Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
There are thousands of soldiers outside Congress and political terror inside its halls. That political terror isn’t coming from a QAnon Shaman who only eats organic food, but from the Democrats who are using a manufactured state of emergency to purge the opposition.
Democrats deployed 26,000 troops to Washington D.C. at a cost of $500 million. Thousands of soldiers, authorized to use deadly force as they were forbidden to do either at the border or during the Black Lives Matter assault on the White House, will stay to fight an imaginary threat.
While walls, razor wire, and military encampments rise outside the halls of government, inside them the Democrats have unleashed a true coup. Protesters have “stormed” Congress before, from both the Left and the Right, which cannot be called overthrowing the government. But Democrats began their own overthrow by launching an unconstitutional post-office impeachment of President Trump for speaking at a peaceful protest and a push to remove Senate members who objected to the stolen election by abusing the 14th Amendment.
The fake emergency has been extended to March. The FBI continues falsely claiming that there is some sort of threat that requires 7,500 soldiers to conduct a military occupation of the nation’s capital. The FBI’s claims that this threat would occur during “First Amendment-protected protests” has a massive credibility problem because there have been no protests in D.C.
Even though these protests have yet to emerge for over a month, the occupation goes on.
The fascist theater of the military occupation is a pretext for a political occupation with Democrats inciting political purges in legislatures, both state and national, of any Republicans who criticised the stolen election and called for accountability on behalf of the voters. A purge is also underway of the military and law enforcement to root out “extremists” from the same forces that the Democrats have deployed to intimidate Americans and suppress political dissent.
Having pulled off a coup, the Democrats are seeking partisan political control over the military.
There are plenty of precedents for a political faction declaring a false state of emergency, occupying the center of government, and unleashing a campaign of political repression.
Those precedents don’t come from America. And they have no place in the United States.
In 1933, the Nazis used the Reichstag fire to begin purging the political opposition. The fire in the German parliament building was exploited by the Nazis to seize control and purge the opposition, beginning with the Communists, and then moving on to everyone else.
A year later the Communists imitated their National Socialist comrades with the Kirov assassination. The Reichstag Fire Decree and the Great Purge both blamed the inciting incidents on the political opposition and used them as a pretext for an emergency, for endless investigations, and for criminalizing dissent against two formerly weak leaders: Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
The Reichstag fire was used to suppress the authority, independence, and democracy of the Weimar Republic’s legislature in the name of protecting it from assault. The Nazis dismantled the Reichstag’s ability to meaningfully govern, purged dissenting parties, and gave the National Socialist movement and its officials complete control over Germany at every level of power.
By the time the Nazis were done exploiting the Reichstag fire, the Reichstag had been destroyed in a way that no fire, no matter how hot or severe, could have done.
The Kirov assassination eliminated Stalin’s greatest rival, and was then used by the Communist dictator to purge all his remaining rivals in a systematic process of trials and executions. Rivals were forced to accept “moral responsibility” for Kirov’s death in an ominous parallel to the way that Republicans are told to accept moral responsibility for a “coup” invented by the media.
The Democrats manufactured a permanent state of emergency and blamed its existence on their political opponents. That emergency has as little reality as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who claimed that she was nearly murdered while being in an entirely different building. But the political terror and the purges being pushed in the name of that emergency are all too real.
History offers ominous precedents as the Democrats engage in a military occupation of D.C. and seek to purge political opponents by treating opposition as, in their own words, “seditious”.
Like their National Socialist and Communist ideological forebears, the Fascist Left has spent the past four years inventing new and undefined political crimes, beginning with “disinformation” and escalating to “incitement” and “sedition”, which lack any resemblance to normative legal usage.
Democrats keep claiming that the First Amendment doesn’t permit “shouting fire in a crowded theater”, even while they’re shouting, “Reichstag fire” in the crowded theater of government.
Nothing in President Trump’s speech could be described as a call to violence. Nor can anything that Senator Ted Cruz or any other Senate Republican said be described as incitement or sedition. President Trump and Senate Republicans were far more careful in their words about the stolen election of 2020 than the Democrats were in falsely claiming that the 2016 election was stolen. (Not to mention the 2000 and 2004 elections which they had challenged.)
When House Democrats universally voted to call for removing President Trump under the 25th Amendment, they engaged in a coup. But just as the Democrats detached the 25th Amendment from its actual meaning and redefined “unable” to mean politically, not medically, unable, they’ve been redefining legal terms, politically to invent an entire set of new political crimes.
The invention of undefined political crimes parallels Stalin’s use of “socially dangerous” to convict, try, and execute political opponents without ever defining a clear legal meaning.
But it had an obvious political meaning.
All the political crimes invented by the Democrats really translate into political opposition.
The Democrat uses of “incitement” and “sedition” are political crimes that mean opposing them. That’s why it was patriotic of them to question every single election won by a Republican in this century, but why it’s “seditious” of Republicans to question the 2020 election. “Incitement” is a Stalinist formulation which invents a political crime and then connects all political opposition to it.
“Disinformation” means any information or opinion whose distribution the Democrats oppose.
“Have you heard what happened in Germany? Some fellow that Hitler, knows how to treat his political opponents,” Stalin had told the Politburo about Hitler’s purge during the Night of the Long Knives. By year’s end, Stalin began his own purge. Biden has profited by his example.
All of this was not a reaction to a single incident. Like the Reichstag fire and the Kirov assassination, the Democrats had spent generations criminalizing political dissent.
The Biden purges have their origins in the FDR administration’s attempt to criminalize political dissent using false claims of a secret shadow conspiracy of industrialists against the New Deal, all the way up to more recent efforts by the Clinton administration to link the militia movement to “right-wing talk radio” to create a political boogeyman, and Obama’s criminalization of the Tea Party as a dangerous and violent movement that was about to usher in a new civil war.
The profiling of military veterans, the suppression of conservative political speech, and the invention of political crimes were rampant under Clinton and Obama. Now they’re back.
The Obama administration had already abused national security tools to spy on its political opponents, from the Trump campaign to pro-Israel activists, by inventing yet another set of political crimes that harkened back to the Hitler and Stalin era, and accusing them of conspiring with foreign powers. The Biden administration is now preparing to step up the same campaign under the guise of fighting sedition. After being part of an administration which abused the National Security Council to target Republicans over accusations of foreign contacts, Biden will use the NSC to combat “domestic extremism”. The pretexts for the emergency justifying domestic repression continue to change, but the repression remains entirely consistent.
The Democrats have only begun exploiting their permanent state of emergency. And they intend to use it to usher in a one-party state while purging the political opposition. Russia and Germany show us how these purges by megalomaniacal fascists will end once they are set into motion.
Republicans must push back against the occupation of Washington D.C. and against a fake state of emergency whose goal, like those of the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Great Purge, is the suspension of political norms and the rule of law by keeping the people afraid all the time.
It’s a lot easier to stop a purge before it starts than to try to pause it once it’s underway.
There is no room in America for show trials, government surveillance of political opponents, and smearing political dissent as incitement, sedition, and domestic terrorism. The only emergency here is the leftist plot against the Constitution under the guise of manufactured emergencies.
The only way that emergency will end is when the Democrats stop inventing emergencies to bury the Bill of Rights under a stack of executive orders, razor wire, and political purges.
Leave a Reply