“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. Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo: You Say You Want An Insurrection” →