In a major article on Democrat corruption of the electoral system, columnist Athena Thorne sees signs everywhere of the collectivist infection represented by the American Left. We have witnessed legal chicanery, ballot harvesting, mail-in and illegal ballots, cryptographic algorithms running voting machines, down-ballot vote manipulation, and the “Midnight Magic” vote dumps that turned the swing states around for the Democrats in the 2020 election swindle.
“In 2020, the telltale pattern of election fraud was evident, as all the battleground states halted counting votes on election night. When vote counting resumed, enough mail-in ballots in each battleground state miraculously appeared, putting Biden on top for good.” Indeed, as gadfly H.L. Mencken wrote, “government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” Perhaps not every, but certainly the Democrats’ 2020 electoral fraud.
The next step following the pilfering of an election is institutional corruption on a massive scale, acts of public disruption, and outright physical mayhem in the streets. It amounts to the local version of what came to be known as “total war,” a parochial instance of a historical manifestation.
Jeremy Black, in The Age of Total War, exploring the thesis of total war formalized by Prussian general Erich Ludendorff, argues that the epoch from 1860 to the end of World War II saw the destruction of civil society as a legitimate war aim. In The Emergence of Total War, Daniel Sutherland shows how Lincoln initiated the strategy of total war as the only sure way of defeating Confederate forces after General John Pope’s catastrophic failure at the Second Battle of Bull Run.
These authors had in mind atrocities like General Benjamin Butler’s “right to rape” order (Order No. 28, known as the Women’s Order) against the women of New Orleans, Philip Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign (“The Burning”), and William Tecumseh Sherman’s “march to the sea” that laid waste the state of Georgia. Civilian populations were targeted as belligerents, as a dehumanized enemy undeserving of mercy or military restraint. There was to be no difference between civilians and combatants.
Party designations change. The template was already in place, mutatis mutandis, for recent Democrat presidents like Barack Obama and Joe Biden to assail their own civilian population. They did not hesitate to weaponize government agencies, control the dissemination of information and opinion through censorship and threat, create new bureaucracies, offices and regulations, cut a swath through the Constitution as if it were a landscape waiting to be scorched, interpret protests as “rebellions,” and act against parents as “domestic terrorists” under the agency of former Attorney General Merrick Garland. All such events comprised coercive intervention against civil society on the part of a reprobate administration.
The turmoil we see erupting in Minnesota today is a vivid example of such a Democrat-inspired insurrection against the legitimate constitutional authority. The current aggression, as it progresses, does not involve whole armies on the march but the insidious and incremental “transformation” of America that proceeded under Obama into a Left-oriented, top-down, media propagandizing, anti-Constitutional, vote-altering, and violence-prone regime. The Minnesota riots surely amount to a virtual civil and political upheaval as the state, its officials and agencies, much of its constabulary, and a mob of illegals and paid myrmidons have launched a violent attack on federal ICE personnel engaged in tracking illegal aliens and criminals.
Further presidential action is clearly required to extinguish the flames of purposely fomented anarchy, whether the mobilization of the army or the elimination of all federal subsidies to the reactionary state, or both. On a rather tempting reading of the situation, the conduct of Minnesota on the domestic stage might be interpreted as resembling the decision of South Carolina on Dec. 20, 1860, to leave the Union.
The hypothesis is as sensational as it is appealing, but it is inaccurate. The Confederates intended to start a brand-new country, a second American Republic under different auspices. They contemplated a political divorce from the Union. The cadet branch of the Southern secessionists, the contemporary Left, does not desire to establish a new nation in the global theater as did their predecessors, but rather wishes to bring down and reconstitute the existing one under the same flag. They intend to change the rules of the marriage between the bipartisan parties, not dissolve it.
In confronting what he regarded as civil disunion and as an instrument of wartime policy, Lincoln initiated a devastating civil war upon the nation to prevent what he understood as its dismemberment. In doing so, he furnished the structural model of combating a national revolution. Trump is not dealing with a possible secession movement — at least not yet — but with a “blue state” insurrection. Trump is obligated to end what amounts at present to an insurgency at present, and he is fully justified in calling in the military before the situation deteriorates.
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As RedState columnist Brad Slager worries, “We are already seeing our legal standards tested daily, including outward defiance of federal authorities in the streets and from political leaders like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey encouraging further defiance of our federal laws.” There is little doubt that these “leaders” are determined to destabilize social and political conditions both in their jurisdiction and at large in the nation itself. This is their version of “total war” and merits the president invoking the Insurrection Act.
In other words, Trump must play for keeps. Half measures and rhetoric are inadequate and anodyne. He cannot allow rogue judges to subvert his legitimate intentions. Lincoln, we recall, did not hesitate to defang an obstructive judiciary. Trump must allow for lethal force to be used if law officers and military are attacked, and must not scruple to arrest on grounds of sedition or treason even the highest of state and municipal authorities, including Tim Walz, Jacob Frey, and Keith Ellison. Lincoln’s motives may be debated by historians, but his methods are apt. There is no other way to prevent an insurrection from conceivably becoming a civil war.
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