I'm aware of getting in legal trouble for saying very specific things. My point was Trump didn't say any of those specific things that's ever been considered incitement. I don't get why you referenced Brandenburg v Ohio because it doesn't have anything to do with getting in legal trouble for saying things because the Ohio law was deemed unconstitutional in that case so the guy, in the end, didn't get in trouble. Nor does that case have anything to do with Trump.
First, in all bluntness, I think you're lying when you now say that you're aware of the very thing that you just said you were unaware of just a few posts ago, and are just trying to save face now that it has become impossible for you to brush off just how telling your ignorance was. This is, again, a well recognized pattern with you. Just because people haven't been calling it out before now doesn't mean that it hasn't been obvious for a long time.
Second, your "point" - such as it is - was that Trump's speech was not substantively different from the Beastie Boys song "Right to Party". And, more to the point, that prosecuting Trump
for his efforts to illegally overturn the election results that culminated in a violent assault on the Capitol immediately after the speech - a speech that you're dishonestly insisting on treating as the sum total of the case against him -
to disrupt an official proceeding with the aim of stopping the transfer of power is necessarily as ridiculous as prosecuting the Beastie Boys because someone cited their
30-year old song as their inspiration for a criminal activity. This aligns with your aforementioned unfamiliarity with the very concepts of incitement and solicitation, as you failed to understand the basic principle of what constitutes a call to action.
Third, this was
literally just explained to you. Brandenburg was cited not to show a guilty verdict, but because the ruling established the imminent lawless action test, making it important case law for this topic. Aside from establishing that the underlying principle dates back decades and is anything but obscure, it established a more rigorous standard that is applied today, and one that makes the difference between the case under discussion and a 30 year old Beastie Boys song patently obvious (and the hint is very much in the name of the test).
This is to say that the case against Trump meets the more rigorous standards of the test that was established by that case. He riled up a mob that he allegedly knew had brought weapons (per the testimony of Ex-White House aide Hutchinson, Trump demanded that the rally's security detail get rid of the Magnetometers so the attendees carrying weapons could get into the rally space quicker, on the grounds that - and I quote - "they're not here to hurt
me") and which were constructing gallows while chanting that Pence and others refusing to flip the results to Trump deserved to be hung as traitors. These were circumstances that were likely to result in imminent lawless action,
and did indeed result in lawless action directed at the target he pointed them at in the immediate aftermath of the rally.
Trump said nothing in the speech that has ever been deemed as inciting violence. Again, what are the chances that you feel Trump gets legally considered an insurrectionist and can't run?
Correction: There's nothing in the speech that
you - who have not heard or read the speech, and who is so emotionally invested in disputing the idea of it inciting violence that you have repeatedly declared that Trump saying "peaceful"
one time in an hour long speech otherwise devoted to stoking the attendees anger and indignation towards Congress, right before their violent assault on the Capitol means that the case is necessarily ludicrous - recognize as inciting violence. There's a difference, and frankly you've demonstrated repeatedly that you do not have an informed opinion.
Gun to my head though? If we're talking about the case purely on merit, I'd say the facts of the case are pretty damning to Trump. Team Trump had been actively campaigning
for months to convince the public that the election results needed to be overturned, and had tried multiple illegal avenues to overturn the results, including trying to get legislators in several states to reject the certification, trying to convince officials in other states to "find" enough votes to flip the results, filing vexatious litigation (often repackaging the same claims) to create an illusion of prevalent voter fraud to undermine confidence in the election results (and as a probably unintended side effect, confidence in the court system for rejecting their claims), and holding fake hearings to provide a pretext his political allies could use to reject the official results, trying to get Pence to play ball with brazenly illegal chicanery to unilaterally (and again, illegally) overturn the results, calling up Congressional Representatives during and after the assault on the Capitol to try and convince them again - now that they were good and scared - to play ball.
That speaks pretty strongly to Mens Rea (as does the Eastman Memo), and the fact of the matter is that not only did lawless action immediately follow the event, a reasonable third party would have understood it to be likely to happen, and rather than trying to cool down the rally, Trump decided to figuratively pour gasoline on it. Never mind that he did so after his alleged demand with the mags, meaning that not only was he aware of the fact that the attendants were armed, he was decidedly unconcerned about it because he was confident that they weren't meant to be used against
him. It's like reminding your dinner guests how much they hate each other, putting a loaded gun on the table and turning out the lights, and then pleading that you weren't the one who pulled the trigger when the police come to investigate the subsequent shooting. You might not have pulled the trigger, but you were the one who created the circumstances, primed them to commit the crime, and then presented them with the opportunity to do so, so you share in their culpability for their commission of that crime.
And hell, at the end of the day, the simple question is "Did Trump push illegal efforts to disrupt the transfer of power in pursuit of an extra-legal seizure or retention of power?" And the answer is yes. Many times over, in fact. We've got that with the strategy laid out in the Eastman memos, which are well recognized as practically an instruction manual for a coup d'etat. We've got that with the efforts to dictate that the Justice Department falsely declare that they had had proof of widespread election fraud so that Team Trump could use that as a pretext to invalidate the results. We've got that with their calls to State officials specifically asking them to "find" enough votes to flip the state's results to Trump. We've got it in his repeated petitions that Pence unilaterally act to unilaterally flip the votes, even after Pence told him that was explicitly illegal. We've got it with the fake electors scheme.
We've got that with the violent assault on the Capitol and Trump et al trying to use it to convince Congress to go along with Eastman's strategy. The facts of the case are pretty overwhelming and illustrate a pervasive campaign in pursuit of allowing Trump to illegally retain power that culminated in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, which only happened as a direct result of Trump et al inciting them and pointing them at a Congress and Vice President that they had spent months telling their base were necessarily traitors. If all of this, culminating in a violent assault on the Capitol with the goal of illegally allowing the central figure of these acts to retain power does not collectively qualify as an insurrection and a betrayal of the oath of office, then what does? As established repeatedly in the court documents of their cases, the overwhelming reason for action in the assault on the Capitol was that arrestees were following Trump's orders to keep Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the presidential-election winner. It's literally a case centered on illegal efforts to overthrow the government that culminated in a violent attack on it with the intent of seizing power. The bar that is being cleared is far from a low one. So yes, if we're judging the case purely by merit, Trump would probably be found guilty.
However, I specify "if we're talking about the case purely on merit", because this is exactly the kind of case that the Supreme Court gets
very cagey about, even before accounting for the fact that a full third of the Justices are Trump appointees who can be expected to be favorably predisposed to his case simply because it would reflect poorly on their own legitimacy if the man who appointed them was declared an insurrectionist, and the wife of a fourth (Thomas) was so deeply in Trump's camp that she actually helped lead the "Stop the Steal" campaign that culminated in the events of January 6, so he's not going to want to rule it was an insurrection because that would mean that his wife contributed to it. That's 4 of the 9 Justices right there that have conflicts of interest that can reasonably be expected to predispose them to ruling in Trump's favor for the case regardless of its merits out of fear that a guilty verdict would indirectly reflect upon them.
And again, even without that, this kind of case is the type that makes the Supreme Court cagey to begin with, and for this specifically, one the justices are giving every indication that they aren't actually judging the merits of the case but rather have been focusing on the political ramifications of the case
irrespective of those merits. They've been openly contemptuous of the very concept, to the point that Kagan out and said that "the question that you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States ", which feels like a pretty strong indication that their ruling will likely be decided as a matter of political principle with little to no regard for the evidence for the case, and basically boil down to declaring that the courts
shouldn't be allowed to rule that Trump was guilty of insurrection, specifically because such a decision would impact the election. Not to put too fine a point on it, Kagan's stated logic reads as "Not guilty
because he's a political frontrunnner" rather than "Not guilty because the evidence didn't show it". Hence the "if we're judging the case purely on merit" qualifier. Statements from the Justices at this time indicate that the merits of the case are going to have very little to do with their decision.
I said that JUST based on Trump's speech there's nothing there. I also said at one point that I'm unsure of all the legal issues associated with Trump actually trying to change the vote way back in 2020 and whether that can come into play or not nor how strong that is for the insurrection case. I've only ever said, again, JUST based on his speech, the case is paper thin. If the other stuff comes into play, then I don't have a very certain opinion on it at all.
And what we've been telling you is that it's
not "just based on Trump's speech". For fuck's sake, I've spent several
very lengthy posts explaining to you that Trump's speech is not something that occurred in a vacuum and that - to quote - "a reasonable person
would interpret Trump's speech at his "Stop the Steal" rally that was explicitly planned and scheduled to immediately precede his base's "Save America" march on the Capitol as a call to action,
due to the surrounding circumstances before, during, and after". That "we're having this discussion
because it did not happen in isolation." Let's review some of the other quotes, shall we?
"That's the
cliffnotes version
of the context that leads to the description of this as an insurrection or failed coup, which is a lot stronger of a case than you pretend."
"And once again
you completely ignore the surrounding context to make it look as if the problem was the simple use of the word "fight", in and of itself, in isolation.
Once again: This did not occur in isolation.
What makes it damning is how it fits into the broader pattern, including the attack on the Capitol." "
"
Context is vitally important. You cannot just pretend that it doesn't exist"
"reflecting the fact that
law is designed to be largely informed by context, to the point that lawyers frequently quip that the answer to any broad legal question is 'it depends'"
And then in the very post you just quoted: "
Because context matters, no matter how religiously you might try to avoid it for the sake of propping up your false equivalence"
I've been calling you out for propping up a strawman argument that is, in the end, utterly reliant on cherry picking several times over. It first demands that we excise the events of January 6 from the surrounding context of Trump's attempts to overturn the results of the election (which frequently took the form of soliciting illegal means) rather than as a part of them in order to pretend that the case has to be entirely self-contained within the events of that day. It then demands that we must judge Trump's speech in isolation from the storming of the Capitol (and Team Trump's actions during and after it), insisting not only that we treat the case as wholly reliant on the events of that day, but wholly reliant on Trump's speech itself with no regard for the illegal action it inspired. "Conveniently", this would make
the very concept of incitement or solicitation impossible as a matter of definition, as it would demand that any speech inciting or soliciting a crime be judged as if the crime it incited or solicited had never been committed, thereby making solicitation or incitement impossible to
ever demonstrate in
any case. Hence why I'm so sure that you're lying when you say that you understand the concepts: You still
clearly do not understand how they function). And
then it demands that we treat the fact that he said "peaceful"
one time in an hour long speech as if it were the only thing he said - or at least the only thing that mattered - so that you can then pretend that it's political persecution and necessarily irrational rather than a reaction to extreme events.
You cherry pick the day from the context of Trump's campaign to overturn the election and insist that we pretend that none of the rest of that exists - despite it all being in service of the same goal - as we judge it. You cherry pick his rally speech from the rest of the events of the day, and
especially the
violent assault on the Capitol to disrupt an official proceeding with the aim of stopping the transfer of power that immediately followed, and insist that in order to judge the speech we must act as though the same assault did not happen. And then you cherry pick
a single phrase in an hour long speech and insist that we judge the entire speech by that one phrase. And you do all of that to convince yourself that the only reason we see this case against Trump to be legitimate cannot have anything to do with the merits of the case and instead must be a position we must have taken as a matter of principle out of irrational petty hatred.
Such an argument is not only unconvincing, it's shamelessly childish.
