On Tuesday evening, in a 4-3 decision, the Colorado Supreme Court took the unprecedented step to exclude former President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 presidential Republican primary ballot. The court also prohibited the counting of any write-in votes for Trump, citing a violation of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Establishing the One-Party State (see also The Unprecedented Resort to Lawfare—Is it Desperation or Provocation?), I discuss the tactic of waging lawfare against one’s political enemies and review the many court cases against Trump. The Colorado Supreme Court’s actions are part of the lawfare strategy. Let’s take a look at it and what it means.
Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in the aftermath of the American Civil War and ratified on July 9, 1868, states, “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
The historical context of the Fourteenth Amendment is the Reconstruction era, a period following the Civil War during which the United States sought to address the aftermath of the conflict, rebuild the Southern states that had seceded, and redefine the status of newly freed slaves. The Fourteenth Amendment itself was a significant addition to the Constitution, designed to secure the civil rights of newly emancipated slaves and provide a constitutional foundation for the principle of equal protection under the law. Section 3 addressed issues related to individuals who had participated in insurrection or rebellion against the United States. For more on this, listen to the first several minutes of this podcast:
The primary purpose of Section 3 was to address concerns about the potential reentry into government positions of individuals who had actively participated in the Confederate rebellion during the Civil War. It targeted those who had taken an oath to support the US Constitution but had later engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States. In other words, it concerned traitors to the Union. The section aimed to prevent those with Confederate sympathies from holding public office unless Congress, by a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, chose to lift the disqualification.
In the Colorado decision, expected to be appealed by Trump’s legal team, the majority asserted that the former president had “engaged in insurrection” on January 6, 2021. As bizarre as this assertion is, the repetition of it has led to a growing sense that January 6 actually was actually such a thing, a false accusation that redefines the crime. This is coupled with the suggestion that acts the establishment dislikes “hide behind” the First Amendment. But Trump didn’t hide behind anything on January 6, 2021. Alongside tens of thousands of his fellow Americans, the President exercised his First Amendment rights of conscience, speech, assembly, and petition. The right to petition is one of the fundamental freedoms of all Americans. The people have the right to appeal to government in favor of or against processes/decisions/policies that affect them or in which they feel strongly.
Here’s the text of the First Amendment for your convenience: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The Fourteenth Amendment in no fashion abrogates this right, and Trump did nothing on January 6 that stood outside the scope of fundamental law.
What is more, January 6 was a police riot. Tossing into the crowd flash bang grenades, and firing upon the throng with rubber bullets and canisters of tear gas, the police instigated the violence outside the Capitol, while officers on the other side of the building invited protestors inside, where they milled about admiring the place and mostly staying within the velvet roped queue. Officers even invited the protestors into the chambers where legislators debate and vote—protestors adorned in patriotic garb and paraphernalia. Elsewhere, they murdered a veteran. Evidence is accumulating that these events were, at least in part, orchestrated by deep state elements of the US government. We know for a fact that Trump, through Kash Patel, chief of staff to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, requested National Guard troops to protect the Capitol four days before the supposed insurrection but was turned down but met resistance from then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the mayor of Washington DC Muriel Bowser. Patel has not been charged with perjury.
Whatever the details, that the police instigated a riot at the Capitol that day does not make the political rally that occurred in Washington DC earlier that day an insurrection. However you define the thing, Trump didn’t cause it. He insisted to the assembled that they “peacefully and patriotically make [their] voices heard.” He invoked the people’s right to petition the government when he said moments before, “We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.”
Chapman University’s Pete Simi, a sociologist who specializes in the study of far-right extremism, testified on Tuesday that, in the aftermath of President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, Trump spearheaded through the use of coded language an initiative to sway violent extremist factions, culminating in the assault on the Capitol. He highlighted, for example, the recurrent use of the term “1776” by Trump supporters leading up to January 6. According to Simi, such references constitute a “violent call for revolution” and exemplify the “doublespeak” employed by extremist groups and their associates to advocate for violence while maintaining plausible deniability. “Outsiders would perceive it with a certain meaning,” Simi explained, “but insiders would understand and interpret that word differently.” An abstract academic theory from an ideological worldview obsessed with right-wing politics now stands in place of fact.
During testimony, Simi was asked to examine various instances of Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric over the years. These instances included Trump’s assertion that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the clash between white supremacists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017; his encouragement of the “roughing up” of protesters at his campaign rallies; his alleged directive to the Proud Boys, an extremist group, to “stand back and stand by” during a 2020 presidential debate; a social media post urging supporters to assemble in DC on Jan. 6, which Trump predicted would be a “wild” event (he got that right). That the Charlottesville canard was given as an example betrays the objectivity of the Court’s expert witness. This is one of many canards promulgated by the corporate state media.
Recall that Charlottesville had already made the decision to remove the statue of Lee, following the democratic process through its city council. Protestors assembled to let their objection of the council’s actions be known. Counterprotestors, led by Antifa, assembled also, their goal to disrupt the First Amendment event (as they are wont to do). On the Monday before Trump’s press conference, demonstrators in Durham, NC, chose a more direct approach; they placed a rope around the neck of a Confederate soldier statue and toppled it. This was the context.
At that August 15, 2017 press conference, after condemning neo-Nazis (which the President had done numerous times before and continues to do), Trump correctly observed that not all the people as Charlottesville were white supremacists. The people had gathered “to protest the taking down of a statue of Robert E. Lee.” Many of my Tennessee friends and family are good people who object to the progressive erasure of history. We debate the removal of Confederate era statues, but they’re not bad people because we disagree. “So this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down,” Trump noted. “I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
The President noted the presence of Antifa, who came to the rally with clubs and other weapons and instigated the violence. A reporter objected, trying to distract from Antifa action: “You said there was hatred, there was violence on both sides.” “Yes,” Trump responded, “If you look at both sides—I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And if you reported it accurately, you would say.” As if the mere presence of neo-Nazis justified the violence actions of Antifa, a reporter shouted: “The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest.”
This is when Trump said, “Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves—and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group. Excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.” Across the media, Trump’s words were taken out of context to distort their meaning.
A reporter then said, rather ignorantly, “George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same,” whereupon Trump educated him: “George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down—excuse me, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him?”
The Colorado District Court’s ruling, which arbitrarily aligned with several arguments presented by those opposing Trump’s eligibility under Section 3, is being reported as having dealt a significant blow to Trump’s campaign. Notably, this case represents the first successful disqualification challenge against Trump in court. In dissent, the minority of the Colorado Supreme Court objected on procedural grounds, echoing the reasons cited by other courts that have dismissed Fourteenth Amendment challenges, mostly over the lack of due process, i.e., when was Trump convicted of insurrection?
Over nine such challenges have failed nationwide due to procedural inconsistencies, but also over about the judiciary’s authority to enforce the ban. Those keen on disqualifying Trump are quick to note that in none of these cases has the rejection of the plaintiffs’ case been on the basis that the former president did not incite or engage in insurrection. David Becker, the director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, insisted, “The three minority Justices of the Colorado Supreme Court didn’t make any ruling with regard to the insurrection.“
If you’re wondering why Democrats are in such a frenzy to stop Trump by extra-electoral means, it’s because they know he’s the front runner and if he wins (again) he will do several things that may very likely end the establishment’s globalist project of managed decline. He is almost sure to launch an investigation into the 2020 election, as well as the 2022 election, the finds of which may result in massive delegitimization of the hegemonic system. Couple this with an investigation of January 6, 2021 and you can see the writing on the wall.
Trump will also end forever wars and pull the United States out of WHO, NATO, and other entanglements with elements of the international system. The military-industrial complex, the medical-industrial complex, and the rest of the web of corporate power stands to loose not billions but trillions of dollars. He will deconstruct the administrative state and its technocratic apparatus, and sharply curtail the permanent political class that currently runs the government without democratic input (the Heritage Foundation has a plan ready to go; see Project 2025). The deep state (DHS, ATF, FBI, CIA, etc.) is in real trouble. He will sharply curtail immigration, which will in turn sharply curtail the corporate strategy of superexploitation of cheap foreign labor and the use of that labor to drive down the wages of native workers, as well as disrupt the electoral strategy of tilting demography towards support for the Democratic Party.
There is more in store for the establishment if Trump is reelected. But there’s one thing that truly terrifies them: the disruption of the pseudo-history they have constructed over the several decades since assuming control over the means of intellectual production. Trump already put the elites on notice with the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, dissolved by Biden by executive order on his first day in office. What Trump sought to accomplish with this commission, established early November 2020, was a more accurate and objective history curriculum. The progressive tactic of historical revision clearly troubling him.
Trumps could see in the historical revisionism of, for example, the 1619 Project, parallels with George Orwell’s warning in Nineteen Eighty-Four, spoken through the character of Syme, a colleague of the protagonist Winston. Syme works on the development of the Newspeak language, which is used by the totalitarian regime in the novel to control thought and eliminate dissent. He warns of a relentless process wherein “every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered.”He emphasizes the ongoing nature of this transformation, stating, “And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.”
The question Trump raises is this: Is this the path a free people follow? Orwell’s wisdom suggests that Trump was astute in raising concerns about the trajectory of these changes. As president, asking Americans to reflect on the consequences of upending our cultural foundation and altering historical narratives, Trump exposed the revisionism: “You are changing history, you’re changing culture.” We all know who the revisionists are. And some of us know what ends they seek.
Is it any wonder elites are inviting the worst possible outcome for the man they despise by alluding to the fate of Julius Caesar ? Tim Elliot, in a November 2020 article for Politico warned: “America Is Eerily Retracing Rome’s Steps to a Fall. Will It Turn Around Before It’s Too Late?” Never mind that Trump sought and seeks the opposite of what Caesar represented, tagged by Elliot a “dangerous populist.” Focus on the fact that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March (March 15), 44 BCE, in the Theatre of Pompey in Rome, by a group of Roman senators, led by Gaius Cassius Longinus and Marcus Junius Brutus. Focus on the fact that the assassination of Caesar played a pivotal role in the downfall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire. Now remember how, night after night, in New York City’s Public Theater production of William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar in Central Park, the conspirators stabbed to death Donald Trump in effigy.
So far, with everything they have thrown at the man, dragging him through show trials in a federal and multi-state coordinated constellation of lawfare actions, now removing him from Colorado state ballot (with other states exploring the same), Trump continues rising in the polls. I’m worried. American history is not unblemished by assassination.
On the night of April 14, 1865, while Lincoln was attending a play at Ford’s Theatre, John Wilkes Booth, a Democrat, entered the president’s private theater box and shot him in the back of the head. Booth’s goal was to remove an obstacle to the reconstitution of the Slavocracy, which was resurrected as the Corporate State only a few decades later. There have been other assassination, as well, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, who represented threats to the deep state, being the most notable in the Twentieth Century. My barber suspects the hesitancy in the present case is that the man is not merely seeking the presidency but is the leader of a social moment, in which case extreme action risks making a martyr. I suspect he’s right.
freedom and reason 