Among the acts of violation and terror committed by Traitor Trump and his lunatic brownshirts, the attack of the Trump Train on the Biden campaign bus convoy on October 30 2020, abetted and enabled by co-conspirators within the security services whose sworn duty it was to protect all of our citizens and defend our free elections, remains a symbolic nadir of the depravity and brutality of the Trump regime.
What is the difference between free speech and assault? Like hate speech, it is a form of violence. As written by AP of the trial; “The defense lost a bid last month to have the case ruled in their favor without a trial. The judge wrote that “assaulting, intimidating, or imminently threatening others with force is not protected expression.”
As we watch the trials of Trump and his failed subversions of America, let us remember always the crimes for which he is yet to face a Reckoning; political assassinations such as this attempt to eliminate a rival and the lynchings and beheadings of members of Congress of both parties he authorized in the January 6 Insurrection.
Remember, and bring a Reckoning.
As written by Diane McWhorter in The Guardian, in an article entitled How a ‘Trump train’ attack on a Biden bus foreshadowed January 6 – and echoed bloody history; “barely responded. History shows the fruits of such inaction;
The bane of raw intelligence – and history – is that you can always look back and find the signs, but you can’t necessarily look ahead and see where they’re pointing. Many questions remain about the intelligence failures that enabled an insurrectionist mob to lay siege virtually unimpeded to the US Capitol. But here’s one sign that’s been flashing in my head since 6 January 2021.
Four days before the 2020 election, a “Trump Train” of motorists swarmed a Biden-Harris campaign bus on Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin. Kamala Harris would have been on the bus but for a last-minute schedule change, according to Wendy Davis, then a Texas congressional candidate and the campaign surrogate onboard. The videotaped vehicular harassment – tailgating, sudden braking, passing the bus within inches – got nationwide coverage, courtesy of participants’ back-slapping on social media and Donald Trump’s high-five in return. Though no one was hurt, it took little imagination to see how a 20-ton container of flammable fuel moving in heavy traffic could have turned into a highway bomb. But to the Trump Train, one of its founders, Steve Ceh, told me, the razzing of the Democrats was simply “fun” – “like a rival football game”.
No local arrests were reported, but the FBI in San Antonio confirmed it was investigating. Presumably (albeit against Trump’s tweeted wishes) it was still investigating two months later when the explosion came: a massive incarnation of the Trump Train rioting against President-elect Biden in Washington. It was then that I started getting flashbacks to another historic act of domestic terrorism, one also presaged by a difficult bus ride and lately back in the news.
Sixty years ago, on 15 September 1963, when Ku Klux Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and killed four Black girls attending Sunday school, the shock to the country exceeded the moral language to express it. Both President John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr cast political blame on Alabama’s “Segregation forever!” governor, George Wallace. At the time he seemed a pariah, the only “vicious racist” King singled out in his I Have a Dream speech 18 days earlier, at the March on Washington. In fact, Wallace was the spearhead of a proto-Maga minority that more than half a century later captured the White House for Trump. And now political violence is so “normal” that we have a former southern governor, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas (whose daughter, Trump’s former spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is the current governor), effectively endorsing civil war should the prosecution of Trump over a violent coup attempt derail his return to power.
More often than not, though, the slope is slipperier than the cliff of depraved extremism over which Trump led a “conservative” political party. Instead, it is an inertial slide driven by institutional blind spots and choices that were professionally expedient in the moment. Thus it was, more than 60 years ago in Alabama, that the FBI turned a half-closed eye to harassers of a bus and wound up reaping shockwaves that killed children.
On Mother’s Day 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying a protest group of integrated Freedom Riders was chased down the highway by a caravan of white Alabamians, who managed to sideline the vehicle outside Anniston and firebomb it. Meanwhile, a second freedom bus headed toward a Ku Klux Klan ambush in Birmingham. FBI agents there had been told by their Klan informant – the eventually notorious double agent Gary Thomas Rowe Jr – that his klavern was coordinating the attack with local police and city hall. But the bureau did nothing to stop the bloody assault. Nor were any arrests made of Rowe’s Klan brothers, certainly not after a widely published news photo showed the informant himself joining in the bludgeoning.
When Rowe’s consorts bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church two years later, the FBI was so familiar with them that four or five prime suspects were identified within days. (Rowe was apparently not an active participant.) The first prosecution – of the suspected ringleader, by the Alabama attorney general – did not take place for 14 years and met with stonewalling if not resistance from the FBI. (A couple of decades later, the bureau provided “cooperation from top to bottom,” says Doug Jones, the federal prosecutor who won convictions against the last two living Klansmen in 2001 and 2002. He went on to become Alabama’s brief Democratic senator before losing in 2020 to Tommy Tuberville, who recently said of white nationalists, “I call them Americans”.)
In contrast to the Freedom Rider attacks, which sent multiple victims to hospital, the buzzing of the Biden team had only one known instance of physical contact, a black pick-up videotaped bumping a campaign car in the bus’s wake. The owner of the pick-up was Eliazar “Cisco” Cisneros, a middle-aged, long-gun-toting San Antonian who had made news six weeks earlier by driving the same Trump-bedecked truck through a peaceful defund-the-police protest. He was not arrested then, but the FBI did talk to him about the Trump Train, according to his lawyer, the former Republican congressman Francisco Canseco. However, Canseco says it was his client who initiated the call, to complain that “his rights were being violated”, meaning the right of Americans “to demonstrate their support for a candidate”. Cisneros claimed the Biden car was the aggressor, despite having boasted on Facebook, “That was me slamming that fucker … Hell yea.” (The available videotape is not definitive, but the analysis by snopes.com contradicts Cisneros’s version.)
Perhaps the FBI had bigger Maga fish to fry than the Trump Train, even though the San Antonio paper reported weeks before the election that the group’s raucous Thursday-night parades 30 miles up I-35 in New Braunfels had featured a man dragging a Black Lives Matter flag behind his pick-up. (A social-media post of his surfaced from a few years earlier: “I’m not apart of the kkk … just hate black people.”) Some African American residents were reminded of the 1998 white supremacist dragging murder of a black man, James Byrd Jr, 300 miles east in Jasper. But by the time the New Braunfels Trump Train caught up with the Biden bus on 30 October, the bar for actionable political intimidation had been set pretty high. Earlier that month in Michigan, the FBI along with state authorities arrested 14 Maga men in connection with an alleged plot to kidnap the governor, Gretchen Whitmer.
Way back in segregated 1961, within hours of the freedom bus burning, the Kennedy justice department found a statute allowing for a politically neutered prosecution: 18 U.S. Code § 33, covering the destruction of motor vehicles engaged in interstate commerce. A paragraph conceivably pertinent to what happened in Texas – on a federal highway – penalizes one who “willfully disables or incapacitates any driver … or in any way lessens the ability of such person to perform his duties as such”. At any rate, when even symbolic federal charges failed to materialize, the Biden bus driver, Wendy Davis and two others filed a civil suit against (ultimately) eight Trump Train members, including Cisneros and Ceh, under the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. They sued the San Marcos police department separately, as the only force along the route that the complaint says ignored SOS calls – though its alleged abdication was more like “we can’t help you” than the Birmingham police’s promise to give the Klan 15 minutes to work over the Freedom Riders.
Davis et al filed their suits six months after January 6. While hastening to say that “we can’t begin to compare what happened on the bus to that violence”, Davis calls it “part and parcel of the same trend”. It was intimidating enough to cause the campaign to cancel the rest of the tour. A trial date for the Trump Train case has been set for next year. Two defendants settled separately in April 2023 and have been removed from the suit.
Among the plaintiffs’ exhibits included in a court filing on Friday is the transcript of a text chain from late December 2020 about “the March in dc”, in which a message purportedly coming from Cisneros’s phone discusses delivery dates for bear mace and a collapsible baton. Two other defendants, Ceh and his wife, Randi – named in the complaint as leaders of the New Braunfels Trump Train – were among the faithful in Washington on January 6. Steve Ceh told me they did not enter the Capitol but watched “antifa thugs in black breaking windows” and “people in Trump hats telling them to stop”. When I asked if he thought the hundreds of people arrested for their role in the riot were antifa (including a former FBI agent from New Braunfels), he said: “I’m not saying that some people weren’t pretty emotional.”
Ceh says the FBI contacted him after he was fired from his job (as a supervisor for a large Texas construction firm) in the aftermath of January 6. “There are a lot of liberals, a lot of Satanists, in this town,” he told me, explaining that they “doxxed” him. Ceh says he invited the FBI man who questioned him (“a very good guy”) to attend the “relevant church” he recently founded. He says the bureau did not seek him out after the Trump Train episode, not even for one of its unofficial “knock and talks”, and in their later interview about the Capitol riot, he says, the Biden bus “never came up”.
The FBI office in San Antonio declined to make Ceh’s interviewer available for comment and, in response to my request for a Biden bus update, said the bureau did not either confirm or deny the existence of an investigation, apparently even one it previously confirmed. That’s not the worst policy in the world, as then FBI director James Comey painfully demonstrated in 2016 when he violated justice department guidelines with public statements in the Hillary Clinton emails case, arguably giving us President Donald Trump and thereby helping normalize terrorism the bureau is mandated to prevent.
John Paredes, one of the many civil rights lawyers representing the bus plaintiffs, says he does “not read anything into [federal officials’] determination not to bring a prosecution”. The US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas emailed its refusal to comment on “the existence or non-existence of investigations”. Still, I have a sneaking feeling that the FBI’s reaction to the vehicular threat on I-35 would have been a little different if, say, those road warriors had been Muslims rather than white Christians.
Sixty years ago, the Birmingham church bombing helped unify the country around a consensus that state-sponsored racism had to end and, along with the assassination of President Kennedy two months later in Texas, eased the posthumous passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished legal segregation. Since the domestic terrorism of January 6, though, the partition of hate has only widened. And so, I got a little jolt of hope and change from Ceh’s surprise answer to my pro forma question about whether he was supporting Trump in 2024.
“I’m waiting,” he said. “We have transitioned.”
I wish I could say the quote ended there, but he went on to talk about how the issue is no longer “about what man’s in there”, because “we’ve got to turn to God”. If I had to interpret those signs, I would take them to mean that things could get worse. Apocalyptic, maybe.”
And what this means for our future, both as a nation and globally, was summarized in an article of 2020 by Lois Beckett as written in The Guardian, entitled Scholars warn of collapse of democracy as Trump v Biden election looms: Dozens of experts on fascism warn of global danger, calling for action from ordinary people: ‘It is not too late’; “y is extremely fragile and potentially temporary, requiring vigilance and protection,” the scholars wrote in the letter released on Sunday. “It is not too late to turn the tide.”
More than 80 signatories, including professors and other scholars at universities in the US, Canada, and Europe, do not agree on whether to label Donald Trump a “fascist”. The fragility of democracy worldwide, they write, will continue to be an issue “irrespective of who wins the American presidency”.
“Whether Donald J Trump is a fascist, a post-fascist populist, an autocrat or just a bumbling opportunist, the danger to democracy did not arrive with his presidency and goes well beyond 3 November 2020,” the scholars write, referring to election day on Tuesday, when Trump will face Joe Biden at the polls.
However, the historians warn, particularly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, “the temptation to take refuge in a figure of arrogant strength is now greater than ever”. They suggest citizens must be ready not only to defend democracy at the ballot box, but “if necessary, also through non-violent protests in the streets”.
“That’s the lesson, to not be complacent in moments like this,” said Jennifer Evans, a professor of German history at Carleton University in Canada and one of the lead organizers of the open letter. “This is a very dangerous time, and we all have a responsibility to prop up democracy.”
Among the many warning signs that democracy is at risk, the historians argue, are the spread of disinformation, inequality, the “politics of internal enemies” and politically motivated violence.
“We need to reveal and denounce any and all connections between those in power and those vigilante and militia forces using political violence to destabilize our democracies,” the letter urges.
Evans said she was particularly disturbed by the evidence of “the infiltration of the far right” in police and military organizations around the world, including in the US, Germany, and Canada.
Signatories to the letter include several authors who have commented on authoritarianism and fascism during Trump’s presidency, including Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor at New York University, and Jason Stanley, the author of How Fascism Works.”
Here follows the letter, How to Keep the Lights On in Democracies: An Open Letter of Concern by Scholars of Authoritarianism: “Regardless of the outcome of the United States’ election, democracy as we know it is already imperiled. However, it is not too late to turn the tide.
Whether Donald J. Trump is a fascist, a post-fascist populist, an autocrat, or just a bumbling opportunist, the danger to democracy did not arrive with his presidency and goes well beyond November 3rd, 2020.
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 twentieth 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.
In contrast to the hollow proclamations of economic and political liberalism’s “inevitable” triumph over authoritarianism in all its iterations, studying the past demonstrates that democracy is extremely fragile and potentially temporary, requiring vigilance and protection. Scholars of race, colonialism, and imperialism have further deepened our perspectives by reminding us of how the myths of national “greatness” were and continue to be written on the backs of largely silenced, marginalized and oftentimes enslaved or unfree, “others.”
We study the conditions that have historically accompanied the rise of authoritarian and fascistic regimes. In nearly every case, we have observed how profound social, political, and economic disruptions, including the ravages of military conflicts, depressions, and the enormous pressures caused by globalization, deeply shook people’s confidence in democracy’s ability to adequately respond to their plights, or even provide basic forms of long-term security.
We have seen all of these patterns in our study of the past, and we recognize the signs of a crisis of democracy in today’s world as well. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed profound inequalities of class and race across the globe. As the last four years have demonstrated, the temptation to take refuge in a figure of arrogant strength is now greater than ever.
To meet the challenge at hand, there are several things we must do.
We must boldly and unapologetically safeguard critical thinking based on evidence. This includes demonstrating the virtues of entertaining a wide array of positions and perspectives, and support, both in word and deed, for investigative journalism, science and the humanities, and freedom of the press. We need swift and tangible commitments from corporate media organizations and governments to tackle the dangers of misinformation and media concentration. We must encourage coalitions organized across differences of race, class, gender, religion and caste, while respecting the perspectives and experiences of others. We need to reveal and denounce any and all connections between those in power and those vigilante and militia forces using political violence to destabilize our democracies. Much like the active democratic movements across the globe from Nigeria to India, Belarus to Hong Kong, we must be prepared to defend pluralism and democracy against the growing dangers of communal violence and authoritarianism at the ballot box but, if necessary, also through non-violent protest in the streets. We must defend 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. And we must re-commit to a global conversation on support for democratic institutions, laws, and practices both within and between our respective countries. This includes directly confronting the unfettered greed that drives global inequality, which has unleashed geopolitical rivalries over access to resources, international migrations, and collapsed state sovereignties all over the world.
We need to turn away from the rule by entrenched elites and return to the rule of law. We must replace the politics of “internal enemies” with a politics of adversaries in a healthy, democratic marketplace of ideas. And above else, we need to work together to find ways to keep the light of democracy shining in our countries and all over the world. Because if we don’t, we will indeed face dark days ahead.”
Signed,
Zoltán Ádám | Associate Professor of Economics, Corvinus University of Budapest (Hungary)
Giulia Albanese | Professor of History, Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy)
Anjali Arondekar | Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Director of the Center for South Asian Studies, University of California-Santa Cruz (United States of America, USA) *
Kai Arzheimer | Professor of Political Science, University of Mainz (Germany) *
Luis Herran Avila | Assistant Professor of History, University of New Mexico (USA)
Jonathan Bach | Professor of Global Studies, The New School for Social Research (USA) *
Luca Baldissara | Associate Professor of History, University of Pisa (Italy)
Shelley Baranowski | Distinguished Professor Emerita of History, University of Akron (USA)
Deborah Barton | Assistant Professor of History, Université de Montréal (Canada)
Michele Battini | Professor of the Intellectual and Political History of Modern Europe, University of Pisa (Italy)
Heike Bauer | Professor of Modern Literature and Cultural History, Birkbeck, University of London (United Kingdom, UK)
Cristina A. Bejan | Adjunct Professor of History, Metropolitan State University of Denver (USA)
Ruth Ben-Ghiat | Professor of History and Italian Studies, New York University (USA)
Waitman Wade Beorn | Senior Lecturer of History, Northumbria University (UK)
Mabel Berezin | Professor of Sociology, Cornell University (USA)
Andrew Stuart Bergerson | Professor of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City (USA)
Anna Berg | Assistant Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
Paul Betts | Professor of Modern European History, University of Oxford (UK)
Frank Biess | Professor of History, University of California-San Diego (USA)
Stephen Bittner | Professor of History, Sonoma State University (USA)
James Björk | Reader in Modern European History, King’s College London (UK)
Monica Black | Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee-Knoxville (USA)
Adam A. Blackler | Assistant Professor of History, University of Wyoming (USA)
Vivian Blaxell | Professor of History and Politics, Marlboro College (USA)
Richard Bodek | Professor of History and Director of European Studies, College of Charleston (USA)
Pascale Rachel Bos | Associate Professor of German Studies, Jewish Studies, Gender Studies, European Studies, University of Texas at Austin (USA)
Marco Bresciani | Research Fellow of Political and Social Sciences, University of Florence (Italy)
Benjamin Brower | Associate Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin (USA)
Christopher R. Browning | Frank Porter Graham Professor Emeritus of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA)
Hubertus Buchstein | Professor of Political Theory, Greifswald University (Germany)
Darcy Buerkle | Associate Professor of History, Smith College (USA)
Renato Camurri | Professor of History, University of Verona (Italy)
Mauro Canali | Professor of Contemporary History, University of Camerino (Italy) *
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James Casteel | Associate Professor of European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Carleton University (Canada)
Laura Cerasi | Associate Professor of History, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy)
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Howard Chiang | Associate Professor of History, University of California-Davis (USA)
Rebecca Clifford | Associate Professor of History, Swansea University (UK)
Joshua Cole | Professor of History, University of Michigan (USA)
Mark B. Cole | College Associate Lecturer, Cleveland State University (USA)
Tim Cole | Professor of History, University of Bristol (UK)
Paul Corner | Professor of European History, Università di Siena (Italy)
Mark Cornwall | Professor of Modern European History, University of Southampton (UK)
Antonio Costa Pinto | Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon (Portugal)
Raymond Craib | Professor of History, Cornell University (USA)
Brian E. Crim | Professor of History, University of Lynchburg (USA)
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Kate Davison | PhD Candidate, University of Melbourne (Australia) *
Carlos De La Torre | Director of the Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida (USA)
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Lindsey Dodd | Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, University of Huddersfield (UK)
Elizabeth Drummond | Associate Professor of History, Loyola Marymount University (USA)
Hilary Earl | Professor of Modern European History, Nippissing University (Canada)
Michael Ebner | Associate Professor of History, Syracuse University (USA) *
Sean Eedy | Lecturer in History, Carleton University (Canada)
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Geoff Eley | Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History and German Studies, University of Michigan (USA)
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Andrew Evans | Associate Professor of History, State University of New York at New Paltz (USA)
Jennifer Evans | Professor of History, Carleton University and Member, College of New Scholars, Royal Society of Canada (Canada) *
Christopher Ewing | Assistant Professor of History, Virginia Commonwealth University (USA)
Daniel Fainstein | Dean and Professor of Jewish Studies, Universidad Hebraica (Mexico)
Federico Finchelstein | Professor of History, The New School for Social Research (USA) *
Tiffany N. Florvil | Associate Professor of History, University of New Mexico (USA)
Filippo Focardi | Professor of Contemporary History, Università di Padova (Italy)
Moritz Föllmer | Associate Professor of Modern History, University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)
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Oz Frankel | Associate Professor of History, The New School for Social Research (USA)
Richard Frankel | Associate Professor of Modern German History, University of Louisiana at Lafayette (USA)
Nancy Fraser | Henry A and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science, The New School for Social Research (USA)
Jane Freeland | Research Associate, German Historical Institute London (UK)
Norbert Frei | Professor of History, University of Jena (Germany)\
Karin Friedrich | Chair in Early Modern European History, University of Aberdeen and Chair, German History Society (UK)
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Mary Fulbrook | Professor of German History, University College London (UK)
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Peter Gordon | Amabel B. James Professor of History, Harvard University (USA)
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Brian J Griffith | Eugen and Jacqueline Weber Post-Doctoral Scholar in European History, University of California-Los Angeles (USA) *
Atina Grossmann | Professor of History, The Cooper Union (USA)
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Erika Hughes | Academic Lead in Performance, University of Portsmouth (UK)
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Caroline Moine | Associate Professor of History, University of Paris-Saclay (France)
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Jason Stanley | Professor of Philosophy, Yale University (USA)
Paul Steege | Associate Professor of History, Villanova University (USA)
Richard Steigmann-Gall | Associate Professor of History, Kent State University (USA)
Michael P. Steinberg | Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of History and Music and Professor of German Studies, Brown University (USA)
Philipp Stelzel | Associate Professor of History and Graduate Director McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts, Duquesne University (USA)
Lauren Stokes | Assistant Professor of History, Northwestern University (USA)
Nathan Stoltzfus | Dorothy and Jonathan Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies, Florida State University (USA)
Marla Stone | Professor of History, Occidental College and President, Society for Italian Historical Studies (USA) *
Frances Tanzer | Rose Professor of Holocaust Studies and Modern Jewish History and Culture, Clark University (USA)
Julia Adeney Thomas | Associate Professor of History, University of Notre Dame (USA)
Annette Timm | Professor of History, University of Calgary (Canada)
Robert Deam Tobin | Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Clark University (USA)
Lisa Todd | Associate Professor of History, University of New Brunswick (Canada)
John Torpey | Professor of Sociology and History, Graduate Center, CUNY (USA)
Enzo Traverso | Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University (USA)
Nadia Urbinati | Kryiakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory, Columbia University (USA)
Louie Dean Valencia-Garcia | Assistant Professor of History, Texas State University (USA)
Eleni Varikas | Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Université de Paris 8 (France)
Yannick Veilleux-Lepage | Assistant Professor of Terrorism and Political Violence, Leiden University (Netherlands)
Angelo Ventrone | Professor of History, University of Macerata (Italy)
Fabian Virchow | Professor of Political Science, University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf (Germany) *
Anika Walke | Associate Professor of History, Washington University in St. Louis (USA)
Janet Ward | Professor of History, University of Oklahoma and President Elect, German Studies Association (USA)
Thomas Weber | Professor of History and International Affairs, University of Aberdeen (UK) *
Robert D. Weide | Assistant Professor of Sociology, California State University-Los Angeles (USA)
Jonathan Wiesen | Professor of Modern European History, University of Alabama (USA)
Christiane Wilke | Associate Professor of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University (Canada)
Andrew Woolford | Professor of Sociology and Criminology, University of Manitoba and Former President, International Association of Genocide Scholars
Benjamin Zachariah | Senior Research Fellow, Research Centre for Europe, University of Trier (Germany)
Eli Zaretsky | Professor of History, The New School for Social Research (USA)
Barbie Zelizer | Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Associate Dean for Research, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
Moshe Zimmerman | Professor Emeritus of History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel)
Karin Zitzewitz | Associate Professor and Interim Chairperson, Department of Art, Art History, and Design, Michigan State University (USA)
References
How a ‘Trump train’ attack on a Biden bus foreshadowed January 6 – and echoed bloody history
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/01/trump-train-attack-biden-bus-january-6?CMP=share_btn_link
Democrats cite Ku Klux Klan Act in suits over ‘Trump Train’ Texas bus incident
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/26/trump-train-texas-bus-lawsuit-kkk-act-democrats
FBI investigating Trump supporters who swarmed Texas campaign bus
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/01/biden-harris-bus-highway-texas-trump-train
Scholars warn of collapse of democracy as Trump v Biden election looms
Dozens of experts on fascism warn of global danger, calling for action from ordinary people: ‘It is not too late’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/01/democracy-fascism-global-trump-biden-election
A ‘Trump Train’ convoy surrounded a Biden-Harris bus. Was it political violence?
https://apnews.com/article/texas-trump-train-trial-ff999a0289a0f5d98d23539c390e274d
How to Keep the Lights On in Democracyhttp://newfascismsyllabus.com/news-and-announcements/an-open-letter-of-concern-by-scholars-of-authoritarianism/
Torch of Liberty 
