John Eastman and the Republican Fantasy

 

I wanted to expand a little bit on the admission of John Eastman that he did want an insurrection, actually.  His belief that the 2020 election was stolen is uninteresting to me, because I think it means nothing more than Eastman feels that there are some people whose right to vote he can't respect because they are doing it wrong. Once you let the franchise get beyond the possession of white, landed males, surely mistakes will be made. He voices desperation that the country will survive a Democrat in office. 

Well, why not? That's the Flight 93 election theory, isn't it? And John Eastman is a Claremont man. 

It's the idea that the Declaration of Independence is what gives the Trump Administration sanction to encourage an insurrection (or to be more precise, an autogolpe) that startles me. Of course, the Declaration is a fine historic document important to the revolutionary history of the United States. And he's citing it's provisions to...

Deny the right of some of the citizenry to representation because he has bad vibes about it? Let Donald Trump play the part of King George III and put down what Eastman and others assumed would be the actual "insurrection" for which the Insurrection Act would need to be called. (Jeffrey Clark is assumed to be co-conspirator 4 in the Trump indictment, who suggested that the Insurrection Act would be needed to put down the rioters in the places whose votes were denied. You know, like Detroit. Atlanta. Philadelphia. Places with certain demographics. Not dissimilar to the demographics of Washington D.C., where Trump really would prefer not to be tried for his attempt to deny some people their vote being counted.)

But that's what Claremont war-gamed. And maybe that's why some conservatives still want to think antifa or the Deep State was responsible for 1/6. The Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, now found guilty of conspiracy and sedition, sure thought the Insurrection Act was about to get called on--not them, but the leftists who didn't have any reason to be there. 

And were not there, at all, at all.

There is a disturbing problem of the hard-right in that they have become fantasists, living in a world wholly made up of their own weird scary stories that they tell themselves, of liberal-enticed immigrant caravans and replacement theories, of George Soros controlling everything around them, of Zombie Democrats controlling elections from the grave. In their Fox News and Breitbart mangled mindscape--do big cities like the one I live in seriously burn every night? Are we all actually shooting fentanyl in our eyeballs? I never really know which things they think are really true and which ones they are just saying to keep the conversation interesting. 

I do know that quite a lot of 2nd Amendment conservatives, whether they think of themselves as militia people, Tea Party people, or MAGA, think the 2nd Amendment is for just what John Eastman thinks--to fight against supposed government tyranny. And from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Civil War, and Waco and Ruby Ridge--it never goes down well. Almost as if that isn't how things work, or are supposed to work, even. 

They staged a coup on the government because they thought they were in the midst of a Democrat coup--because a lawfully-held election supported a Democrat. It's dumb beyond belief, and the evidence nonetheless supports it. People died because little white think tank rodents like Eastman believed their own bullshit. And so did little Republican Congresscritters. And a whole right wing media apparatus supported fairy tales. 

It isn't funny, but I taste something like irony in the back of my throat.