascist party because one of the hallmarks of fascism is forcibly suppressing your opponents. And they are now doing that and sitting members of the Republican Party are cheering them on when they foster this environment where their opposition can't even hold a campaign event without intimidation, without armed militia members showing up to scare them out of the state. I mean, this is fascism. And we've seen this happen a lot more in more rural areas of the country when there would be these more small-scale Black Lives Matter protests during the height of the George Floyd protests. And you would see members of far-right pro-Trump militias show up, stand there with guns, to intimidate the peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters. And police officers would let them do it and, you know, they'd oftentimes coordinate with cops in many instances, including in Oregon, in rural areas of Oregon. It's happening everywhere. This is fascism. And historians are warning that if we don't stop this fascism right now, then there's going to be a point where it's too late. We will reach a tipping point, a point of no return, where we're no longer a democracy. We're just a flat-out authoritarian regime. And as Brett Wilkins of Common Dreams explains, over 80 historians of fascism and authoritarianism from around the world signed an Open Letter Sunday warning that American democracy is an existential peril and urging people to take action now before it's too late to save it. Regardless of the outcome of the United States election, democracy as we know it is already imperiled, the letter opens. Whether Donald J. Trump is a fascist, a post-fascist, a populist, an autocrat, or just a bumbling opportunist, the danger to democracy did not arrive with his presidency and goes well beyond November 3, 2020. It continues. The letter notes that while democracy appeared to be flourishing everywhere in the years following the end of the Cold War, today it seems to be withering or in full-scale collapse globally. As scholars of 20th century authoritarian populism, fascism, and political extremism, we believe that unless we take immediate action, democracy as we know it will continue in its frightening regression, irrespective of who wins the American presidency in early November, the author is right. I've been an election observer in broken authoritarian countries and let me tell you, Trump's behavior would be swiftly and unequivocally condemned by all international election monitors if it was happening elsewhere. Brian Klass, a political scientist at the University College London tweeted last month, he is behaving like the despots past presidents condemned. Ann Berg, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, whose grandparents were Nazis in Germany, warned earlier this month that the US is in a rapid descent towards fascism. People need to be aware of the risks we are facing right now, Berg told the Philadelphia Inquirer. So, this goes deeper than Donald Trump. This is deeper than Donald Trump. Look at the GOP's efforts to undermine this election. Look at the way that the Republicans in Texas tried to invalidate more than 100,000 ballots in Harris County. All around the country, we are seeing the GOP suppress the votes, try to make sure that less and less people vote, and forcibly suppressing their opposition is one of the hallmarks of fascism. And we are seeing this in the open now to where, you know, when one of their support groups intimidates voters, intimidates their opposition, they're celebrating it. They're cheering it on. So what these historians are saying is this could be the beginning of the end. We could devolve into an authoritarian regime if we don't stop it. So what do we do? They say that there's still time left. There's some hope, right? So what do we do to stop fascism? Well, they say we can stop it by boldly and unapologetically safeguarding critical thinking based on evidence, including by supporting investigative journalism, science and the humanities and freedom of the press, securing commitments from corporate media, organizations and governments to tackle the dangers of misinformation and media concentration. Good luck with that. Building coalitions organized across differences of race, class, gender, religion and caste, and respecting the perspectives and experiences of others, revealing and denouncing any and all connections between those in power and those vigilante and militia forces using political violence to destabilize our democracies, being prepared to defend pluralism and democracy against the growing dangers of communal violence and authoritarianism at the ballot box, but if necessary also through nonviolent protest in the streets, defending the integrity of the electoral process and ensure the widest possible voter turnouts, not just in this election, but in every election, large and small in all of our hometowns, recommitting to a global conversation on support for democratic institutions, laws and practices both within and between our respective communities. Now, I don't mean to be too cynical, but when I hear this, I think, yeah, this isn't going to stop fascism. We've been protesting. That's not going to stop fascism. We've been calling out the relationship between militias and our elected officials, white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys and their connection to police departments, and nothing's happening. Because we've devolved so far into fascism, they're just suppressing these protest movements. I mean, we saw how Bill Barr, Trump's attorney general, literally gasped peaceful protesters just to clear the path so Trump can have a photo op. So it's almost like we're past the point of no return, but what do I know? Because these are the experts. So they clearly know more about it than me. But one thing that I do find persuasive is if there is this coalition, you know, this anti-racist union, anti-fascist union across the country that forcefully denounces this. If we can somehow defeat Donald Trump and really delegitimize fascism and fascist politics, maybe that can do it. I don't know though, because it seems as if with how far we've crossed into fascist territory, it's really difficult to put the cat back in the bag. Like once you've opened Pandora's box, how do you close it? That's the question. So when I see all of this with Trump supporters, like do you think that fascism and the threat of fascism is just going to go away if Donald Trump goes away? The end of the Trump era is not going to mark the end of fascism. It will continue and somebody else will pick up the torch once Donald Trump is gone. So this should worry everyone. We should be educating people who we know in our personal lives if they support Donald Trump. Let them know that the GOP has become increasingly fascistic. And if we don't stop, then we're not going to have a democracy left. Like we talk about how democracy is already like dying and declining in the United States. If you even want to argue that we were a thriving democracy from the get go, but whatever hope we had, what progress we've made towards democracy in this country is being undone before our very eyes. And this is something that we have to take seriously. Anyone who has studied political science, comparative politics, the historians, they know that what we're seeing is the breakdown of democracy, the beginning of the breakdown of democracy. But there can only be so much that happens. So much erosion of our democratic institutions before it's too late and you can't undo the damage that's been caused. So we have to do what we can to stop fascism before it's too late.