In 1776, Thomas Jefferson, as author of the Declaration of Independence, accused the king of England of having "excited domestic insurrections amongst us," with reference to the slave revolts occasionally supported by England insofar as they weakened US bourgeois power.
In 1807, Thomas Jefferson, as president of the US, signed into law the Insurrection Act, "authorizing the employment of the land and naval forces of the United States, in cases of insurrections."
In 1831, president Andrew Jackson invoked the Insurrection Act to repress the slave revolt led by Nat Turner.
Although liberal historians like to point to the times when the Act was invoked to defend Black reconstruction in the 1870s, and to enforce the desegregation in the 1960s, the majority of invocations have been used to repress slave revolts, ghetto uprisings, and militant labor strikes.
In 1992, the most recent invocation of the Act occurred when president Bush Sr. used it to repress uprisings following Rodney King's murder.
This is the law which Trump is threatening Minneapolis with. A law theorized and established by slaveholders anxious to defend their "property," employed by white-supremacist bourgeois pigs in order to keep down the wretched of the earth.
When we say that the racist violence going on today is fundamental to the existence of the US, this is what we mean. Not simply in a metaphorical or spiritual sense, but in an explicitly traceable one, the violence enacted under Trump is the founding father's system working as intended.
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