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By Josh Marshall
I want to return to this revelatory interview with coconspirator John Eastman, the last portion of which was published Thursday by Tom Klingenstein, the Chairman of the Trumpite Claremont Institute and then highlighted by our Josh Kovensky. There’s a lot of atmospherics in this interview, a lot of bookshelf-lined tweedy gentility mixed with complaints about OSHA regulations and Drag Queen story hours. But the central bit comes just over half way through the interview when Eastman gets into the core justification and purpose for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and overthrow the constitutional order itself. He invokes the Declaration of Independence and says quite clearly that yes, we were trying to overthrow the government and argues that they were justified because of the sheer existential threat America was under because of the election of Joe Biden.
Jan 6th conspirators have spent more than two years claiming either that nothing really happened at all in the weeks leading up to January 6th or that it was just a peaceful protest that got a bit out of hand or that they were just making a good faith effort to follow the legal process. Eastman cuts through all of this and makes clear they were trying to overthrow (“abolish”) the government; they were justified in doing so; and the warrant for their actions is none other than the Declaration of Independence itself.
“Our Founders lay this case out,” says Eastman. “There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable, tolerable while they remain tolerable. At some point abuses become so intolerable that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.”
“So that’s the question,” he tells Klingenstein. “Have the abuses or the threat of abuses become so intolerable that we have to be willing to push back?”
The answer for Eastman is clearly yes and that’s his justification for his and his associates extraordinary actions.
Let’s dig in for a moment to what this means because it’s a framework of thought or discourse that was central to many controversies in the first decades of the American Republic. The Declaration of Independence has no legal force under American law. It’s not a legal document. It’s a public explanation of a political decision: to break the colonies’ allegiance to Great Britain and form a new country. But it contains a number of claims and principles that became and remain central to American political life.
The one Eastman invokes here is the right to overthrow governments. The claim is that governments have no legitimacy or authority beyond their ability to serve the governed. Governments shouldn’t be overthrown over minor or transitory concerns. But when they become truly oppressive people have a right to get rid of them and start over. This may seem commonsensical to us. But that’s because we live a couple centuries downstream of these events and ideas. Governments at least in theory are justified by how they serve their populations rather than countries being essentially owned by the kings or nobilities which rule them.
But this is a highly protean idea. Who gets to decide? Indeed this question came up again and again over the next century each time the young republic faced a major political crisis, whether it was in the late 1790s, toward the end of the War of 1812, in 1832-33 or finally during the American Civil War. If one side didn’t get its way and wanted out what better authority to cite than the Declaration of Independence? There is an obvious difference but American political leaders needed a language to describe it. What they came up with is straightforward. It’s the difference between a constitutional or legal right and a revolutionary one. Abraham Lincoln was doing no more than stating a commonplace when he said this on the eve of the Civil War in his first inaugural address (emphasis added): “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”
In other words, yes, you have a revolutionary right to overthrow the government if you really think its abuses have gotten that intractable and grave. But the government has an equal right to stop you, to defend itself or, as we see today, put you on trial if you fail. The American revolutionaries of 1776 knew full well that they were committing treason against the British monarchy. If they lost they would all hang. They accepted that. They didn’t claim that George III had no choice but to let them go.
From the beginning the Trump/Eastman coup plotters have tried to wrap their efforts in legal processes and procedures. It was their dissimulating shield to hide the reality of their coup plot and if needed give them legal immunity from the consequences. The leaders of the secession movement tried the same thing in 1861.
In a way I admire Eastman for coming clean. I don’t know whether he sees the writing on the wall and figures he might as well lay his argument out there or whether his grad school political theory pretensions and pride got the better of him and led him to state openly this indefensible truth. Either way he’s done it and not in any way that’s retrievable as a slip of the tongue. They knew it was a coup and they justified it to themselves in those terms. He just told us. They believed they were justified in trying to overthrow the government, whether because of OSHA chair size regulations or drag queens or, more broadly, because the common herd of us don’t understand the country’s “founding principles” the way Eastman and his weirdo clique do. But they did it. He just admitted it. And now they’re going to face the consequences.
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nando161mando · 6 days
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‘NCIS’ Actor Arrested for Allegedly Storming Capitol on Jan. 6
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eyedontgettumblr · 7 months
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there is one fucker on earth whom i want in jail just as much as djt
i would give my phantom left nut and watch with rapture,
Mark fucking Meadows
make his way into jail and do time in prison
after the jan 6 testimony i want to see this shit eating grin fucker go to jail
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mielmoto · 9 months
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@boomermania said: basil, who was a swashbuckling criminal at fontaine before coming to mondstadt: w h a t?
honestly the hilarious potential here is unlimited.
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tomorrowusa · 1 year
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Putin is a terrorist propped up by oil money and dependent on his control of the FSB. It’s only natural that he would find common ground with the ruling clique in Iran which is busy murdering its own citizens nowadays. 
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene sided with the pro-Trump terrorists who attacked the US Capitol on January 6th last year. It surprises nobody that she would try to undermine Ukraine in order to please Vladimir Putin – the boss of her boss Donald Trump. She’s the 21st century equivalent of US citizens who sided with the Third Reich against the UK.
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The best way to keep Greene from gaining influence in the US House is to donate directly to Democratic candidates in tossup districts or give through the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Join Our Campaign to Defeat Trump's Republican Agenda
Please don’t waste money on people running against Greene or other rabid Trumpsters in super red districts. Money is best spent on close races – not on longshots with no chance of winning whatsoever.
We can also protect democracy in both the US and Ukraine by contacting people we know, one on one, and letting them know that their votes are important to us. Elections are determined by turnout, numbers of votes matter as numbers of representatives matter.
So fight terrorism by voting Democratic.
Be A Voter - Vote Save America
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takunwilliams · 2 years
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nas big pun 
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oldtestleper · 2 years
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ok we are done w this now right we are done kidding ourselves and playing nice and putting up with bullshit. are we getting out cocktails yet or what. fixing up some little envelopes. when is the leftist coup.
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angelx1992 · 2 years
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gwydionmisha · 3 months
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The US Justice Department is seeking 33 years in prison for Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy in one of the most serious cases to emerge from the attack on the US Capitol, according to court documents.
The harsh sentence request came as it emerged that Christopher Worrell, another member of the extremist group, has disappeared, days before he was due to be sentenced on Friday.
The sentence for Tarrio, if imposed, would be by far the longest punishment that has been handed down in the massive prosecution of the riot on 6 January 2021. The Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy in a separate case, has received the longest sentence to date – 18 years.
Tarrio, who once served as national chairman of the far-right extremist group, and three lieutenants were convicted by a Washington jury in May of conspiring to block the transfer of presidential power in the hopes of keeping Donald Trump in the White House after the Republican President lost the 2020 election.
Tarrio, who was not at the Capitol riot itself, was a top target of what has become the largest Justice Department investigation in American history. He led the neo-fascist group – known for street fights with leftwing activists – when Trump infamously told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during his first election debate with Democrat Joe Biden.
During the months-long trial, prosecutors argued that the Proud Boys viewed themselves as foot soldiers fighting for Trump as the Republican spread lies that Democrats stole the election from him, and were prepared to go to war to keep their preferred leader in power.
“They unleashed a force on the Capitol that was calculated to exert their political will on elected officials by force and to undo the results of a democratic election,” prosecutors wrote in their filing on Thursday. “The foot soldiers of the right aimed to keep their leader in power. They failed. They are not heroes; they are criminals.”
Meanwhile on Friday it emerged that the authorities are looking for Worrell, of Naples, Florida, who was “unaccounted for” ahead of his sentencing. He was convicted of using pepper-spray gel on police officers as part of the mob storming the Capitol in 2021.
Worrell had been under house arrest in Florida since his release from jail in Washington in November 2021, less than a month after a judge substantiated his civil-rights complaints about his treatment in the jail.
Prosecutors had asked a judge to sentence Worrell to 14 years. Court records show the sentencing was canceled on Tuesday and a warrant issued for his arrest, initially under seal.
More than three dozen people charged in the Capitol siege have been identified by federal authorities as leaders, members or associates of the Proud Boys, whose members describe it as a politically incorrect men’s club for “western chauvinists.”
As well as the long sentence for Tarrio, prosecutors are also asking for a 33-year-sentence for one of Tarrio’s co-defendants, Joseph Biggs of Ormond Beach, Florida, a self-described Proud Boys organizer.
They are asking the judge to impose a 30-year prison term for Zachary Rehl, who was president of the Proud Boys chapter in Philadelphia; 27 years in prison for Ethan Nordean of Auburn, Washington, who was a Proud Boys chapter president; and 20 years for Dominic Pezzola, a Proud Boys member from Rochester, New York.
A total of about 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the January 6 riot. More than 600 of them have pleaded guilty or been convicted after trials decided by a jury or judge.
Defense attorneys argued there was no conspiracy and no plan to attack the Capitol.
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nando161mando · 5 months
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"It appears that Patriot Front member Ben MD and #hoodedbatongrabber from the capitol riot are the same person. If anyone has info on either please email us"
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thepoliticalvulcan · 3 months
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The bleak irony of people who get really into Fight Club for the wrong reasons is that their love of the film for the wrong reasons mirrors a lot of what is happening in society today. Charismatic grifters attract people who are lost, usually lost for the right reasons: the alienation of repetitiveness, meaninglessness, dehumanization; and sell them the idea that the dynamism they are missing can be found in righteous violence and symbolic terrorism that feels purposeful but reveals how ignorant the perpetrators are about how the world really works.
Even in the 90s, blowing up a few skyscrapers would not have reset credit debt. It was a stupid plan rich in symbolism and impoverished in critical thinking.
How little things change.
Edward Norton's "Tyler" also darkly mirrors the path of some of the less overtly atavistic gurus. Thinking you can set up guardrails on your ideas and followers. That no one will take it further than you think anyone would ever consider reasonable. Then one day you're Rupert Murdoch watching a man in a bison headdress lofting a spear in Congress.
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lejacquelope · 4 months
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This is what happens when you don't obey the law.
If it's good enough for Michael Brown it's good enough for Asshli Babble.
You're welcome, right wing subhuman trash. Suck it!
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tomorrowusa · 1 year
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Vote Trump Republican for more political violence, more guns going to gang members, and more domestic terrorism.
Trump Republicans create a climate of violence and then blame it on minorities and immigrants.
Incite violence and you get violence.
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