When it comes to the Second Amendment, Matt Gaetz has no clue

Watch the Florida congressman in action at a recent rally:

Actually… no.

Here is Saul Cornell, our best historian of the Second Amendment, writing in 2012:

The founders had a word for a bunch of farmers marching with guns without government sanction: a mob. One of the reasons we have a Constitution is the founders were worried about the danger posed by individuals acting like a militia without legal authority. This was precisely what happened during Shays’ Rebellion, an insurrection in western Massachusetts that persuaded many Americans that we needed a stronger central government to avert anarchy.

Many people think that we have the Second Amendment so that we can take up arms against the government if it overreaches its authority. If that interpretation were correct, it would mean that the Second Amendment had repealed the Constitution’s treason clause, which defines this crime as taking up arms against the government. In reality, in the first decade after the Constitution, the government put down several rebellions similar to Shays – and nobody claimed that they were merely asserting their Second Amendment rights.

Read Cornell’s entire piece at The New York Daily News.

American historian Joanne Freeman also chimes in:

Britain’s Conservatives Are on the Brink of Civil War

LONDON — They have been dubbed the Conservative rebels, a group of renegade lawmakers willing to risk their careers to defy their newly chosen leader, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and hobble his leadership over their clashing views on Brexit.

But behind all the talk of revolutionary ardor and mutinous tactics is an unlikely group of insurrectionists — a band of starchy grandees of Tory politics that includes Winston Churchill’s grandson and a 45-year party veteran and ex-chancellor so colorless that he earned the nickname “Spreadsheet Phil.” Running the government only weeks ago, they now flout it from the sidelines.

They believe that Mr. Johnson, in his zeal for pulling Britain out of the European Union without a deal, is risking severe damage to the British economy. But they also believe that he is tearing the Conservatives apart, setting fire to their vision of a big-tent party with priorities beyond Brexit.

In setting aside their usual caution and threatening to rip the heart out of Mr. Johnson’s Brexit plans on Tuesday night, they are offering perhaps the clearest indication yet that the party, squabbling for decades over Europe, is on the brink of a civil war.

‘The Trump Prophecy’ Is a Horrifying Window Onto Evangelicalism

A new movie makes a retired firefighter out to be a prophet. In reality, he’s a radical conspiracy theorist who thinks Democrats control the weather.

Even more disturbingly, earlier in this same interview Taylor describes how God has been speaking to him through racehorses, reading the euthanization of a racehorse named after Barack Obama as a sign that Democrats are about to start being executed.

This has nothing to do with Roe vs Wade right now,” says Taylor of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. “This has everything to do with military tribunals, them being charged with treason, and going to prison for the rest of their life and some being executed.” He continues:

The racehorse named Barack Obama was euthanized. That is probably the biggest prophetic sign that you could have of God saying this man is going to go down. Period. That’s the bottom line. You can get mad at me all you want to, but God’s the messenger here, he is the one sending the message. People don’t think that this stuff is real or it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen.

This is real. Justice is not coming, it’s here, period, and it is taking place on the earth. This whole thing with Kavanaugh is about trying to stop the military tribunals … This is all about rounding these people up, charging them with treason, and they know that, basically, their head is going to be in a noose, literally.

Taylor’s beliefs are extreme even for Christian fundamentalists. But by co-producing a motion picture about his life, Liberty University—one of the largest, most organized institutions of American evangelicalism—has effectively endorsed Taylor’s status as a prophet.

That The Trump Prophecy aims to establish the legitimacy of a “prophet” whose latest “prophecy” predicts the state-sanctioned murdering of Trump’s political enemies is a fact that the film’s most prominent reviewers haven’t even touched on. Harriet Sherwood, writing for The Guardian, ends her coverage of the film with a feel-good quote from producer Rick Eldridge, who says “every American who loves his country should appreciate the movie and be inspired by it.”

How many Benedict Arnolds can one administration hold?

“This is treason,” Trump informed his then-economic adviser, Gary Cohn, when Cohn attempted to resign after Trump’s nice words for neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, according to Woodward’s book.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, likewise, was pronounced a “traitor” by Trump for recusing himself from the Russia investigation.

.. News he doesn’t like is “fake.”

Actions he doesn’t like are “illegal.”

People he doesn’t like are “traitors.”

Trump says the famed journalist and author should be disbelieved because “I don’t talk the way I am quoted.” But Woodward’s Trump sounds exactly like the Trump we hear daily.

.. Trump suggested that the so-called surveillance of his campaign was “treasonous.” On June 23, he told Mike Huckabee that coverage of his summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un was “almost treasonous.” On Feb. 5, after congressional Democrats’ failed to applaud for him at the State of the Union, he said: “Can we call that treason? Why not?”

.. On Jan. 11, he told the Wall Street Journal that FBI agent Peter Strzok’s text messages to his mistress were “a treasonous act.” He has also embraced the view that Hillary Clinton, leakers and Republicans who didn’t support him in the 2016 election were traitors.

.. In Woodward’s account, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Trump had the understanding of “a fifth- or sixth-grader,” Cohn described him as a “professional liar,” then-lawyer John Dowd told the president that he was “not really capable” of answering a prosecutor’s questions, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron,” and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly called him an “idiot.”