Anticipating the horrors of the Reign of Terror in France, Burke warned against the “untempered spirit of madness, blindness, immorality, and impiety” and the “insolent domination of bloody, ferocious, and senseless clubs.” If Burke was too tolerant of monarchy, French revolutionaries certainly were too tolerant of bloodshed. Indeed, they reveled in it.

These days, some “conservatives” (anti-conservatives, really) take the Reign of Terror not as a warning but as inspiration. Who can forget the violent mob, spurred on by the president of the United States based on bogus claims of election fraud, who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021?

More recently, Donald Trump called for the execution of six members of Congress, including Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, for pointing out the obvious, that members of the military ought not follow illegal orders, something that, by the way, Trump’s Secretary of War Pete Hegseth also conceded in a 2016 talk. Trump later said that he didn’t really mean it.

Here in Colorado, MAGA activist Joe Oltmann took to X on November 27 to call Governor Jared Polis, Attorney General Phil Weiser, Secretary of State Jena Griswold, and others part of a “synagogue of Satan Jews” who are “traitors.” Oltmann followed his grotesquely slanderous and antisemitic commentary by saying that “rotted judges” involved with Tina Peters’ trial for election security breaches “deserve to be tried for treason in military tribunals and hang.”

When Oltmann hosted Peters’ attorney Peter Ticktin December 4 on his conspiracy-drenched podcast, Oltmann doubled-down on his pro-violence rhetoric.

Previously, during a November 24 appearance with Steve Bannon, Ticktin, in response to a question about whether the president should send the Army’s 101st Airborne Division into Colorado to free Peters from prison, said, “I’d love to see that happen.”

Ticktin alleged that various elected officials and judges have committed “wrongs,” are “acting in favor of a cabal,” and are “assisting and aiding people that are causing an insurrection in this country.” Ticktin said such people “need to meet justice, sooner or later.” He continued, “If you’re a traitor to this country, you don’t get excused because you have a black robe on, or because you’re a secretary of a state someplace.”

In response, Oltmann said, “Why is the Insurrection Act not on the table? Why are we just not getting to the fact where we have military tribunals, and 50,000 people that we get rounded up, and we can just have a hanging party.”

To this, Ticktin said, “It’s coming. It’s coming with the evidence.”

For comparison, the French Reign of Terror claimed the lives of around half the number of people that Oltmann is talking about killing.

On December 5, after Kyle Clark of 9News reported on Oltmann’s comments, Oltmann returned to X to accuse Clark, based on nothing but a conspiracy fantasy, of being a “media CIA stooge.” Oltmann called for Clark, one of Colorado’s best-known TV news reporters, to “be arrested and charged with conspiracy and treason.” Do not ever pretend that people such as Oltmann, who would trash the First Amendment to destroy his critics, are friends of the Constitution.

Nor can we simply write off Oltmann, who has been calling for the execution of elected officials since 2001, as a lone kook irrelevant to Colorado politics. Kristi Burton Brown, formerly the head of the Colorado Republican Party and currently a member of the Colorado Board of Education, once served as president of Oltmann’s FEC United, the left-leaning Colorado Newsline reports. And George Brauchler, now a district attorney in Colorado, once said, “Joe is a friend.” Rep. Lauren Boebert has appeared on Oltmann’s podcast. Then-state rep. Ron Hanks appeared at an Oltmann event in 2022. The same year, then-reps. Richard Holtorf, Mark Baisley (now in the state senate), and Dave Williams (who later chaired the Colorado Republican party) shared the stage with Peters and election conspiracy monger Mike Lindell at a rally promoted by Oltmann.

Peters’ crime

What did Peters do that landed her in prison? The AP reported, “Peters . . . was accused of using someone else’s security badge to give an expert affiliated with My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell access to the Mesa County election system and deceiving other officials about that person’s identity. . . . Peters was convicted of three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with the secretary of state.”

Peters was prosecuted by a Republican district attorney, Dan Rubinstein, and found guilty by a jury of her peers.

Trump, though, cares nothing about the law or about justice. For him, “law and order” means only that he is above the law and order is whatever conforms to his whims. In a December 3 post to social media with zero basis in reality, Trump called for Peters’s release, claiming that she “was unfairly convicted . . . for trying to stop Democrats from stealing Colorado Votes in the Election.”

Rubinstein and Weiser, along with county clerks from both parties, spoke out against releasing Peters to federal custody.

Now, Ticktin is asking Trump to pardon Peters on the absurd theory that the president can pardon people for state-level crimes. This is a pressure campaign, not a serious legal strategy.

I do think there is a case for transferring Peters to home detention to serve out the rest of her nine-year sentence, with clear rules that she may not use the Internet or interact with other conspiracy mongers (including Oltmann). Peters’s crime, although serious, was not in itself violent, and Peters, a 70-year-old cancer survivor, hardly is a physical danger to others (unlike some people Colorado’s judicial system is releasing).

We should try not to be partisan about this. Yes, horrible people including Oltmann would declare victory if Peters were transferred to home detention. The thought of giving the likes of Ticktin any satisfaction sickens me. But that’s not a good reason not to do it. If it helps, imagine that a woman like Peters had instead committed a crime on behalf of a leftist cause, maybe industrial sabotage on behalf of the environment or something. Then, we might be having a debate in which leftists urged the legal system to take it easy while conservatives called for a hard line.

We can argue about appropriate punishment. But no genuine conservative makes light of Peters’ serious violations of law. And certainly no genuine conservative sanctions Oltmann’s calls for Reign-of-Terror-style mass violence. To real conservatives, “law and order” actually means something.

Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.