John and Nisha Whitehead over at The Rutherford Institute always write compelling essays documenting America's descent toward tyranny.  "A State of Martial Law: America Is a Military Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy" is no exception and deserves reading.

In that essay, the legal duo reminded me of something John Lennon once warned: "When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system's game.  The establishment will irritate you — pull your beard, flick your face — to make you fight.  Because once they've got you violent, then they know how to handle you."

There is no question that the D.C. Establishment has been picking a fight with ordinary Americans for quite some time.  The Department of (in)Justice and federal law enforcement routinely look the other way whenever Antifa and Black Lives Matter domestic terrorists rough up citizens and destroy small businesses.  Then a bunch of patriotic Americans without criminal records show up at the U.S. Capitol to protest the fraudulent 2020 election, and the Stasi FBI immediately labels every grandparent and veteran within miles an "insurrectionist."

While Soros-aligned prosecutors award the left's paramilitary brigades with accolades instead of incarcerations, the Feds have dragged J6 protesters through unfair criminal proceedings, inflicted unnecessary suffering, and forced political prisoners to languish without bail.  When political prisoners finally do face trial, the government hides potentially exonerating video evidence and records under fabricated claims of "national security," prosecutors flippantly throw around terms like "treason" and "rebellion" in front of juries, and partisan judges are all too willing to hand down excessive sentences as an unconscionable form of political revenge.  

Murderers and rapists are given greater presumption of innocence and protection of their due process rights than the law-abiding Americans who exercised their constitutional right to petition the government for redress of grievances on January 6, 2021.  Along with its authoritarian campaign to censor Americans' speech through the use of corporate proxies, D.C.'s criminal targeting of citizens for their political beliefs constitutes an indisputable pattern and practice of government hostility toward the First Amendment.

More and more evidence continues to corroborate the assertion that provocateurs from federal agencies were actively stoking mayhem outside the Capitol and steering J6 protesters to commit petty crimes that could later be used against them.  Once labeled a "conspiracy theory" by the State-fed corporate press, the idea that government agents were instigating chaos and crime is now rather prosaically accepted as no big deal.

It is a big deal.  If federal agents were provoking criminal behavior and surreptitiously exciting a large crowd, then they are directly responsible for any repercussions.  If Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence truly believe that their lives were in danger on January 6, then their beef lies with the undercover operatives who worked to turn a protest into a riot.  

Any federal agents present in the crowd ostensibly worked for the president of the United States — Donald Trump.  The timing of his speech — delivered miles from the Capitol — was known well in advance precisely so that security precautions could be made to protect both government officials and the million or so Trump-supporters who showed up in D.C. to voice their displeasure with an election riddled by unorthodox voting procedures and mail-in-ballot chicanery.  Federal agencies tasked with providing security and keeping the peace should have been protecting protesters' right to assemble while ensuring that everyone in D.C. remained safe.  

To do the opposite — to actively incite a riot in order to entrap Trump-supporters under specious charges — not only put everyone around the Capitol in danger, but also betrayed both ordinary American protesters exercising constitutional rights and the man vested with inherent executive authority.  The federal government's disregard for the Constitution is clear.

As we have witnessed these last two and a half years in congressional show trials and politicized courtrooms, the government's risible J6 prosecutions have taken one lowly citizen's scalp after the next for the previously unenforced crimes of "trespass" or "obstructing an official proceeding" until finally and ludicrously bagging a few Americans for "seditious conspiracy."  If this steady drumbeat of political prosecutions is now leading to the indictment of Donald Trump as the so-called "ringleader" of an imaginary "conspiracy" to overthrow the government of the United States, then that means all of the federal agents working under the authority of President Trump on January 6 were actually conspiring to set him up for criminal liability.

There is a name given to the secret commission of a plan meant to remove from power a legitimate head of state: coup d'état.  Of course, since the Stasi FBI and Obama's Intelligence heads had already unsuccessfully conspired with Hillary Clinton's campaign to remove President Trump from power through the Russia hoax, undermining an elected president was hardly new.  In fact, given that Adam Schiff and Mitt Romney had desperately worked with fake Pentagon "whistleblowers" to turn Joe Biden's Ukraine bribery scandal into a Trump impeachment, transforming the events of January 6, 2021 into some kind of inexplicable attempt to overthrow the sitting president's own government merely looks par for the course.  When Trump is in power, the permanent Deep State is coup-coup for regime change.  

Didn't Antifa and Black Lives Matter always provide the backup plan for Trump's removal from office in case the permanent political class couldn't steal the 2020 election?  Their rampage during the summer of 2020 far exceeded anything that happened on January 6, 2021.  When the left's paramilitary shock troops terrorized the White House nonstop, they frequently placed President Trump's life at risk.  Those "insurrections," of course, were ignored or even lauded as justifiable crimes redressing "injustice."  In truth, they were a warm-up act for what would have occurred in cities across the country had President Trump's historic re-election margins — in which he claimed over ten million new voters since his first victory — proved insurmountable even after days of secretive counting in battleground states flooded with unsecured and anonymous mail-in balloting.  

Had President Trump declared victory on November 3, 2020, Antifa and Black Lives Matter would have likely taken their 2020 trial run to the next level and turned D.C. into a war zone.  However, I suspect that neither the Cheka FBI nor the Department of (in)Justice would have declared any violent mayhem as part of an organized "rebellion" or "insurrection."  I doubt Congress would have felt compelled to spend the next two years running partisan show trials or instigating a reign of prosecutorial terror against Biden supporters, as they have with Trump voters.  Nancy Pelosi, General Milley, and the corporate press would have surely lionized Antifa's brownshirt behavior.  The United Nations and World Economic Forum would have most likely issued the arsonists, looters, and murderers prestigious awards.

The rank injustice intentionally imposed upon J6 defendants is the point.  The unethical federal agents, prosecutors, and judges all seem to be saying between haughty bouts of laughter: What are you gonna do about it?  They would like nothing more than for an armed militia of Americans to rise up and provide the Department of (in)Justice and the regime-protecting FBI with the justification they need for decades of funding to combat "domestic extremism."  If Joe Biden is given an excuse to formally declare martial law, he will gladly use the opportunity to expand the national security surveillance State, seize gun and ammunition stockpiles, and implement even more of the World Economic Forum's "Great Reset" blueprint for technocratic tyranny.  The totalitarians in control of the U.S. government want us to resist; they need us to resist.

We must do so wisely and prudently, knowing that the "military dictatorship disguised as a democracy" is setting traps and eagerly waiting.

Image: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).