Yuck it up, you morons who think it’s cool to try to frame political opponents because your mug shots are coming soon enough. And maybe not just mugshots. You’ve genuinely screwed yourselves. You can’t control what you have unleashed. And you’re celebrating. You shouldn’t.
I know, I know, you can’t imagine that your decision to take out your political opponents by throwing them in jail will bite you in the Asa. But it will. Hard. And you ought to hope it’s only mug shots. I hope it’s only mug shots, not for your sake, but for my country’s sake. You’ve screwed up my country, and it’s not clear that the wounds you caused are not mortal. This is now a country where we lock up political opponents. I just want to get that out there again, and I want you to understand what has changed. This is now a country where we lock up political opponents. And it’s inevitable that very soon, you’re going to realize that you are some people’s political opponents too.
Some people ask me my legal opinion of these frame jobs masquerading as criminal cases. Well, I have no legal opinion of them because these have nothing to do with the law. When not invented out of whole cloth, they consist of inapplicable statutes stretched tighter than Nancy Pelosi’s lifted and Botoxed face to try to encompass perfectly legal activities by people whose real crime is opposing the ruling class. And the accused aggravated their crimes by having succeeded for a time.
Do you think these laws only go one way? Do you think this precedent can’t be used right back against you and yours? There are a lot of state attorney generals and district attorneys out there in red states, and they are going through their statute books. Conservatives, who tend to be doomers, are fretting because none of these red officials have acted yet. But they will act, all in good time. First, slow, then all at once. That is inevitable. That is the logic of this scenario. You see, all the incentives are to prosecute Democrats in red enclaves for things Democrats did far away. The first red AG or DA who does it is going to be a superstar. And then all the others are going to have to follow along lest they be left behind. Some of them won’t want to. Some of them may have some residual attachment to the law as we once knew it. But their red voters do not, and in the words of Rush – the Canadian band, not the radio legend – these Republican officials must conform or be cast out.
What they do in retaliation will have the appearance of law but not the substance. In that way, these prosecutions will be exactly like the ones Trump is currently experiencing. They will echo the nonsense of the Trump indictments. Perhaps I will outline it in more detail in a future column, but suffice it to say that when Anthony Fauci and dozens of other bureaucrats are indicted under Missouri’s RICO law based on a conspiracy to violate the civil rights of the citizens of the Show-Me State via their massive COVID fraud, the indicted ones are really going to hope that the aptly-named Fani – because of what she’s full of – Willis‘s ridiculous indictments have already been tossed out by the federal courts.
Oh, this isn’t right or good or anything I wanted. In fact, I have columns going back years warning you about the new rules you decided to play by. But you didn’t listen. It was inconvenient. It was hard actually having to convince lesser people to give you power, so you’ve decided to steal it. Now, of course, you don’t put it that way. You don’t tell yourself that you’re a fascist. But you are. No, you tell yourself this is a necessary exception. You imagine that Donald Trump is some sort of particular case and that after you frame him, we’re just going to go back to business as usual. You really are stupid, or you think we are. Ron DeSantis will be the next special case because he’s practically Hitler, too. Next, Nikki Haley will be Hitler. Then Tim Scott will need to be indicted to keep him from invading Poland.
You’re not putting this genie back in the bottle. Right now, you don’t want it back in the bottle. You think you’ve stumbled on a shortcut to permanent power. You couldn’t just try to beat Trump in an unrigged election. You decided to toss the law out. And you’re too freaking dumb to realize that the only thing protecting you is the law that you just erased. There was a pretty famous movie about a pretty famous guy who you never learned about at the University of College, where you got your degree in Marxist interpretive dance. He had something pretty insightful to say about the law and its purpose and why you need to uphold it.
But the law got in the way of what you really wanted, so you tossed it out, and now there is no law, and there’s nothing for you to hide behind. So, who protects you? I mean, you don’t have guns. You don’t have training. You can’t even do a push-up. There’s just power now, and all you have is the institutional power that is backed up and enforced mainly by, well, people like the ones you want to oppress. And the guys who Oliver Anthony has been talking about who wear a uniform or carry a badge might kill for you and might die for you for a little while. Still, when you send them to butcher their own brothers and sisters, they’re probably going to rethink the direction they’re shooting.
Oh, that’s crazy talk, you say. All through history, no ruling class that tried to clamp down on the masses has ever been overthrown and its members punished. There was nothing about that in the 1619 stuff you learned about in commie school. The law is still going to protect you, and the institutions will still protect you because they’ll still function because you haven’t torn their guts out. Oh, wait, you have.
A reckoning is coming, and you’re too dumb to know it. I guess it’ll be a surprise. You’ll look up and cry that what’s about to happen to you is wrong and that it’s illegal. But I don’t think the enemy you created is going to care very much.
So be it.
Let me get this out of the way now…
I told you so.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get Inferno, the seventh book in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, as well as his non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.
Look, you need to keep up the fight by joining Townhall VIP right now. You get access to a bunch of great stuff, not the least of which is my extra Wednesday column, my weekly Stream of Kurtiousness videos every Friday, and the Unredacted podcast every Monday! Plus, some stuff from Larry O’Connor – and a bunch of other stuff.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member