Reformers see a problem and want to fix it. You may not agree that the problem is a problem and you most likely don’t agree with their solution and you may strongly suspect their motives, but at least the reformer is working with and within the system to fix the system. They’ll run for office, work for a lobbying company, take part in a protest outside the state capitol. It may be effective, it may be pointless, it may be annoying to others, but our society is built to take it.

Revolutionaries are different. They want to destroy the system. Sometimes they see a problem and decide that the system is too broken to fix and must be torn down. Sometimes they’re just wreckers who want to tear everything down because of their own mental problems. Sometimes the revolutionaries are in it for the money, being paid by outsiders to bring down their own system.

Some are more profiteer than revolutionary. They think that the destruction can be controlled and that they can buy up the pieces and profit when stability is rebuilt.

And then there are the simple thugs. They have no philosophy. They’re in it for the looting and raping. They’re not revolutionaries, just criminals.

These groups have different motives and sometimes have different tactics and different effects.

I don’t care. They are all working to destroy society.

They are all traitors.

They want to destroy our high-trust society and the rule of law.

They also want to hide behind the rule of law when they’re caught. They want trials and to have their lawyers provided by foundations with undisclosed funding. They expect that the police will keep them safe even as they’ve been calling for the murder of police or CEOs. They’re counting on the system to protect them from the consequences of breaking the laws they don’t respect.

Revolutionaries, in all their hateful varieties, do not deserve the protection of the laws that they subvert. They should receive a brief hearing and if the preponderance of the evidence shows that they are attempting to overthrow the law, they are to be stripped of the protection of law and dealt with like any other insurgent in a nation at risk. And collective guilt is a thing. Dress up in the Antifa uniform, get a bullet in the head even if you never assaulted anyone.

I don’t think that these recommendations go beyond what most Americans would support. Americans who are not revolutionaries or terrorists or supporters of either, at any rate.

Now let’s go beyond comfort zones.

Stopping the paid rioters and the ideological revolutionaries isn’t enough. So long as the funding and the organizational structure remains in place, new mobs can always be formed. New patsies will pop up to try to assassinate Supreme Court justices.

Political cover needs to be removed just as surely as the funding sources. Every city council which declares that their city is a sanctuary city is a criminal supporter. Every judge who sets pocket-change bail for murderers.

If a prosecutor declines to press charges against the 25 arrested rioters who were part of a mob which caused fifty million in damages, he needs to be viewed as part of the insurrection. Give him a hearing just like the other revolutionaries.

The same goes for the journalists, talking heads, and academics who create an environment in which a formerly law-abiding member of the public is more likely to join a revolutionary group or to act violently himself. “Stochastic terrorism” is the term used in the counter-terrorism community. It refers to public rhetoric against a group or against society itself, repeated often enough to act as low-level brainwashing. It increases the likelihood of people acting violently, even with no orders given and no specific individuals being identified in advance.

In other words, exactly what we have, with the primary identified enemies being Republicans and Whites. (And the secondary enemies being men, heterosexuals, and Christians. The people who built the society currently being torn down.)

I have no moral problem with putting five dozen activist judges, “studies” professors, militant Mohammedans admitted under dubious refugee claims, and agitators-with-a-byline up against the wall and shooting them.

There are practical problems, though. Patriotic Americans can’t rely on any police forces to arrest the rogue prosecutors and the propagandists. They barely manage to arrest rioters looting stores during mostly peaceful protests. Individual police officers or sheriffs or special agents may be patriotic, honest, and courageous but departments follow the political winds or the paymaster of the officials and cannot be trusted.

The same goes, more strongly, for turning the suspects over to the legal system for the hearings. There is almost no chance of a judge finding another judge to be a traitorous revolutionary not deserving of legal protections.

That leaves patriotic Americans to seize suspected offenders and to form citizens’ tribunals to judge them. Or individual patriots to act by themselves if they don’t have people they can trust to work with.

And at this point, the patriots trying to save our society look a lot like the revolutionaries trying to destroy it. “If you argue with an idiot, bystanders may not be able to tell you apart.”

As I said, it’s a problem.

About all I can say about that is that history is written by the winners.

And that patriotic Americans are currently on the way to losing. It’s impossible to win when only one side is fighting.

Losing sucks. Try to make sure your side wins.