Was It an Attempted Coup?

 

Paul Craig Roberts is perhaps the political pundit with a personal background that  matches closest to my own. He and I are both about the same age, grew up in the Atlanta area when public schools were segregated, entered Georgia Tech in the late fifties, and eventually served in senior management at the Department of Treasury under President Reagan.

Roberts wrote the following article this week following the public release of the Durham Report. According to Roberts, Durham exonerates Donald Trump of any wrongdoing in connection with the Russia Hoax and cites FBI senior personnel Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok as the principals behind the fabricated attacks on Trump and fails to place significant responsibility on former FBI Director James Comey and current Director Christopher Wray.

I think we witnessed a non-violent coup attempt to overthrow a sitting duly-elected President through fabricated charges of treason that coupled with tampering with public information dissemination just prior to the 2020 election perhaps resulted in Donald Trump failing in his re-election bid. 

The FBI Must Be Held Accountable for Russiagate

Actually, Roberts wrote this in the first month of Trump’s Presidency, foretelling accurately where this was going.

This is where the Republican Establishment failed their voters and the American people. No excuses.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/02/16/trump-presidency-rip/ 

Published in General
This post was promoted to the Main Feed by a Ricochet Editor at the recommendation of Ricochet members. Like this post? Want to comment? Join Ricochet’s community of conservatives and be part of the conversation. Join Ricochet for Free.

There are 35 comments.

Become a member to join the conversation. Or sign in if you're already a member.
  1. BDB Inactive
    BDB
    @BDB

    This was absolutely a coup.  They had gained control of the military prior to the election, and certainly deployed them to cement their seizure of power.  Heaven knows that other organs of state power had been utterly and unlawfully weaponized, with large sections of the executive in open mutiny.

    You’re not comfortable with the term — well I am.  In fact, I’m not comfortable with shying away from it.

    • #31
  2. Ed G. Member
    Ed G.
    @EdG

    Hoyacon (View Comment):

    Ed G. (View Comment):

    Hoyacon (View Comment):

    I would agree that this was an attempted, yet ultimately unsuccessful, coup (let’s leave the subsequent election aside).

    But I believe that it’s also important to look into why we’re saying “unsuccessful.” Somewhere, in the bowels of DC and beyond, the “system” emerged battered and bruised and worked despite the best efforts of some powerful people. This extends to two attempt to impeach a President, both of which were defeated through the Senate, where the supposedly feckless Republicans held the line.


    Definitely feckless. You characterize it as holding the line, based on the failure to directly remove President Trump via impeachment or prosecution. The system worked.

    With an attempted coup this flimsy, this internally inconsistent, this fact free, it should have been no problem, barely an inconvenience, to 1) stop it early and 2) punish the perpetrators. Instead, it worked. Republicans were in fact pushing in the wrong direction throughout, sternly warning Trump not to overstep or interfere in the investigations (i.e. the coup).

    So the system didn’t work? The R’s didn’t stop the impeachments? A plot hatched and supported at the highest levels of government is flimsy?

    Correct on both.

    The FISA system didn’t work. The independence of the FBI and other civil servants didn’t work. The DOJ didn’t work. The IC didn’t work. The courts didn’t work. The Congress didn’t work, unless you define “worked” in the extremely narrow sense of barely voting to not remove the president on obviously flimsy and fake charges that should never have gotten anywhere that far. The system spent five years hoaxing and impeding a duly elected president and ignoring or covering up real crimes and corruption.

    • #32
  3. Flicker Coolidge
    Flicker
    @Flicker

    Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio… (View Comment):

    Flicker (View Comment):

    BDB (View Comment):

    Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio… (View Comment):

    Dr. Bastiat (View Comment):

    Bob Thompson: I think we witnessed a non-violent coup attempt to overthrow a sitting duly-elected President

    Pretty hard to argue with that.

    Nah. It’s easy to argue with that,

    A coup is a sudden, violent, and unlawful seizure of government power. There’s no such thing as a non-violent coup.

    It was a corrupt political intrigue. That’s bad, but not a coup.

    We need a word for something this stupid.

    Wow. There’s no such thing as a bloodless coup pushing a leader off into exile?

    No. I think that you need to be more careful with terminology, and think about it carefully.

    I think that it makes sense to call something a “bloodless coup,” if there is little or no actual killing. Technically, “bloodless” would require zero fatalities, though we might use the term a bit metaphorically to refer to a coup with only a small amount of bloodshed.

    This is not because a coup is non-violent. It is because sometimes a violent coup works with little or no resistance.

    I think that it is a serious error to use terms like “coup” carelessly, just as it is a serious error to use terms like “rape” carelessly. If some woman is seduced and charmed into sex, that’s bad, but it ain’t rape. Don’t call it rape.

    Words are symbols and definitions are do have fuzzy borders.  And there are always new forms of an old endeavor.  So a portion of a government illegally forcing the top government leader out but not shooting anybody, is not a coup?  Okay.  But then what is the right word for it?

    Added: And is rape rape if it’s done at the point of a gun and the victim acquiesces to all the rapist’s demands?  What is more there is a well-informed rumor that Trump was threatened with assassination and that the Secret Service would have been unable to prevent it if he entered a second term.  So acquiescing to threats of assassination also counts as a coup.

    But I think BDB and Ed G. have it right here for slightly different reasons.  And my reasoning here is a slightly different but related third.

    • #33
  4. Unsk Member
    Unsk
    @Unsk

    BDB:

    “This was absolutely a coup.  They had gained control of the military prior to the election, and certainly deployed them to cement their seizure of power.  Heaven knows that other organs of state power had been utterly and unlawfully weaponized, with large sections of the executive in open mutiny.

    You’re not comfortable with the term — well I am.  In fact, I’m not comfortable with shying away from it.”

    Absolutely  correct.

    One can argue about the  exact semantics of a word, but what happened in America over the last few years is best described as a “coup.” No other word comes close to the appropriate description of what happened.

    And I would say that the coup was at least sufficiently successful, among other things,  to take down Trump, imprison thousands of Americans illegally, impose the Totalitarism of the Lockdowns and the VAX, increase incredibly the size of government  and worse of all nearly gut our system of Justice.

    •  If not, why can’t the J6 prisoners held for wrongfully accused misdemeanor charges be released after over 2 years?

    • If not, why can’t the Hunter Laptop crimes by addressed by the DOJ after several years and much evidence that has come to light?

    • If not, why haven’t charges been brought against the perps of the Russian Hoax after the Durham Report?

    • If not, why has Federal Spending grown by an unbelievable 40% over the last 3 years, funded almost exclusively by inflationary money printing?

    • If not, why weren’t the Constitutional Rights of those who refused the VAX upheld, and why were so many denied the appropriate care of treatments  like HCQ and Ivermectin and then left to die ?

    • If not, why has our school system continued with  this absolutely insane glorification of the Transgendered in our schools and the indoctrination of it on  our young?

    • If not, why have so many who have spoken the truth as guaranteed under the First Amendment treated and at times tried as “Domestic Terrorists”?

    And the list goes on, and on.

    The fact is that we may be on the verge of a unbelievable financial collapse followed by an even  greater societal collapse all intended by the sickos of the Neo-Communist Totalitarian Left to sweep away the American Constitutional Republic and replace it with a High Tech Totalitarian Regime that enslaves us all in some sort of Techno gulag.  So far their plans are working, even thought there have been just a few defeats here and there, but overall they still have the upper hand by far and look to consolidate their power in even greater ways with a financial collapse and the implementation of Totalitarian Digital Currency.

    • #34
  5. Michael Minnott Member
    Michael Minnott
    @MichaelMinnott

    Ed G. (View Comment):

    …it should have been no problem, barely an inconvenience…

    Someone’s been watching Ryan George.

    • #35
Become a member to join the conversation. Or sign in if you're already a member.