At a rally in Iowa on Tuesday, President Trump railed against what he called the “angry left-wing mob,” even as his supporters chanted their warmed-over “Lock her up!” taunt. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) — who, hoping to whip up public opposition to health-care reform, stood up in a public park a decade ago and predicted the bill might “pull the plug on Grandma” — went on the Senate floor last week to decry protesters’ “mob rule.” When confronted last week at the Hart Senate Office Building — a facility paid for by taxpayers — Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) told protesters that he’d talk to them when they “grow up,” then literally tried to shoo them away with a wave of his hand.

As The Washington Post reported this week, Republicans have seized on this as their closing argument in the coming elections: Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) said that “we’re finding swing voters are turned off by how Kavanaugh was treated,” later adding, “And we’re responding.”

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It all feels very familiar, because something similar happened to me and others when we spoke out against the Iraq War.

After my son, Casey, was killed in action in Iraq in 2004, I raised my voice in opposition to an unprincipled, disastrous war that needlessly cost hundreds of thousands of lives. President George W. Bush, whom I met after Casey’s death, later refused to look me in the eye again and explain what my son and so many others died for, after I camped out near his ranch. A few Republicans urged him to talk to me, but others were busy trying to shoo the antiwar movement away. In 2005, days after we protested at the Washington Monument, Jeff Sessions, then a senator and now the attorney general, said we “did not represent the American ideals of freedom” and dismissed us as the “blame America first” crowd. Later that year, hand-waving Hatch called antiwar protesters “nutcakes.”

The irony, of course, is that no one in their right mind would defend that war now. We were mocked back then for trying to end bloodshed that the majority of Americans now recognize as a terrible mistake. It’s why Trump twisted himself into a pretzel to convince people he’d always opposed the war, even though he initially said he favored it. But his instinct, and that of many others — Republicans and, yes, sometimes Democrats — is to immediately malign protesters as “Screamers” and “Troublemakers” who don’t deserve to be heard by their elected representatives, never giving serious consideration to the issues underlying their protests, the possibility their own positions might need to be reexamined or the history of civil disobedience on which America was built.

The first act of protest that most of us learn about in schools in the United States is the Boston Tea Party. Colonists were indignant about taxes, passed by Parliament, and not American colonial legislatures, which had the effect of bailing out the British East India Company by imposing taxes that raised the price of tea in the colonies. It’s easy to oversimplify the economic issues involved, or the politics of colonialism, but what most of us learn as kids is that anger over “taxation without representation” helped provoke Americans into rebelling against monarchy.

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In 1913, thousands marched in Washington on Inauguration Day to demand women’s right to vote. In 1917, suffragist Alice Paul was jailed after demonstrating in front of the White House.

In 1914, National Guardsmen were deployed in a deadly attack against mine workers in Ludlow, Colo., who were striking for better working conditions.

In 1955, the arrest of African American organizer Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat to a white rider on a segregated bus line in Montgomery, Ala., spurred the famous boycott that helped to eventually bring about the end of the Jim Crow era. At the time of her death, she was honored with a memorial in the Capitol rotunda, but during the civil rights struggle, Parks and other activists were routinely called agitators and troublemakers, and faced threats of violence.

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In 2016 and 2017 at Standing Rock, protesters faced off against armed and well-funded government forces in a battle to protect something as vital as clean water and a livable planet.

Today, we take as a given that women vote, or that segregation is unconstitutional. But we got here because people marched, protested and, in some cases, subjected themselves to deadly violence to make their voices heard. Gains we take for granted, from the eight-hour workday to same-sex marriage, came about because Americans fought for them, often through protest, not because these things just happened.

But if you only listened to some politicians, you’d be led to believe that Americans are obligated just to sit down and take it when we see we’re being mistreated by our government. Wrong. Whether you believed Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony or Kavanaugh’s denials, whether you’re a Republican or Democrat — I’m neither — the notion that protesters demanding a full, fair hearing and a credible investigation of Ford’s sexual assault allegations were a “mob” to be dismissed, instead of citizens to be addressed, is not only repugnant, it flies in the face of history. And those trying to silence protest, not the protesters, should be ashamed.

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Last month, in an interview with the right-wing outlet, the Daily Caller, Trump remarked: “I think it’s embarrassing for the country to allow protesters,” adding, “In the old days we used to throw them out. Today, I guess they just keep screaming.”

Actually, it’s his statement that’s an embarrassment.