(I’m starting this post a day early because it’s important and because tomorrow is a milk run day into Prettytown under the impending threat of a snowstorm that’s expected to last a while.)

Not bird nor plane nor even frog named pepe.

Not republicrat nor demican tryhard, christlover nor certain atheist, reactionista nor progressophile, not bush hog blade nor liberal in the contemporary devolved sense.

When your eyes are flashed with an image like the one above, your reaction will be to tense, and to take the message at face value for your own protection. Your own eyes will take in the flow of the message’s logic, and necessarily equate Armed Protest with Bloodshed, with deadly outcomes.

Your mind will not go to a place in memory that knows that the original American Revolution was an armed protest, nor to the less inspiring place that holds the information that the Second Revolution, the failed one of the slave states, was too.

You might think instead of the armed National Guard gunning down four innocent college students at Kent State, or some old man being tripped by armed cops and smashing his face on the sidewalk. But most likely you’ll think about those people at the Capitol a couple of weeks ago, the poor deluded souls who thought they were saving an already dead democracy, with face paint and a handful of zip ties.

Armed protesters, dimly mindful of the watchword of a more ancient revolutionary, who once said that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Which of course is true, and true whether the guns are being held by the King’s soldiers shooting down revolutionary terrorists on the morning of April 19, 1775 in Lexington, Massachusetts (8 dead, 10 wounded) … or whether the guns belong instead to 400 New England Patriots down the road in Concord later the same day, whose shots were said to have been heard all around the world, and whose shots were not only murderous to the police force of a duly constituted authority, but also a declaration of open Treason against the supreme authority of the Crown.

The chief complaint of these … Insurrectionists, Patriots, take your pick … was an outcry against inequality in terms of both political and economic power, summed up succinctly in the phrase “Taxation without Representation”.

In other words, the royal Hegemon was taking their money away from them, in the form of taxes in this case, and that was bad enough. But unlike the British subjects back on Empire Island, who were also taxpayers, the colonials never got the slightest scrap of pretend political power in the form of their own voice in Parliament. They were Without Representation.

They were without any form of political power at all, until they took the foolishly bold step of deciding to grow-their-own, out of their smoking gun barrels, in 1775 Massachusetts.

The case today is a little bit different. Where once there were Tories, there is now only a professional and managerial class. Where back then …

Ah. Pardon my habitually digressive transgressions. Back to the news.

There were in fact many armed protests at state capitols in the run-up to the Biden inauguration, although the corollary feared bloodshed did not materialize.

So far all attempts at a Third Revolution have been a complete bust, and I mean that in the broadest possible sense. Occupy Wall Street, and nothing. The attempted Sanders Revolution from within, shut down with a few buttons pressed deep inside the undisclosed bunkers of the new Empire. The witless insurrections at the Capitol never got as far as hanging a single toady, much less a hedge fund manager. And all told, the body count has been almost immeasurably small, compared to the wildcat strikes early in the last century that brought you the revolution of the forty-hour work week, or compared to the half-million American corpses attributable to the virus and the non-response to it on the part of the Our Leaders and the necromancers ostensibly in charge of the private capitalist Health Insurance System.

Nevertheless, even the failures are producing some interesting results. Please consider this. In the wake of the latest failure …

“Social media megacorporations launched a purge of all left, right and libertarian voices who oppose the political establishment of both parties.

“This may be the last chance to warn the government of the United States. The people before you … they are the antibodies. Not the disease that is destroying our country. The disease is a country run by two corrupt political parties that do not care about you. So deeply incestuous with corporations that they are indistinguishable from each other.

“A government that spent six months debating whether to give their own people $600, while only 24 hours to unanimously agree to give billions of dollars to foreign tyrannical governments and corporations. A government that has bombed villages overseas my entire life, for my supposed safety here.

“This is a call for unity. For all the American people that realize the true threat against us, you come together. For every mother mourning the children that was killed by police. For every business crushed down by state lockdowns. For every broken soldier sent to fight wars that have no point. This is our last chance to avoid either a tyrannical government or a bloody and pointless civil war among American people who do not have that much against each other, and have more in common than they realize (emphasis added).

“And a message to the government: We come in peace. We do not intend to commit violence. But I am pleading with you, with tears in my eyes and cracks in my voice, if you continue to oppress the American people, they will remain rational no longer. Thank you.”

Who would you guess said all that truthful and prescient stuff?

You don’t know his name, and I can’t tell you because I don’t know it either. His momma does. You can bet the FBI does too. But all the average person can know is that he’s … one of those armed protestors who your media tells you should stoke you with fear of more bloodshed, a politically powerless person speaking truth to power while standing in front of the Michigan capitol building. The people standing around listening to him are carrying guns, and wearing t-shirts that support both Black Lives Matter and queer pride.

Objective Journalists will tell you that he looks like a boogaloo boy, and Wikipedia will tell you that these boogaloos are “a loosely organized far-right, anti-government, and extremist political movement in the United States”, and that “at least 31 people affiliated with the boogaloo movement have been charged with crimes”, without explaining the nature of the alleged affiliations, or what they mean by ‘movement’, or ‘far-right’ for that matter.

Why would right-wing extremists be displaying symbols of BLM and gay rights?

Wikipedia hints darkly at a conspiracy to throw people off the trail of their real motivations.

Yeah. Maybe, maybe.

But hey–that wouldn’t explain the existence of the John Brown Gun Club, “an American far-left political group that organizes predominantly among white working-class people. The group supports gun rights and members often openly carry firearms. Its political positions are anti-capitalist, anti-racist and anti-fascist”.

They’re … Antifa? White, armed, and named after an extremist Christian abolitionist who was hanged for treason before the Civil War? Well that’s confusing.

These contradictory facts, and the impassioned rhetoric of the anonymous boogaloo man are highly disruptive to easy media narratives that want you to be afraid and go back to hiding in the comfort of the products offered by their advertisers, vote Dem with a hasty prayer, and leave it at that.

And in your consumer trance, to blink blandly while your Representatives shove through further elaborations of the surveillance state, and their corporate masters unilaterally and capriciously decide who can say what online.

It’s for your own safety, bitches!

Or maybe just for consolidating all political power at the tippy top. Whatever, whatever. America. Freedom. Liberty. Democracy. Get a job, shut up, and remember that all union organizers are communists. Unity! Okay?

I am indebted to Jimmy Dore for bringing attention to the brief speech I quoted above. I will criticize him even so, for his lazy take and lack of research into the deeper meaning of the speech, as evidenced in the glib and frankly stupid title on the video I just linked. I love you Jimmy, honestly and more than any other Tuber, but you need to lay off the weed and apply yourself a little if you really want your work to make a difference. (You didn’t ask Jordan Chariton any hard questions about his ‘nuanced’ censorship take later in the day, either.)

I am further indebted to some anonymous lily of the field out there who not only obtained a longer and better recording of the speech, but transcribed it into text below his video where it was easy for me to copypaste. As far as I can tell, his work has since been scrubbed out by the Google overlords, or I’d thank him here by (channel) name.

I’m grateful to Good Ol’ Shep Smith for providing an example of how to do journalism exactly wrong, by providing a unchallenged platform for bloviating corporatists to tell scary lies and callous half-truths.

Finally, I recommend to you a piece by Reason magazine, the house organ of the Libertarian Party, which takes a slightly partisan view of the boog-boys that nevertheless is ten times better than anything you’d find on the sordid airwaves of the mainstream media.