If there is one thing that conservative pundits can agree on, it is … well, it’s everything. They’re honestly not all that original. But this week, at least two of them are out here warning us all that if the fact that Trump broke the law all over the place prevents him from being president (or, let’s be real, if he is not elected president for any other reason), that his voters will be so mad that they will be forced into civil warring the rest of us.
Mike Huckabee tried to put it gently, and in a way meant to suggest that his supporters are not bad people, but that arresting Trump for doing crimes will turn us into a Banana Republic in which we will all be forced to wear overpriced khakis with black turtlenecks and statement necklaces. Wait, no. Not that. We will become a banana republic in which elections are decided by bullets instead of ballots!
“Do you know how political opponents to those in power are dealt with in third-world dictatorships, banana republics, and communist regimes?” Huckabee asked during his opening monologue of Saturday night’s episode. “The people in power use their police agencies to arrest their opponents for made-up crimes in an attempt to discredit them, bankrupt them, imprison them, exile them, or all of the above.”
“If you are not paying attention, you may not realize that Joe Biden is using exactly those tactics to make sure that Donald Trump is not his opponent in 2024,” Huckabee claimed.
“Here’s the problem,” Huckabee warned. “If these tactics end up working to keep Trump from winning or even running in 2024, it is going to be the last American election that will be decided by ballots rather than bullets.”
Well, golly! It’s only natural. If people can’t have the president they want because he is in prison, what choice do they even have but to take up arms and start killing the rest of us?
Huckabee is far from the first to propose this — within the last month, as Right Wing Watch notes, the popular take from conservative pundits this month has definitely been “Sorry, but if you don’t give these people what they want, they’re just going to have to murder you in order to get it.”
The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles tried to soften it a little bit, trying to claim that the real bullets Huckabee was talking about are unfair elections. Sort of! Unless the unfair elections happen, in which case they will have to kill us.
Mike Huckabee said nothing wrong. Every single thing Mike Huckabee just said is right. Regardless of even what happens in the election and how you interpret it, if the legal mechanisms that the liberals are trying to use — which are really illegal mechanisms — if they succeed at taking Trump off the ballot in certain places, then the likelihood of civil war is much higher. The last time that we had a president elected not being on the ballot in a number of states was immediately before the Civil War. That’s just an historical fact. He’s not saying if Trump loses the election fair and square, then the next election’s gonna be decided by bullets rather than ballots. He’s saying if these unfair, often illegal operations that the liberals are trying, if those succeed, then you’re gonna have a breakdown of the electoral order. That’s obviously true.
Okay, but like … who would it be doing the civil war here? On the Left, we don’t like guns, we don’t even like wars in other people’s countries … we’re not going to be doing that. The only people trying to civil war anyone, with bullets, are the people who have guns, with bullets. Not us.
It’s even true if the — the liberals exert this kind of power and keep the conservative from having a fair shake at being elected, even then — even if the conservatives do nothing and they sit at home on their hands, it will nevertheless remain true that the future elections will be decided by bullets rather than ballots because the bullets will be in the guns pointed by the state at the people who want to challenge the regime. If there is no longer to be any real political opposition permitted in the United States, if every time an actual opposition leader tries to run, he gets shut down because the liberals won’t even let him be placed on the ballot, then that means that our elections are decided by bullets rather than ballots because they’re decided by the implicit coercive force of the state, of the regime.
This would surely make some amount of sense if the reason Trump might not be on the ballot was because we just hated his views. We do, but that’s not his issue. He’s been on the ballot twice before (and lost the popular vote both times) and we hated him just as much then as we do now. The issue here is that he did crimes for which he may have to go to prison, which would make presidenting a tad difficult.
As is often the case with Mike Huckabee, what he’s saying is obviously, obviously true. And the Liberals are pursuing that strategy. Do not confuse yourself. Don’t think it’s hyperbole or that we’re all paranoid with tinfoil hats. The liberals are explicitly trying to keep Trump off the ballot.
I don’t think anyone thinks it’s hyperbole after the January 6 nonsense. Pretty much everyone, by now, is well aware of the fact that many Trumpists are violent psychopaths who are ready to flood the streets with our blood if they don’t get their way. Indeed, that is at least a small part of why we do not think that anyone they want to be in power would make a very good president.
Too bad for them, however — because as January 6 has also demonstrated, they aren’t actually legally allowed to overthrow the government without consequences. So sure, they can try to have a civil war, but it’s a lot more likely that they will end up in prison with Trump than it is that they will get to illegally install him as president again.
