This week, the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrectionist riot at the Capitol launched its hearings with emotional and riveting testimony from law officers who were brutalized by the pro-Trump marauders. These four men—who valiantly fought for their lives against Trump’s shock troops while defending members of Congress and American democracy—made clear the profound threat the nation faced that day and put to shame the GOP officials and conservative loudmouths who are trying to whitewash or downplay the assault. Meanwhile, a song that can be interpreted as a call for more 1/6-like violence was riding high on the country charts.

Earlier this month, Aaron Lewis, a rocker-turned-country-music artist, released a single titled “Am I the Only One,” a lugubrious lament for the end of the Trump presidency. With much sorrow in his voice, Lewis, who supported Donald Trump in 2016 and has performed wearing a MAGA cap, intones, “Am I the only one not brainwashed? / Makin' my way through the land of the lost / Who still gives a shit and worries 'bout his kids / As they try to undo all the things he did?”

Undo all the things Trump achieved? Like, say, the preventable deaths of 400,000 or so Americans in the COVID-19 pandemic?

Lewis offers no specifics, but he’s all in on the political culture wars—and fears his side is losing. He bemoans “another statue comin' down in a town near you,” and he equates the removal of Confederate monuments to “watchin' the threads of Old Glory come undone.” It’s the same toxic fusion of misguided patriotism and nostalgic support for traitors that fueled many of the Trumpers who ransacked the Capitol and savagely beat, pummeled, tased, and maced law enforcement officers. (One of the officers who testified, Harry Dunn, recounted how rioters called him the n-word while assailing him.) And Lewis just can’t figure out why the nation gave the boot to a racist, misogynistic, and autocratic demagogue who mismanaged a pandemic, perpetuated the Big Lie, and incited a violent raid on the citadel of America democracy: “Am I the only one here tonight / Shakin' my head and thinkin' somethin' ain't right...Am I the only one?/ Tell me I'm not / Who thinks they're takin' all the good we got?” Of course, there’s the obligatory love-it-or-leave-it xenophobia: “Am I the only one who can't take no more / Screamin', ‘If you don't like it, there's the fuckin' door’ / This ain't the freedom we've been fightin' for.”

Lewis even takes a swing at Bruce Springsteen, who is well known for his progressive politics and fierce opposition to Trump: “Am I the only one who quits singin' along / Every time they play a Springsteen song?” This is quite the snowflake move: Lewis wants to cancel the Boss because he disses Trump.

Okay, Lewis is a cranky alt-right grouser PO’ed that the White House has been de-MAGAfied, and he’s hurling minor chords at the libs. That isn’t too special or too worrisome. But the mournful song gets darker. “Am I the only one willin' to bleed / Or take a bullet for bein' free?” he asks. And he adds, “Am I the only one willin' to fight / For my love of the red and white / And the blue?” Lewis appears to be telling his fans that now’s the time to do combat—when bullets will be flying—for Trumpism. In the post-1/6 stretch—after thousands stormed Capitol Hill for Dear Leader—it’s hard not to view this as bordering on incitement.

In the first week after its release, Lewis’ anguished anthem drew 4 million streams and hit the number-one spot on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. In response to criticism of the tune, Scott Borchetta, the head of Big Machine Label Group, which released the song, felt compelled to issue a statement: “Aaron Lewis and I have political disagreements. But there are also things we agree on. I think that’s the foundation for the idea of our country. It doesn’t work if we’re so divided that we can’t reach across the aisle, have a conversation or an argument, and ultimately, shake hands. If we can’t do that, and this moment is so divisive, we may never get our country back."

That’s a fine sentiment: Let’s all come together and talk. But Lewis is not proposing a tax plan or Social Security reform that we can politely debate. After a violent assault on Congress mounted by white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists, QAnoners, and others who sought to overturn a democratic election, Lewis is singing about bleeding, bullets, and going into battle for Trump. This is not an invitation for a civil conversation about a policy or political dispute and shaking hands. It’s a love song for the 1/6 seditionists. He’s encouraging more brutality and viciousness.

At the end of the track, Lewis plaintively notes, “I'm not the only one willin' to fight...I'm not the only one / I can't be the only one.” This is no plea for a constructive exchange of ideas. He’s inflaming and fomenting—and arguably justifying (and calling for more of) the rage-driven violence that transpired on January 6. At the rally preceding the treasonous raid on the Capitol, Trump told a dangerous mob, which he had whipped up with his bogus claim of a stolen election, to “fight like hell.” And they did—literally. In this perilous environment, as Trump and his Constitution-defying cultists in the Republican Party continue to send signs of support to these domestic terrorists, Lewis is using a guitar and a hummable tune to sell the same message, and millions are buying (or streaming) it. This is American fascism in the key of G-sharp.

A Civil Rights Hero More People Should Know

When Bob Moses died earlier this week, I noted he “was less known than John Lewis and other civil rights icons. But he was a hero his whole life. RIP, Mr. Moses.” Radio host Roland Martin had an apt reply: “Bob Moses is lesser known because he chose that. He didn't run to the light; he ran from it. He wanted the focus to be on the work and not the personality.”

That quality, among others, made Moses one of the most admirable and intriguing of the leaders of the civil rights movement. In 1960, Moses, the son of a janitor, left his job as a high school math teacher in New York City and headed to Mississippi. In the heart of the racist South, he organized low-income and rural Black people. He registered voters. He developed freedom schools to train other organizers. He confronted violence. He was arrested and jailed many times. He helped change the nation—without making much noise about himself. Years later, he developed a math program called the Algebra Project that targeted underprivileged children. “I believe that the absence of math literacy in urban and rural communities throughout this country is an issue as urgent as the lack of registered Black voters in Mississippi was in 1961,” he said. And because of Moses, thousands of children became literate in mathematics.

If you’re not familiar with Moses and his inspiring work, take the time to read his obituaries. You will be better for it. Here are some excerpts:

The New York Times:

White segregationists [in Mississippi], including local law enforcement officials, responded to his efforts with violence. At one point during a voter-registration drive, a sheriff’s cousin bashed Mr. Moses’ head with a knife handle. Bleeding, he kept going, staggering up the steps of a courthouse to register a couple of Black farmers. Only then did he seek medical attention. There was no Black doctor in the county, Mr. Moses later wrote, so he had to be driven to another town, where nine stitches were sewn into his head.

Another time, three Klansmen shot at a car in which Mr. Moses was a passenger as it drove through Greenwood, Miss., Mr. Moses cradled the bleeding driver and managed to bring the careening car to a stop...

His natural confidence and calm demeanor drew people to him, and he soon became something of a civil rights celebrity. He was a hero of many books on the movement, and an inspiration for the 2000 movie “Freedom Song,” starring Danny Glover.

Eventually the fame got to be too much — not only because it added to the stress of an already overwhelming task, but also because he thought it was dangerous for the movement. He resigned from the Council of Federated Organizations in December 1964 and from S.N.C.C. [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] two months later. He was, he said, “too strong, too central, so that people who did not need to, began to lean on me, to use me as a crutch.”

Mr. Moses grew active in the movement against the Vietnam War, and in April 1965 he spoke at his first antiwar protest, in Washington, D.C. “The prosecutors of the war,” he said, were “the same people who refused to protect civil rights in the South”—a charge that drew criticism from moderates in the civil rights movement and from white liberals, who worried about alienating President Lyndon B. Johnson.

The Washington Post:

In 1964, he helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, bringing hundreds of White college student volunteers to help with the voter drive as a way to generate national publicity and pressure Congress to enforce Black voting rights. (President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the landmark Voting Rights Act the following year.)

That summer was also when the racially mixed Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party failed in a dramatic effort to unseat Mississippi’s regular all-White delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. It was a deep disappointment for Mr. Moses, one of the key architects of the challenge, especially when he saw White Northern liberals side with segregationists.

It had been an exhausting battle. And by the late 1960s, he was pulling away from SNCC, not only because of its increasing Black nationalist radicalism under leader Stokely Carmichael, but also because of his own shift in focus from civil rights to opposing the Vietnam War.

In 1966, he decamped for Canada after being denied conscientious-objector status by the U.S. draft system. He also spent years as a teacher in Africa with his wife before returning in 1977 after President Jimmy Carter granted amnesty to draft evaders. Mr. Moses soon began building his second enduring legacy, the Algebra Project.

Esquire:

In 1982, he partnered with his daughter’s eighth-grade teacher to teach algebra to his daughter and several other students since it was not offered in her school. At the time, Moses was back at Harvard, pursuing his Ph.D. in the philosophy of mathematics. Out of this, with some eventual help from the National Science Foundation, came The Algebra Project, a program to make low-income students fluent in mathematics generally and algebra in particular. Employing the same kind of clarity of vision that had made him see the ballot as the means to change Mississippi, Moses saw that the deindustrialization of the northern city and the rise of the information economy could result in generations of poor Black children. In case anyone missed the point, he memorably argued: We are growing the equivalent of sharecroppers in our inner cities.

The Algebra Project revolutionized the teaching of mathematics and brought it to students that had been ignored for decades. Those are the people to whom Bob Moses had devoted his entire life. He was a genuine hero in the South, and I think we should put up a statue to him in the U.S. Capitol. I hear there’s some room now.

The New Yorker:

In his last years, Moses promoted an idea he called “constitutional citizenship”—a key aspect of which would be a new constitutional amendment establishing a federal guarantee of a high-quality education. This would run counter to the deeply embedded American tradition of decentralized public education, which falls under the control of more than thirteen thousand local districts. He was well aware that when it came to voting, which is similarly under local control, it took the direct involvement of the federal government to engender a better deal for Black people, and the withdrawal of the federal government to make things worse. It was typical of Moses that he liked to be artfully unspecific about how his idea of a guaranteed education would function in practice. He wanted to frame a discussion that would then take its own course, while insuring that the debate would take into account how unacceptable it is that the norm is for American children to have highly unequal access to educational resources. Bob Moses’s legion of admirers should now take pains to carry on that part of his work.

Amen.

Read Previous Issues of This Land

July 27, 2021: Are Republicans going to sabotage police reform that doesn’t even go far enough?; how to put a senseless murder to good use; how sober is Liz Phair?; and more.

July 24, 2021: Has Paul McCartney finally won me over?; Dumbass Comment of the Week; Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

July 22, 2021: My bizarre encounter with Rep. Jim Jordan—and why Speaker Pelosi was right to bounce him from the 1/6 committee; celebrating and grieving with musician Steve Earle; and more.

July 20, 2021: The time a Republican president did the right thing to stop an epidemic; Trump’s big narcissism fail; Nelson Algren and Norman Podhoretz; a new psychedelic Beatles-esque tune; and more.

July 17, 2021: Why the Guardian’s Trump-Russia bombshell—dud or not—doesn’t fully matter; Dumbass Comment of the Week; why Bosch works in spite of Bosch; MoxieCam™; and more.

July 15, 2021: Does President Joe Biden really stand with the Cuban people?; the time I really pissed off the Cuban regime; J. Edgar Hoover vs. MLK; one of the best movie reviews of all time; and more.

July 13, 2021: A coming referendum on Donald Trump; a suggestion for Hunter Biden; a new book on how the super-rich screw us all; and more.

July 10, 2021: Why the Republicans are right to be terrified of the new House committee investigating the 1/6 attack; Dumbass Comment of the Week; Joni Mitchell’s Blue 50; and more.

July 7, 2021: How The Summer of Soul counters the GOP’s season of hate; a debate on the recent UFO report; Garry Trudeau, American Dostoyevsky; MoxieCam™; and more.

July 3, 2021: Donald Rumsfeld, Christopher Hitchens, the Iraq War, and me; the perils of taking a home DNA test; Dumbass Comment of the Week; a Springsteen story; and more.

July 1, 2021: Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and perjury; Adam Serwer’s new book; Cézanne’s crime scene; and more.

June 29, 2021: How the new UFO report is bad news for UFO believers; my own UFO tale; HBO Max’s Hacks; an anti-racist anthem; and more.

June 26, 2021: Is Josh Hawley dumb or evil? (The answer is not both); Dumbassery that encourages mass “executions” in the United States; renowned guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson’s new tour and new book (and his claim regarding the best strings arrangement ever on a popular song); MoxieCam™ (before and after photos!); and more.

June 24, 2021: How an alleged 1/6 conspirator who called for executing Trump’s foes hooked up with a prominent Republican Party official; new Los Lobos; and more.

June 22, 2021: Why the GOP is pushing “political apartheid”; Ted Cruz wins Dumbass Comment of the Week; recommendations for an Apple TV+ series and a book on the curious origins of the universe; the first Clash tour of the United States (and being trapped in a van driven by a punk on acid); MoxieCam™; and more.

Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at thisland@motherjones.com.