Two cities under siege -- Radley Balko

[erronis]

https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/two-cities-under-siege
(Via Digby: https://digbysblog.net/2026/01/26/right-back-where-we-started/)

Remarkably similar scenes from Boston and Minneapolis, 260 years apart, show a federal government betraying its founding principles.



(Balko's article is long and full of background information and many graphic scenes.)

Conservatives are fond of invoking the American Founding, the framers of the Constitution, and the principles that drove the fight for independence. Those invocations have always been selective and opportunistic, but they've grown downright farcical as right-wingers contort themselves into knots to defend executive powers explicitly contradicted by the Constitution.

This gaping chasm between what they claim to believe and how they govern is best exemplified by the copy of the Declaration of Independence Donald Trump has put on display in the same Oval Office gilded with gold flourishes and garish gifts from foreign leaders and business titans seeking favors.

Given the way Trump has been governing like a mad king, it's almost as if he displayed the document not in tribute to the founding, but to treat the famous list of colonial grievances as his to-do list. (This would require him to have actually read it.)

The Republicans' veneration of the Founders is particularly rich at the moment because, of all the abuses England heaped on the colonies, nothing angered them more than the Crown's deployment of soldiers on city streets -- and the streets of Boston in particular. Anger, resentment, and violence simmered in Boston for years before the Boston Massacre in 1770. The Declaration of Independence Trump hangs in his office came six years later, followed by the American Revolution, then the birth of the United States.

. . .

[Jilly_in_VA]

1. As I have said in a couple of previous posts

READ the damn Declaration of Independence. Read it carefully, article by article. I think you will find that two-thirds of the articles apply directly to Shitler. Then decide what you are going to do yourself, because this guy is a TYRANT trying to make himself king of the US, and we don't have kings here! It is time for a second American Revolution, whether we have to do it at the ballot box, or failing that, in the streets. Prepare yourself for either alternative. If the first one fails, then we will have to take the second.

[2naSalit]

2. K&R