Seditious conspiracy
If two or more
persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the
jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or
to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war
against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force
to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United
States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the
United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be
fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or
both.
They even carry the same fucking flag.
I fucking warned you what would happen if we let these traitorous sonsofbitches keep running their shit. Instead we coddled them and gave them a lollipop and now look at us.
They have sowed the wind.
They should reap the whirlwind.
They won't.
But they should.
As I said on Facebook today:
"If it was up to me, I would be at these traitors with the bayonet. A bullet is foolish and may go anywhere. The bayonet is wise and knows what must be done to end treason. Bill Sherman’s prescription remains the correct one; for traitors like this, fear is the beginning of wisdom."
If this is not crushed with brutal force we will rue this as the day we made these traitors our masters.
14 comments:
It would seem impractical to bayonet 30% of the population.
Even 3% is likely excessive.
While one could argue that you would only need to stab a few to "encourage the others", based on my experience with kids, corporal punishment leads to avoidance behaviour rather than desired behaviour.
A big issue is that there seems to be no way to agree on the facts.
There is no evidence of significant electoral fraud but a significant minority of Americans truly believe that the election was stolen. And if you are a true believer then insurrection against illegitimate authority is an appropriate response
But facts should not be so malleable. How useful is the principle of free speech?
Should politicians and media be able to tell blatant untruths?
If not, who gets to police the truth?
In Canada, we have much more limited right to free speech.
Hate speech against an identifiable group of people is criminal behaviour.
The police charge and then the courts get to define the exact line.
We also have professional bureaucrats running our elections who report to the figurehead of state. This can be convenient sometimes.
If these treasonous fuckers had tasted the long spoon - going back to the wretched Bundys through the Malheur Mulisha up to these rebels - then you'd have gone a long way to dealing with the nitwit 30% of the population that seem to find "no way to agree on facts". For treason fear IS the beginning of wisdom; you SHOULD be afraid to rebel. That means if you DO, then you're fighting for something serious, not some ridiculous lie that you "truly believe".
It's really simple. These dumb fuckers want to be lied to so they can believe that they're something other than simpleminded dumb fucking racist sonsofbitches. I'm tired of the coddling and excusing their credulous stupidity. We - everyone NOT on the MAGAt Delusion Train - have given these bastards a pass for so long that the one thing that they TRULY believe is that they can do any damn thing and not pay for it.
The principle of free speech is invaluable. The principle of intelligent listening and analyzing free speech is even more invaluable.
There isn't just "no evidence of significant electoral fraud".
There was. No. Fraud.
It's a lie and a lie so ridiculous that you have to be a nitwit, or a MAGAt - but I repeat myself - to believe it.
If you are that fucking stupid, so stupid that you're willing to break your country's democratic government, then you deserve nothing more than to be fed 10 inches of cold steel.
I can't put it any clearer than that.
And to expand on the above;
A people only control their own destiny to the degree to which they can control those whose out-of-control lunatic obsessions threaten to steer that destiny in the direction of those obsessions. That's why we don't let armed paranoiacs simply run around in public. That's why we - if we have to - authorize our agents in the form of the police and the military use deadly force against those who would attempt to enact their lunatic (or simply unlawful or aggressive) agendas.
Which is not to say that those agents, or, indeed, We the People, use that force in lawful or appropriate ways. The history of this nation is full of We using that force against people who were trying to resist our doing similarly vile things to them.
Which, however, doesn't make the use of that sort of force incorrect when applied to groups or individuals like last week's Trumpenscum.
One thing that has deepened our current national troubles is that the wrong people - people like the ones who made up Occupy, or the BLM protests who have legitimate causes, have been met with brutal and even deadly force, while people like this MAGAt dross - that have nothing but bizarre fantasies and ridiculous lies to support - have been fondled and met with caresses and deference.
So. It's time and past time that the responses were reversed, and these wingnuts were treated with the deadly force they have earned as the traitors they are, not the "patriots" they think they are.
They will not respond to either caresses or kicks with the "desired behavior"; they are lost to sane reality. If they can be fooled into deep conviction by the nitwit QANut lies then they are as far outside of human reason as a cat is to quantum physics.
No. They cannot be reached.
But they CAN be crushed. And it's high time they were.
I disagree. You can not "crush" them.
It simply won't work.
As evidence, I point to the Rebel war banner being paraded around the Capitol.
Bill Sherman obviously failed.
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation process might be a more useful pattern.
Excuse me? There's someone called "Heinrich Himmler" holding on Line 2...
The persistence of the American Swastika is proof that it wasn't Sherman's plan that failed, but that it was betrayed by the generation of Gilded Age politicians that culminated in the "Compromise of 1877" that withdrew the troops from the South.
The only way that a South African process can work is if the oppressors are an overwhelmingly small, threatened minority that is offered wealth and security in return for formally handing over power. Read this (https://newrepublic.com/article/152687/south-africa-glimpse-post-trump-america) as an antidote that "truth and reconciliation" was some sort of magic lamp. What made the South African whites willing to let go of official political and military power was that the incoming ANC promised them they'd never pay, that they'd never be forced to undergo what they put their black neighbors to.
So South Africa remains an exceptionally punitively racist place, just as we are. "Truth and reconciliation" have done nothing real to change the relative positions of black and white. Here's a bit from the end of the linked article:
"The guard was happy to let me, a white person in a car, drive in alone, but he wouldn’t let in Mothakge, who was walking. “These are the rules,” he said, citing “regulations” of the estate. “I don’t make them.”
Mothakge wasn’t as upset by this as I was. Ten years ago, the pervasiveness of racism throughout South African society had helped Zuma win the presidency. It’s still pervasive, but Mothakge seemed to have accepted its permanence—even its validity. He seemed to have acquired some of the subtle contempt for black people that had previously so hurt and offended him."
So, no.
The problem wasn't that Sherman's prescription was tried and found wanting but, as Chesterton said about Christianity, that it was found difficult and never tried.
The South Africans I know personally are mostly academics and I have never detected a strong "racial" vibe from them. In a similar manner, I have never detected a strong racial vibe from any American servicemen I have known.
I acknowledge that the both are narrow segments of society, but my primary point is that you will need to reformat things through persuasion. Furthermore, persuasion requires communication.
Beating people will NOT result in them acknowledging the wrongness of their views. You either go full Beothuk on them (and that approach is long out of fashion, look at Israel and the Palestinians), or you start (really) talking to them.
As the linked article notes; RSA is still one of the most racially divided, racially unequal societies in the world. I, too, know some lovely South Africans, which simply proves the saying the the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
Persuasion requires communication, and the requires BOTH parties to be willing to listen.
Over the past forty years we of the Left had "listened" to the wingnuts until our ears bled. We've moved the fucking Overton window way the hell over to the Right. We don't talk - none of our real political leaders talk - about punishment for racial injustice or reparations for the hundreds of years of crimes of chattel slavery. We've listened to them as they told us that tax dollars can't go to abortions and that women need to shut up and go back to the kitchen. We've listen to the Ledeen Doctrine (and we're not innocent there, what with the R2P people on our side, but we're way less deep in the neoimperail weeds...) and fighting them there so we don't fight them here. We've tried to talk about defunding the police to use that money for less militarized law enforcement and have heard nothing but "Back The Blue!" in return.
I don't expect them to accept that their views are fucked up. Their views are so self-evidently fucked up that a monkey could recognize and be ashamed of how fucked up they are. If all the "talking" we've done since the end of legal apartheid here in the US in the 1950s and 60s hasn't gotten them to accept they're fucked up and wrong no more talking is going to change that. Care to suggest a way that we haven't tried?
Nope. I want them to be too frightened of retribution or public punishment to act on their views. They can have, hold, cherish, and fap to them all they like in private. In public? They need to STFU and act like a civilized resident of the 21st Century multicultural United States.
And that begins with taking the most angry, irredentist, and violent of them and responding to their violence with overwhelming force in a way that they have yet to experience.
Let them feel what it's like to be on the black end of "law enforcement" and maybe they'll STFU and start being a model minority.
Worth a try.
Stop every white guy driving a F-150 on a rural road, if they can't recite Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech by heart, then lock em up until they learn it.
Also, let me know how random "stop and frisk" checks for the boyz in red beanies works out.
Yup, a sure fire recipe for peace, order and good government in the next century.
The goobers can drive around rollin' coal all they want to.
(Well, no, actually; that's part of the problem, too - the climate change problem, and they need to be stopped and cited, not for knowing the leadership of the SLCC in 1964 but for violation of vehicle emission standards...)
But when they cross the line into insurrection?
That has to be slapped down, immediately, hard, and mercilessly.
Because, as you may have noted, NOT doing that - instead, privileging white supremacy, racism, ignorance and the hubris of the ignorant - HAS, indeed, produced all the lack of "peace, order, and (especailly) good government" you mention.
Turns out that when you let foolish racist fucksticks prance around pretending to be the only "Real Americans" with a divine right to rule you get the sort of rule you'd expect from foolish racist fucksticks.
But, again, you tell me.
Your counterclaim is that somehow these people can be brought back into the bounds of We the People by "really talking to them".
Okay. Prove it. How. Show your work. Be specific; what to you "talk to them" about that will make them willing to do that?
Because it looks to me like we already did that.
We talked to them with Occupy, that promised them economic equality and a hope so smash the iron grip of capital that was taking their jobs and impoverishing their lives.
We talked to them with Bernie Sanders, who promised them a rebirth of the New Deal that rescued them the last time the plutocrats and the Gilded Age closed in on them.
And it looks to me like they listened instead to Donald Trump.
But go ahead - tell me what we talk about that will make them listen THIS time.
And regarding "crushing" these traitors...this thread is worth reading:
https://twitter.com/LiteraryMouse/status/1347873482550468609
...to get a sense of the ridiculous ease with which the MAGAts were allowed to do a successful version of FEB 6 1934 and are still planning to try again.
As is remembering that in the very first election after the enactment of the Great Society (1968), Nixon and Wallace got 57% of the vote, and 1972 (after Nixon had escalated in Vietnam, less you be tempted to use that to explain the immediate reactionary backlash) Nixon bumped that over 60% while Wallace got nearly a quarter of the Democratic primary electorate.
So the Trumpist thinking that led to last week's putsch runs very deep in American politics.
Well, given how Obama crushed Occupy and how the Democrats crushed Bernie, I am not sure how persuasive you can regard the outreach.
Also, there remains the little matter of identifying "them". I assume that you are not advocating "crushing" everyone living in the Mississippi watershed.
You could post snipers and shoot everyone wearing a red baseball hat, but I don't think that would be particularly effective. Recall, that you are talking about 30% of the population scattered across 100% of the land area.
In Canada, we came within a whisker of blowing up the country. I was extremely angry about it. However, the government has made long term efforts and now the risk of Quebec separation has become much smaller. In fact, with Covid, I expect that the Federal government is much more popular than ever in Quebec as people see the tangible benefits of being in a larger polity. Similarly in Alberta, our own local nutbar separatists have gotten a *lot* quieter recently. I have no doubt that they will be back, but they will be take less seriously, at least for this generation.
But...but...but...if the wingnuts had roared into the streets for Occupy, with their fierce 3-percent rifles, how could Obama have crushed it?
If they'd turned out en masse and flocked to the polls and voted for Sanders, how could "the Democrats" have crushed Bernie?
Nice try. But you pretty much just made my point. Both of those ideas - that arose from the Left - could never have been stopped had these supposed-populist gomers been willing to cross the aisle.
They didn't.
Instead they turned out for the Orange King, in support of his orange lies, because all those black people voted (or something). Even today, as the House voted to impeach the fucker again, none of their legislators - NONE - stood up and spoke the simple words; "We were wrong. Trump was wrong. Biden won, and we lied, and Trump lied, and because of that we saw something we've never seen before in our history."
Canada has issues with linguistic and racial minorities. You have NEVER had the issue of a majority - racist white people - struggling with the possibility, indeed, the likelihood, of becoming a minority. The GOP has played on that, used it, and has succeeded in creating a mob of reprogrammable meatbags that will believe whatever ridiculous lie they've just been told that contradicts the ridiculous lie they were told ten minutes ago. I frankly don't know what if anything can be done about that, but it needs to be and it needs to start now, because currently the Red parts of this nation are ungovernable tribal regions.
As for sniping MAGAts...well, I'd be fine with it. At this point they're sort of human vermin, filthy and disease - in many cases, literally disease-riddled. They aren't really doing anything but making the country stupider and more fucked up.
But...I WILL settle for treating the most aggressive of these nimrods, the sorts of people that stormed the US capitol, or our state capitol here in ORegon, the same way we treat the people who are out in the streets trying to stop cops killing people, or who are out in the fields and woods trying to stop pipelines.
A sachet of tear gas, some casual clubbing here and there, some flex-cuffs, a bouquet of fines and jail sentences...the shine of whiteness might rub off a bit when these gunhumpers and Proud Boys taste a little of the same cop-stick that any BLM protestor could tell you about.
And if they try and push past the barricades? If they try and overthrow the very seat of government by force?
You bet the fucking bayonet comes out.
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