What the ****?
“I have a message tonight for Merrick Garland and Jack Smith and Joe Biden — and the guys back there in the fake news media, you should listen up as well, this one is for you,” Ms. Lake said. “If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A.” The crowd cheered.
Ms. Lake added: “That’s not a threat, that’s a public service announcement.”
This is dangerous, but it’s tolerated, even encouraged, here. Contrast with Scotland, and the recent arrest of Nicola Sturgeon, Former First Minister, Scotland:
Her (Nicola Sturgeon) arrest also means the case is now active for the purposes of the Contempt of Court Act 1981.
It means everyone has to be careful about what they say to avoid potentially prejudicing any future trial.
This applies to politicians and members of the public on social media as well as broadcasters and newspapers and the rules around what can and cannot be said about this - or any other - case are interpreted much more strictly in Scotland than in some other parts of the world.
Scotland is not the United States, for example, where pundits merrily speculate about the guilt or innocence of a suspect long before the case goes anywhere near a jury.
Convictions for contempt of court can be punishable by up to two years in prison and/or an unlimited fine.
If the US would pivot and provide safeguards such as this, freedom of speech is still protected, but the wild, inflammatory remarks like Lake, Trump and others make would be squashed.
We need to stop ignoring this and listen. They are announcing their intentions.
President Biden needs to abandon his current strategy of being centrist and trying to negotiate with people who want to drag our country into a second civil war. Instead, he should be signing an executive order that authorizes Federal law enforcement agencies to start treating these people like the domestic terrorists that they are. Threats to national security like this would actually be taken more seriously, and we would have more tools to respond to them, if they were being made on foreign soil. Instead, insurrectionists like Kari Lake are allowed to hide behind the First Amendment and claim “free speech”, even though their goal is to set fire to the very Constitution that currently protects them.
Inaction at this point only gives the lunatic fringe an opportunity to organize, and we’ve already seen the consequences of inaction play out once. There’s no doubt in my mind that a lot of this is meaningless bluster and rhetoric, but at least a handful of people will actually take these calls to violence seriously. We need to be asking ourselves, how much damage do we want to let these people do in the name of free speech, before we finally recognize their domestic extremism as being just as big a threat to our country as foreign terrorism?
I agree that something needs to be done but wouldn’t issuing an EO be a slippery slope? I mean it’s not far fetched that whoever the next R President is could maliciously do the same to left/liberal groups. I’m really hoping '24 ends up being a a sweeping win for the Dems so more permanent actions can be taken but that also depends on the Dems pulling their collective heads out of their asses.
I don’t think the slippery slope argument is good enough to justify continued inaction at this point. Could a Republican president try to use a domestic terrorism EO against liberal groups? Yes. But they’d have a hard time finding any liberal groups calling for gun owners to take retributive action against the government over decisions they don’t agree with. The EO would have to be worded so that only groups that make terroristic threats would be targeted, and that kind of conduct simply doesn’t exist outside of the MAGA death cult.
If Congress would actually back legislation that would classify the Proud Boys or similar groups as terrorist organizations, I’d be advocating for that instead. But they’ve already blocked one such attempt, and I firmly believe that we’ve reached the point where continued tolerance of violent rhetoric is going to get people killed.
It’s just so crazy and unnerving with the position we’re in right now. For the record I don’t actually think left/liberal groups would be targeted right now but the few die hard Republicans I’m loosely acquainted with probably have zero problems with groups that aren’t them being targeted and that’s what worries me. Such a precarious spot we’re in. I agree I think things are going to get worse before they get better unless some serious actions are taken.
