Rex Kerr
4 min readMay 3, 2022

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Actually, I think that although a majority of the BLM protests were peaceful and the organizers mostly did not incite violence, the minority that were caused an immense amount of damage. There are a number of cases where the organizers did incite violence whether willfully or not. I'm not applying different standards here. For instance, when prominent figures react to looting as "liberating merchandise", that is incitement to further violence and theft by anyone who happens to hear (and, I guess, is among the group of approved "liberators" in that case).

Regarding the video, note that the speaker is using "we were invited here by the President of the United States" as a reason to disobey directives from law enforcement. You asked, and I quote, 'Do we have a record of any of the rioters saying something along the lines of “I did it because Trump wanted me to do it”?' Well, here, kind of yes.

If you want another one, how about the case of Jenna Ryan (https://www.cbsnews.com/dfw/news/texan-jenna-ryan-cbs-11-hoping-pardon-arrest-riot-capitol/). She was arrested for entering the Capitol building; in the interview she says, among other things, "I don't feel a sense of shame or guilty from my heart. I feel like I was basically following my president. I was following what we were called to do."

She certainly thought she was being incited.

You can read a transcript of Trump's speech at https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial.

Here are some key quotes from the speech that align with your thought-experiment incitement.

something about legitimate versus illegitimate authority

"this year they rigged an election. They rigged it like they've never rigged an election before."

"We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved."

"But this year, using the pretext of the China virus and the scam of mail-in ballots, Democrats attempted the most brazen and outrageous election theft and there's never been anything like this. So pure theft in American history. Everybody knows it."

"You know what the world says about us now? They said, we don't have free and fair elections."

"Over the past several weeks, we've amassed overwhelming evidence about a fake election. This is the presidential election. Last night was a little bit better because of the fact that we had a lot of eyes watching one specific state, but they cheated like hell anyway."

"In every single swing state, local officials, state officials, almost all Democrats, made illegal and unconstitutional changes to election procedures without the mandated approvals by the state legislatures. [...T]hese changes paved a way for fraud on a scale never seen before."

"These people are crooked. They're 100%, in my opinion, one of the most corrupt, between your governor and your secretary of state."

"So when you hear, when you hear, while there is no evidence to prove any wrongdoing, this is the most fraudulent thing anybody has, this is a criminal enterprise. This is a criminal enterprise."

"We won in a landslide. This was a landslide. They said it's not American to challenge the election. This the most corrupt election in the history, maybe of the world."

I think that's enough. He's clobbering authority over and over and over and over.

invoke the American Revolution itself, which I might be able to get away with by emphasizing the principles on which this country was founded

This isn't directly made, but there's a lot referencing the existence of the country itself, which is a way to evoke that Revolution-level action is warranted:

"We want to go back and we want to get this right because we're going to have somebody in there that should not be in there and our country will be destroyed and we're not going to stand for that."

"And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn't, that will be a, a sad day for our country because you're sworn to uphold our Constitution."

"Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing"

"Our country has been under siege for a long time."

"But it almost seems that they're all going out of their way to hurt all of us and to hurt our country. To hurt our country."

[Regarding sending the results back to the States, but look at the logic here.] "Somebody says, "Well, we have to obey the Constitution." And you are, because you're protecting our country and you're protecting the Constitution. So you are."

"we can't let this stuff happen. We won't have a country if it happens."

"Well, I say, yes it does, because the Constitution says you have to protect our country and you have to protect our Constitution, and you can't vote on fraud. And fraud breaks up everything, doesn't it? When you catch somebody in a fraud, you're allowed to go by very different rules."

"And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."

This is tough, because I would need a reason to incite violence

Well, we got that, didn't we? You're allowed to go by very different rules (Constitution-preserving, and therefore Revolution-level rules), and can't let the vote be certified (must act now) because "we won't have a country any more".

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So Trump did a pretty decent job of following your intentional, willful incitement suggestions.

And you want us to believe that it wasn't incitement at all?

Really?

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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