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#domestic terrorism
vague-humanoid · 1 month
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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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lilithism1848 · 4 months
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odinsblog · 2 months
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intersectionalpraxis · 4 months
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queerism1969 · 11 months
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haggishlyhagging · 10 months
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“[Omar] Mateen married Ms Yusufiy, an estate agent whose family was originally from Uzbekistan, in April 2009, and it didn't take long for her to realise that her new husband was an abuser. In a classic pattern of controlling behaviour, he confiscated her salary and refused to allow her contact with her family; he was physically violent as well, once trying to choke her because she hadn't finished the laundry. After four months of abuse, Ms Yusufiy's parents realised what was going on, came down from New Jersey and had to physically wrest her from their son-in-law's arms as he tried to stop her leaving him.
Mateen's second wife was not so lucky. Noor Salman, whose Palestinian parents came to the US from the West Bank, was divorced after an arranged marriage that did not work out. She met Mateen on a dating site called Arab Lounge and married him at a mosque in Rodeo, California, in 2011. In another pattern familiar to experts on domestic abuse, he started attacking her when she became pregnant, punching her and threatening to hit her harder if she told anyone. After interviewing Ms Salman, the New York Times described the abuse she suffered in detail:
When [Mateen] became angry, he would start biting his lips and clenching his fists. In public, he also had a code word he used if she was doing something he didn't like. He would call her 'shar'. That was short for sharmuta - slut or whore in Arabic.
He would also pull her hair, something she has since learned he also did to his first wife. He choked her and threatened to kill her. He never said he was sorry. ‘He had no remorse,’ she said.
In this second marriage, unlike the first, Mateen had a hold over his wife: they had a child together and he threatened that he would get custody of their son if she tried to leave. On the night of the attack, she was in bed when he sent her a text message in the early hours, asking whether she knew what had happened. Hours later, the FBI came to the house and revealed that her husband was the perpetrator of the nightclub attack.
From the outset, the FBI suspected that Ms Salman knew about Mateen's plans in advance. Very unusually, in a development which exposes a failure by the American criminal justice system to understand how women are controlled by their abusers, she was charged with being her husband's accomplice and spent four months in jail awaiting trial. The prosecution case rested on a confession she signed following an interview which lasted almost twelve hours, carried out directly after the attack, when she was in a state of shock and wasn't represented by a lawyer. The FBI agents failed to tape the interview and a key prosecution claim, that Ms Salman had gone on a reconnaissance mission to the nightclub a few days before the attack, fell apart when phone records showed neither she nor her husband was anywhere near it on the day in question. She was tried on charges of obstruction of justice and of aiding and abetting her husband, a man she accused of beating, raping and imprisoning her in their home. In March 2018, not quite two years after the massacre, Ms Salman was acquitted on both counts. Like other widows of terrorists, she has been left with the task of bringing up her son on her own - and one day having to tell him why he doesn't have a father. While Mateen is rightly reviled as the perpetrator of the worst homophobic attack in American history, he was also a domestic tyrant who tried to compensate for gnawing feelings of inadequacy by beating up women in his own home.”
-Joan Smith, Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists
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BREAKING: Thanksgiving Terror Attack on U.S.-Canada Border, Car Explodes.
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A vehicle crossing into the United States from Canada on the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, New York has reportedly exploded. All four New York international crossing between the United States and Canada are currently closed as the incident is being investigated. Sources have told Fox News that the incident was an attempted terrorist attack and the vehicle was packed with explosives. This report has not been confirmed by law enforcement officials, however.
Both state and federal officials are said to be monitoring the situation and the FBI is on the scene. K9 units have been dispatched by law enforcement on either side of the bridge as a precaution. Media reports indicate at least one male has been taken to the hospital with injuries sustained in the blast and at least two individuals in the vehicle are dead.
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rickmctumbleface · 1 year
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imkeepinit · 5 months
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nodynasty4us · 10 months
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One of these days, one of these folks, encouraged by the rhetoric of Donald Trump and his ilk, is going to kill one or more officeholders. And frankly, it's more likely to be an "apostate" Republican than it is a Democrat. This is one of the primary reasons that Republican officeholders who oppose Trump often head for the hills after doing so, as giving up their seat is a better choice than potentially giving up their lives. It's also why so many officeholders who oppose Trump simply aren't willing to say so publicly, or back that with their votes. Which means that the rhetoric of the former president, and of his supporters and enablers, is doing exactly what it's designed to do.
Electoral-vote.com
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jackass-democrats · 6 days
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Flash Back - Schumer threatens SCOTUS Judges.
Is Senator Schumer Threatening The Supreme Court ? Senator Chuck Schumer stoops to a low level once again going political and trying to attack President ........ 
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merelygifted · 24 days
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Sinéad O’Connor Estate Orders Trump to Quit Using Her Music “Immediately” | The New Republic
Sinéad O’Connor has a posthumous message: Fuck Donald Trump.
On Monday, the Irish musician’s estate issued a missive to the GOP front-runner, demanding that Trump never again use her music after he featured her breakout hit, a cover of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” during rallies in Maryland and North Carolina over the weekend.
“Throughout her life, it is well known that Sinéad O’Connor lived by a fierce moral code defined by honesty, kindness, fairness, and decency towards her fellow human beings,” read a joint statement issued by O’Connor’s estate and her longtime label, Chrysalis Records. “It was with outrage therefore that we learned that Donald Trump has been using her iconic performance of Nothing Compares 2 U at his political rallies.”
“It is no exaggeration to say that Sinéad would have been disgusted, hurt and insulted to have her work misrepresented in this way by someone who she herself referred to as a ‘biblical devil,’” they continued.
“As the guardians of her legacy, we demand that Donald Trump and his associates desist from using her music immediately.”  ...
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queerism1969 · 1 year
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