Roger Stone’s ‘F*ck the Voting, Let’s Get Right To the Violence’ To Showcase January 6 Cmte Hearing

As you know, the January 6 Committee has canceled its hearing for today due to Hurricane Ian. It’s not known at this time when the Committee will reconvene, but what is speculated is that Roger Stone’s stunning audio tapes advocating denying the results of the election and declaring victory, regardless of the actual outcome, and then going into a revolutionary war spiel, is going to be the centerpiece of the next hearing.

Stone has attempted to walk it all back and he’s accused CNN and others of “deep fakes” but that’s not going to fly and he knows it. Charlie Sykes, the Bulwark:

The committee plans to show a video of Trump whisperer Roger Stone enthusiastically declaring, “Fuck the voting, let’s get right to the violence,” even before the votes were counted in 2020.

“Shoot to kill. See an Antifa? Shoot to kill. Fuck ’em. Done with this bullshit.”

The video clips obtained by CNN were recorded by Danish filmmakers Frederik Marbell and Christoffer Guldbrandsen. In the clips, Stone relishes the prospect of bloodshed.

Later that day, as The Post previously reported, Stone seemed to welcome the prospect of clashes with left-wing activists. As an aide spoke of driving trucks into crowds of racial justice protesters, Stone said: “Once there’s no more election, there’s no reason why we can’t mix it up. These people are going to get what they’ve been asking for.”

In one clip, Stone is seen telling MAGA supporters that they should declare victory on election night, no matter what the results showed. “I really do suspect it’ll still be up in the air,” Stone says. “When that happens, the key thing to do is to claim victory.” Well. . .

And there’s more.

In another clip, filmed a week after January 6, Stone is seen criticizing the White House Counsel’s Office for what he described as their argument that Trump could not provide preemptive pardons to Stone and others for their alleged involvement in efforts to overturn the election.

“I believe the President is for it. The obstacles are these – are these lily livered, weak kneed, bureaucrats in the White House Counsel’s Office and now they must be crushed because they’ve told the President something that’s not true,” Stone says in the clip.

As far back as July 2020, Stone talked about challenging the upcoming presidential election in the courts. “The election will not be normal,” he said.

“Sorry, we’re not accepting them,” he said of the anticipated results. “We’re challenging them in court.”

“If the electors show up at the Electoral College, armed guards will throw them out,” he continued. “I’m challenging all of it. And the judges we’re going to, are judges I appointed.”

Stone is trying to brush all of this off, alternately questioning the authenticity of the tapes and claiming that he was merely engaging in protected free speech. And, as the Wapo notes, Stone immediately followed his recorded call to violence with: “I am of course only kidding. We renounce violence completely. We totally renounce violence. The left is the only ones who engage in violence.”

Righto, it was a bunch of lefties who stormed the Capitol on January 6, breaking windows and doors and smearing caa caa on the marble floors and walls. Uh huh.

And of course, it gets worse. We live in an era where extremists in the GOP have split off and gone mad, and the rest of the GOP doesn’t know how to get a grip on any of this. If dusting off Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America is the best that this iteration of the GOP can do, it is in a world of hurt on that fact alone.

The fact that the only policy it can even begin to cobble together is from 28 years ago and it wasn’t much of a prize then, says everything that you need to know about how the Republican party has been faltering on its path for some time now. It’s not even the party of Dick Cheney anymore, let alone Reagan or Eisenhower. Those days are long long gone.

The vocal part of the party is not its conservative faction. It is its crazy extremist faction. And that faction wouldn’t mind revolution. Both Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene have tweeted many times about it being “1776.” And as Charlie Sykes points out, “Stone is not the outlier his rationalizers would like to imagine.” Au contraire. This thinking is more mainstream in the party than most people realize and that’s the terrifying part.

American Greatness — the online home of ultra-MAGA intellectuals like Victor Davis Hanson & Co. — is publishing an essay suggesting violent revolution by former Trump White House aide Michael Anton. You’ll recall that Anton was the author of the perfervid 2016 “Flight 93 Election” polemic that urged conservatives to storm the electoral cockpit even if it meant we were all going to die.

Anton is again reaching for the hysteria, and his penchant for violence is not slacking. And, of course, he casts his call to arms as a call to First Principles: “What does fidelity to our founding principles require today?” he asks. (The article is based on a speech he gave at the September 2022 meeting of
the Philadelphia Society, a group cofounded by Nobel laureate Milton Friedman.)

I won’t bore you with the whole thing, but Anton rehearses a parade of horribles that are afflicting America today, from open borders to crashing birth rates, and a “giant, unaccountable, unelected fourth branch of government that does what it wants without input or supervision from the people, and that usurps executive, legislative, and judicial power.”

Anton worries that “conservatives” are too passive, too civil, too nice, and too reluctant to engage in political violence.

In the speech I referenced earlier, Joe Biden said, “There is no place for political violence in America. Period. None. Ever.” Leave aside the fact that his team commits such violence almost daily and with impunity. As a historical and theoretical matter, this statement is ridiculous.

It’s just a historical fact that violence birthed America. Granted, that violence was justified, organized, careful, and the furthest thing from indiscriminate. But the American Revolution was still a war waged against a government that considered itself legitimate.

So what is he proposing, exactly? Sounds like . . . more revolution.

Is the right of revolution ever justified? Was it justified only that one time, in 1776, but never again? If so, why was it justified then and what makes it unjustifiable ever again? Because of historicism? Because the American Revolution was somehow an irreversible leap forward?

Is it that you think things can’t ever get bad enough to justify recourse to this right, or merely that they won’t? Is there some deep structural reason for America’s privileged position, or is our miraculous continued good fortune merely your expectation? If the latter, then you are implicitly admitting, at least in theory, that the right of revolution might, at some point, be justified—and that it has not been obviated by “history.”

If this is not a revolutionist’s manifesto, it will do until the real thing comes along. The writer clearly wants an inalienable (which Lauren Boebert pronounces “un-uh-lean-able” — seriously, I’m not joking) “right of revolution.”

“it [is] axiomatic that you can’t have natural rights without a right of revolution, just as you can’t have the founding without an actual revolution, and since you can’t have the regime of the founders without natural rights, you can’t have the founding principles or the founders’ regime without a right of revolution.”

Great. Look for this to become the next right-wing talking point and quite possibly right after the election. If the GOP takes the shellacking it may indeed take in the midterms in six weeks, that may provide impetus for things to get truly nutty. Everyday the right-wing tom toms beat out Trump’s manifesto, “nation in decline” and calls up “patriots” which is New Speak for “traitors” to rise up and “take America back.”

Patriots are indeed in the process of taking America back — from the crazies. We got the White House out of Donald Trump’s paws and we may be able to keep both the House and Senate from going back into Republican hands, glory be. And if that is the case, the rage that will be generated could be something to behold.

Prepare for it. All the signs are there. The GOPers love to talk big and some of them actually will take to the streets and go nuts, as we saw January 6. I don’t think it’s paranoia nor hyperbole to say that the threat of civil disobedience by MAGAs after the election is a real possibility. I firmly believed prior to January 6 that Trump was not going to go gracefully back to Mar-a-Lago and unfortunately, that was right.

The last days of Donald Trump will be colorful, that much is certain. Whether actual blood will flow, I can’t say. But I can say, without any hesitation, that there are enough MAGAs, particularly the QAnon faction and the uber-right religionists, who think this is a holy war. And Donald Trump has recently embraced these facts and is egging them on daily, on what’s left of his social media platform. Things could legitimately get nuts.