Judge Luttig's warning

Who is Judge J. Michael Luttig, and why does his voice matter so much right now?

Judge Luttig is not a partisan figure from the margins of American politics. He is one of the most respected conservative jurists of his generation. Appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 1991 and long regarded as a leading legal thinker within the conservative legal movement, he built his reputation on fidelity to the Constitution, the rule of law, and institutional restraint. His credentials are, by any fair measure, deeply and unmistakably conservative.

The Arizona Eagletarian (me) encourages you, the reader, to listen to Judge Luttig's remarks (warning) from the 31 minute mark of the video, until the end. If you wish to listen to the rest, you may do so on YouTube.

Judge J Michael Luttig is an American lawyer and jurist who served as a U.S. circuit judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006.

An influential conservative legal figure, Luttig gained broader prominence after the presidency of Donald Trump, characterizing him as "a clear and present danger to American democracy," and advocated invoking the Fourteenth Amendment to render Trump ineligible to serve a second term as president.

These comments (by Luttig) are very recent, urgent and critically important. 
 

History EMPOWERS the powerless

 

The power of tyranny is overestimated (not in the short run, but in the long run)…and can be overcome by the unity, the determination, of apparently powerless people. Howard Zinn epigraph to The People's Historian by Dave Zirin

Their cruelties, in their minds, constitute a moral good. But that’s the macho posturing of

nerfy, weak men with uncallused hands and a great deal of unresolved anger. The truth is

that they were shaken to their bones by the 2020 protests and this is the brutish, reactionary

response. They lock away the works of Zinn not because they loathe the historian but

because they fear the history. The irony, however, does burn. What Trump and his cabinet

of reality-show contestants, pro-wrestling executives, and fascist-fanfic authors are

showing in practice is that they actually share a very fundamental belief with Howard

Zinn: that history from the point of view of social movements holds the potential to

empower the powerless. That’s why Zinn worked to popularize this kind of history and

that’s why they aim to erase it. They fear something Zinn wrote decades ago: “Our

country is full of heroic people who are not Presidents or military leaders or Wall

Street wizards, but who are doing something to keep alive the spirit of resistance to

injustice and war…. To ward off alienation and gloom, it is only necessary to

remember the unremembered heroes of the past, and to look around us for the

unnoticed heroes of the present.” They oppose this because their algorithms aimed at

fostering alienation and gloom are essential to making a populace feel defeated. ibid p10

 

A [person]’s spirit can be marked most clearly in its passage from the reform to the revolutionary impulse at the moment when [they] decide that their enemy will no longer write [their] history. Murray Kempton ibid epigraph