The January 6th Insurrection: Burning the Reichstag not 1776
Trump's violent, vulgar, unschooled mob lacked legitimate grievances
“Hang Mike Pence!”
A staccato of four-letter words threating the Speaker of the House too vile and vulgar to print.
Saluting bullets over the ballot box to select the President.
These were the odious earmarks of the armed insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They aimed to dethrone the rule of law as king and make Donald Trump Emperor for life.
January 6th was an attempted burning of the Reichstag in 1933. It was not 1776 as the unschooled ringleaders of Trump’s mob bellowed and roared. Indeed, January 6th was the opposite.
Did you see any mobster signs celebrating unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Did you hear the insurrectionists expounding a theory of government like no taxation without representation or government by the consent of the governed? Did you hear them recite even one sentence in the Declaration of Independence? Did they voice grievances against the United States Government like the 27 specifically enumerated in the Declaration?
Believing they were re-enacting 1776 underscores the magnitude of their mad delusion. None alleged they had been denied the right to vote. None alleged they had been denied the right of free speech or association seeking to persuade others to vote for Trump. None alleged they had been denied access to independent tribunals—many populated by Trump appointees—to challenge Joe Biden’s election. None claimed an infringement on the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, which was strengthened manifold by the Supreme Court’s decision in Heller v. District of Columbia (2009).
More than 60 judicial challenges were lodged and not one showed a single miscounted vote. No member of Trump Team Normal or even Semi-Normal believed his Stop the Steal fantasy, including Attorney General William Barr and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone. The Republican Party gained seats in Congress and state legislatures in 2020. Trump himself was elected in 2016 with a minority of the popular vote as happens occasionally under the Constitution and Electoral Count Act.
The Declaration offers no justification for January 6th. None of the insurrectionists have raised it as a defense in hundreds of criminal prosecutions, convictions, and sentencings. For good reason.
According to the Declaration, citizens possess the right to alter or abolish any government that has ceased to secure their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The insurrectionists, however, had not been denied such rights. Every right enjoyed under the Constitution had been fully protected—including the right to seek to have their grievances heard by the United States Supreme Court featuring three Trump appointees.
The Declaration explains that governments should not be changed for featherweight complaints, i.e., “light and transient causes.” Stability protects reasonable expectations and planning, whereas constant upheavals spawn demagogues and speculators on public measures. The threshold justifying insurrection is reached only “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce [the People] under absolute despotism….”
The January 6th insurrections voiced no long train of abuses. They didn’t even have a grievance caboose. Stripped of curse words and juvenile grunts, their complaint was that the Constitution and the rule of law prevailed in the 2020 presidential election and did not award the losing candidate the White House. In other words, the insurrectionists were attacking the United States for adhering to government by the consent of the governed, turning the Declaration of Independence on its head.
The January 6th insurrectionists did not represent the People of the United States and thus had no right alter or abolish it. They represented an ultra-extremist fringe who are undergoing criminal prosecution for flouting not celebrating the philosophical principles of the Declaration.
Let them depart for dictatorial regimes. Let us forget they ever were our countrymen.