In a nutshell
Those who want civil war are about to get their wish.
At long last, wake up and notice the moment. Hear the argument.
Anti-Trump legal scholars have been arguing that the third clause of the 14th Amendment, a post-Civil War measure barring Confederates from holding public office after participating in an insurrection, can be used against Donald Trump. Attaching a broken boxcar to the back of this moving train, an Aug. 25 essay at Politico casually compares the case for 14th Amendment disqualification from the presidency to the disqualification of southern congressmen during the Civil War.
You may have already spotted a problem in that last sentence because the story Joshua Zeitz writes about Trump and the 14th Amendment has nothing to do with the 14th Amendment: It’s a story about the refusal of the House of Representatives to take notice of southern congressman in 1864, well before the Reconstruction amendments were ratified. With that in mind, go read it.
The subtext speaks louder than the text. Notice the framing; notice the language that colors the argument. Here’s how Zeitz describes the context for the 14th Amendment: “They had vanquished the Confederacy and compelled Southern states to remain in the Union.”
So what should we do about Donald Trump? Well, there’s this great moment in history in which a grim-faced dictator maintained tight control for the purpose of implementing radically punitive policies over conquered territories to dominate people who were not entitled to govern themselves.
That’s the discussion we’re having. The people Angelo Codevilla called the American ruling class, the hegemonic academic-political-media hive people, are now casually discussing Trump and Trump voters as a conquered people who have to be dominated and kept out of the system of self-government. Because Trump is a dangerous authoritarian, you see.
We are not engaged in anything resembling political debate.
I find NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a hilariously obtuse expert on authoritarianism, an especially helpful source for parsing the eliminationist radicalism of the moment because she has the quality of mind that allows her to slop her givens all over the page without ever thinking about them at all. What should we do about Trump? Well, “lots of other heads of state have been prosecuted, convicted, sentenced to jail or house arrest,” so we just need to be more like the countries that imprison their political leaders. In fact, “Trump arrest=democracy in action.” What should we think of the presidential candidacy of Vivek Ramaswamy? It’s authoritarian for him to be allowed a platform because it’s “designed to get more poisonous extremist ideas into the mainstream and further degrade democratic politics.” Allowing Republicans to speak is an extremist assault on democracy; arresting them is “democracy in action.” And again, that’s where we are.
Indeed it is. I think renowned military strategist Bugs Bunny put it best:
So let them have it, then—good and hard.
From the horse’s ass mouth update! Think I’m kidding? Think THEY’RE kidding? Best think again. The reliably execrable John Heinz-Kerry, for one, most certainly is not.
The corporate state is intent, apparently, on ramping up its propaganda against so-called “climate deniers,” presumably to set the rhetorical groundwork for more extreme legal and social action against them in the future. So it dispatched something called its “climate envoy,” John Kerry, to Scotland with that aim.
Continuing with what is essentially Kerry’s declaration of war on “climate change” deniers (emphasis added):
And while they refuse to accept the facts behind increasingly obvious damages, which the First Minister listed, they lash out at the truth-tellers instead, and label indisputable evidence as hysteria. They compound the already difficult challenge of the climate crisis, by promising to do more of exactly what created this crisis in the first place. So now, humanity is inexorably threatened by humanity itself, by those seducing people into buying into a completely fictitious, alternative reality, where we don’t need to act and we don’t even need to care.
Let’s take the phrase “inexorably threatened” and parse it a bit. Per Merriam-Webster, “inexorable” means “not to be persuaded, moved, or stopped.” What he’s saying — the reason his handlers chose that descriptor — is that there is no longer any need to try to persuade the public of their climate change scam because the “deniers” are individuals who cannot be reasoned with. On a societal level, what does one do with an existential threat that cannot be reasoned with because words are meaningless to it? One goes to war with it.
Humanity, for the record, is, in fact, inexorably threatened by humanity itself in a very real and meaningful sense, but the threat is posed not by “climate change” deniers but by technocrats like John Kerry (assuming he is actually human and not a demonic entity wearing a skinsuit).
An assumption not in evidence if ever there was one. In certain quarters, what Heinz-Kerry is doing here is sometimes referred to as battlespace preparation. Any of you who might be keeping “a little list,” IYKWIMAITYD, needs to be sure that his name features prominently thereon.
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