What Should Come After

On the dispensation of justice for the usurpers

Photo by Priscilla Gyamfi on Unsplash

The constitutional order of the United States of America has been wrecked. Wrecked in her 249th year — a republic so founded against the very tyrannies that now wear its colors.

I have said, on the various social media platforms where I publish my views, that there should be public hangings after all of this. I mean every word. I am not trying to be provocative. It is my opinion, and I do not care who finds it uncomfortable.

Some have suggested this represents a sinking to the level of my enemies. This greatly misunderstands what I am saying.

I am not calling for summary executions. I am calling for trials. Public trials. Public commissions on truth and justice, and a final dispensation for the group of individuals who explicitly sought to subjugate the machinery of the United States government to their personal control, and bring about the end of the constitutional order so conceived and so established by the framers.

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I shall cut through the niceties and get straight to my point, because the language of normal politics is not adequate to describe what has occurred.

We do not stand at the intersection of political debate. We stand at the edge of the abyss. Looking down at the evil ranks of individuals who sought to carve up the world and extract its riches for themselves, while declaring lordships over their fiefdoms. What has happened is a civilizational-scale event. People are dying. Inhuman tyrannies are being visited upon law-abiding citizens. The government has been weaponized against political opponents, turned into an organ of personal enrichment, and bent toward purposes wholly alien to the constitutional order established in 1788.

The individuals who did this did not do so in ignorance. They did so knowingly, with deliberate intent, understanding precisely what they were attempting. They are not merely people with different politics. They are great usurpers — the very species of actor against whom the framers designed every protection the Constitution contains, and against whom every protection ultimately failed.

For that, there must be a reckoning commensurate with the crime.

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I believe the Constitution should be amended — within the boundaries of the amendment framework itself, that the framers wisely provided — to set aside any pardons this regime has claimed for itself and its confederates. I believe a grand prosecutorial commission should be established to investigate, charge, and bring to justice every individual who participated in this historical crime.

This is not partisan politics. Partisan politics is an argument about tax rates and healthcare policy. What I am describing is the minimum institutional response to the attempted destruction of popular sovereignty itself — of the principle, fought for and bled for across 249 years, that the people are the final authority over the republic that bears their name.

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When the people come to fully understand the nature of what was done to them — and they will — the word that will describe it is sedition. And sedition of this character, prosecuted against the world’s first liberal democracy in its 249th year, deserves the full weight of consequence that the law, properly applied, allows.

History should not forget what these men and women did. The historical record should be complete, public, and permanent. The trials should be public. The verdicts should be public. And if the verdicts warrant it, the consequences should be public.

I have said there should be public hangings, and I mean it in the precise sense that has always animated such language: that when a sovereign people is attacked — not metaphorically, not rhetorically, but in the actual machinery of its government and the actual lives of its citizens — the response must be visible, proportionate, and permanent. So that what was done is understood. So that what followed is understood. So that anyone who considers doing it again understands, with absolute clarity, what awaits them.

When you swing at a sovereign people, you had best not miss.

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If what I am saying makes you uncomfortable — if you think it is too extreme — I would ask you to sit with that discomfort for a moment and examine its source.

It is not extreme to insist on accountability for the attempted destruction of a constitutional republic. It is not extreme to demand that the law be applied fully, publicly, and without mercy, to those who knowingly sought to end it. What is extreme — what is genuinely, historically extreme — is the attempt itself. That is the thing that happened. That is the thing against which my words should be measured.

If you believe that both sides do bad things, and that this is some kind of double standard, then I would suggest with the gentleness that the situation permits that you occupy the wrong side of history. Your awakening to the reality you have helped create — through direct involvement, through tacit approval, or through the ordinary human comfort of looking away — is coming. It will not be comfortable. I am sorry for what it will cost you.

I am not sorry for saying so.

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The republic was not given to us. It was built, across two and a half centuries, by people who understood that self-governance is not a gift from the powerful to the rest. It is an achievement, claimed and defended at continuous cost, against continuous opposition, by people who understood what they were defending and why.

It can be rebuilt. It must be rebuilt. But it cannot be rebuilt without first establishing, with the full authority of the law and the full witness of the public, what was done, who did it, and what they deserve.

That is what should come after.

That is what I am calling for.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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