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PRESENT DAY 53: Jefferson Davis and Donald Trump
The first trial of Trump starts today in New York. He’s finally being tried for cheating in the 2016 election though that’s not the exact charge. The exact charge is something more like falsifying documents in order to cover up campaign finance violations aimed at dis-informing the public about who and what Trump really is. Of course, Trump ought to be on trial for treason, one of the crimes enumerated in the Constitution itself. Trump committed treason for all of us to see on live t.v. on Jan. 6, 2021. Why he wasn’t arrested that day or the next remains a question that America ought to be answering but isn’t and maybe it has something to do with the other guy who unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow the government, Jefferson Davis.
IMAGES INSERTED: Davis / Trump, Famous American White Nationalists
Davis led a larger, more violent mob against the U.S. government from 1861 till 1865 when that mob was finally put down. Davis was captured shortly after the Civil War ended and held for trial, which proved as difficult to accomplish as bringing Trump to trial has proven to be over the past three and a half years. Trump, of course, has described nazis, skinheads, KKK members and white nationalists in general as “very fine people.” But Trump had long borne his white nationalist soul to anyone paying attention to the racist lies he’d for years been spreading about Obama. In case you’re wondering how much of a white supremacist Jefferson Davis was, I’ll quote him once though it ought not be needed, given that he declared himself to be “president” of the confederacy, a country that did not exist outside the twisted minds of American white supremacists. This is from Wikipedia:
Speaking to the Mississippi Legislature on November 16, 1858, Davis stated "if an Abolitionist be chosen President of the United States ... I should deem it your duty to provide for your safety outside of a Union with those who have already shown the will ...to deprive you of your birthright and to reduce you to worse than the colonial dependence of your fathers.”
In other words, it was the “birthright” of the southern slave owner to own human beings. Losing this “birthright” would be akin to being thrown back into a colonial state. How twisted was confederate logic? When Lincoln freed the slaves with the emancipation proclamation, Davis saw this as an attempt to turn slave against slave owner, which it certainly was but in his mind, this, not rebelling against the country, was “treason.” As “president” of the confederacy, Davis declared that Union solders captured by rebels were to be tried for inciting rebellion, the rebellion of the newly freed slaves, still considered to be sub-human and mere chattel by Davis and the confederacy. Even after Lee was defeated and the south lost Richmond, Davis continued to encourage southerners to continue their treason. He was captured by Union troops on May 9, 1965, less than a month after the assassination of Lincoln. Davis was initially imprisoned but it didn’t take long for this imprisonment to morph into something much closer to a comfortable house arrest. By Sep. 1866 he was living with is wife in a four room apartment still awaiting trail. As with Trump the government was somehow having trouble figuring out how to try him though he had openly committed treason. Davis was released on bail in May of 1867 with people like Horace Greeley and Cornelius Vanderbilt posting his bail. Trump, of course, found like-minded white nationalists to post the money he needed to avoid having his assets attached by the state of New York. Out of jail, Davis hightailed it to Quebec, which had been a rendezvous point for confederates throughout the war, including the coordinating of the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward, who was gravely injured at the same time Booth murdered Lincoln. Then in 1868 Andrew Johnson granted amnesty to all the traitors of the confederacy and Davis was home free. He ended up paying virtually no price for nearly toppling the U.S. government. He was not, like for of the people who conspired with Davis to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, hang for his treason.
IMAGES INSERTED: Mary Surratt, David Herold, Lewis Powell, David Atzerodt executed on July 7, 1865, less than three months after conspiring with Booth to assassinate President Lincoln
Far from it. Davis lived the rest of his life (till 1889) a hero among southerners who were happily instituting Jim Crow to ensure the oppression of African Americans, raising monuments to himself, Lee and all of the other leading confederate traitors and pushing the “lost cause” narrative with much assistance from white nationalist sympathizers across not just the south but the entire country. Hundreds of thousands turned out for Davis’ funeral 25 years after the end of the Civil War but just at the start of the new apartheid created throughout the south that went unchallenged for decades until the Civil Rights movement finally made inroads against it in the 50s and 60s. Donald Trump sent the confederate flag to the Capitol on Jan. 6 where it was proudly hoisted by modern white supremacists, the direct descendants of Jefferson Davis, Robert E.Lee and all the others. Trump sent a mob to stop the transfer of power and thereby overthrow the government that day and like Davis, Trump has so far gotten off scot-free. As with Andrew Johnson, Joe Biden and Merrick Garland have been reluctant to hold Trump accountable for his act of treason, which was shown by the J6 House Committee to encompass far more than just the violent attack on the Capitol. There were concomitant plans to fraudulently overturn state elections and to send fake electoral college representatives to Washington. Trump is captured on tape committing this sort of treason and has yet to be tried for those acts as well even though as with Davis the evidence is there for all to see and the cases open and shut. So the question today is: has anything changed? Are we a different country today than we were in 1861 or 1889 or 1921 (Tulsa race massacre)? Are we going to allow traitors to celebrate treason by wearing bull horns to the Capitol as we have allowed people in confederate garb to roam Gettysburg all these years? Are we going to erect monuments to Oath Keepers, Nazis and Proud Boys to celebrate their participation in this violent coup attempt? Trump, of course, is vowing to do just that and he has something like thirty to forty percent of the country behind him. Is there any doubt that Trump would do as Davis and convert American currency into Trump dough?
IMAGES INSERTED: Confederate / Trump Bills
The only way to learn the lessons not learned from the Civil War, from the Jim Crow Era, from the Joseph McCarthy era, from Nixon, from H.W.’s illegal war against Nicaragua and from J6 is to jail Trump for his treasonous crimes against America. Anything short isn’t just the abdication of justice and the rule of law; it is the admission that America is not now and never was the democratic haven for all that we have always claimed to be.