The biggest danger of the Mar a Lago FBI intrusion is civil war.
Here are the details. At roughly ten in the morning of Monday August 8th, a team of FBI agents entered the Trump mansion at Mar A Lago, went to a padlocked room in the basement, and removed roughly a dozen boxes of papers.
They kept what they were looking for secret. But word was that they were searching for high-risk materials on nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, former president Donald Trump, who received a copy of the search warrant outlining what the FBI was looking for, kept it to himself.
This was the first time in 233 years that a former president has come under possible criminal investigation and has had his home raided. It’s a dangerous precedent. A precedent that, if it’s politically motivated as Republican leaders claim, could lead to a banana republic in which new presidents use the FBI to attack the old presidents they replace.
The legitimacy of the raid hinges on a question: has former president Donald Trump actually done anything criminal, anything that justifies the raid?
Those on the left who have followed the proceedings of the January 6th Committee believe that president Trump was attempting to lead an insurrection, an armed uprising, on January 6th when a mob of over two thousand MAGA believers built a gallows outside the capitol building, then broke in and called for the death of Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi.
Insurrection against the United States is a crime punishable by a fine or imprisonment of “not more than ten years, or both.” But there’s more. A leader of an insurrection, according to Title 18 of the U.S. law Code, “shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.” So if former president Trump did, indeed, attempt to lead an insurrection on January 6th, the law bars him from running for president in 2024.
According to an Associated Press poll, between three and ten percent of Republicans feel that the violence of the January 6th riot has been grossly exaggerated and that the event was actually peaceful.
But 40% of Republicans believe the January 6th riot was violent. And ten percent of Republicans feel former president Trump should be charged with a crime.
However the real danger is that some are using the Mar a Lago event to push America another step closer to the killing fields of a new American civil war. Here are some of the comments on MAGA-friendly social media:
“Lock and load”
“I already bought my ammo”
“Civil war! Pick up arms, people!”
“Civil War 2.0 just kicked off.”
“The Dems are starting a civil war.”
“Summertime was made for killing fields.”
Is this mere rhetoric, or is it for real? The Trump camp and Donald Trump’s confidante, Roger Stone, have forged an alliance with the militia movement. The militia movement is armed to the teeth, trained for battle, and has been looking for an excuse for civil war since at least the 1980s. And these militias will apparently do anything former president Trump asks them to do.
We had a preview of the militiamen’s eagerness to use force on January 6th, when the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters broke windows, smashed open doors, of the capitol building, and injured 100 police officers, often bludgeoning them with their own weapons.
The rioters were eager to usher in what QAnon believers call “the Storm,” a bloodbath in which they would execute not just Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, but every Democrat in congress and the senate.
What’s the ultimate goal of this violence? A race war in which only Christians of white European descent are left in this nation and all others are killed or driven out.
Or, as MAGA social networker Dave O put it, “Is this the ‘first shot’ of a Civil War? Is this the tyranny mentioned in the 2nd Amendment? The Founding Fathers would have started shooting a long time ago!”
And as another social networker, Patriot Girl, summed it up, “Civil war people! That’s the answer.”
But civil war would be the death of America.
References:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2383
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/comingracewar.htm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/11/garland-trump-mar-a-lago/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/01/06/militias-capitol-january-6/
https://www.axios.com/2022/08/09/trump-mar-a-lago-fbi-search-boxes
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Howard Bloom has been called the Einstein, Newton, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his seven books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am et every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on Coast to Coast AM. For more, see http://howardbloom.institute .
