‘no such thing as a state public health emergency exception to the U.S. Constitution’……
Sounds like the newest set of damage control talking points got emailed out for the parrots

 

EVERYTOWN COMES OUT FROM BEHIND THE CURTAIN

For years, gun control organizations have been seeking to dismantle the bipartisan Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA). That’s the crucial federal law shielding firearm manufacturers and sellers from frivolous lawsuits designed to bankrupt law-abiding businesses by blaming them for the criminal misuse of lawfully sold firearms or drive the industry to its knees and impose gun control through court ordered settlements. It is what former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich dubbed “regulation through litigation.”

Gun control advocates have unsuccessfully urged Congress to repeal the law, falsely claiming it provides total immunity from all lawsuits – a falsehood regularly repeated by President Joe Biden even though the media has fact-checked him and said it is not true.  In court, these groups have unsuccessfully challenged the PLCAA’s constitutionality. Attorney General Merrick Garland testified before Congress that the PLCAA was Constitutionally-sound, despite the contrary rhetoric coming from The White House and the gun ban lobby. They continue to ask courts to misapply the law’s exceptions (disproving the total immunity claim). All these efforts are designed to open up a new floodgate of frivolous litigation against the industry not seen since the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was that litigation which the bipartisan PLCAA prevents.

Now, the enemies of the Second Amendment have opened up a new line of attack on the PLCAA. Surreptitiously led by the Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety, they have convinced a few “Blue” antigun legislatures to pass an unconstitutional “public nuisance” (anti-PLCAA) statute. These statutes attempt an end run around the PLCAA to set the table for a renaissance of reckless lawsuits against members of the industry. NSSF is challenging the Everytown-backed laws in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, California, Illinois, Washington and Hawaii.

Out of the Shadows

Not content to be the “man behind the curtain,” however, Everytown is now stepping into the well of the courtroom to defend its unconstitutional law. Everytown Law recently filed petitions for three of their staff attorneys to represent Hawaii’s Attorney General Anne E. Lopez, in NSSF’s challenge to Hawaii’s unconstitutional “public nuisance” law. This puts Everytown Law in an active role, not just a supporting role, of defending unconstitutional laws.

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I Can’t Stop Laughing: Biden Thinks He’s Treated Like a Toddler.

Joe Biden is a man who likes his ice cream and routinely needs the White House to clean up his messes. He could be in diapers at this point, too. Who knows? If he is, I’m sure the White House is doing everything possible to keep that under wraps.

But I digress. According to a new book by Franklin Foer, staff writer at The Atlantic and former editor of the New Republic, Joe Biden feels like his White House staff is babying him, and he’s not particularly happy about it.

The book recalls the incident where Biden riffed after the conclusion of a speech about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, making a statement that appeared to call for Putin to be overthrown. “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said. According to Foer’s account, the White House was walking back the statement by the time Biden had reached his motorcade.

“Suddenly, the press wasn’t marveling at his rhetoric or his diplomatic triumphs; it was back to describing him as a blowhard lacking in self-control,” Foer writes in his book, and Biden was deeply upset over the media coverage of the gaffe and “left for home, ending his triumphalist tour, feeling sorry for himself.” The president “resented his aides for creating the impression that they had cleaned up his mess.”

“Rather than owning his failure, he fumed to his friends about how he was treated like a toddler,” Foer writes.

Naturally, the White House disputed this story when Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked about it.

“President Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history. Why does White House staff treat him like a baby?” Doocy asked.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre might have needed a diaper of her own when she got that question, as she was none too pleased by it.

Doocy then quoted the book and asked, “Was John [F.] Kennedy ever babied like that?”

“So, look, I’ll say this,” she began. “There’s going to be a range — always — a range of books that are — about every administration, as you know — that’s going to have a variety of claims. That is not unusual. That happens all the time. And we’re not going to litigate those here. That’s something that we’re not going to speak to.”

Cute story. I wonder if Jean-Pierre would dismiss all the outlandish claims made about Trump in various books the same way.

Frequently Debunked Crackpots Claim the AR-15 is Worthless for Self-Defense

When the young paste-eaters at Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun propaganda factory, known as the Trace, team up with the stodgy window-lickers at the Gun Violence Archive to produce a story about the utility of the AR-15 platform as a modern self-defense tool, it’s hard not to get too excited.

It’s like watching two freight trains headed toward each other on the same track. You know the results are going to be cataclysmic. None of these halfwits have ever heard a shot fired, much less one fired in anger, or especially one fired to good effect. They know less about what makes a reliable home defense weapon than I do about man-buns, skinny jeans, or avocado toast.

We have debunked the Trace and the Gun Violence Archive so often it’s getting old. The kids at the Trace masquerade as legitimate journalists when, in fact, they’re nothing more than highly paid anti-gun activists. The GVA purports to track gun crimes and maintain a list of mass shootings, but their data is collected from media, and even social media sources, and their stats are so inflated they’d have you believe a mass shooting occurs nearly every time someone draws from a holster. When the two anti-gun nonprofits combine for a story, it’s bound to be something as bereft of facts as it is poorly written, and to that standard their most recent collaboration does not disappoint.

A story published Tuesday asks: “How Often Are AR-Style Rifles Used for Self-Defense? Supporters of AR-15s, often used in mass shootings and racist attacks, say they’re important for self-defense. Our analysis of Gun Violence Archive data suggests otherwise.”

The story was written by one of the Trace’s senior fabulists, Jennifer Mascia, who is “currently the lead writer of the Ask The Trace series and tracks news developments on the gun beat.” Mascia has also led the Trace’s hilarious we’re journalists, not activists, propaganda campaign on social media.

Mascia reportedly searched the GVA’s data for “assault weapon,” which she said the GVA defines as “AR-15, AK-47, and all variants defined by law enforcement.” Of course, there’s no mention of whether the weapons were capable of select-fire and, therefore, actual assault weapons. She started with 190 incidents, which she whittled down for various reasons. The results: “That left 51 incidents over a nine-and-a-half-year span in which legal gun owners brandished or used an AR-style rifle to defend life or property. That averages out to around five per year.”

To be clear, I trust Mascia’s findings about as much as I trust the GVA data that produced the results. The whole story is GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.

It is noteworthy that the firearms “expert” whom Mascia found to further beclown herself – who wrote in a CNN story that the AR is the last gun he’d recommend for self-defense – is none other than former Washington D.C. police officer Michael Fanone. He’s the officer who cried a lot before the January 6 Commission – the one with the beard who cried a lot, if that helps jog your memory.

The network must have liked the cut of his jib. Fanone is now a CNN contributor and hawking a new book: “Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul.” (Nancy Pelosi highly recommended it.)

Since he’s so afraid of the AR platform, I can’t help but wonder what weapon Fanone, or for that matter, Mascia, would recommend for home defense. If I had to guess, it probably has two barrels, a wooden stock and exposed hammers.

I’m somewhat familiar with the AR myself, which is why I trust it to defend my hearth and home. It’s light, accurate, and deadly, which is exactly the point, and something we should stop making allowances for.

Despite the exhortations of Bloomberg’s activists or crybaby ex-cops, an AR-15 is exactly what I want when The Bad Man comes a-calling.

David Hemenway Given Platform to Mislead on Guns by Obscure Online Outlet

David Hemenway, a Professor of Health Policy at Harvard University’s Injury Control Research Center, has been a proud proponent of anti-gun “research” for many years. Rather than relying on criminologists and experts in law enforcement to diminish violent crime where firearms are used, Hemenway long-ago jumped on the anti-gun bandwagon of trying to frame the discussion about gun-control from an approach of addressing it as a “public health” issue—as if there is some sort of vaccine that could be developed to stop violent criminals from being violent criminals.

One might consider him simply misguided, or perhaps he has just bought into what many on the far left do whenever faced with something they wish to control; frame it as a “public health” crisis.

But with Hemenway, it may be that he just hates guns and law-abiding gun owners, and all of his “research” he claims supports his radical theories is guided predominantly by confirmation bias. And who better to offer support for the theory that this particular anti-gun researcher just hates guns and gun owners than Hemenway himself?

A recent interview with Hemenway was posted by the online outlet Undark, a relatively obscure digital magazine with ties to any number of media outlets that hold extreme anti-gun views. Publishing partners include outlets that have shown anti-gun bias such as HuffPost, Mother Jones, NPR, Salon, and Slate. It should come as no surprise that Undark would give Hemenway a platform for his anti-gun views.

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The Washington Post Calls for Reducing Free Speech to Improve Democracy

In very post-2016 fashion, The Washington Post last week published an article implying democracy might require curbs on freedom of speech. This unsettling approach suggests concerns around “misinformation” on social networks supersede freedom of speech, a move that has elicited intense debate and, rightly so; criticism.

In what appears to be a shift in public discourse towards further censorship, the widely-read Washington Post article critiqued Elon Musk’s reinstatement of former President Donald Trump on the social media platform, X, previously known as Twitter.

The article suggested that the proliferation of what it calls “political misinformation” disturbs democracy, sparking concern amongst proponents of free speech.

The perspective is reflected in the reporting by The Washington Post journalists Naomi Nix and Sarah Ellison. However, their piece lacks critical analysis of the ambiguity surrounding the term “misinformation” and fails to address the consequential question of how to moderate content in situations where politicians’ statements are arguably false or misleading.

The article’s glaring omission of any mention of the First Amendment – a core pillar of American democracy fostering media freedoms – also raised eyebrows amidst media and legal circles.

The Washington Post reporters worryingly suggest the retreat of social media companies from combating online falsehoods could impact the 2024 presidential election. They fault Musk, along with Facebook and YouTube, for taking a step back from reining in what they call misleading claims and conspiracy theories.

Nix and Ellison also critique X for permitting Tucker Carlson’s President Trump interview, which they deem as a platform for Trump to reiterate his allegations about the 2020 election. They contend that social media should only host political content if its accuracy can be proven, posing an unrealistic expectation that conceals underlying issues of censorship under the pretext of curbing “misleading” or “hateful” speech.

The Slanted Findings of a Gun-Control “Study”

Everytown for Gun Safety is a Michael Bloomberg-funded gun-ban group that has never heard of an anti-gun proposal that it hasn’t supported. So, when Everytown recently joined with The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab to study “youth” and guns, it should come as no surprise that they “found” exactly what they were looking for.

The combined groups’ new “study,” titled “U.S. Youth Attitudes On Guns Report,” concluded that pro-gun youth are more likely to hold supremacist or racist views. “Evidence from this study suggests that pro-gun attitudes were associated with more extreme worldviews like male supremacist ideation and racial resentment,” the report stated.

Before we get into the nuts and bolts, let’s first take a look at an interesting aspect of the research. While it explicitly states “Youth” in the headline, the study participants ranged from 14 to 30 years old. Even the most-liberal definitions of “youth” tend to use the parameters of 14 to 24. While there is no consensus on what defines “youth” under law in the U.S., nearly every state, along with the federal government, considers the age at which one becomes an “adult” to be 18 years old. Some may debate including 18- to 24-year-olds among “youth,” but adding 25- through 30-year-olds to the study ensures it doesn’t have any validity concerning American “youth.”

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They want us disarmed?


There Can Be No Negotiating on the Right to Arms — with Hate Groups or with Anyone

“Senate Majority Leader @SenSchumer  is negotiating with the NRA to pass his priority bill – the SAFE Act, a cannabis banking legislation – with Section 10 added as a sweetener for the NRA-backed Senate Republicans,” Newtown Action Alliance tweeted (x’ed?) Monday. “We appreciate @SenJackReed  working to modify the bill to ensure that regulators can warn banks about risky customers – like gun retailers. Congress should not be negotiating with the NRA, a terrorist group that is pushing its any guns to anyone everywhere agenda. Guns are the #1 killer of our children & gun deaths have increased 50% since the Sandy Hook shooting tragedy.”

That’s a lot of vitriol-drenched lies to unpack. Let’s start with NRA’s interest, which is passage of the  Fair Access to Banking Act to protect against “banks, credit card companies, and other financial service providers [setting] terms of service that openly discriminate against lawful firearm-related commerce.” Gun owners who recall the days of Operation Chokepoint recall the offensive excesses – from financial ostracism of FFLs and the pejorative conflation equating them with purveyors of “Ponzi schemes” and “racist materials” to the ridiculous revelation that ATF’s banker was stiffing porn stars – pun intended. (Note: Those last two links go to the Internet Archive and may take a bit to load).

Democrat gun-grabber Jack Reed’s interest is in imposing Operation Chokepoint on steroids, this time by mandating Department of Precrime “snitchware” via “Merchant Category Codes” developed by a “progressive” bank affiliated with a leftist union that “rakes in millions from Dem campaigns, liberal orgs,” and has organized rallies and marched in solidarity with communists.

Suddenly motives are seeming less and less about “gun safety” and more and more about totalitarian citizen disarmament. So, let’s look at the last part of Newtown Action Alliance’s missive.

Congress should just impose such edicts and not include the largest lobby group representing millions of gun-owning citizens in its deliberations…? Leave them with no voice in what’s going to happen to their property — and to them if they don’t comply…?

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Joe Biden Boasts He Has Bypassed Congress for Gun Control More than Any Other President

On August 17, 2023, President Joe Biden boasted about the number of times he has used executive action to institute gun control that Congress did not pass.

He tweeted:

On April 8, 2021, Breitbart News reported Biden used executive gun controls that included restrictions on “ghost guns,” a push for red flag laws, recategorization of AR-15 pistols, and DOJ-led research into gun trafficking.

These controls led to an ATF-issued rule classifying “partially complete pistol frames” as firearms. That rule means a background check is now required in order to purchase certain gun parts kits.

The  same executive controls also led to an ATF-issued rule categorizing AR-pistols with stabilizer braces as short-barrel rifles. This new categorization means owners of said pistols with stabilizer braces are required to the register the firearms under the auspices of the National Firearms Act (1934).

On July 21, 2022, the White House recounted that Biden had issued 21 executive actions related to gun control and gun violence up to that point in his presidency.

On May 14, 2023, Breitbart News noted that Biden issued yet another executive order on gun control, this one directing Attorney General Merrick Garland to act where Congress has not acted and take the United States “as close as possible” to universal background checks.

Another executive gun control is anticipated late this year or early next year, in the form of an ATF-issued rule to redefine the meaning of gun dealer so as to broaden it, and thereby broaden the number of gun sales in which a background check will be required. The goal of the ATF rule will be to get as close as possible to a universal background check scenario in America.

Okay, this tells us that they know SloJoe is such a liability that if he can’t be stopped, he’s going to lose.

Jake Tapper Stuns CNN’s Audience: “Trump Was Right and Joe Biden Was Wrong”

CNN’s Jake Tapper came clean and admitted that Trump was right and Joe Biden was wrong about Hunter Biden’s shady dealings in China.

TAPPER: Let’s turn to the Biden administration because Jeff you have some new reporting that President Biden might have a blind spot, according to people around him when it comes to his son Hunter Biden’s legal troubles and concerns about how this might impact his desire to be reelected. What do you got? What are you hearing?

ZELENY: Well, look, this is something that the President was hoping to put behind him. They were hoping that the plea agreement would go through, et cetera. Now there is very likely to be a trial unfolding at the same time as a presidential campaign. Even worse, a second special counsel’s investigation on top of the one that’s already investigating the President for classified documents.

So the point talking to a bunch of advisors is that this is something that is not discussed around the President in his orbit because they do not think voters care about it.

They think voters care about the economy, other matters. They’re probably right about that. However, we know that this is going to be a central piece of the Republican debate and Republican talking points next week and beyond, the Hunter Biden situation.

So what do swing voters think of Hunter Biden? As of now, they’ve never sort of drawn a correlation or blamed the President for his son’s conduct. They feel sympathy for him, et cetera.

But is there a blind spot directly around him and the campaign by not talking about this? It’s verboten. You can’t talk about Hunter Biden. We’ll see.

This is definitely going to be a topic on the debate stage this week.

TAPPER: Yes. And Kristen, Glenn Kessler from “The Washington Post” had a fact check about Joe Biden from earlier this month noting that Hunter Biden admitted in court in July that he was, in fact, paid substantial sums from Chinese companies.

Kessler wrote, Hunter Biden reported nearly $2.4 million income in 2017 and 2.2 million income in 2018, most of which came from Chinese or Ukrainian interests.

But this — and this directly goes against what Joe Biden said in the debate in 2020 with Donald Trump.

Biden administration best understood as a junta

I have come to realize that the Biden administration is nothing but a junta.

Those who constitute it are the opposite of the Founders.  They don’t believe in limited government — of, by, and for the people.  They do not believe in objectivity — or freedom of speech, religion, and assembly.  They do not believe in “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,” or in their right to be free from “unreasonable searches and seizures.”  (Just ask Roger Stone or Donald Trump.)  Nor do they believe in equality under the law, the people’s right to a “speedy and public trial” by a jury of one’s peers (just ask Donald Trump), natural law, etc., etc.  And they certainly don’t believe that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”  In fact, in recent years, they appear increasingly to disdain all these concepts…because they obviously increasingly disdain those who disagree with them and/or who could stand in the way of the ever-increasing power and control they have over others — power and control they revel in and believe they richly deserve.

They do believe in a Supreme Ruler.  But they believe they are that Supreme Ruler.  They believe they have the right — indeed, duty — to rule over the “deplorables” in rural areas and flyover country.  Preposterously, they purport to believe that their ideas and policies must be implemented, whether the rest of us like it or not…if we are to “save our democracy.”  There is nothing less democratic — or more deplorable — than that.

The alphabet agencies that Obama and Biden have fully politicized and weaponized are now on roughly the same objective and moral plane as the Nazis’ SS or Brownshirts, East Germany’s Stasi, or the Soviet Union’s KGB.  The CIA, FBI, Department of Injustice (DOI?), and the rest are so boldly and brazenly partisan — and aggressive in pursuing their agenda — that it is breathtaking to those of us who knew a younger and more innocent America.

Modern-day Democrats’ signature tactic is to vehemently (and indignantly!) accuse their opponents of doing exactly what they have done — and of being exactly what they are.  As I have stated repeatedly, they are very good at being evil.  Newt Gingrich had it exactly right in a recent interview with Sean Hannity, whom he schooled.

Donald Trump is kryptonite to the Adam Schiffs of the world, the evildoers, and those in the Deep State and the swamp.  That is why they called him a fascist, authoritarian, etc.  And why they are attempting to indict/imprison/destroy him now.  For such “crimes” as tweeting “Georgia hearings now on @OANN.  Amazing!”  Yes, they indicted him for tweeting his opinion of a cable news show.

If we truly want to remove the junta — and save our representative republic — we must help Trump in his fight against the vast left-wing conspiracy that is the Democrat-Media-Complex.

Another pissant wanna-be tyrant, shilling for those BloombergBucks.
But it is so nice when pictures for positive ID are provided.

the need for that assault weapon ban. Not one on the buying of weapons in the future. One on ALL military style assault weapons in American hands now. Buy them back and make the penalties so severe that no one will be tempted to keep one

We aren’t doing enough to address gun violence

C.J. Mikkelsen is a retired Lieutenant/paramedic for Dallas Fire Rescue in Dallas, Texas. He was born and raised in Michigan and is glad to be back in his home state.

CJ Mikkelsen

Mark Barden’s face looks out from my phone imploring me to contribute to Sandy Hook Promise to stop gun violence about every three minutes while
I swipe it away as soon as that five second countdown ends. But it bothers me when I do it.

Yes, I’ve contributed. “I’ve done my part,” I say to myself.
But have I? Have we, as a society?

Do we protect our most vulnerable citizens, our children, like we should?
So many of us go on ridiculous rants about drag queen story hour or share posts about the “Sound of Freedom” movie on our Facebook page. We’re all about “saving the children” as long as all it takes is a painless couple of clicks of a mouse.

Sorry, folks. I can’t let it go and fade into the background.
I know, I’ve written about gun violence and I’m supposed to have moved on to the next big topic. Something keeps bringing me back to guns. It’s either Mark Barden’s face or another tragic mass shooting or something as mind-boggling as an article about a mini-AR15 that a company is marketing to children less than eight years old.

America is, according to Everytown Research & Policy, (The Impact of Gun Violence on Children and Teens | Everytown Research & Policy) killing or maiming our children at a rate of 53 each and every day of the year.

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If Saying An Election Is Stolen Is A Crime, Why Isn’t Stacey Abrams In Prison?

The fourth and latest round of indictments against former President Donald Trump suggests that constitutionally protected actions such as questioning election results, asking for phone numbers, and encouraging voters to watch TV are now indictment-worthy acts of conspiracy. If claiming an election is stolen is truly a crime, as prosecutors and grand jurors in Trump’s Georgia case suggested on Monday, failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams should be behind bars.

Abrams lost the race for governor in Georgia in 2018 to then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp by 1.4 percentage points. Due to the small margin of victory, Abrams refused to formally concede her loss because she believed the election was “tainted” which led to the “disinvestment and disenfranchisement of thousands of voters.”

In her “non-concession speech,” the Democrat admitted that Kemp “will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election” but stopped short of officially agreeing that she lost.

“To be clear, this is not a speech of concession. Concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true, or proper. As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede,” Abrams said.

The activist threatened lawsuits but never provided evidence for her claims that black voters’ votes were being suppressed at the polls. Instead of facing punishment for her lies, Abrams was elevated by her party and the corporate media as the face of their attempt to permanently manipulate elections ahead of Trump’s second and third runs. She was so encouraged by this attention that she ran and lost against Kemp again in 2022.

Abrams’ sore loser behavior resonated with the Democrat Party, which still clings to its own stolen-election theories used to undermine Trump’s victory in 2016. She quickly entered the pool of possible options for President Joe Biden’s running mate. Her whining even scored her political points with other failed candidates such as Hillary Clinton, who complained that “if [Abrams] had a fair election, she already would have won.”

Years after her initial loss, Abrams was still pretending that Georgia elections were rigged against her. In 2021, she made a national show of calling for boycotts of Georgia when Republicans in her state passed election integrity laws. To this day, she regularly appears on TV to discuss how to advance Democrats’ undemocratic version of “democracy” during elections.

Disclosure filings from her second failed campaign in the Peach State suggest that, between 2018 and 2022, Abrams’ election fraud book tour, speech circuit, and activism made her into a multimillionaire.

In just four years, Abrams went from arguing that her $400,000 in credit card debt, student loans, back taxes, car loans, and real estate debt shouldn’t disqualify her from running to confessing her $3.17 million worth just months before voters would reject her again in the 2022 election.

For objecting to how the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia ended, Abrams was handed fame and fortune. For objecting to how the 2020 presidential election in Georgia was handled, Trump was slapped with 13 felony charges and the possibility of jail time.

A majority of Americans already believe the U.S. has a two-tiered system of justice. The fact that Trump, who raised legitimate questions about a poorly conducted election in Georgia, is facing prison instead of Abrams, who never gave evidence for her outrageous election claims, further proves it.

 

Age of Rage: UChicago Report Finds 30 Million American View Violence as Justified to Keep Trump From Power

The chilling answer is found in a new report out of the University of Chicago showing that almost 12 percent of the population, representing 30 million people, believe that violence is warranted to prevent Trump from assuming the presidency. That is almost double the number who believe that violence is warranted to ensure that Trump does become president.

As discussed in The Guardian, the Chicago Project on Security & Threats survey found many Americans are embracing violence as an option for political change.

We have watched as rage has risen in the country. It is often celebrated by one side or the other. I previously discussed how a scene like the recent confrontation on the floor of the Tennessee House perfectly captured our “age of rage.” Protesters filled the capitol building to protest the failure to pass gun-control legislation. Three Democratic state representatives — Justin Jones from Nashville, Justin Pearson from Memphis, and Gloria Johnson of Knoxville — were unwilling to yield to the majority. They disrupted the floor proceedings with a bullhorn and screaming at their colleagues.

It is a scene familiar to many of us in academia, where events are regularly canceled by those who shout down others.

The three members yelled “No action, no peace” and “Power to the people” as their colleagues objected to their stopping the legislative process. Undeterred, the three refused to allow “business as usual” to continue.

Nobel Laureate Albert Camus once said, “Insurrection is certainly not the sum total of human experience but … it is our historic reality.” Those words came to mind when Tennessee’s House of Representatives expelled two members accused of disrupting legislative proceedings in what some called an “insurrection” or a “mutiny.”

Only a few days before the Tennessee House floor fight, a confrontation occurred off the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington which captured perfectly this new political reality.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) was shown on videotape screaming about gun control in the Capitol as his colleagues left the floor following a vote. Various Democratic members, including former House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), tried to calm Bowman. However, when Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) asked Bowman to stop yelling, Bowman shouted back: “I was screaming before you interrupted me” — which could go down as the epitaph for our age.

The problem is that political figures on both sides are attempting to harness this rage.  They are playing a dangerous game. Trump’s inflammatory tweets are an example. Likewise, former Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison, now the Minnesota attorney general, once said Antifa would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump. This was after Antifa had been involved in numerous acts of violence and its website was banned in Germany. His son, Minneapolis City Council member Jeremiah Ellison, declared his allegiance to Antifa as riots raged in his city last summer.

Unleashing such rage is difficult to control and often those leading the mob find themselves later pursued by it. This is why, during the French Revolution, the journalist Jacques Mallet Pan warned, “Like Saturn, the revolution devours its children.”