San Antonio, Texas teenager Hunter Richard was dining with a friend at a fast-food restaurant earlier this week when a livid stranger approached his table, picked up Richard’s soft drink and threw it in his face. The stranger also yanked the teen’s hat off his head and walked away with it. Why?You guessed it. Richard’s hat wasn’t just any old baseball cap. It was one of those “MAGA” (Make America Great Again) hats: a.k.a. the official uniform of the Trump campaign.Objectively speaking, the MAGA hat is an unfashionable piece of headwear made even less so by the fact that it’s bright red — the same colour as many of the sunburned Caucasian Americans who wear it. But that’s not why the stranger, now identified as Kino Jimenez, harassed Hunter Richard and stole from him.He did so because many anti-Trump Americans have come to view the MAGA hat as a symbol of unapologetic hatred. For example, after a video recording of the above incident made it onto Twitter and went viral, Van Lathan, the TMZ reporter famous for criticizing rapper Kanye West about his support of President Donald Trump, tweeted the following: “Wish I could take the high road but your MAGA hat reads like a swastika to me.”It reads that way to me too, not because the Trump administration’s evils are on par with Hitler’s but because anyone who wears that hat today may as well walk down the street shouting at the top of their lungs, “I love creeping fascism.” In other words, it’s easy to understand the impulse to rip the hat off somebody’s head and throw a drink in their face. However, there’s a big difference between understanding a violent impulse and making excuses for a person who acts on it.The former is human nature. The latter is human nature at its worst.It’s been disappointing then, to say the least, to observe the swiftness with which many anti-Trump voices jumped to defend the hat- ...
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