Ever since it has been determined that Joe Biden is the winner of the American Presidential popularity contest (aka election) there have been louder and louder protests against him with many believing that he manipulated the outcome of the election and “stole” victory. This all took a new turn last Wednesday, Jan. 6th, 2021 when thousands of pro-Donald Trump protestors stormed Capitol Hill in Washington DC in an effort to stop the Senate confirmation of Joe Biden’s election by the Electoral College. This description of the events comes from the New York Post’s link above:
By 1:10 p.m., protesters had pulled down barriers facing the West Front of the Capitol. Under threat of a siege, police ordered an evacuation of the Library of Congress, the Madison Building and Cannon House Office Building just before 1:30 p.m. Within minutes, Trump supporters storm the Statuary Hall, a room that separates the House and Senate, heading towards the House and Senate. At 1:40 p.m., DC Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered a 12-hour curfew in the capital starting from 6 p.m. as the threat of violence heightened. Just before 2:15 p.m., horrifying images and video started emerging of rioters scaling the walls of the Capitol complex and charging past lines of clearly outnumbered cops.
They attacked cops “with metal pipes, discharged chemical irritants and took up other weapons against our officers,” Steven Sund, the Capitol Police chief, would say later. “They were determined to enter into the Capitol Building by causing great damage.” Lawmakers were then evacuated from the Chamber as rioters started smashing windows and ripping open doors as they were seen roaming Statuary Hall, carrying flags and chanting about election fraud. Many insisted that they had every right to be there because it was “our house,” belonging to the American people. Just before 2:43 p.m., some of the most alarming images emerged – of police drawing their guns at the entrance to the House Chamber as rioters try to smash their way in. Some of the mob made their way to the dais, posing for photos as terrified politicians escaped wearing breathing masks and hoods.
Just before 3 p.m., an officer shot Air Force vet Ashli Babbitt as video showed her trying to climb through into a protected area – one of four fatalities during the day of carnage. By now, the mob was running rampant – trashing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and smashing windows and ripping apart signs. By 3:51 p.m., DC’s entire National Guard – about 1,100 troops – was mobilized to back up overwhelmed cops. While the curfew [ordered by DC mayor Muriel Bowser] kicked in at 6 p.m., hundreds of rioters remained in the area for hours – before lawmakers finally returned to the Chamber at 8 p.m. to ratify Biden’s election. Officials later revealed that three others — one woman and two men — died from “medical emergencies” during the carnage, while at least 14 officers were injured. On Thursday morning, lawmakers were demanding answers on how police had been so easily overwhelmed — as well as many calling for Trump to be removed from office.
As one can imagine, condemnation for these events have already started rolling in from all sides. Vice-President Mike Pence wrote, “We grieve the loss of life in these hallowed halls, as well as the injuries suffered by those who defended our Capitol today.” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said, “This temple to democracy was desecrated, its windows smashed, our offices vandalized,” and went on to compare the day to the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell called it a “failed insurrection” that tried to “disrupt our democracy.” Baybars Örsek, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said, “This is not the first time in the world where masses obstruct a democratic process during a transfer of power but might be the first one fueled by conspiracy theories on such a scale.” Christopher Guess, lead technologist at the Duke Reporters’ Lab, the University’s center for journalism research, said, “You’re seeing the complete collapse of reality. You’ve got people arguing for a worldview that Joe Biden is not the president.”
Reality Check
While I, being dedicated to the nonviolent ethics of Christianity, condemn any sort of violence I do hope that this event really pulls back the curtain for most people. We spend all our lives being told that “democracy” is the highest political good and that it is our role to submit to the authority of those in power who can decide what we eat, drink, wear, what we do, how we work, what we make, what we can buy, what we can sell, where we can go, what we can say, what we can do, how we can live. It doesn’t matter how authoritarian the government becomes as long as it is democratically decided upon by the masses, as if the winners of large popularity contests suddenly became, by virtue of their victories, smarter and wiser than the rest of us, omniscient and omnipotent enough to dictate the lives of hundreds of millions of others from on high. Well, this is reality. This is democracy, this is rule by the masses.
Does that look like a mob to you? That is no surprise. That is what democracy is – rule by the demos, the common people, the mob. Democracy is what you get when you place the mobs at the head of the State and this is what happens when those mobs get fed up with their mob leaders. As President Brigham Young taught:
“The whole Government is gone; it is weak as water. I heard Joseph Smith say nearly thirty years ago, ‘They shall have mobbings to their hearts’ content, if they do not redress the wrongs of the Latter-day Saints.’ Mobs will not decrease but will increase until the whole government becomes a mob, and eventually it will be State against State, city against city, neighborhood against neighborhood, Methodist against Methodist, and so on. It will be Christian against Christian and man against man, and those who will not take up the sword against their neighbors must needs flee to Zion.”
Already we are seeing the way President Young’s warnings are being fulfilled. Politics are dividing states, cities, and families against one another. The whole nation is a mob and almost every American belongs to either the Democrat Party Mob or the Republican Party Mob. And both of them will have mobbings to their hearts content. Division will increase, violence will grow, isolation, excommunication, and hatred between the two will ever become the norm. The political parties are rival sects in the secular religion, commonly called the Cult of the State here, and the religious nature of their dedication to government is revealed in the way that both sides refer to the U.S. Capitol as “hallowed,” that is holy ground, and as a “temple,” that is the earthly home of their god. These differing sects will not allow for any rivals to power, especially not the blasphemers and apostates in the other sect. This is why you have Leftists, the very people who just last year were holding mass protests against police brutality, celebrating the cold-blooded murder of a woman by police on Wednesday. Her name was Ashli Babbitt and she was described by her husband as being “loud and opinionated but caring, sweet, thoughtful, loving.” Those rejoicing in the death of an unarmed woman shot by police reveal what their true motivations are – not justice, not an end to police brutality, but power over their political opponents. They don’t want to abolish or defund the police, they want to control the police, to use them for their own ends. If the person killed by the police is someone of the rival political sect then it is a social good because everyone of that sect is evil. For example:
All the hand wringing by some that this mob was “within feet of senators” just demonstrates how much disdain these people have for the demos, the common people the politicians claim to represent. How dare the peasants question what they’re told and get so close to their betters! It is darkly humorous the way that these people see it as a “collapse of reality” that some people have a “worldview that Joe Biden is not the president.” They’ve fallen for their own propaganda and truly believe in the self-existence of the State. They don’t understand that all governments are merely socially agreed upon fictions which when revealed as such collapse like a piece of straw which has a hundred pound weight dropped upon it. The government exists as long as the masses agree to its edicts. Donald Trump is your President because you want him to be for as long as you choose to follow him. The minute you decide otherwise is the same minute he is no longer your President. The same is true of Joe Biden. As soon as you refuse to obey the government then it is dissolved, no matter what those in “power” shout as they huff and puff from their collapsing halls of power or, worse, as they are led to their appointment with Madame Guillotine.
The power to “alter or abolish” governments at will is the very power that people are referring to when they talk about “the power of the people” and it is the purest form of democracy that exists. For the group that stormed the U.S. Capitol, Joe Biden isn’t their President and he never will be. He may be their ruler if he can use the police and the military to beat, cage, kill, and terrorize enough of them into obeying him, but he’ll never be their leader. If this were a democracy than those in power would acknowledge that and allow these people to have the leaders for their demos that they wish. Secession would be as common as the grass. But, of course, this isn’t a democracy and almost no one who uses that word actually believes in it. They believe in collectivism, victory, and power – not individuality, liberty, and freedom. They are oligarchical republicans and the system is their means to their end and in the end they mean to rule. They mean to have power, nothing more and nothing less. “Democracy” as they call it is merely the warping of a popular word to give false legitimacy to the system of theft, extortion, violence, and authoritarianism that provides the oligarchs in office with their positions, profusion of wealth, and power.
Solutions
The agnostic solution is both simple and probably the most difficult to implement given the amount of mental conditioning most people have been subjected to since their earliest childhood in order to convince them to venerate the State. I am, of course, talking about secession. The right of the people to give or withdraw consent to their government and to form a new one when they believe they need to do so is one of the most well established in Western tradition that it should be as commonly and popularly accepted as fact as gravity and the existence of the Sun, but the exact opposite is the case. Why? The reasoning seems clear, if the people really understood their right to secede, to withdraw their consent from one government and to form another, then those in power would never be secure upon their thrones, never safe in their rule. This is why secession in the United States is always painted as being neo-Confederate and pro-slavery or pro-racism despite the fact that some of the most ardent anti-slavery, anti-racist, pro-liberty voices before the American Civil War were secessionists, voices like leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who declared:
Such is man, in every clime—above all compacts, greater than all institutions, sacred against every outrage, priceless, immortal! By this sure test, every institution, every party, every form of government, every kind of religion, is to be tried. God never made a human being either for destruction or degradation. It is plain, therefore, that whatever cannot flourish except at the sacrifice of that being, ought not to exist. Show me the party that can obtain supremacy only by trampling upon human individuality and personal sovereignty, and you will thereby pronounce sentence of death upon it. Show me the government which can be maintained only by destroying the rights of a portion of the people, and you will indicate the duty of openly revolting against it.
No, instead of allowing people to separate peacefully and bloodlessly those in power would rather murder and destroy, slaughter and annihilate. They would rather destroy you, everyone you love, and everything you’ve ever known than allow secession. They would rather blow up entire cities teeming with innocent men, women, and children than allow secession. That is how much these “democrats,” these oligarchical republicans, love power. It is this very thing that should most drive our rebellion against them. Their government can only be maintained by destroying the rights of the people and this necessitates our rebellion against it. It should be done peacefully and nonviolently, but it should be done.
It is not that civil disobedience comes without any hardship or even bloodshed; it is that nonviolence and civil disobedience minimize the bloodshed such that the murders are only committed by the oppressors, who thereby reveal themselves for the snakes and wolves they truly are, turning the public against them in the process. Meanwhile, the disobedient win allies, even converting their enemies to their cause, and ensure their victory, because the more you convince people to disobey the less power the State has until it crumbles into nothing at all. As Dr. Ericka Chenoweth has proven in her study comparing the effectiveness and impacts of violent revolution and nonviolent revolution, nonviolent resistance is far more effective and successful than violent revolution. Nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience can be undertaken by the very young or the very old, the very healthy or the very ill, by women as well as men, by people of every race and ethnicity. It also has a lower threshold of success with every nonviolent resistance campaign that has mobilized a mere 3.5% of the population having always been successful in its goals. Consider how much of a society must be mobilized in a war effort to make a violent rebellion successful. A quarter? Half? More? And how much destruction is caused, how many more than those who are fighting are slaughtered in the ensuing conflict? All of that is minimized, if not outright avoided, by the less bloody and more successful path of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience.
Now don’t think I am talking about simply having protest marches. I am not. Protest marches are not nonviolent resistance or civil disobedience. They are ineffectual scraps thrown to the masses to make them feel like they are doing something meaningful. I am talking about active mass disobedience, intentional disregard of political authority, purposefully and intentionally breaking laws, and doing what you want no matter what the politicians, police, and soldiers say otherwise. Imagine if those people on Wednesday had occupied the U.S. Capitol building without destruction and without violence, something which is likely to turn even those sympathetic to them against them. They could have shutdown that “hallowed temple” of power without hurting others and would have looked like the victims when the police reacted the only way they know how – with violence. The protestors would have won more attention to their message and their actions while actually preventing the count like they meant to do as opposed to only drawing attention to the destruction they wrought.
More than half of Republicans think Trump either won the November 2020 Presidential Election or that Biden cheated to win. Well, 25% of Americans identify as Republicans, which means the half of Republicans who think that Joe Biden stole the election is roughly 12.5% of the American population, far in excess of the 3.5% that Dr. Chenoweth has shown that nonviolent resistance campaigns need to be successful. The only way that Joe Biden ever rules them is if they give in to the mental conditioning they’ve been subjected to since childhood that has taught them to obey the government and adore the Presidency or they surrender before obtaining victory. If those 30 million+ people decide to never give in then they cannot be conquered. I say let them go. You can have Joe Biden as your President. They can have Donald Trump as theirs. I will have neither and we will all be happy. While I have written somewhat on this subject before, for a fuller exploration of how you have secession without having to worry about “who rules” I suggest you read the books Polystate: A Thought Experiment in Distributed Government by Zach Weinersmith and The Machinery of Freedom by David D. Friedman.
The agnostic answer is, at best, a half measure, though it does better allow for the full measure to occur. That full measure being the religious answer – the establishment of Zion. As President Young taught, the hatred and division of politics will only grow worse until there will only be a single place where we will be able to find any peace, safety, unity, and salvation, that place being Zion. The reason Zion is the only place where people will find hope and peace is Zion because it will only be in Zion that the people will be of “one heart and one mind, and dwell in righteousness.” (See Moses 7:18–19) And why are they of one heart and one mind, why do they dwell, that is constantly live, in righteousness? Because they truly believe in and live the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ – they are truly religious Saints and not merely creedal Mormons. When all the powers of the world seek to divide people it is only the Gospel that can unite us all through the power of conversion to Christ, which unifies the faithful through common beliefs, desires, and goals. As Elder Aldin L. Porter taught, it is only in Christ that we have a hope of safety and peace:
He is our protector in a world constantly seeking to solve problems through violence. He is our protector in a world where the minds of so many are filled with evil continually. We, of all people, should look to the future with enthusiasm and optimism. We have His word to direct us, to comfort us, and to give us hope for the future. There is so much that lies ahead of light and purity and virtue; and, in time, violence will disappear, for surely the lamb will lie down with the lion.
So, while the fearful and halting stagger and tremble because they see their faith assaulted, their State deity challenged, I am unmoved. I do not worship their God-State and I am not deluded about either its means or ends; nor am I blind to the true nature of its political messiahs and secular saviors. Nor are you. I know all the treasure they spend on propping up their God-State’s idol is waste and dross for, in the end, all nations, including America, shall be consumed and ended when Christ comes again. (See D&C 87:6) So do you. I have better things to do than send my children as human sacrifices to murder and die for those in power and to waste their lives on something that will ultimately be nothing but dust. So do you. Let D.C. become the new Versailles, we have the New Jerusalem to build.
