Originally published at: GOP congressmen Clay Higgins and Andy Biggs call for violence | Boing Boing
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So when is the GOP going to designated a terrorist org?
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Remember when the GOP claimed with a straight face to be the “party of law and order”?
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18 U.S. Code § 2381 - Treason
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Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 807; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(2)(J), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2148.)
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All elected officials who call for violence against this country must be removed from office, permanently banned from politics at any level, and put on trial.
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This is, literally, the definition of sedition. Is it prosecutable? I don’t know. They are certainly flirting with the line.
Contemporary Sedition:
While the U.S. still criminalizes sedition in 18 U.S.C. § 2384, the First Amendment’s free speech protections limit the extent to which states and the federal government can criminalize sedition. In 1969, a U.S. Supreme Court case, Brandenburg v. Ohio, created a test requiring that speech must directly or imminently likely produce violence. Most modern seditious conspiracy convictions under § 2384 involve terrorist plots. For example, in U.S. v. Rahman, the Second Circuit upheld the convictions of the Muslim clerics under § 2384 who plotted “to bomb office building, tunnels, and bridges in New York City, to assassinate President of Egypt, and to assassinate Israeli citizen who professed militant Zionism.”
Personally, I think Trump’s actions on January 6 meet this modern test, but the Biden administration seems unlikely to test that. I will say, if people do respond to Higgins’s and Biggs’s call for violence and do something, then I think they should be prosecuted.
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I am personally gratified that Biden isn’t trying to personally influence who gets prosecuted for what crimes because that would be an abuse of his office. He’s standing aside and letting the DoJ do their thing, as is appropriate.
I do hope the DoJ doesn’t let this shit slide though.
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You know you’re in a cult when, if presented with a mountain of evidence your cult leader committed crimes, you cant accept it, and decide to just destroy everything.
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Yeah, I didn’t mean Biden personally. I agree 100%.
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Of course, that’s been a popular phrase going back to Nixon, but rarely has it meant actual law and justice prevailing, but rather it mean “order” as in a white, patriarchal order, where white men, especially the rich ones, get to be above the law, while the rest of us are told what to do and suffer the consequences if we step out of line… they use words in a way that we don’t, often times. That phrase in their lexicon is especially fraught…
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“Rules for thee and not for me”
Fixed it for you
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Yes. It was always a Wilhoit situation. It just sounds all-out ridiculous now when members of the party are openly preaching insurrection for the entire nation.
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That is the “order”, and then they are the “law”. As people said about the Third Reich, it keeps the streets “safe”.
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It’s unsettling to realize that absurdity can be chilling. Strange days are these.
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I have never been happier to not live in the United States than today.
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I can guarantee you “Meal Team Six” has no idea what he is tweeting about.
Yes they do. Can we stop pretending that any of this is difficult to decode or that what is happening isn’t happening?
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More than half of these so called patriots haven’t served a day in the United States Military. That carp is arcane even to me and I’ve had Airbase Ground Defense Training. That’s some kind of Army Special Forces speak I guess. I just spoke with an Army Veteran and he said it’s Gibberish, pure gibberish.
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Higgins was a Staff Sergeant in the Louisiana National Guard. That also doesn’t matter. You can kill a lot of people and break a lot of things without any military training.
Then your vet buddy is wrong. The maps in question are better known to most people as county maps and while the summary of them mostly covering the area around military bases is wrong, they are widespread maps. They have a near mythic status in certain chunks of the prepper and militia movements. It sounds like gibberish to your friend because he isn’t the target for the dogwhistle, but the targets knew damn well what he was talking about.
I find a more useful trick for assessing such things is working backwards to see if there is a non-horrifying option within a plausible oops distance. There are no typos within range. As far as dual meanings the only one within possible distance would be a Warhammer reference, but that doesn’t make sense with the Trump arrest and bridge references. So yeah, we’re forced to assume he’s talking about the popular idea of county level insurrection using tactics frequently discussed in militia movements, using language common in those movements, about a cause that has that group worked up.
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I never served in a militia. So I’m not up on militia speak. Know your bridges is militia speak for Rise Up!?
