Prattville Dragoons Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp 1524 Commander's Column for October 2023 - A Weaponization of the Federal Government Agencies

 It is frightening to witness the weaponizing of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the federal Justice Department against those who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 elections.  Every day it seems new charges are brought against President Trump by state attorney generals installed by Soros to pursue these very tactics and lawsuits.  Dozens have now been imprisoned for attending rallies in Washington on January 6, 2021 supporting President Trump, calling for an investigation into voting irregularities and, entering the capital building.  Conflicting evidence shows people in a frenzy at the gates to the capital where Ashli Babbitt was shot while other tapes show an orderly procession of people seemingly touring the halls of the capital escorted by capitol police.  Subsequently, the FBI has executed arrests of many of these protestors who attended the rally including those who entered the capital building and some are facing many years incarceration under charges of insurrection.   The photos and videos of the arrests are alarming with heavily armed FBI agents swarming residents and places of business and handcuffing citizens as they lead them off to jail under questionable charges with secretive trials.  Calls for the release of all the tapes showing the capital building are ignored.  Evidence of federal agents acting as instigators in the rallies is ignored.  The mere grounds defining those rallying and protesting as mounting an insurrection seems ridiculous as the only people armed on January 6th were the capitol police.  These arrests and imprisonments should be frightening to American citizens believing in our First Amendment rights as these actions certainly seem to be an infringement of our rights to assemble and free speech by a weaponized federal bureau bent on protecting those in power including President Biden and his administration.  

These actions by an American President of course are not without precedent.  Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and arrested dozens of political opponents as threats to his administration and to the federal government existence.  “On September 17, 1861, fully one third of the members of the Maryland General Assembly were arrested, due to federal concerns that the Assembly "would aid the anticipated rebel invasion and would attempt to take the state out of the Union."” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland_in_the_American_Civil_War#:~:text=On%20September%2017%2C%201861%2C%20the,of%20the%20Union.%22%20Although%20previous)  Arrests for hypothetical possibilities.  Earlier in the spring of that year, “Baltimore Mayor Brown,the city council, the police commissioner, and the entire Board of Police were arrested and imprisoned at Fort McHenry without charges.”  Following the May Supreme Court ruling that the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was unconstitutional and “Lincoln's dismissal of Chief Justice Taney's ruling (he) was criticized in a September 1861 editorial by Baltimore newspaper editor Frank Key Howard (Francis Scott Key's grandson), (and) Howard was himself arrested by order of Lincoln's Secretary of State Seward and held without trial. In all nine newspapers were shut down in Maryland by the federal government, and a dozen newspaper owners and editors like Howard were imprisoned without charges.”

Lincoln justified his actions saying “that the American people will, by means of military arrests during the rebellion, lose the right of public discussion, the liberty of speech and the press, the law of evidence, trail by jury, and Habeas Corpus, throughout the indefinite peaceful future”.  Something like 14,400 civilians were arrested by Lincoln during the lead up and course of the War for Southern Independence.  Lincoln moved the enforcement of these arrests from the State Department to the War Department in 1862 placing “the program always in the hands of persons who were firm believers in its necessity as a means of saving the Union” including Joseph Holt, judge advocate general.  The Merrick Garland of 1862 as it were.  It seems that Lincoln’s arrests were effective as there was little opposition to the enforcement measures, “Clement Vallandigham was the most famous politician in Dayton, Ohio, but his arrest in the night — despite a mysterious shrill whistled signal and three shots the victim fired into the air to alert friends — brought few people even curious to see what was happening. True, a mob the next night set fire to the offices of the local Republican newspaper, and one rioter was shot by a soldier while trying to cut a water hose in use to douse the fire, but the riot was quickly put down without loss of life. There were indignation meetings in most of the major cities of the North following Valiant Val's arrest, but this was orderly protest organized by politicians with some stake in preserving the system.”  This lackadaisical laissez faire attitude persists today in questioning authority even such overbearing use of prosecution threatening very individual freedom and liberty.  Lincoln’s arrests focused on Confederate citizens with a large percentage claiming Jefferson Davis as their President and those refusing an oath of loyalty.  A parallel could certainly be claimed that those jailed for the January 6th “insurrection” claim Trump as their President.  (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/idx/j/jala/2629860.0005.103/--lincoln-administration-and-arbitrary-arrests?rgn=main;view=fulltext )