Insurrection Chic

Is Jeff Davis the Model?

Who is the real, or fictional, inspiration for the new insurrectionary wing of the Democrat Party?

The fictitious Hollywood insurrectionist, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “James Mattoon Scott” (Burt Lancaster), who in the 1964 film Seven Days in May attempted to overthrow the presidency?

Or perhaps Jefferson Davis? He ultimately ordered the attack by South Carolina state forces against the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, which ignited the Civil War.

Or is the better inspiration the “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door?” Alabama Governor George Wallace likewise vowed to use his state’s law enforcement to nullify a federal law.

Yet how odd that the left, which had lectured us so often about a January 6th “insurrection”—a charge that not even the Javert-like special counsel Jack Smith ever lodged against Donald Trump—now talks frequently about the proud nullification of our nation’s federal laws.

The New Confederacy

Democrats weirdly boast of the subordination of the Constitution to international statutes. Our governors and mayors in blue states and cities take neo-Confederate vows to oppose the national government’s right to protect its own property, to direct its own employees, and to enforce our shared federal laws.

Over a decade ago, some 600 “sanctuary cities” declared that they were immune from the full enforcement of federal law. They further boasted that they would not hand over illegal aliens, detained by state or local authorities, to federal agents.

These were strange threats. Not long ago, at the 1992 and 1996 Democratic conventions, liberal grandees like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi had vowed to stop all would-be illegal aliens from unlawfully entering the U.S. Apparently, they all flipped to open borders when spiraling numbers turned the undocumented into a new Democratic constituency.

Moreover, being the left, their loud nullificationist vows were, of course, purely political and never principled.

Once, an exasperated Arizona governor, Jan Brewer, had beseeched the Obama administration in vain to enforce its own federal laws at the southern border. In frustration, she finally sought ways to use her own state’s resources to do what Obama refused.

And the reaction of the Obama administration?

It was certainly not gratitude for Brewer’s efforts to enforce federal law. Instead, the Obama crowd sued her. It successfully sought out left-wing judges to stay her state’s efforts.

How strange that our current “principled” district judges once ruled that states could not interfere with federal border policing—even in cases where the federal government was illegally refusing to enforce its own laws.

But now they’ve become neo-Confederates who routinely favor states blocking the federal government when it is finally fulfilling its constitutional duties.

Of course, if any rural red county decided that it could nullify the federal government’s laws governing handgun registration or EPA regulations, the projectionist left would deem them insurrectionary new Confederates and send in the FBI.

Coup Bluster

In Trump’s first term, some retired four-star admirals and generals—Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice be damned—talked of a sitting U.S. President Trump leaving office, the “sooner the better”—whatever that meant. Others libeled him as a “liar” and “Mussolini,” his policies comparable to those of the executioners at Auschwitz.

Some retired lieutenant colonels in 2020 even publicly advocated using military units to confront presidential security details. Did they want an armed showdown to forcibly remove Trump from the Oval Office? And in their madness, they bragged about the purported greater lethality of their army friends to defeat the president’s supporters or security details: “Trump’s little green men, so intimidating to lightly armed federal law enforcement agents, step aside and fade away, realizing they would not constitute a good morning’s work for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne.”

Do we remember the Obama-era Pentagon lawyer who, eleven days into the first Trump administration, speculated in print about how to remove an elected President Trump? She offered up the choices of Trump removal by either the 25th Amendment, the impeachment process, or a military coup: “[A] possibility [for removing President Trump] is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup…”

We also remember Gen. Mark Milley, the recent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

He once apparently diagnosed Commander-in-Chief Trump as unhinged.

So Milley took it upon himself to warn his communist Chinese counterpart that during any existential crisis, the People’s Liberation Army head would be first contacted by Milley—if Milley ever felt Trump was too erratic to be obeyed (in Milley’s nonprofessional medical judgment).

So Milley reported his call as follows: “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”

Milley apparently also decided that he was exempt from obeying federal laws.

As JCS chair, he also violated laws governing the chain of command. He unlawfully directed regional commanders to report to him first, should they receive a direct presidential order deemed lunatic by Milley. Yet the legal chain of command mandated that subordinate theater commanders report to, and receive presidential orders via, the Secretary of Defense.

Later, ex-generals like Milley and John Kelly routinely and emphatically blasted ex-President Trump as a “fascist.”

“Fascist” was just the sort of dangerous hyperbole that the left so often has warned us can prompt the unstable—like a Thomas Crooks or Ryan Routh—to emerge from their creepy shadows to “save the republic.”

Fort Sumter?

Democratic officials are also currently calling for organized and state-sanctioned opposition to the federal government, in near-Bleeding Kansas or Fort Sumter insurrectionary fashion.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson claims he will use his city resources to actively thwart ICE duties. In deranged fashion, he threatens to call in the UN to prevent federal law enforcement. He apparently treats the Constitution as nothing, as if Johnson were elected not by fellow citizens but by global voters from Iran to North Korea.

Johnson’s idiocy is no mere boast: when a trapped convoy of ICE vehicles was recently besieged by violent protesters, local Chicago-area police were told to stand down and let ICE fight its own way out.

In Portland, the local police sometimes advise violent Antifa-related protesters on strategies for their anti-ICE street activities, presumably to help them avoid arrest.

Consider the blather of the increasingly disturbed octogenarian Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

She recently boasted that “Trump is ‘a vile creature, the worst thing on the face of the Earth.” Then she doubled down and giggled that she “could have done much worse.”

But what exact epithet could Pelosi mean that is “much worse” than “vile” and “the worst thing on earth”?

The ‘vilest creature in the cosmos’?

Pelosi, remember, as Speaker of the House, set an embarrassing historic precedent by tearing up on national television the State of the Union address of the President of the United States when the text, as is customary, was ceremoniously presented to her by Trump. Should that now become a normal part of all SOTU addresses?

Recently, in a veritable paean to Jefferson Davis, Pelosi warned that federal agents might be arrested on her home turf if her state officers determine whether their enforcement of federal law violates California statutes.

If Pelosi’s confrontation materializes, will they use force?

Mayor-elect Zoran Mamdani has boasted in the past that he will soon override federal law as mayor of New York and arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he arrive at the UN headquarters in New York.

But what if the federal government says, “NO!” Will Mamdani then call in the NYPD?

Note, Mamdani did not issue a comparable threat to the communist Chinese UN delegations, whose government oversees a million Uyghurs in work camps, nor to the Nigerians who have allowed Islamic terrorists to kill over 150,000 Christians, nor to Vladimir Putin, who invaded Ukraine, causing over 1.5 million casualties in the greatest European slaughterhouse since World War II.

Instead, Mamdani appeals to a superior “international law.” In his unconstitutional mind, world law supersedes his own government’s constitutional authority.

As a de facto insurrectionist, Mamdani would claim that international human rights activists, or the International Criminal Court (?), deserve greater legal authority inside the U.S. than do Americans’ own elected federal government.

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