The President is Guilty of Treason and Must Be Impeached
The Only Thing That Matters Now.
If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, the protestors are speaking.
I’m not being ironic: with protestors putting themselves on the line against the barrel of an authoritarian gun, if you open your mouth to say anything other than “this is a good thing,” just shut the fuck up. I’m serious. The only thing you should say right now—other than “pro-democracy protests are good”—is “Donald J. Trump is guilty of treason and must be impeached and removed from office.”
We have completely lost the plot.
We should have impeached President Trump months ago. We should have been investigating high crimes and misdemeanors and discussing which Senate Republicans are going to split off and join Democrats in their solemn duty to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic.
Instead, we watched the polls. We analyzed Trump’s approval ratings and the political fallout of his actions, shifting the focus from whether they were legal to whether they were popular. By the time Trump’s American Gestapo began flagrantly violating our constitutional rights, the pundit class had already baked in the assumption that voters were broadly supportive of reasonable immigration enforcement.
It doesn’t matter if we know Trump is treasonous. What matters is that we get people talking about it and go back on offense. We desperately need to move the conversation away from protest critique and back where it belongs: impeachment and removal.
But what we’re seeing has nothing to do with protecting the border; the Trump Administration has in fact opened a domestic terrorism campaign against the American people. There have been small skirmishes elsewhere, but this weekend Los Angeles saw the first major front open up in the struggle to save the constitution and preserve the rule of law.
After federal goons were rebuffed from executing unlawful orders on Friday, they came back on Saturday, and were met with massive nonviolent demonstrations on Sunday. As LAPD teamed up with state and federal law enforcement agencies to crack down on peaceful protests, pundits and politicians tuned in—and regrettably, many of them weighed in:
Who is this message for?
Senator Schiff gestures at abstract, unprovoked attacks on law enforcement as if that were a thing. It is not. When people gather to nonviolently demonstrate against the Gestapo, anyone who shows up to assault them should expect to be pushed right back and twice as hard. That is not violence, that is self defense. Yet pundits and politicians are now tripping over themselves to disavow a nonexistent violence coming from the very people being suppressed by illegitimate state violence themselves.
I’m not just picking on Schiff because he’s my senator, but because this messaging failure is particularly devastating coming from the leader of the first Trump impeachment hearing in 2019. While we regularly lament the Democrats’ inability to deploy a coherent, unified message, the rare instances when they do coalesce around a talking point tend to bolster something completely asinine—like abundance.
If there is a silver lining in these darkening storm clouds, perhaps it will be the sense to do away with this ridiculous abundance talk once and for all. But liberals with power and influence must not trade the slick language of trojan horse Reaganomics for tone-policing and tactical criticism of those rallying against Trump’s campaign of terror.
Somebody needs to remind Van Jones that all the Waymo self-driving taxis in the world stacked atop one another are worth fewer tears than a single day of your life. Someone needs to remind Mayor Karen Bass that Trump is not a potential partner for peace—he is the enemy and he is violating the law.
Shortly after the LAPD cleared 101 Freeway of anti-ICE demonstrators on Sunday evening, Mayor Bass appeared at a press conference to reiterate the city’s commitment to its people, hammer home the importance of nonviolence, and reject the White House’s efforts at local destabilization. When asked whether she had spoken to Trump, Bass said, “No, I have not.”
Wrong answer.
“Fuck that guy” would have been the right answer. “Donald Trump is guilty of treason and must be impeached and removed from office” would have been an even better one. We are so far past the rubicon of normal politics, if these officials want there to be a city, state or country left over to lead at the end of all this it is high time they started acting like it.
“I’ve seen a lot of these folks carrying a Mexican flag in the middle of this,” said never Trump Republican Adam Kinsinger, “I don’t know why you would do that, we’re talking about people having a right to be Americans? Or immigration to the United States? If you’re going to carry a flag, carry a U.S. flag. We want to show that patriotism, that’s important to say it like ‘we are proud Americans, we’re proud of what we believe, we’re proud of the history of this country.’ “
Kinsinger has absolutely no idea what game he is playing. We are a nation of immigrants. Protestors carrying Mexican, Salvadoran, and Honduran flags root this fight in the reminder of what makes America great. These proud demonstrations of ethnic heritage exude an authentic patriotism that Kinsinger simply cannot see. They tell the real history of this country, not whatever “history” the former member of Congress seems to have in mind.
But even if he had the correct take—even if Kinsinger were out here broadcasting to millions of followers how good and important it is to see these flags at the protest, that would still be entirely beside the point. Anyone with a platform as big as his should be talking about one thing and one thing only, and it’s not the optics of these demonstrations.
Trump has committed numerous high crimes and misdemeanors in broad daylight. A thorough congressional investigation would reveal even more. Quite likely, some of them might even qualify as the ultimate crime of higher office: treason against the United States.
It doesn’t matter if we now know that to be true with absolute certainty. What matters is that we get people talking about it and go back on offense. We desperately need to move the conversation away from protest critique and back to where it belongs: impeachment and removal.
Somebody needs to remind Van Jones that all the Waymo self-driving taxis in the world are worth fewer tears than a single day of your life.
The conservative movement won because they owned the narrative through endless repetition and message discipline. If we’re going to find our way out of this mess, we have to learn how to retake the narrative and drive our own agenda. If you’re talking about immigration right now, you’re missing the point. No football team would draw up a play designed to sack one of the opposing team’s offensive linemen. You go straight for the head.
We have to get the word “treason” trending until it reaches a crescendo.
The only real solution starts with message discipline, when we talk up “impeachment and removal” until that which is currently impossible becomes inevitable.
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Stand Back and Stand By
People power is the only thing that can save us from this nightmare: only the people can force Congress to impeach the president, only the people can pressure the courts to exert their authority and preserve what’s left of the constitution. Bernie and his team of rag-tag progressive champions have reminded us all what people power actually looks like. But people power is more than a premise, it’s a very real tool that can and must be deployed to achieve very specific, discrete outcomes.
He never should have been elected. Either time.
Those who brought the Mexican flag is just to say they are proud of their country too
You have THE RIGHT HERE IN AMERICA TO HAVE THE FREEDOM TO DO AS YOU WISH!’
THATS the whole fucking idea folks!!