Let me get this out of the way right up front, this is a response to a diary by a RedState member and not by RedState, any of its editors or front page contributors. I hope and really do suspect that Erick Erickson and RedState's editors do not support this diary. But – it went unchallenged and in fact has as of this writing received two recommendations and supportive comments from at least three other users.
With the disclaimer out of the way, poster jkilgore1776 openly calls for revolution in America. He starts with
When will it start? How will it start? Who will start it? How will it end?
What am I talking about? The next American Revolution.
More below the curly thing (which will undoubtedly confuse future reads of this diary after the next version of DKos replaces it with something else).
Following the great tradition of Thomas Jefferson, jkilgore1776 enumerates the grievances against the government – but of course he doesn't. I guess they are self evident and don't really need to be listed.
I am not going to re-cap all the things that the Federal Government has done to us, is doing to us and will be doing to us in the future but when will the American people reach the breaking point and take action? Our government is like a runaway train that is going to crash. It is just a matter of when, not if unless something is done.
These are the reasons we need a New American Revolution (capitalized presumable because it is a registered trademark of 'New American Revolution' a whole owed subsidiary of the Koch brothers. :) )
After the obligatory Reagan quote, our diarist waxes poetic on the great sacrifices our Founders made. Along the way he hits two of my pet peeves. He misattributed the quote “Indeed we must all hang together, otherwise we shall most assuredly hang separately,” to Benjamin Franklin. There is no record of Franklin actually having said that, and in fact the comparative pun goes back at least as far back as Dryden's 1717 play The Spanish Fryar.
The second thing that always bugs me is his assertion that
They were under the rule of the King of England and the strongest military in the world but the lure of freedom and individual liberty drove them to do something the world had never seen before.
[Bold text added by me]
Has no one ever heard of Oliver Cromwell? In the middle of the 17th century, Cromwell and his army throw King Charles I off the thrown and in fact executed him, setting up the Commonwealth of England governed by the Romp Parliament - and without a king. You can say what you want to about Oliver Cromwell, and I am unlikely to disagree, but he did the unthinkable more than one hundred years before the American colonists. If you think this is not important to American history, consider the following quote from John Adams.
[In April 1786 John Adams hosted Thomas Jefferson in London. Here, they have visited Shakespeare's home, where Jefferson was deeply moved, and now are surveying Cromwell's battle sites.]
"At Edgehill, scene of the first great battle of the English civil war, and later at Worchester, the setting of Cromwell's final victory over Charles II [sic], in the year 1651, it was Adams' turn to be deeply moved. This was history he knew in detail. Here were "scenes where freemen had fought for their rights," he wrote in his diary. Finding some of the local residents sadly ignorant of the subject, he gave them an impromptu lecture.
"And do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for?" he asked. "Tell your neighbors and your children that this is holy ground,…All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year." "
John Adams, by David McCullough, p 359; Simon & Schuster, 2001
But I digress.
At this point the author has me a bit on edge with statements like this calling on a revolution like we had in 1776.
If there is not someone out there that is willing to risk everything to take a stand and start a revolution like they did in 1776 nothing change [sic]. And even if someone stands up will people like us rally around this person and stand with them or will we watch from a safe distance (just in case) and let them fall?
But than he relieved some of my fears with
The great thing about our society is we CAN peacefully change our government. It may not be easy and it may not be pretty but we can do it IF we all rally together.
So now I am thinking this is just a rally cry for party unity and he is talking about an electoral revolution. But I was wrong! His plans have nothing to do with elections. He offers two scenarios.
Scenario A)
1) Ten million of us march on Washington DC and peacefully invade and take over Congress. We demand a total resignation of everyone in Congress. We literally shutdown the federal government as we know it by the sheer mass of ten million of us.
2) Ten million of us all stop paying taxes at the same time. We opt out of the system and bring the government to its financial knees while at the same time demanding that all current politicians resign.
3) Only people who take a pledge to never allow the government to spend more than it takes in (except in times of declared war) will be allowed to fill the now empty seats in Congress. They must also pledge to run our government according to what the Constitution says.
4) The Federal Reserve will be fully audited and made to operate in the open.
So he would have ten million villages descend on Washington with pitch forks and torches to 'peacefully' take over Congress? Somehow he fails to reconcile 'to run our government according to what the Constitution says' with the contradictory tax revolution and his pledge to a balanced budget as a requirement to hold office. The income tax is in the Constitution and the pledge is pretty much excluded as a requirement to hold office.
One wonders what are bond rating would be after this peaceful revolution.
Plan B is actually so ludicrous that I found it funny.
Scenario B)
1) A number of states opt out of the system. A good example would be Governor Perry of Texas telling the Federal Government that Texas will no longer be accepting any funds from the Federal Government and will no longer be sending any funds to the Federal Government. The residents of Texas will no longer pay income taxes to the Federal Government and Texas will operate as an independent Republic.
2) Other states such as Alaska, Montana, Idaho, North Dakota and more do the same. These new “Republics” form a consortium of Free States and trade with each other as well as encourage free enterprise to prosper by having no corporate income taxes.
3) Citizens of the United States are free to move to any of these new Free states and opt out of Washington DC’s control over their lives.
Secession! When has that been tried before?
First off how can Parry decree that U.S. Citizens can not pay their legally required income taxes? Or what funds is he talking about? Second, and this is the part I find funny, how does the Republic of North Dakota (a purple state by the way) freely trade with the Republic of Texas without crossing the United States of America? Maybe the new Confederacy of Free Republics could make a pact with socialist Canada and ship stuff through the Panama canal to British Columbia and via roads to North Dakota? But that seems a bit expensive. Thirdly, the Supreme Court ruled that a state can not leave the Union without two thirds of the other states voting to allowing it. I could go on about the ludicrousness of this idea, especially from some one who seems to adhere to a strict Constitutional interpretation, but it gets a bit tedious after a point.
I guess I just wrote this because I was amazed that RedState let this stand or at least allowed it to go unchallenged. As one of the comments said “I agree that we will never elect enough of the right people that will have the courage to fix what is broken.” The whole idea of resorting to revolution if you don't get your way at the polls is as un-American as you can get, but it appears to be acceptable discourse among the conservatives of today.