There is a lame tradition – at graduations, in some pedestrian columns (not mine, shut up you haters!) – of giving a dictionary definition of a well-known term as an introduction. “Webster’s defines ‘graduation’ as a ‘ceremony marking the end of a period of study,’ but it is actually the beginning of a whole new journey into a new phase of life…”
Well, I’m going to risk following that lame tradition to make an argument about a contentious political term that the left has been using as a weapon in recent years. The same way they’ve used “Nobody is above the law!” – but are now running from that claim, now that it turns out that all Democrat bad actors would very much like to remain above the law, thank you very much.
That term is “insurrection.” And here – brace for the lameness – is the definition, from the American Heritage dictionary:
“1.The act or an instance of open revolt against civil authority or a constituted government.
2. A rising against civil or political authority, or the established government; open and active opposition to the execution of law in a city or state.
3. A rising in mass to oppose an enemy.”
The Democrats have been calling January 6th an insurrection every day for years, and using it as a cudgel with which to beat all conservatives. They held sham congressional hearings over it – with no GOP members chosen by the GOP, which has been the accepted practice in such hearings, for obvious reasons – and repeated it endlessly, everywhere.
During a four-year period in which they had zero accomplishments and plenty of disasters – the Cadaver and the Cackler at the top of government, the humiliating and incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan, 9% inflation and trillions of extra debt, a wide-open border, mentally disordered males in every women’s room, etc. – the Dems have turned the “worse-than-9/11 insurrection of January 6th” into the sole reason to vote for them.
Of course, all conservatives have acknowledged that to the extent a minority of those involved in January 6th were destructive, and got violent with the police, they should be condemned, and charged and punished according to the law. And we don’t condone the bad actions that day.
At the same time, the left’s wild exaggerations and lies about January 6th required rebuttal, which we’ve done, if for no other reason than to shoot down the ridiculously exaggerated comparisons to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.
To wit: the whole thing only lasted a few hours; of the roughly 1500-2000 people who were there, only around 10-15% did anything violent at all; the majority of the protestors were middle-aged or senior citizens with clean records, who walked around inside the capitol taking selfies for a half hour or less and then departed peacefully. Even the ones who fought with cops brought no weapons, and they killed or seriously injured zero people.
(I’m not 100% sure about the “serious injury” part. But considering that the MSM wildly exaggerated every single aspect of that day – including breathlessly reporting that the MAGA-nauts brutally murdered 5 cops, when the actual number, again, was zero – I’d bet my house that no cops were seriously injured that day. Because if they had been, they’d be the most famous cops in history, and we’d all know their names the way we know George Floyd or Trayvon Martin.)
I guess if you really stretched the formal definition hard, you could say that the minority of January 6ers who fought with cops engaged in some insurrectionist – I would say insurrectionist-adjacent – behavior. I don’t think you can call a very short-lived, unarmed struggle with a small number of cops “an open revolt against civil authority” to be taken deadly seriously.
I suppose you could call it “a rising…[in] active opposition to the execution of the law,” in the sense that the ostensible goal was to prevent Biden from taking office, as far-fetched and delusional as that aim was.
But as to the third part of the definition, I don’t see how you can call a few hundred unarmed people – out of a nation of 330 million – brawling like drunken, idiotic frat boys for several hours a “rising in mass to oppose an enemy.”
Now compare that to the gigantic, repeated, months-long, nationwide orgy of violence and destruction of property committed during the BLM and Antifa protests/riots/vandalizing loot-fests of 2020, and the sustained and violent anti-ICE protests and attacks this year.
Not one nationally prominent Democrat (with the possible exception of Fetterman?) or MSM talking-head propagandist that I’m aware of has called ANY of those mob attacks acts of “insurrection.”
But let’s go back to our tripartite definition. Could these events be reasonably called “act[s] of open revolt against civil authority or constituted government?”
Obviously! The insurrectionists are openly defying our immigration laws and multiple federal agencies (ICE, Border Patrol, DHS), and opposing the well-precedented legal use of the National Guard to protect and safeguard federal property and agents.
Could they also be called “open and active opposition to the execution of law in a city or state?”
Same answer. And it’s not just happening in “A” city or state, it’s happening in MANY cities and states all across the country. And it’s happening with the open support of governmental officials on the local, state and national levels.
In my late, great home state of Illinois, Brain-dead Brandon (mayor of Chicago) and Governor Goodyear, (D)irigible, are both defying federal authority as we speak. And Mayor Brandon has declared areas of the city “ICE-free” zones.
On the one hand, that is likely to be as successful as declaring Chicago a “gun-free zone.” (How’s that working for you, Brandon? What’s that? I couldn’t hear your reply over the incessant chatter of small arms fire and bodies hitting the ground.) But on the other hand, trying to ban federal agents enforcing federal law clearly violates the supremacy clause, among other constitutional strictures.
Finally, and obviously, they clearly represent groups “rising in mass to oppose an enemy.” It’s hard to know precisely how many different people have participated in this years-long insurrection, because many of them are serial offenders, participating in dozens or even hundreds of separate riots in separate cities and states. But the numbers of perpetrators are obviously well into the hundreds of thousands, and likely into the low millions.
(Put your shoes back on and take my word for it, AOC: that’s a lot more than the several hundred bad actors on January 6th.)
But let’s get beyond the letter of the law in the definition above. Everybody can easily tell the difference between seriously threatening insurrections and momentary tantrums by tiny groups of marginalized people with no chance of overthrowing the government.
Consequential insurrections with even a tiny chance of success always involve armed perpetrators, recognized leaders among the rebels, serious organization, a plan for an end game, and strategic, coordination actions to get there (ex: taking control of armories, communication facilities, or other significant government facilities; arresting or taking hostage key government figures, etc.).
Does any of that sound like what happened on January 6th? None of those boneheads were armed. The closest thing they had to a leader was a bi-polar weirdo in a horn-hat whom nobody knew. (The logical leader for a real insurrection would have been the president who stood to retain power… but Trump never coordinated or communicated with the J6ers, and in fact explicitly told them only to protest, and to do that peacefully!) (Which would make him the Worst. Insurrection leader. Ever!)
They had no organization, no plans for an end game, and no strategic plans to gain control over any location or assets more consequential than Imhotep Pelosi’s ceremonial gavel.
But the leftist insurrectionists pass all of the tests required to be considered a serious threat. They are obviously armed with everything from slingshots, clubs and various deadly throwable objects (cans of soup, pavement, frozen water bottles) to cars (used to ram agents and their vehicles) to fireworks, handguns and long guns. They’ve murdered at least 27 people, and have badly injured literally thousands of others.
They have recognized leaders, and an organizational structure composed of associated national networks and coordinated local cells, like the 10-creature team who lured ICE agents out of a facility in TX with fireworks, and then ambushed and shot at law enforcement, striking one in the neck.
They obviously coordinate, with some supporters providing housing near ICE facilities, some providing political cover, some gathering and disseminating intelligence (including doxxing individual ICE agents and broadcasting the locations and movements of law enforcement who are carrying out their legal and constitutional roles). Others provide them with funding, and also with legal support. (One such idiot was the Vice President, who used the power of her office to solicit funds to bail out violent insurrectionists who had been arrested!)
They were also determined enough to cost literally billions of dollars of damage in just the second half of 2020: $2 billion in insured damage, and likely that much more in uninsured . And that’s not counting the costs of paying for what is likely millions of man-hours of LEO time and overtime, not to mention the costs of trying, convicting and housing those who end up in jail. Or the clean-up costs of public buildings, highways, court-houses or other government facilities and private businesses.
And they have won victories. They forced kangaroo trials that failed in many places (against Kyle Rittenhouse in WI, for example) but succeeded in others (against Derek Chauvin in MN). They set up temporary lawless zones like CHOP, even though those ended in disaster. (UNEXPECTEDLY!) More importantly, they have cowed state and local officials in many insurrectionist cities and states.
What is a “sanctuary city” if not a place where insurrectionists defeated law-abiding citizens and seized control over their public infrastructure and government, in open rebellion against our democratically established democratic republic?
I always like to apply the double-standards test to all political issues, and something tells me that the lefties who love designating “sanctuary cities” when it comes to our immigration laws would not be so happy with conservatives declaring their cities and states as sanctuary areas.
For example, I for one would love to declare my hometown a sanctuary tax-law city. If Dem mayors can declare LA, Chicago and NYC to be ICE-free zones, how about we declare half the country IRS-free zones? We demand that the IRS stay out, and we won’t obey any tax laws within our state or city borders. Starting tomorrow our gas stations will stop collecting gas taxes (gas is now $1.50 per gallon!), our grocery stores will stop collecting taxes on food, snacks, beer, cigarettes, and sombreros for use in comic videos mocking Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.
Also, we could create and distribute an app to allow citizens to track IRS agents or other tax collectors who come into our cities. We will also form mobs – and if we can’t get there, we will lionize such mobs – to surround, obstruct, attack and possibly shoot at such agents. Because everyone knows that people who enforce tax laws are Nazis and fascists.
That’s absurd of course, because we’re the ones who obey laws and pay more than our fair share, and we are disgusted by the idea of murdering people who disagree with us.
I hope the violent left has enjoyed their victories, because now we’re turning the tables on them, and helping them to reap that which they so eagerly sowed. They lectured us about how “no one is above the law,” and now we’re proving them right. (Ask Letitia, and Fani, and Comey, and Pencil-Neck, etc. how they feel about that.)
And since they screamed that insurrectionists deserve the harshest of punishments?
Coming right up, comrades!
Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!
Martin Simpson 