Daily Wire host suggests a judge allowing a lawsuit regarding Trump's eligibility for office under the 14th Amendment to move forward could result in another civil war

Michael Knowles: “Civil wars happen. And the liberals would appear to be cultivating the conditions to make it much more likely.”

CNN reported about a Colorado judge allowing a lawsuit regarding Trump's eligibility for the ballot to move forward:

A judge has rejected three more attempts by former President Donald Trump and the Colorado GOP to shut down a lawsuit seeking to block him from the 2024 presidential ballot in the state based on the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban.”

The flurry of rulings late Friday from Colorado District Judge Sarah Wallace are a blow to Trump, who faces candidacy challenges in multiple states stemming from his role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection. He still has a pending motion to throw out the Colorado lawsuit, but the case now appears on track for an unprecedented trial this month.

A post-Civil War provision of the 14th Amendment says US officials who take an oath to uphold the Constitution are disqualified from future office if they “engaged in insurrection” or have “given aid or comfort” to insurrectionists. But the Constitution does not spell out how to enforce the ban, and it has been applied only twice since the 1800s.

Legal scholars are discussing whether or not former President Donald Trump can be legally removed from 2024 presidential ballots for his role in inciting the January 6 insurrection, citing a clause in the 14th amendment that bars anyone who “engaged in insurrection” against the United States government from serving in public office. Right-wing pundits have blasted the idea as a “vile attack on our elections” and warned that there will be an “insurrection” if Trump is removed from ballots. 

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From the October 24, 2023, edition of The Daily Wire's The Michael Knowles Show

A judge, a Democrat judge in Colorado, has just green-lit a campaign to keep Trump off the ballot in Colorado. This judge, Sarah Wallace, was appointed by the Democrat governor, Jared Polis, and she has denied a motion by Trump and the Colorado GOP to throw out a lawsuit seeking to block Trump from appearing on the ballot in Colorado. And why are they gonna block Trump from appearing on the ballot? Because he's an evil rapist, insurrectionist, Ukraine colluding, Russia colluding, mean old orange man who we really hate and in invisible ink in the Constitution that says that mean orange men can't be on the ballot. I think that's pretty much the substance of the lawsuit. And this Colorado judge says, OK, it can go ahead – or that's the substance of the campaign, rather. And the judge says, yeah, the campaign could go ahead. Sure. OK.

The last time we had a situation like this, I will remind you, was 1860. People sometimes say that in 1860, Abraham Lincoln didn't appear on the ballot in the southern states, which is not quite true because elections were conducted differently than they are today. You didn't have a formal ballot on a computer screen or even just printed out, it was parties who would produce the ballots, and the GOP didn't even invest in the South because they were never gonna win, and GOP was a new party with not a lot of resources. But the effect of it was basically that Abraham Lincoln was not a candidate that one could even really plausibly vote for in a lot of the country. And then when he got elected president, that was a cause of the Civil War because half the country felt that it didn't have any representation, it didn't really have any say whatsoever. This is not an identical situation, but it's pretty close.

If the liberals succeed at kicking Donald Trump off the ballot in 2024, it's going to tell us two things. One, it's going to tell us that Trump is obviously electable. One of the silliest lines I hear is that Donald Trump can't win the general election. He can't win a general election, which I know is false because he won at least one general election. He did. A lot of people who said the same thing in 2016, Donald Trump can never win a general election. They were quite surprised when he won the general election in 2016. But then they use the dubious election of 2020 to say, well, see, now he actually he can't win, although he could. I think he will. I'm just saying he could. So it's going to the fact that the Dems want to keep him off the ballot shows you they don't think it's going to be a slam dunk to defeat him at the ballot box. Even with the vote harvesting, even with the drop boxes, even with all of their nonsense and all of their shenanigans that open the elections to fraud, they still are not convinced they can beat him at the ballot box. So they want to they want to prevent voters from even having the choice at the ballot box. That's the first thing it's going to tell you.

The second thing it tells you is we are dangerously close to not having much of anything in common as a country. We are dangerously close to the conditions that we were at in 1860. And I'm not one of these catastrophists who says that we're always going to be on the brink of civil war, and we're all gonna – I'm certainly not encouraging civil war by any means. But it could happen. Just like people sometimes say, do you think we're living in the end times? My answer is, well, I don't think we are, but someone's gonna be living in the end times. I guess we could be. That's kind of how I feel about civil war. I'm not saying that we're headed for civil war, but we could be. Civil wars happen. And the liberals would appear to be cultivating the conditions to make it much more likely.