This is a Coup

Do not panic. Do not look away. Your calm attention is required, America.

The United States government, in its 249th year, has been couped. All three branches have been captured by seditionist elements of the body politic. The federal republic has no functioning institutions in its service. What is regularly called the United States federal government cannot, at this moment, be understood as a legitimate constitutional entity of our republic. It is, as our Founders recognized would someday be possible, an alien institution wearing the colors of the American republic.

I want to be clear about what I am and am not saying.

I am not saying this is permanent. I believe this coup will be dispelled by popular uprising — by the brave and free people of the United States of America, whose republic this is and has always been. I believe we will recapture these institutions. I believe the midterm elections will happen, despite everything I am saying, and that they will be the vehicle through which the people reassert their sovereignty. I believe the seditionists will rue the day.

But we should be clear, right now, about the political and moral status of what is happening. An illegal war has been launched without congressional authorization, in violation of Article I of the Constitution, in violation of the Take Care Clause, in violation of the post-1945 international order that was constructed at great cost specifically to prevent this kind of unilateral executive aggression. The institutions that should have stopped this — the Congress, the courts, the free press — have been systematically weakened, captured, or cowed into silence. The republic’s constitutional machinery is not functioning as designed.

That is a coup. Not a metaphor. Not hyperbole. A coup.

This is a very sad 249th year of the American experiment. I hope the lessons we learn from it will secure the republic for the next thousand.

If you fly an American flag on your property, it is now your patriotic duty to fly it upside down to indicate the distress that the republic in which it stands is in. To signal to its citizens that their attention is required to task of defending their sacred inheritance. On behalf of all those who died so that we may live free in a peaceful world.

God bless America.

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