“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we’re finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio.” From Ohio, written by Neil Young.
The New York Times, which nearly half the American electorate conflates with Pravda, said yesterday “Under an 1878 law called the Posse Comitatus Act, it is normally illegal to use federal troops on domestic soil for policing purposes. But an 1807 law, the Insurrection Act creates an exception to that ban for situations in which the president decides that ‘unlawful obstructions, combinations or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States,’ make it ‘impracticable’ to enforce federal law.”
Over the next month or so, it is likely you will be inundated with two words: “Superman,” and “Insurrection.” We all know the former is a big-ass movie about a boy and his dog, but what is an insurrection?
In 2006, George W. Bush considered intervening in the state of Louisiana’s response to Hurricane Katrina back in 2006 — you may remember the photo op of Bush impotently performing a flyover in Air Force One. Louisiana’s governor refused. In 2020, Donald Trump said he would invoke the Insurrection Act in response to the protests following the murder by police of George Floyd. Trump told “every governor to deploy the National Guard in sufficient numbers to re-establish civil law and order until the violence has been quelled.” Like the governor of Louisiana thirteen years earlier, the sundry state officials in question did not cave in to Trump’s demand.
You might recall the National Guard were brought in during Trump’s January 6, 2020 violent and deadly MAGA invasion of the United States Capitol, but even then the Insurrection Act was not invoked. There’s no doubt who Trump’s army would hold accountable for those deadly acts. Today’s Republican Party, such as it is, is a gaggle of liars, opportunists and cowards.
On January 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order requiring the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security to detail a report about the conditions at the southern borders of the United States, complete with recommendations to keep brown and black people from crossing that border. Invoking the Insurrection Act was stated specifically. Clearly, the concept of invoking terrorizing totalitarian actions to force his party’s racist and xenophobic beliefs remains active in Trump’s Quarter-Pounder-With-Cheese brain.
On Saturday, June 7, 2025, America’s hot-pants rapist dictator called up California State National Guard troops to be put under his control despite objections from that state’s governor. He cited ongoing protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Los Angeles, although such protests are occurring all over this country, including in “Red States.” Hey, remember when “state’s rights” used to be a Republican thing? Trump favors state’s rights the way OG Republican President Abe Lincoln favored slavery.
We’re less likely to see the Guard or federal troops invade the Red States, at least not at first. But if you’re pissed off at our refusal to uphold our constitution and you live in a Blue State, you’d better prepare for tanks and rifles. Maybe you’ll get a couple shots off before they send you to a Sudanese concentration camp.
Tin soldiers and Trump is coming. It’s happened before. Not the invocation of the 1807 Insurrection Act; back then America was ruled by people who were a lot more sane and a hell of a lot less bigoted than our present-day despots who act as though the only people they consider to be Americans are cis white Christian Nationalists who earn over $400,000 a year. If you’re not one of those, you are fucked.
It is never a bad idea to be prepared to defend yourself and your family. Right now, if you’re not a cis white Christian Nationalist who earns over $400,000 a year, such preparation is simply common sense. As author and inadvertent futurist Joseph Heller wrote, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
And they certainly are.
