Severian the Autarch

I've been going through the Democracy Files leaks @DataRepublican has been releasing, and whether or not any of this ultimately meets the legal bar for seditious conspiracy. The plan these organizers are discussing doesn't hold together unless you assume their "non-violence" language is masking their true intentions from public consumption. Their red line is the Insurrection Act as a potential triggering action, there may be others, but all of the potential triggering acts that have been hinted at are lawful actions. Nobody invokes the Insurrection Act over people walking down the street with signs. It doesn't happen. The Guard deployments in LA and Portland last year to counteract violent protestors weren't even the Insurrection Act. The only scenario where it actually gets invoked is one where there is sustained violence that local authorities can't or won't control. So if your entire plan is built around what happens after the Insurrection Act is invoked, you are building a plan around mass violence happening. You can say "non-violence" as many times as you want. The plan doesn't work without the violence. That's a wink and a nod tactic to cya legally. But understand the logic flow of what comes next. In the transcripts published by The Post Millennial and WECU, the talk is about governors becoming "the leading governing authority," about how to "wall off these illegitimate individuals," and about moving "into an extra-constitutional process." In other words, the federal response has been labeled illegitimate before anything has even happened. That's where this starts to matter legally. The seditious conspiracy statute covers conspiring to oppose by force the authority of the United States, or to prevent, hinder or delay by force the execution of any law. The Supreme Court said back in 1887 that if federal officers carrying out the law are forcibly opposed by people who conspired for that purpose, that is exactly what the statute was written for. If violence breaks out, and the federal government steps in to protect communities, and these same organizers then use ongoing violent protests to tell governors and the public that the federal government is no longer legitimate, that bleeds out of activism and into something far more serious. Advocating an idea isn't a crime necessarily and the courts have been clear about that. But there is a big difference between teaching an abstract idea and lining up the lawyers, the bail money and the governing plan for the day after. Maria Stephan, who co-leads the Horizons Project, the group that co-wrote the toolkit for these organizers, wrote in 2020 that calling the George Floyd protests violent riots "is simply untrue" and that the looting and vandalism were "a minute portion" of it, "largely committed by opportunists." Erica Chenoweth, whose 3.5% rule keeps coming up in these circles, co-wrote that claims the protests were overtaken by rioting "are false." Paul Zeitz wrote last year that troops had been "deployed against peaceful protestors" in LA. So they are obviously hiding behind legalese to cover their tracks while having a background of defining violent protests as non-violent. All of this tells you exactly how they'll describe the violence when it comes. “It isn't really violence, it's a tiny percentage, it's opportunists, and the real threat is the federal response.” They're being evasive and misleading, intentionally. The question now is what the full archive shows. If anyone on these calls is planning to physically resist federal law enforcement once it shows up, or keeps backing these movements after they've clearly turned violent, that's not politics anymore. And it’s worth repeating this last point. If the organizers of this say “peaceful protest” now, but advocate for advancing their plan to delegitimize the authority of the United States government after violent protests break out, they will be exposed to more obvious legal scrutiny.