Sheriff Joe was threatened with imprisonment for enforcing the law of the land, after he was elected on a platform of enforcing that law.

This reflects the drift towards criminalizing political differences. Or as the Democrats call it “rule of law”, rule of law being a euphemism for rule by judges, where judges make executive rulings on traditionally executive issues.

Straightforward extrapolation of this trend is that if Trump loses power, he will be imprisoned, and eventually executed, and not very long thereafter, we will see a purge of military and police in which most of the current leadership is imprisoned and/or executed, nominally for past crimes towards single women, blacks, gays, fat people, and whoever gets on the oppressed list next year, actually for being suspected of insufficient loyalty and enthusiasm for the new regime.

Trump is losing or firing his strongest loyalists, and surrounding himself with people who intend his destruction. He rather should surround himself with people who intend Trump and his descendants to remain in power permanently.

People are going to tell me that imprisoning and killing the Trumps is unthinkable. It is unthinkable in 2017, but a whole lot of things were thinkable in 2016 that were unthinkable in 2008, and imprisoning Sheriff Joe was one of those things.

Purging loyalists and installing enemies in power is how the Romanovs died. The first coup resulting from this policy was the Kadet coup, which merely intended democratic constitutional monarchy, which was swiftly followed by a social democrat coup which merely intended a democratic socialist Republic, resulting in the purging of the Romanovs, which was swiftly followed by a communist coup, which swiftly resulted in the execution of the Romanovs. Something along those lines for 2024 is just straightforward projection of current trends, of which the attempt to imprison Sheriff Joe for enforcing the law of the land is one straw of a great many straws in the wind. The elite is increasingly using political violence, not only on ordinary political opponents as at Charlottesville., but on elite political opponents such as Paul Manafort and Sheriff Joe. They have crossed a line, and there are no remaining lines between what they are doing now and full scale war. This sets in motion an inevitable drift to the greater use of simple violence to resolve political disagreement within the elite. Wars are easy to start, hard to stop. We are drifting towards wars internal and external. War is a form of entropy. If you don’t do anything clever, forceful, and effective to prevent war, war will probably ensue. If actions are unconstrained by the possibility that war may ensue, war will ensue. War is easy, peace is hard. Even if the right rolls over and plays dead, this will merely mean that people who are today unthinkably far left will be deemed extreme right, and eventually executed for their reactionary tendencies.