I have discovered a route that will take me from New York State to Kansas City without driving a single mile on either I-70 or I-80. I make this trip twice a year now, most recently in the first week of October.
This trip was particularly invigorating, as my side trip to the William McKinley boyhood home in Niles, Ohio, allowed me to avoid the interstate loop around Cleveland. Enhancing the splendid natural scenery of eastern Ohio, at least in my eyes, was the astonishing array of Trump signs posted in front of homes both regal and humble.
These signs outnumbered the Harris signs at least 10 to 1.
No stretch of highway was as Trump-friendly as Ohio’s US-422, but everywhere en route across rural America, including Missouri Highway 36, Trump signs proliferated.
Not until I entered the Kansas City metro on I-35 did I notice the shift in posted allegiances. In midtown Kansas City, the shift was profound. It’s not that Harris signs were everywhere – they’re not – it is just that Trump signs were nowhere.
In my midtown neighborhood, I mean “nowhere” literally.
Since my return I have seen zero Trump signs. Even my activist Republican friends won’t post them. They don’t think it worth the risk. The well-publicized attack on Mission Hills resident Dwight Sutherland in October 2020 sobered them up.
A former national committeeman for the Kansas Republican Party, Sutherland took a chance and posted a Trump sign in his front yard. He understood Mission Hills was not the Republican enclave it was when the GOP stood for little beside lower taxes, but he did not expect violence.
One night a vandal stole the sign. Sutherland replaced it. A vandal stole that sign. Sutherland replaced that too. Finally, Sutherland decided to wait up and confront the thief. That decision led to Sutherland being hospitalized after being slammed by the thief’s car door in what he believes was a deliberate attack.
The Prairie Village police proved useless, as did Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe.
Although Trump carried both Kansas and Missouri by 15 points, public figures in the metro seemed paralyzed by the fear of seeming to support, even indirectly, the then-president of the United States. That paralysis emboldens local yahoos whose TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) overwhelms their common sense and common decency.
TDS also empowers the Karens of Mission Hills and elsewhere to ignore the overt voter intimidation in their own neighborhoods, even to quietly endorse it.
Days after the Sutherland attack, American Conservative Union president Matt Schlapp posted on Twitter a copy of a letter being left on homes in the Kansas City area. “Dear Neighbor,” it began, “You have been identified by our group as a Trump supporter. Your address has been added into our database as a target for when we attack should Trump not concede the election.”
This was no idle threat. In February 2021, Time magazine published an extraordinary article by Democratic insider Mary Ball that boasted in some detail how the Left used the George Floyd riots to intimidate institutional America into submission.
The cabal of organizers who led what Ball called “the racial-justice uprising” hoped to “harness its momentum for the election.” Rioting, Ball all but boasted, was the leverage leftists used to keep the business interests in line.
“The summer uprising,” Ball wrote, “had shown that people power could have a massive impact.”
Harnessing the numerical power of passive young whites and the active menace of young blacks and their Antifa allies, protest organizers brought America to its knees, in many places, literally. High on their success, “activists,” claimed Ball, “began preparing to reprise the demonstrations if Trump tried to steal the election.”
By “steal” Ball meant “win.” Potential rioters had been conditioned to believe in 2020, and today as well, that only election fraud could assure Trump victory. Well before the election, a coalition called “Protect the Results” had posted a map with some 400 sites where protestors would assemble to protest the election results and, if history was a guide, not necessarily peacefully.
Expect a reprise in 2024.
“You have been given ‘Fair Warning,’” concluded the 2020 Kansas City letter. “Always remember that it was ‘you’ who started this Civil War. Be prepared to face the severe consequences of your pre-emptive actions against democracy.”
Jack Cashill’s new book, “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6,” is now available in all formats.
