The Reichstag Fire of the Democrats
A pretext for political terror.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
There are thousands of soldiers outside Congress and political terror inside its halls. That political terror isn’t coming from a QAnon Shaman who only eats organic food, but from the Democrats who are using a manufactured state of emergency to purge the opposition.
Democrats deployed 26,000 troops to Washington D.C. at a cost of $500 million. Thousands of soldiers, authorized to use deadly force as they were forbidden to do either at the border or during the Black Lives Matter assault on the White House, will stay to fight an imaginary threat.
While walls, razor wire, and military encampments rise outside the halls of government, inside them the Democrats have unleashed a true coup. Protesters have “stormed” Congress before, from both the Left and the Right, which cannot be called overthrowing the government. But Democrats began their own overthrow by launching an unconstitutional post-office impeachment of President Trump for speaking at a peaceful protest and a push to remove Senate members who objected to the stolen election by abusing the 14th Amendment.
The fake emergency has been extended to March. The FBI continues falsely claiming that there is some sort of threat that requires 7,500 soldiers to conduct a military occupation of the nation’s capital. The FBI’s claims that this threat would occur during “First Amendment-protected protests” has a massive credibility problem because there have been no protests in D.C.
Even though these protests have yet to emerge for over a month, the occupation goes on.
The fascist theater of the military occupation is a pretext for a political occupation with Democrats inciting political purges in legislatures, both state and national, of any Republicans who criticised the stolen election and called for accountability on behalf of the voters. A purge is also underway of the military and law enforcement to root out “extremists” from the same forces that the Democrats have deployed to intimidate Americans and suppress political dissent.
Having pulled off a coup, the Democrats are seeking partisan political control over the military.
There are plenty of precedents for a political faction declaring a false state of emergency, occupying the center of government, and unleashing a campaign of political repression.
Those precedents don’t come from America. And they have no place in the United States.
In 1933, the Nazis used the Reichstag fire to begin purging the political opposition. The fire in the German parliament building was exploited by the Nazis to seize control and purge the opposition, beginning with the Communists, and then moving on to everyone else.
A year later the Communists imitated their National Socialist comrades with the Kirov assassination. The Reichstag Fire Decree and the Great Purge both blamed the inciting incidents on the political opposition and used them as a pretext for an emergency, for endless investigations, and for criminalizing dissent against two formerly weak leaders: Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
The Reichstag fire was used to suppress the authority, independence, and democracy of the Weimar Republic’s legislature in the name of protecting it from assault. The Nazis dismantled the Reichstag’s ability to meaningfully govern, purged dissenting parties, and gave the National Socialist movement and its officials complete control over Germany at every level of power.
By the time the Nazis were done exploiting the Reichstag fire, the Reichstag had been destroyed in a way that no fire, no matter how hot or severe, could have done.
The Kirov assassination eliminated Stalin’s greatest rival, and was then used by the Communist dictator to purge all his remaining rivals in a systematic process of trials and executions. Rivals were forced to accept “moral responsibility” for Kirov’s death in an ominous parallel to the way that Republicans are told to accept moral responsibility for a “coup” invented by the media.
The Democrats manufactured a permanent state of emergency and blamed its existence on their political opponents. That emergency has as little reality as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who claimed that she was nearly murdered while being in an entirely different building. But the political terror and the purges being pushed in the name of that emergency are all too real.
History offers ominous precedents as the Democrats engage in a military occupation of D.C. and seek to purge political opponents by treating opposition as, in their own words, “seditious”.
Like their National Socialist and Communist ideological forebears, the Fascist Left has spent the past four years inventing new and undefined political crimes, beginning with “disinformation” and escalating to “incitement” and “sedition”, which lack any resemblance to normative legal usage.
Democrats keep claiming that the First Amendment doesn’t permit “shouting fire in a crowded theater”, even while they’re shouting, “Reichstag fire” in the crowded theater of government.
Nothing in President Trump’s speech could be described as a call to violence. Nor can anything that Senator Ted Cruz or any other Senate Republican said be described as incitement or sedition. President Trump and Senate Republicans were far more careful in their words about the stolen election of 2020 than the Democrats were in falsely claiming that the 2016 election was stolen. (Not to mention the 2000 and 2004 elections which they had challenged.)
When House Democrats universally voted to call for removing President Trump under the 25th Amendment, they engaged in a coup. But just as the Democrats detached the 25th Amendment from its actual meaning and redefined “unable” to mean politically, not medically, unable, they’ve been redefining legal terms, politically to invent an entire set of new political crimes.
The invention of undefined political crimes parallels Stalin’s use of “socially dangerous” to convict, try, and execute political opponents without ever defining a clear legal meaning.
But it had an obvious political meaning.
All the political crimes invented by the Democrats really translate into political opposition.
The Democrat uses of “incitement” and “sedition” are political crimes that mean opposing them. That’s why it was patriotic of them to question every single election won by a Republican in this century, but why it’s “seditious” of Republicans to question the 2020 election. “Incitement” is a Stalinist formulation which invents a political crime and then connects all political opposition to it.
“Disinformation” means any information or opinion whose distribution the Democrats oppose.
"Have you heard what happened in Germany? Some fellow that Hitler, knows how to treat his political opponents," Stalin had told the Politburo about Hitler's purge during the Night of the Long Knives. By year’s end, Stalin began his own purge. Biden has profited by his example.
All of this was not a reaction to a single incident. Like the Reichstag fire and the Kirov assassination, the Democrats had spent generations criminalizing political dissent.
The Biden purges have their origins in the FDR administration’s attempt to criminalize political dissent using false claims of a secret shadow conspiracy of industrialists against the New Deal, all the way up to more recent efforts by the Clinton administration to link the militia movement to “right-wing talk radio” to create a political boogeyman, and Obama’s criminalization of the Tea Party as a dangerous and violent movement that was about to usher in a new civil war.
The profiling of military veterans, the suppression of conservative political speech, and the invention of political crimes were rampant under Clinton and Obama. Now they’re back.
The Obama administration had already abused national security tools to spy on its political opponents, from the Trump campaign to pro-Israel activists, by inventing yet another set of political crimes that harkened back to the Hitler and Stalin era, and accusing them of conspiring with foreign powers. The Biden administration is now preparing to step up the same campaign under the guise of fighting sedition. After being part of an administration which abused the National Security Council to target Republicans over accusations of foreign contacts, Biden will use the NSC to combat “domestic extremism”. The pretexts for the emergency justifying domestic repression continue to change, but the repression remains entirely consistent.
The Democrats have only begun exploiting their permanent state of emergency. And they intend to use it to usher in a one-party state while purging the political opposition. Russia and Germany show us how these purges by megalomaniacal fascists will end once they are set into motion.
Republicans must push back against the occupation of Washington D.C. and against a fake state of emergency whose goal, like those of the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Great Purge, is the suspension of political norms and the rule of law by keeping the people afraid all the time.
It’s a lot easier to stop a purge before it starts than to try to pause it once it’s underway.
There is no room in America for show trials, government surveillance of political opponents, and smearing political dissent as incitement, sedition, and domestic terrorism. The only emergency here is the leftist plot against the Constitution under the guise of manufactured emergencies.
The only way that emergency will end is when the Democrats stop inventing emergencies to bury the Bill of Rights under a stack of executive orders, razor wire, and political purges.
BLM's Nobel Peace Prize Nomination
Rewarding the destruction of a nation — in the name of “peace.”
These are exciting times for Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its comrades. First, they spent most of 2020 raking in countless millions of dollars in donations as compensation for turning dozens of American cities into war zones—an activity they describe as “racial justice” activism. Next, they helped get two their two most influential supporters on Earth, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, installed in the White House. And now, they have been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
The nomination was put forth by the Norwegian parliamentarian Petter Eide, who lauds BLM for its noble “struggle against racism and racially motivated violence.” In light of the fact that Mr. Eide has represented the Socialist Left party in Parliament since 2017, it is no surprise that he should be impressed by the agendas and tactics of BLM, an organization founded by three self-identified “trained Marxist” revolutionaries: Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. Under their leadership, BLM has perfected the longtime Marxist strategy of portraying the U.S. as a racist cesspool in desperate need of fundamental transformation. Presumably Mr. Eide believes that such a message, if repeated with sufficient frequency and passion, will promote “peace.”
Perhaps he also believes that yet another Marxist ideal advocated by BLM—the dissolution of “the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”—will likewise further the cause of “peace.”
While conceding that “people message me to say that BLM is a violent organization,” Mr. Eide dutifully explains that “if some elements of the movement may have been violent, that is not a reason to blame the whole movement.”
Thus, it apparently meant nothing when, in June 2020, BLM’s New York chairman, Hawk Newsome, exhorted African Americans to arm themselves and candidly declared that “we pattern ourselves after the Black Panthers”—a Marxist-Leninist gang that in the 1960s and '70s waged armed warfare against the police and engaged in all manner of criminality: drug dealing, pimping, rape, extortion, assault, arson and murder. Commending the BLM rioters who were tearing apart city after city, Newsome explained: “People want to destroy because they’re angry and they’re frustrated. They want to go out and grab all those things that America told them that they should have, but they couldn’t have.” “If this country doesn’t give us what we want,” he said later in June, “then we will burn down this system and replace it.”
One can almost picture Mr. Newsome, in BLM's name, tearfully clutching that Nobel Peace Prize to his breast.
By the end of June 2020, at least 14,000 protesters and rioters in 49 separate U.S. cities had been arrested at BLM uprisings during the five weeks since George Floyd's death. As many as 26 million people had already participated in BLM demonstrations from coast to coast, prompting The New York Times to run a headline that read: “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History.” Moreover, the 2020 riots were projected to become—in terms of losses due to theft, fire, vandalism, and other forms of destruction—the costliest sustained acts of civil disorder in American history. On top of this, approximately 25 people were killed amid the 2020 mayhem.
All that violence, coupled with the fecklessness of Democrat political leaders who refused to condemn BLM and its activities and rhetoric, had consequences that were beyond horrific. As it became increasingly clear that Democrats across the country had no intention of standing up in defense of the police, and no intention of rejecting BLM's “defund the police” initiative which was gaining traction among the left, law-enforcement officers nationwide understood that they were on their own; that their careers, their pensions, indeed their very lives, could suddenly go up in smoke if they were to find themselves in a situation where they needed to use deadly physical force against a black criminal suspect. Thus the police became increasingly reluctant to engage criminals except where absolutely necessary. This, in conjunction with the ever-growing rage, self-righteousness, and sense of invincibility among violent criminals, resulted in a massive increase in homicides throughout urban America.
Chicago was hit particularly hard. “We’ve never seen anything like it at all,” said Max Kapustin, the senior research director at the University of Chicago Crime Lab. “I don’t even know how to put it into context. It’s beyond anything that we’ve ever seen before.”
New York City was likewise turned into a cauldron of violence by BLM hatred. June 2020, the month immediately following the month in which George Floyd had died, became New York’s bloodiest month since 1996.
Nationwide, homicide rates jumped by an astonishing 30 percent from 2019 to 2020, a statistically unprecedented occurrence. New Orleans-based crime analyst Jeff Asher called the trend “a symptom of this concept of police legitimacy, where police pull back because people are upset and questioning their legitimacy.”
In an important September 2020 report, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit organization that tracks conflict in every part of the world, identified 1,143 post-George Floyd protests that had featured physical violence of some sort, such as looting, armed attacks, arson, rock-throwing, clashes with police, the use of pepper spray, etc. Of these violent incidents, 84 percent involved BLM.
Of the aforementioned 1,143 incidents, 582 were coded as full-blown riots whose leaders and participants could be definitively identified. Fully 95 percent of the 582 riots involved BLM. One of them occurred during the Jewish festival of Shavuot on May 30, 2020, when BLM members carried out a pogrom in Fairfax, a Los Angeles community largely populated by Orthodox Jews. On that day, the BLMers not only vandalized five synagogues and three Jewish schools, but also looted most of the Jewish businesses along Fairfax Avenue. Moreover, they chanted “Fuck the police and kill the Jews.”
None of these facts, of course, mean much to Petter Eide and other defenders of Black Lives Matter, who take pains to remind us that BLM events are “mostly peaceful.” That's quite a trick: a “mostly peaceful” movement that just happens to have been responsible for more property destruction during 2020 than any other uprisings in American history, plus at least two-dozen deaths.
But to truly put Black Lives Matter's devotion to “peace” in its proper perspective, we must remember that at all BLM events, the participants take time to formally invoke the words of the organization's acknowledged heroine, Assata Shakur. They are words that Shakur once wrote in a letter titled “To My People”: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” (Shakur drew the fourth sentence from the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.)
Shakur is a lifelong, committed Marxist revolutionary, a former Black Panther, a convicted cop-killer, and a onetime member of a Panther offshoot known as the Black Liberation Army (BLA), an organization that was tied to the murders of more than ten police officers between 1970-73. As Jordan Schachtel writes in Conservative Review, Shakur “was the leader of a notorious New York City BLA cell that hunted down police officers for brutal assassinations.” Former Assistant FBI Director John Miller describes Shakur as having been “the soul of the Black Liberation Army.”
Shakur's greatest fame came as a result of what she did at approximately 12:45 a.m. on May 2, 1973. That morning, she shot New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster twice before her gun jammed. With Foerster on the ground, wounded and helpless, Shakur grabbed the trooper’s own firearm and blasted two fatal shots into his head, execution-style. The 34-year-old Foerster was survived by a wife and a three-year-old son. Shakur, for her part, escaped from prison in 1979 and has lived the past 42 years as a fugitive in Communist Cuba, under the continuous protection of Fidel and Raul Castro. And today, she – and she alone – is the person whom Black Lives Matter reveres above anyone else in this big, wide world. Assata Shakur is the soul of BLM, just as she was the soul of the BLA.
And so, with that in mind, let us congratulate Black Lives Matter and its acolytes for their Nobel Peace Prize nomination. If they end up winning the award, their achievements can be forever recalled in the same breath as those of 1994 Nobel Laureate Yasser Arafat, the prolific Jew-killer who likewise devoted his life to fomenting hatred, chaos, and suffering on a massive scale—all in the good name of “peace,” of course.
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