This is September 18, 2021. Will it be another day of infamy, or just 9/18/21?
It's interesting that this date falls just one week after the 20th anniversary of only the second time in our national history that our homeland has been attacked by forces of another country.
One week ago everybody who is anybody in the United States was attending a 9/11 memorial ceremony. The latest former president was not. The Orange Golem was announcing a pay-per-view boxing match and flogging his Great Lie between blows.
Are you listening, Donald? This is you we’re talking about. You, the utter disgrace to your family and blight on your country, the most egregious waste of space in this land's history.
Yet people whose minds have been infected with your filth may gather in the national capital and other cities around the country today seeking justice for those who may not deserve it. They come in the name of justice, but seek amnesty.
Justice involves due process, with the emphasis on process. Facts are gathered, statements taken, pros and cons weighed, past offenses considered, juries empaneled; it moves deliberately, not precipitately, to ensure fairness to all. Your people just want all the jail doors to open.
The genuinely fake news outlets, Fox, OAN, Newsmax, et al., have been spreading lies to the gullible. The usual suspects claim that arrestees from the January 6 uprising are held as political prisoners in 23-hour solitary confinement, denied medical care and legal counsel, trapped in a gulag somewhere, blah-blah-blah ad nauseam.
It's not true. The people who participated in the January 6 riot violently attacked the seat of their own government, seeking to kidnap, injure or kill its leaders, to disrupt its constitutional processes, to deny the will of the majority of its people.
In many countries they would be summarily executed.
But they are Americans, and the very system they denounce and seek to overthrow protects them and provides them justice as it does all its citizens.
Those who come out today may do so under cover of the First Amendment right of the American people to gather together and to seek redress. Let’s just make sure we all understand the exact phrasing of that blessing of liberty: we have "the right . . . peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
We have the conditional right to gather, and that condition is “peaceably.” We have the right to petition for redress of grievances. A petition is a formal request, not a demand.
The second this gathering becomes violent it will be in violation of the Constitution and its members will be subject to arrest for rioting or insurrection.
The far-right protesters who may gather today do so in the name of people who broke the most sacred of laws, and who were responsible for the deaths of others trying to defend their country. They claim they come in the memory of insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, who was shot while attempting to attack members of Congress.
Let's be clear: the police officers who died as a result of the January 6 insurrection were patriots; Ashli Babbitt was a traitor.
--- Diogenes, 9/18/2021