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Joni Ernst and the Right To Revolutionary Violence
Washington Monthy's Political Animal Blog ^ | October 23, 2014 | Ed Kilgore

Posted on 10/23/2014 3:16:42 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet

The picture of IA GOP SEN nominee Joni Ernst that’s emerging from exposure of her pre-2014-general-election utterances is of a standard-brand Constitutional Conservative embracing all the strange and controversial tenets of that creed. There’s Agenda 21 madness. There’s Personhood advocacy. There are attacks on the entire New Deal/Great Society legacy—and perhaps even agricultural programs—as creating “dependency.” And now, inevitably, there’s the crown jewel of Con Con extremism: the belief that the purpose of the Second Amendment is to enable “patriots” to violently overthrow the government if in their opinion it’s overstepped its constitutional boundaries. Sam Levine of HuffPost has that story:

Joni Ernst, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Iowa, said during an NRA event in 2012 that she would use a gun to defend herself from the government.

“I have a beautiful little Smith & Wesson, 9 millimeter, and it goes with me virtually everywhere,” Ernst said at the NRA and Iowa Firearms Coalition Second Amendment Rally in Searsboro, Iowa. “But I do believe in the right to carry, and I believe in the right to defend myself and my family — whether it’s from an intruder, or whether it’s from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.”

Now this is a guaranteed applause line among Con Con audiences, for reasons that have relatively little to do with gun regulation. The idea here is to intimidate liberals, and “looters” and secular socialists, and those people, that there are limits to what the good virtuous folk of the country will put up with in the way of interference with their property rights and their religious convictions and their sense of how the world ought to work. If push comes to shove, they’re heavily armed, and bullets outweigh ballots. It’s a reminder that if politics fails in protecting their very broad notion of their “rights,” then revolutionary violence—which after all, made this great country possible in the first place—is always an option. And if that sounds “anti-democratic,” well, as the John Birch Society has always maintained, this is a Republic, not a democracy.

This stuff is entirely consistent with everything we’ve been learning about how Joni Ernst talked before she won a Senate nomination and decided upon an aggressively non-substantive message based on her identity and biography and one stupid but apparently irresistible joke comparing the kind of treatment she’ll give to the pork purveyors of Washington (presumably those who support obvious waste like food stamps and Medicaid) to hog castratin.’ Issues are absolute kryptonite to her campaign, so it’s no surprise she’s decided abruptly to cancel all meetings with editorial boards between now and November 4, according to Des Moines Register columnist Rekha Basu:

Is Joni Ernst afraid of newspaper editorial boards? After much negotiating, she was scheduled to meet his morning with writers and editors at The Des Moines Register, but last night her people called to unilaterally cancel. She has also begged off meetings with The Cedar Rapids Gazette and The Dubuque Telegraph-Herald.

Is Ernst that sensitive to the kinds of criticisms that invariably will come in such a high profile U.S. Senate race? Is she afraid of the scrutiny? Sure, it’s stressful, but all the other candidates for Congress are doing it to get their messages out, including Steven King, the target of frequent editorial criticism.

Maybe Ernst’s cynicism will be justified by the results, but I dunno: Iowans are pretty old-school about this kind of thing, and the Register actually influences votes, probably more than any newspaper I can think of. If she does win, nobody in Iowa has any excuse to be surprised if she turns out to be Todd Akin or Sharron Angle with better message discipline. As I said in another post recently, that’s pretty much who she is. Knowing she’s played the “I have the right to overthrow the government with my gun” meme makes that even clearer.

Still, somebody should ask Joni Ernst: “Since you brought it up, exactly what circumstances would justify you shooting a police officer or a soldier in the head?” Oh yeah: that would require her taking questions, which I doubt we’ll see in the last days of this campaign.


TOPICS: Iowa; Campaign News; Issues; U.S. Senate
KEYWORDS: 2ndamendment; banglist; ccw; ernst; iowa; joniernst; rtkba; secondamendment
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To: ought-six

21 posted on 10/23/2014 3:43:04 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet (The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

We shall see how his tune changes when there is flying lead in the air...


22 posted on 10/23/2014 3:48:01 PM PDT by wastoute (Government cannot redistribute wealth. Government can only redistribute poverty.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Hey, Ed, remember the New Left, the petri dish of modern liberalism? It seems to me that they had a few revolutionary slogans as well: “Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun” . . . “Up against the wall, MF” . . . “Off the pigs (police)” . . . Ho ho ho Chi Minh”. Yep, Ed, and more than a few of those people are now Democratic office holders, college profs, and so forth.


23 posted on 10/23/2014 3:50:48 PM PDT by Steve_Seattle
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
If push comes to shove, they’re heavily armed, and bullets outweigh ballots. It’s a reminder that if politics fails in protecting their very broad notion of their “rights,” then revolutionary violence—which after all, made this great country possible in the first place—is always an option. And if that sounds “anti-democratic,” well, as the John Birch Society has always maintained, this is a Republic, not a democracy.

Alinsky would be proud.

24 posted on 10/23/2014 3:55:47 PM PDT by TADSLOS (The Event Horizon has come and gone. Buckle up and hang on.)
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To: Steve_Seattle

Both is a distinct possibility that “or” excludes.


25 posted on 10/23/2014 4:31:29 PM PDT by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Well let’s read what one Minnesota liberal aid about the Second Amendment:

“Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used, and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible”

That was Hubert Humphrey back in 1960. Yet the tyranny that seemed remote in 1960 is at our doorstep now. Old Hubert accurately saw that possibility.
Of course Old Hubert would not be welcome in today’s Dem Party.


26 posted on 10/23/2014 5:13:01 PM PDT by Fred Hayek (The Democratic Party is now the operational arm of the CPUSA)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

You beat me to it!


27 posted on 10/23/2014 5:14:09 PM PDT by Fred Hayek (The Democratic Party is now the operational arm of the CPUSA)
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