The Uses of an "Insurrection"
Civil Liberties die in darkness
"It is in this realm — in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass,... and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies." - US Supreme Court Justice Robert JacksonYesterday was January 6, and here, via the irreplaceable Julie Kelly, President Biden and his repulsive followers celebrate the imprisonment of their political opponents, gleefully counting off arrests, convictions, and years in prison. “Because democracy,” of course.
https://x.com/julie_kelly2/status/1743380898769211594?s=20
The January 6 riot featured some violence, only some of it initiated by protesters, and the only person killed was Ashli Babbit, an unarmed woman shot by a panicked policeman. It has been met with the largest law enforcement operation in history, mostly arresting protesters who wandered around the Capitol for a few minutes.
This is the civil rights outrage of our age. And you don’t have to be on the right to see that: in Chris Hedges’s words, Trump supporters have been subjected to a “judicial lynching.” The contrast to the treatment of leftwing BLM and Antifa protesters during the massive and not “mostly peaceful” riots of 2020 is obvious. An unequal administration of justice is not justice.
The Biden Administration is perpetrating a discriminatory and politically motivated abuse of the criminal justice system. The abuse works on two levels: it criminalizes the opposition party, and simultaneously threatens dire consequences to any who might think of joining any future conservative or Republican demonstration.
The criminalization of the Republican Party, and Trump and his MAGA supporters in particular, will help to energize a Democrat base already determined that Trump is a criminal, or a Russian agent, or a racist, or whatever he is today. And the Democrats calculate that it will have some effect on independent, non-political, or poorly informed voters who believe what they hear, or who naively assume that behind all the smoke there must be some fire. Criminalization entrenches a myth, a summary narrative of January 6, with clear good guys and bad guys, voluntarily repeated by the establishment media and losing nothing in the retelling.
The ferocious reaction of the security state to January 6 also serves to warn Republican supporters, normally law-abiding citizens, that they will face years in jail (even before a conviction) and the loss of jobs, homes, savings, friends and family, and any hope of a middle-class life if they so much as show up to demonstrate for the a disapproved cause. The state is one step away from withdrawing security clearances, refusing to hire, or otherwise putting employment restrictions on “insurrectionists.”
Here in Canada, they seized bank accounts. As we now know, the Canadian state jumped eagerly at the slogan of “insurrection”, and had a J6-based narrative of the Freedom Convoy already written even before the Convoy arrived in Ottawa (as I argued from POEC documents here). Those documents show that the government had willing help from the mainstream media in constructing this useful narrative.
Because the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa was completely peaceful, the state has had less success framing Tamara Lich and Chris Barber. The crown’s case in what is now the longest mischief trial in history appears to be falling apart. That it was brought at all points to the need to criminalize opposition.
The Coutts Four — Chris Carbert, Chris Lysak, Anthony Olienick, and Jerry Morin — remain jailed on non-disclosed evidence, although substantial parts of the official story, including the “Diagolon” terrorist group that turned out to be a meme, have been debunked.1 Experienced eyes have questioned the pictures of weapons that were released.2 But the Trudeau government needed violence to justify the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the seizure of citizens’ bank accounts, so they made something up. The mainstream media is letting them get away with it.
The pattern remains the same: established power needs to criminalize populist opposition movements. The same need does not exist where leftwing BLM, Antifa, indigenous, green, or now Palestinian movements are concerned. Parties of the left, like the Democrats and the Liberals, are familiar with demonstrations from the left, which generally push those parties in a direction that they want to go. Real popular opposition meets a different reaction.
This can only happen because elite opinion, dominating the institutions and led by the mainstream media, accepts and even welcomes the repression of populism. The capture of the institutions by the left is having direct consequences for civil liberties.
I did watch the early seasons of the Crown, and very much liked it, but for some reason didn't make to Harold Wilson. There was a novel A Very British Coup that sounds a bit like what you describe.
I don't believe the feds organized Jan 6 (that would posit organizational ability), but they certainly exploited it.
I don't know if you have ever watched the series The Crown, but in one episode set in the 1970s after Harold Wilson was elected, there is a discussion by Mountbatten about what it would take to actually carry out a Coup d'Etat in the modern UK. There would have to be a lot to it, and he explains in some detail what it would have taken to overthrow the elected Wilson (Socialist) government. What happened Jan 6 in DC was no more than a riot, simply based on the scenarios Mountbatten describes.