Insurrection?

An insurrection is a violent uprising against an authority or government. This nation itself was formed from a successful insurrection against the government of England. Since then, the next major attempted insurrection resulted in our Civil War. After that, the only insurrection that took an active, organized form was the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021-- an effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and hand it to Donald Trump.

Now, however, this administration appears to be moving toward labeling anyone a domestic terrorist, who is out of favor with the current president Donald Trump while turning a militarized national force loose to bludgeon citizens into compliance-- or to use whatever means are deemed necessary to silence or subdue them. It begins to resemble an army of occupation.

Those who oppose what this administration is doing to the nation-- its direction now determined by Project 2025-- and who attempt to speak up or resist in any way, are being intimidated, threatened, and targeted in an attempt to impose a new national structure on the populace.

The Trump administration is building detention centers as fast as they can, filling them now with detained immigrants, but leaving them just as readily available for so-called "domestic terrorists".

The problem is that the anonymity provided to unidentified, masked, armed federal agents-- driving unmarked vehicles and often without producing warrants or legal documentation-- allows them to detain whomever they choose-- or simply terrorize the general public. Those detained are whisked away to undisclosed detention centers, often transported to locations scattered across the nation and at times deported without due process. All of this is occurring alongside massive funding increases to Homeland Security and the rapid expansion of a domestic enforcement apparatus.

Any opposition can be taken as evidence of an attempted insurrection. How ironic.

The people protesting are not a single organized group with a unified purpose, but all are shocked by this show of force from a government they believed was there to protect them. They are individual citizens with a wide range of motivations, from peaceful opposition, often there to witness and record events, to anger stemming from their personal experiences of abuse of power directed at them, to those who have been long ignored and written off by society, some of whom now simply want to be heard or to strike back. The restraint and lack of violence shown by the public is, under these conditions, remarkable.

This administration believes that if it pushes hard enough, eventually someone will fight back-- providing the excuse needed to invoke the Insurrection Act, granting the president even more extraordinary powers, including the use of military force against the civilian population.

We have arrived at this moment by steadily transferring political power to those with the most money, to oligarchs and corporations-- through tax policy, Supreme Court rulings, and the erosion of checks and balances-- while allowing the presidency to gain control of the legislative and judicial branches, creating what amounts to a unitary executive. This does not even account for the Court granting extraordinary immunity to a sitting president.

Once the Insurrection Act is invoked, you can forget about the possibility of meaningful midterm elections.

The blitzkrieg will be over.

And we will be an occupied nation, ruled by an alien ideology that does not support democracy.