Be careful about your statements on lynch mobs, because again, you veer into very anti-marxist territory. First of all, Charles Lynch, a Virginia Judge and an American revolutionary, began “Lynch’s Law” in his famous capture and ad hoc trial of British Loyalists hostile to the revolution. His actions were legalized ex post facto by the revolutionary Virginia General Assembly.

Lynching took on a negative connotation to many after the end of the Civil War, when the rebel south was finally freed from the occupation of federal troops after the end of Reconstruction. Lynching was then used to enforce a racist division of society in an attempt to defend the privileges of the Southern planter aristocracy. This negative connotation, however, was not shared by Karl Marx.

Marx supported the Paris Commune, even if it was started by what Marx himself called a lynch mob. (First and Second Drafts of The Civil War in Paris) Two generals, Claude LeComte and Jacques Leon Clement-Thomas, were killed by mutinous soldiers and angry Parisians calling themselves the Committee of Vigilance. The trial was considered insufficient and opposed by the mayor of Paris, opponent and exile of the Paris Commune, and future Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. Marx supported the Paris Commune and you would oppose it, siding with Georges Clemenceau. You are a defender of France’s Third Republic, (1870-1940) excusing the atrocities of French generals, while justifying the artillery shelling of civilians for daring to form their own government. Marx wrote on the incident of the summary execution of these two generals:

“…General Lecomte, had four times ordered the 81st line regiment to fire at an unarmed gathering in the
Place Pigalle, and on their refusal fiercely insulted them. Instead of shooting women and children,
his own men shot him. The inveterate habits acquired by the soldiery under the training of the enemies of the working class are, of course, not likely to change the very moment these soldiers are change sides. The same men executed Clement Thomas.”

When French troops entered Paris to crush the Commune in what became known as the Bloody Week, the Commune responded by, among other things, burning buildings. This, you would call a horrific crime against architecture, but Marx wrote:

“If the acts of the Paris working men were vandalism, it was the vandalism of defence in despair, not the vandalism of triumph, like that which the Christians perpetrated upon the really priceless art treasures of heathen antiquity; and even that vandalism has been justified by the historian as an unavoidable and comparatively trifling concomitant to the titanic struggle between a new
society arising and an old one breaking down.”

There was also an execution of an arch-bishop and other hostages. You would oppose the decision of the Commune with regard to taking “hostages,” without any “due process” but Marx wrote:

“When Thiers, [first President of the Third Republic of France] as we have seen, from the very beginning of the conflict, enforced the human practice of shooting down the Communal prisoners, the Commune, to protect their lives, was obliged to resort to the
Prussian practice of securing hostages. The lives of the hostages have been forfeited over and
over again by the continued shooting of prisoners on the part of the Versaillese. How could they
be spared any longer after the carnage with which MacMahon’s praetorians celebrated their entrance into Paris?

“Was even the last check upon the unscrupulous ferocity of bourgeois governments – the taking of
hostages – to be made a mere sham of?

“The real murderer of Archbishop Darboy is Thiers. The Commune again and again had offered to
exchange the archbishop, and ever so many priests in the bargain, against the single Blanqui, then
in the hands of Thiers. Thiers obstinately refused. He knew that with Blanqui he would give the
Commune a head; while the archbishop would serve his purpose best in the shape of a corpse.”

Why do you side with Clemenceau and Thiers, enemies of the Paris Commune? Why do you side against Karl Marx, while claiming to represent Trotskyism? Trotsky would side with Marxism and against you. He would side with the soldiers who executed General LeComte and General Clement-Thomas and with the Committee of Vigilance. He would side with #MeToo against Senator Al Franken, the highest paid media CEO Les Moonves, and the close associate of Hillary Clinton, mogul Harvey Weinstein. Do you want them, like the French generals we spoke of, to order the shelling of the U.S. version of the Paris Commune and hold back the socialist revolution for ages? The media and the politicians of the Democratic Party, like Al Franken, are shelling the people with hate and ignorance, but you have an endless well of forgiveness for them.

The absence of the German army on the outskirts of the capital makes the situation less deadly, but the opposition to the government, to executive-level predators, and to the capitalist system they uphold has polarized the country to civil-war-like levels of mutual distrust and hate. In this situation, it is important for revolutionaries not to turn on each other, but remain committed to the vision of the people forcefully removing the broken government and the capitalist oligarchy from power. The original 1780 Lynch Law of Virginia Judge Charles Lynch belongs, not to the Southern U.S. Planters, but to the workers of the world.