Sept. 2
The Value of Orientation
A quick message.
Our world has become particularly disorienting in the 666 days since Donald Trump was elected. We live in a dystopian oligarchy. Our constitutional rights have been fully trodden. The horrible future is now, and we are the rebellion. That’s my personal starting point. I wake up with that right in front of me. In cognitive behavioral therapy this is called appraisal. In Stoic terms, it’s my version of the morning meditation Marcus Aurelius wrote for himself.
Orient yourself, to the best of your ability. I’ve heard that Russian government and politics are comparable to dogs fighting under a rug, and that seems like an apt comparison. So now that we have oriented ourselves, let’s discuss the practical matter of toppling a tyrant.
Our nation was built with a brilliant system of checks and balances beyond the three branches of the federal government. Cities and states across this nation have authority that largely sits unused, which they can direct right at this regime and use to rein in lawlessness.
District attorneys and attorneys general will tell you that they have no power to investigate or prosecute this administration’s crimes, which isn’t true. Those people need to be removed from office and replaced with people ready to fight, and in most of this country the voters do the removing. When a district attorney or county prosecutor decides not to investigate or prosecute a powerful person, they may cite laws, statutes, and precedent, but if the effect is ultimately to place a class of people above the law, this must end. We must end it.
One of the most beautiful things about democracy is that, when applied correctly, it molds politicians who are either courageous or terrified of public unrest.
In Edinburgh, Scotland, there’s an area known as the Royal Mile, where the old Tolbooth prison stood. In 1736 the captain of the city guard, John Porteous, ordered his men to fire into a crowd at a public hanging, and several people died. A jury convicted him of murder and the court sentenced him to death. Then Queen Caroline, acting as regent while the king was abroad, granted him a reprieve. On the night of September 7 an armed crowd broke into the Tolbooth, took him out, and hanged him in the Grassmarket. The crown put an officer above the law, and the city refused to accept it.
Back to the modern day.
The fact is, Manhattan could elect a district attorney whose primary focus was criminal cases against corrupt politicians. The New York Stock Exchange is in Manhattan, New York. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James could have hundreds of criminal investigations going this very second and likely sweep this entire administration up in the net. So why won’t they?
People are scared to put handcuffs on the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or to investigate a president. So we need people with the courage or the insanity to just do it anyway. Everywhere. They don’t want their residents harmed, their families attacked, or to create a situation where state law enforcement officers are being asked to arrest the director of the FBI.
So they just focus on cases that won’t bring the heat onto them, cases that are unequivocally victories, but do nothing to rein in a lawless regime.
The real problem is that once you’ve put a party above the law, you are past the point where elections alone can restore order.
Fixing things is not going to be quick. We need years of hammering lower-level offices to restore justice. So the bad news is that this won’t be over soon; the good news is that we can win.
We can even make winning inevitable.
This process is very clear. Every effective social movement, from the American Revolution to the abolition of slavery to women’s suffrage to organized labor to the civil rights movement, followed the same path that we have outlined here at The Existentialist Republic. Educate. Activate. Recruit. Repeat. It takes us all learning, and then sharing that knowledge with others, like when Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense and an estimated 20 percent of colonists owned a copy; people would read it in the streets. We can have a free and fair nation when you put educational posters on all your neighbors’ front doors. What if that’s all it took? I tell you, just go out, print the thing and put it in someone’s hand, and the genocide could be over. Just not right away and maybe not even in your lifetime.
We do what we can, when we can, because we have a world to save.
Someone in Tulsa County, Oklahoma, reached out and wants to petition their county to convene a criminal grand jury to investigate the Department of Government Efficiency’s misconduct. We put together a free toolkit for how they could approach the process, and you can download it here. If you live in one of the six states that allow criminal grand juries to convene via citizen petition, Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, comment below and we will reach out. We will be releasing toolkits for many more states and counties.
Start-here guide
Petitioner Q&A
Process timeline, from filing to seated grand jury
Petitioner to-do list
Model petition, complete for Tulsa County, print-ready PDF and editable Word
Signature sheet, print-ready PDF and editable Word
Filing checklist
Source packet
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