Donald Trump’s recent return to Butler, PA where he was nearly assassinated due to Secret Service incompetence (or deliberate failure) has got the political left all worked up. Perhaps in part because Thomas Crooks failed to complete his task despite being given every conceivable opportunity to succeed, but also because Elon Musk was there to support the rally. Nothing Musk said was particularly shocking to normal Americans, but his comments on the necessity of the 2nd Amendment as a means to keep the 1st Amendment have outraged Democrats.
Coastal progressives in particular have sought to disarm the rest of the nation for decades. Gun control and ultimately gun confiscation are foundational policies that their movement revolves around. The question is, why? Why are they so desperate to violate the Bill of Rights and take firearms away?
They certainly don’t care about people’s safety. If they did, they wouldn’t have cheered on the baseless and violent BLM and Antifa riots. Social media is replete with woke activists calling for the deaths of conservatives. These are not peaceful people seeking nirvana, they are happy to use violence if they think it will get them more power.
This is a problem that old-school Democrats like Jon Stewart continue to enable while pretending it doesn’t exist. Stewart, clinging to cultural relevancy on his newly rebooted Daily Show, attempted to lampoon Elon Musk over his assertions on the 2A in Butler, but his strange diatribe about representative democracy is a retro callback to the 1990s and comes off as rather naive.
Jon Stewart has a childlike vision of how society came to exist. The ultimate arbitration in all political discourse is violence, which is precisely why the Founders wanted the public to be armed and not just the state. Basic political theory here.
— Carl Benjamin (@Sargon_of_Akkad) October 10, 2024
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Does Stewart really believe this nonsense? It’s hard to say, but the past few years have made his arguments obsolete.
The 1st Amendment is not protected by the “consent of the governed.” Americans just experienced a three year period of active censorship under the Biden Administration working closely with Big Tech and social media companies. Stewart shrugs off such censorship as if it’s overblown and doesn’t matter, but even Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook was under pressure from the establishment to silence dissent on a number of issues from covid mandates to Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Contrary to Stewart’s delusions about democracy, the reality is that the Constitution does not defend itself. According to polls a large number of Democrats desired the erasure of numerous rights during the covid scare. They don’t represent the majority, but there is more than enough of them to add weight to any authoritarian effort. And, the only thing stopping them from getting everything they want is the existence of millions of American gun owners.
It’s not as if the progressive/globalist establishment intends to give up, either. As John Kerry noted during a climate conference held by the WEF in September, their open intent is to shut down free speech rights regardless of the democratic process. If they could get rid of the 1st Amendment, they would. The only reason they haven’t is because the US government doesn’t have a monopoly on force.
In Stewart’s fantasy land, a free Republic is a self perpetuating entity that continues on for eternity once it is set in motion, driven only by the goodness and purity of ideology and the voting process. But elections can be subverted by top-down corruption and the system has clearly been broken for some time.
One only need to look at the malicious government crackdown on speech happening in the UK to see what happens when a population is disarmed. There are examples of this across the globe, yet in the world of The Daily Show there is some kind of magical force embedded in “democracy” that protects the populace from abuse. To be sure, the act of violent rebellion is generally a last resort after all other measures have been exhausted. It’s just important to recognize that there’s always a breaking point and America is very close now.
Stewart ironically contradicts his own premise when he claims guns “only protect the speech of the people holding the guns.” Yes Jon, that’s why the 2A exists, so that everyone’s speech is protected.
Because a representative government can become a tyrannical government as easily as any other government. All it takes is time. The 2A ensures that the “consent of the governed” is never manufactured or forced without the threat of rebellion. Once a government has a monopoly on violence, the concept of public consent is meaningless and the elites will do as they please.
As Thomas Jefferson once wisely stated in reference to the potential for future citizen rebellion:
“…What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Jon Stewart’s vision of a free society without arms is ludicrous. It is the same delusion that many progressives have about crime and criminals. Criminals are never satiated, they will keep taking simply because they can and because no one is stopping them. Defunding the police or diluting the laws only makes the situation worse. Tyrants are the same; they will keep taking simply because they can, until someone stops them with guns.
Stewart may one day find himself thankful for the very citizen militia’s he seems to fear. They aren’t only prepared to fight for their own constitutional rights, they are prepared to fight for the rights of Americans as a whole.