Radio Courtoisie's 250th Anniversary Part 2: An American Retrospective — From George Washington to Teddy Roosevelt and Donald Trump

Today, I was a guest on Evelyne Joslain's Radio Courtoisie for the Second Part of America's 250th birthday celebration: An American Retrospective: from George Washington to Teddy Roosevelt and Donald Trump (audio at link).

The first part, on June 24, was a history stroll through the first half century of the American Republic, from about 1756 to 1815, from the French and Indian War and the Boston Tea Party through the revolutionary years and the writing of the Constitution until Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana territory and the Lewis and Clark expedition. 

Today's second podcast — Une Rétrospective américaine : de George Washington à Teddy Roosevelt et à Trump, avec Erik Svane — treats the next couple of centuries of American history, focusing on the first hundred years, with the War of 1812 and the Texas Revolution through the conquest of the Wild West and the Civil War to the closing of the frontier and the Spanish-American War.

I am grateful that we have received lots of congratulations from people after the first podcast who added that they have learned a lot. 

 

Libre journal du nouveau monde du 22 juillet 2026 : « Une Rétrospective américaine : de George Washington à Teddy Roosevelt et à Trump, avec Erik Svane »

• Patron d'émission : Joslain Evelyne

Le 22 juillet 2026

Evelyne Joslain, assistée d’Eric, reçoit :

• Erik Svane, porte-parole des Republicans Overseas France

Une Rétrospective américaine : de George Washington à Teddy Roosevelt et à Trump.

From the 13 Colonies' Insurrection to Independence: The Birth of the Young American Republic

• With Britons from the British Isles fighting against Britons from North America, the conflict of the 1770s was often described, certainly at first, as a civil war or a war between brothers. As a shocked Virginia farmer put it (none other than George Washington) after hearing the news from Massachusetts of Concord and Lexington, 

Unhappy it is … to reflect that a brother's sword has been sheathed in a brother's breast and that the once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with blood or inhabited by slaves.

Ten days before the 250th birthday of America's Declaration of Independence, I was a guest of Evelyne Joslain on her Radio Courtoisie program to talk not about the news for once, but to engage for an hour and a half on a history stroll through the first half century of the American Republic.

What is essentially a podcast goes over 50 years of American history, from the French and Indian War and the Boston Tea Party through the revolutionary years and the writing of the Constitution until Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana territory and the Lewis and Clark expedition. (Thanks for the the Instalink, Sarah.)

A second podcast, due a month from now on July 22, will treat the next century of American history, from the War of 1812 and the Texas Revolution through the conquest of the Wild West and the Civil War to the closing of the frontier and the Spanish-American War.

Update: Radio Courtoisie's 250th Anniversary Part 2: An American Retrospective — From George Washington to Teddy Roosevelt and Donald Trump

I am grateful that we have received lots of congratulations from people who added that they have learned a lot. The podcast is in French, but here are some of the subjects that, beyond the top paragraph above, I mentioned:

• What with the redcoats' aim at Concord and Lexington, it turns out that a major reason for the outbreak of the revolution was the government's attempt at (what we in today's parlance would call) gun control. 

• The term "Americans" (in centuries past used only for… the Indians) had slowly but surely come to be used for the Britons from North America — by both the latter and by the Britons from the British Isles — to mark the growing difference between — but to what extent is the following description 100% correct? — the two (?) peoples (or the two populations of the same people). In that perspective, the insurrectionists who dumped the tea in Boston's harbor during the Tea Party of 1773 not only disguised themselves as Indians, but disguised themselves in fact as… Americans!

• Why were the colonies so set against taxes from London? Weren't they ingrates regarding the French & Indian War? The answer is simply that, in the view of the colonists, the empire was sort of like the Commonwealth today. Granted, every member is under the king (George III or Charles III), but: apart from that, every part should take care of nobody but the people within its own domain. Let London take care of the Britons within the borders of England while Philadelphia takes care of the Britons within the borders of Pennsylvania. England should no more make decisions about (and levy taxes on) the Britons in Maryland or in Virginia than Philadelphia should make decisions about (and levy taxes on) Britons in Georgia and in South Carolina — or, for that matter, in… England itself! 

• However, we must be realistic, right? Britain is an empire, correct? Now, if you accept this and that, therefore, it needs a centralizing center of power, then fine, by all means let it be London. (Where else would it be?!) But in that case, let it be composed of Members of Parliament not only from Birmingham and Leeds and Edinburgh, but of MPs from all parts of the British Empire around the planet (including the 13 colonies and Québec). To summarize this in four (well-known) words: No taxation without representation. (By the way, did you know that while none of the colonies on the mainland had a representative in London, the sugar island of Jamaica did have one?)

• What is amazing is the young ages of the founding fathers. At the time of the Declaration of Independence (1776), Jefferson was 33, John Adams was 40, Washington was 44. At the time of the Constitution (1787), James Madison was 36, James Monroe was 29, Alexander Hamilton was 30, John Jay was 41. (And how about Lafayette — how old was he when he became a general in the Continental Army? Read the answer below…)

• Every single sentence of the Constitution provides the same message: that the citizen is a free man

• There are quite a number of parallels between POTUS1 and POTUS47 (aka POTUS45):

— As president George Washington had a powerful message:  "The promotion of domestic manufactures will, in my conception, be among the first consequences which may naturally be expected to flow from an energetic government." According to Ron Chernow, George Washington 

believed that "commercial connections, of all others, are the most difficult to dissolve," which foreshadowed his faith as president in enduring commercial rather than political ties with other countries.

— Also — just like Trump's bombings taking out Iran's leadership (not to mention his Caracas raid taking out Venezuela's lider maximo) — the Continental Army would deliberately aim for enemy officers; which was deplored by the Royal Army as that was not how wars were fought between "gentleman" in those times.

• Used to gathering at inns, the Founding Fathers' generation was higher into liqueurs and other types of alcohol than their descendants are two centuries later. Benjamin Franklin once said: “In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.” The greatest distiller of whiskey in North America was located at… Mount Vernon; George Washington produced 41.000 liters of whiskey per year.

• After purchasing Louisiana territory, Jefferson offered the post of governor of the territory to a dual citizen, aka "the hero of two worlds" — the Marquis de Lafayette.

• Because it is a French podcast (en français), we focused quite a bit on French subjects such as Louis XVI's military intervention and French officers, notably the nobleman whom George Washington considered a son. Lafayette was only 19 when he became a general in the American army. His own (real) son was named Georges Washington de Lafayette and the last of his three daughters was named Marie-Antoinette Virginie Lafayette. This led Benjamin Franklin to quip that his wife had only 12 more children to give birth to (in order to have one child named after every state). 

• Although it depends on how the statistics are used, there seems to be more more places and townships named after Lafayette than after Washington, Jefferson, or Lincoln.

• How exactly were the Indians' lands "stolen"? By the end of July 1804, after sailing 600 miles up the Missouri River for two months (since leaving on May 21), the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition had not once met a single American Indian. 

 
Here are some related history NP posts written over the past 22 years: 

• What Caused Secession and Ergo the Civil War? Was It Slavery and/or States' Rights? Or Wasn't It Rather Something Else — the Election of a Ghastly Republican to the White House? 
• During the Winter of 1860-1861, Did the South's Democrats Obtain Their Aim — the Secession of 7 Slave States — Thanks to Elections Filled with Stealth, Lies, Voter Fraud, Intimidation, Violence, and Murder? (Wait 'til You Hear About… Georgia's Dark Secret)
• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech" 
• The Greatest Myth in U.S. History: Yes, the Civil War Era Did Feature Champions of States' Rights, But No, They Were Not in the South (Au Contraire)
• Harry Jaffa on the Civil War Era: For Democrats of the 21st Century as of the 19th, "the emancipation from morality was/is itself seen as moral progress" 
• "Break Their Spirit" with "Maximum Warfare": What Nobody Tells You About Reconstruction in the South After the American Civil War
• Why Does Nobody Ever Fret About Scandinavia's — Dreadful — 19th-C Slavery Conditions? 
• A Century and Half of Apartheid Policies:  From Its 1828 Foundation, the Democrat Party Has Never Shed Its Racist Past 
• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History 
• How to Prevent America from Becoming a Totalitarian State 
• Inside of a month, Democrats have redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy — And by “democracy”, they mean the Democrat Party
• Why They Don't Tell You the Whole Truth: The 1619 Project Summarized in One Single Sentence 

Libre journal du nouveau monde du 24 juin 2026 : « De l’insurrection des Treize Colonies à l’Indépendance : les débuts de la jeune Amérique »

• Patron d'émission : Joslain Evelyne Le 24 juin 2026

Libre journal du nouveau monde du 24 juin 2026

 

Evelyne Joslain, assistée d’Eric, reçoit :

• Erik Svane, porte-parole des Republicans Overseas France

Thème : « De l’insurrection des Treize Colonies à l’Indépendance : les débuts de la jeune Amérique » 

Cliquez sur le lien pour entendre l'émission d'une heure et demie…

Patron d'émission du Libre journal du Nouveau Monde à Radio Courtoisie, Évelyne Joslain est l'auteur d'une poignée de livres sur les États-Unis et l'Occident. Parmi ceux-ci, son chef d'œuvre est paru il y a deux ans.  Voici la revue du livre La Guerre Culturelle.

Widespread failure across nearly every level of leadership in Minnesota: Public programs fraud on the scale we see today— of which Ilhan Omar is Somali Fraud Exhibit A—indicates a leadership class that has either forgotten or no longer takes seriously the idea that public office is a public trust

 

Over at Hillsdale College, Power Line's Scott Johnson treats its Imprimis readers to Learning From Minnesota’s Somali Fraud Scandal. For more than ten years this "fellow of the Claremont Institute … has covered Minnesota Fifth District U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar and three major trials in Minnesota involving Somali defendants." (Thanks for the Instalink, Sarah.) Read the excerpts below or read the whole thing.

The massive public programs fraud committed almost entirely by Somali perpetrators has recently exploded in the national news. The controversy is centered in Minnesota, where the amount of money bilked from American taxpayers could prove to be as high as $9 billion. But the scandal is spreading to other states as well.

 … Long known for having a largely Scandinavian population, Minnesota is now home to the largest Somali population in North America, numbering roughly 100,000, most of whom are congregated in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. The seeds of this community were planted in the early 1990s, when the State Department directed thousands of refugees from Somalia’s civil war to Minnesota. Except for a dip in 2008, the immigration of Somalis into Minnesota has continued unabated, augmented by Somalis arriving from other states. The latter likely has to do with Minnesota’s generous welfare and charity policies. As Professor Ahmed Samatar of Saint Paul’s Macalester College was quoted as saying in a 2015 Washington Times story, Minnesota is “the closest thing in the United States to a true social democratic state.”

The massive fraud currently in the news was not the first controversy surrounding the Somali immigrant community. Around 2015, it proved to be a fertile source of ISIS recruits. … Of ten Minnesota Somalis charged with seeking to join ISIS in Syria, six pleaded guilty and three were convicted at trial in June 2016.

During the trial of the three Somalis who contested the charges, it became clear, primarily from recordings introduced into evidence, that although they gave the outward appearance of American assimilation, they hated America. They took advantage of educational and employment opportunities and moved into and out of the workforce at will. At one time, all three worked at a UPS facility in a leafy Saint Paul suburb, where they enjoyed watching ISIS videos of beheadings during their breaks.

Foreshadowing the fraud scandals of today, the Somalis involved in terrorism showed themselves to be sophisticated in their creative use of social welfare benefits. Two of four Somali ISIS recruits intercepted at New York’s JFK airport while en route to Syria had used federal financial aid funds to pay for their travel. One financed his planned trip to Syria with a $5,000 debit card withdrawal on his student loan account.

In the decade since, the controversy over terrorist recruitment of Somalis has receded and the Somali abuse of social welfare programs has proliferated.

Child Care Fraud

The defrauding of Minnesota’s Child Care Assistance Program for day care services, although brought dramatically to national attention by Nick Shirley in late December, goes back more than ten years. Jeff Baillon, a Twin Cities TV reporter, reported on day care frauds in 2013 and 2015. A year ago this month Jay Kolls, another local reporter, went to two of the ten sites Shirley visited and reported that one of them was guilty of 95 violations—including “no records for 16 children”—between 2019 and 2023. But taxpayer funds continued to flow to these programs.

 … Minnesota’s Office of the Legislative Auditor issued a detailed report on child care fraud in 2019. On the question of how much had been stolen, the report restricted itself to amounts established in convictions. Because convictions were few and far between, that only came to between $5 million and $6 million. But the report concluded, citing the lax administration of the day care program, that the level of fraud was likely higher. Indeed! And the laxity continues. Jim Nobles, the legislative auditor at the time of the 2019 report, wrote a recent column in The Minnesota Star Tribune decrying the “permissive approach” of Minnesota’s state government that makes it “easy for fraudsters to steal” and questioning why nothing had been done over many years to “implement standard financial controls and oversight.”

Feeding Our Future Fraud

In that same Star Tribune column, Nobles wrote: “We now know that the fraud scheme used in the state’s child care program has been used frequently in other state human service programs.” A dramatic example of this is the case that has become known as the Feeding Our Future fraud.

Feeding Our Future is a nonprofit organization that served as a sponsor of sites like day care centers and restaurants that participated in two federal nutrition programs. During the peak Covid period, from April 2020 until January 2022, Feeding Our Future and its sites and their vendors found it remarkably easy to bilk these programs by filing false claims for reimbursement supported by false meal counts, fake rosters, and bogus invoices.

 … It is important to note that suspected fraud was often never fully investigated because government overseers were easily scared off by absurd claims of racism—charges that continue to be leveled even today. …

Medicaid Fraud

The Feeding Our Future fraud cases opened a window on scams involving several Minnesota Medicaid programs. After the FBI executed search warrants in one such case in July of last year, then-Acting United States Attorney Joe Thompson—who until very recently was leading both the Feeding Our Future and the Medicaid fraud prosecutions—called a press conference in September to announce criminal charges against the first eight Medicaid fraud defendants, all of whom are Somali.

 … Uncovering fraud in Minnesota is like playing with Russian nesting dolls. “Many of the owners of [the involved HSS] companies,” Thompson said, “had one or more other companies through which they billed other Medicaid programs such as the [Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention] program, the Adult Rehabilitative Mental Health Services program, the Integrated Community Support program, the Community Access for Disability Inclusion program, [Personal Care Assistance] services, and other Medicaid-waivered services.” The details of these cases were almost incidental to Thompson’s main point—that “Minnesota is drowning in fraud.”

“It feels never-ending,” Thompson said. “I have spent my career as a fraud prosecutor and the depth of fraud in Minnesota takes my breath away.”

On December 18 of last year, Thompson called another press conference to announce charges against six more defendants in connection with Minnesota’s Medicaid programs. The new cases involved allegedly fraudulent claims in programs for housing, autism services, and assistance for disabled adults seeking to live independently. “Every day we look under a rock and find a new $50 million fraud scheme,” Thompson said.

The total amount of money disbursed through these programs since 2018 is $18 billion. Based on his ongoing investigations, Thompson estimated that as much as half that amount—$9 billion!—may have been paid out on fraudulent claims. “The magnitude cannot be overstated,” Thompson said. “What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It’s a staggering, industrial-scale fraud.” Four of the six defendants charged in December are Minnesotan Somalis, and those involved in the uncharged cases under investigation are almost entirely Somali.

Political Responsibility

Two defendants from Philadelphia, Anthony Waddell Jefferson and Lester Brown, undertook what Thompson called “fraud tourism.” Having heard that Minnesota’s HSS program presented an easy mark, they set up in Minnesota to become fraudulent service providers. One wonders how word of this was able to make its way to Philadelphia but not to the State Capitol in Saint Paul, where the people’s elected officials are charged with protecting the public interest.

In a Star Tribune interview, Thompson cast the net widely in terms of responsibility: “This fraud crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the result of widespread failure across nearly every level of leadership in Minnesota: Politicians who turned a blind eye. Agencies that failed to act. Prosecutors and law enforcement who didn’t push hard enough. Reporters who ignored the story. Community leaders who stayed silent. And a public that wanted to believe it couldn’t happen here.”

Partly because it’s a problem that the people can solve directly, I would focus on the politicians. Three in particular.

The first is Governor Tim Walz. … Walz will never live down the frauds committed on the agencies under his jurisdiction.

The second is Attorney General Ellison … Like Walz, Ellison continues to refuse to sit for an interview with a serious reporter to answer questions about what he knew about the fraud and when he knew it. Nor has anyone in the mainstream media made an issue of that fact, which is a scandal in its own right.

The third is U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar. Even if we leave aside the fact that she immigrated to the U.S. as a fraudulent member of the Omar family and later married her biological brother in her own Elmi family for further fraudulent purposes, we could still fairly describe her as Somali Fraud Exhibit A. She sponsored the MEALS Act that facilitated the Feeding Our Future fraud, and her congressional district served as its epicenter. She was a friend of Salim Said, Aimee Bock’s co-defendant in the second Feeding Our Future trial. She filmed a promotional video at Said’s restaurant that was introduced by Said’s lawyer at trial, although it actually served to support the charges against Said. Yet despite these facts, Omar claims to have known nothing about the fraud.

***

Public programs fraud on the scale we see today in Minnesota—and to a lesser degree (so far at least) in other states—indicates a leadership class that has either forgotten or no longer takes seriously the idea that public office is a public trust. What more fitting time could there be than the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence to restore the moral power of that idea in irresponsible state governments like that of Minnesota?

Read the whole thing 

Related — Law Enforcement Officers and Police Shootings: 

Try Comparing Those of January 6 to Those in Minnesota

Mind-Boggling: America's statues "weren't desecrated or destroyed" — The Left Is Rewriting Its Mobs Tearing Down of Statues to Only a Desire to Put Them "into museums to commemorate the fallen during the Civil War"

The head is spinning! The propensity of the Left to rewrite history — ancient or recent, its own as well as everybody else's — is rarely anything less than mind-boggling.  The Leftists' latest rewriting of history concerns their mobs tearing down of America's statues in and around 2020:

When one leftist went berserk on Facebook regarding the fate of the White House's East Wing, I posted a Fox story quoting Sen. Josh Hawley. The Missouri Republican

replied that the far left has supported the destruction of statues of U.S. historical figures in recent years. 

 … "I hear all of a sudden from my liberal friends that they’re very concerned about our history. Really? These are the same people who tore down every statue they could get their hands on in the last four years," the lawmaker said. … "Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt. They didn’t have any concern for history then. Now, all of a sudden, they’re like, ‘Oh, the facade of the East Wing is iconic,'" Hawley said. "Oh, give me a break. I mean, give me a break."

That post of mine got two reactions. From Ann:

Statues are different than the White House and you know that.

So now, it's "just" statues (it wasn't "only" statues when y'all were tearing them down, they were symbols of America's intrinsic evil — including even… Northern statues!). And "you know that," you damn conservative, meaning that therefore you should just shut up! (Thanks for the hyperlink, Sarah.)

Wait, it gets better! From Dori:

we supported said statues be put into museums to commemorate the lost and fallen during the Civil War.  They weren't desecrated or destroyed in the process of taking them down.

You have just entered the twilight zone! Leftist mobs (dripping with patriotism?) removed the statues (respectfully? in a professional manner?) for the sole reason to… (respectfully?) place them inside (respected?) museums?! And only to honor America, her history, as well as both sides in the Civil War?!?!

To the first woman ("Statues are different than the White House") I replied

You're right Ann … : it's far worse!

before proceeding to quote the Bob Woodson interview at the very bottom of this post. To the second woman I answered with a news item about Hans Heg, an (anti-slavery) officer in the Union army whose statue was thrown into a lake, although not before being… decapitated [see also the Stonewall Jackson statue]. To Dori's contention that "They weren't desecrated or destroyed in the process of taking them down" I linked a news report about the Hans Heg statue, adding that

Of course they were Dori …

Statues were painted over, (unceremoniously) torn down, decapitated, and dumped in lakes, as hysterical mobs squealed in glee. I see that the left's rewriting of history and that their fairy tales are never far from the surface.

One observer who has made profound observations about the left and their tactics is NATE HOCHMAN. Last year, he noted that the anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox 

was occasion for gleeful crowing from the left-wing corners of the internet. “Happy Traitors Surrendering Day,” one young Virginia Democrat wrote. “F*** Robert E. Lee, f*** the Confederacy, and f*** their cause of treason.” A widely shared video featured a woman chugging “rebel tears” to celebrate the Confederacy “taking a fat f***ing L.” (Gratuitous vulgarity seems to be a feature of this discourse.) The famous left-wing hacker group Anonymous added, “On this day (April 9th, 1865) the Confederacy surrendered after getting it’s [sic] ass kicked.” 

Notice, incidentally, that the vulgar cheers recall the recent ones in the wake of the brutal killing of Charlie Kirk ("It Should Not Be Considered Free Speech" Says Karsenty of the Left's Anti-Kirk Rants; "It Is the Glorification of Terrorism"). In Undoing the Appomattox, HOCHMAN points out that what the Left is doing "is rewriting history. What are they giving themselves permission to do?" 

 … Today’s vulgar cheers have very little to do with the Civil War at all. Today’s gleeful celebration of Lee’s surrender is part and parcel of the same fervor that has sought to remove any positive commemoration of the Southern general and his counterparts from public life. It has nothing to do with the Confederacy, except insofar as the soiled memory of the Antebellum South can be mobilized to undermine, attack, and delegitimize Red America. The contemporary Left seeks to recast the white, conservative, Christian lumpenproletariat as the inheritors of slavery, segregation, and the numerous other crimes that have replaced men like Grant and Lee at the center of our new national mythology. 

 … This is the true meaning behind the gratuitous, jeering celebrations of Appomattox. It is not, as the anonymous X user Lunkhead noted, about “hating traitors” so much as it is about a fervent desire to punish contemporary enemies. Given the violent nature of the Confederacy’s demise, it’s reasonable to ask: Just what, exactly, are they giving themselves permission to do?

I foresaw this in 2015, when the Rebel flag was starting to get demonized (Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History). Of course, as I have written in the past, the Confederacy really represented the Democratic Party, and when an ignominious Republican had the gall to win the election of 1860 (the Election of a Ghastly Republican to the White House, shades of 2016, 2020, and 2024), the Democrats went berserk, and for the next four years, these drama queens (called by Abraham Lincoln Fire-eaters and Locofocos) tore the country apart. 

As I quoted Bob Woodson, the founder of 1776 Unites, as saying, concerning the entire 1619 Project — check out The 1619 Project Summarized in One Single Sentence:

This is a fight against … the credentials of this country … slavery was a stain [beyond] which we moved … This is really a struggle for the soul of this nation. Lincoln [and the Emancipation Memorial] are a symbol of redemption, and the Left does not believe in redemption. 

… One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth. Because these statues, like the Emancipation Memorial, are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for [the Left] to remove evidence of the truth.

Related: From U.S. Grant and Union Soldiers Fighting the Slavocracy to John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, All Statues Must Come Down 

• What Caused Secession and Ergo the Civil War? Was It Slavery and/or States' Rights? Or Wasn't It Rather Something Else — the Election of a Ghastly Republican to the White House? 

• During the Winter of 1860-1861, Did the South's Democrats Obtain Their Aim — the Secession of 7 Slave States — Thanks to Elections Filled with Stealth, Lies, Voter Fraud, Intimidation, Violence, and Murder?

• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• The Greatest Myth in U.S. History: Yes, the Civil War Era Did Feature Champions of States' Rights, But No, They Were Not in the South (Au Contraire) 

• A Century and Half of Apartheid Policies: From Its 1828 Foundation, the Democrat Party Has Never Shed Its Racist Past

• Harry Jaffa on the Civil War Era: For Democrats of the 21st Century as of the 19th, "the emancipation from morality was/is itself seen as moral progress"

• Why Does Nobody Ever Fret About Scandinavia's — Dreadful — 19th-C Slavery Conditions?

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History 

• How to Prevent America from Becoming a Totalitarian State

• Inside of a month, Democrats have redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy — And by “democracy”, they mean the Democrat Party

• Why They Don't Tell You the Whole Truth:  The 1619 Project Summarized in One Single Sentence

The Imperial Judiciary: The Constitution A) does not authorize judges to veto a president and B) it is not a suicide pact: The rights of citizens are sacrosanct; The rights of spies, terrorists, and illegal aliens are nonexistent

Power corrupts. … the judiciary is an overreaching monster in black robes, hellbent at overturning the 2024 election one unwarranted TRO—temporary restraining order—at a time.

What is going on right now, writes Don Surber, can be described as Trump v. the imperial judiciary. (Thanks to Mark Tapscott, who adds that Don "takes apart the federal judiciary’s illegal immigrant deportation insanity more effectively and completely than I’ve read anywhere else.")

District Judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts issued an order that prevents President Trump from using one of the nation’s oldest laws—The Alien Enemies Act of 1798—to deport of MS 13 and other terrorist illegal aliens. The law was written and approved by Founding Fathers such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson who realized the Constitution is not a suicide pact. The rights of citizens are sacrosanct. The rights of spies, terrorists and illegal aliens are nonexistent.

Murphy is one of 677 district judges who have taken it upon themselves to veto any and all presidential actions that George Soros does not like. The same people who turned and looked the other way when Biden was calling a protest at the Capitol an insurrection now refuse to allow the deportation of violent criminals who are here illegally.

They want El Salvador to send one of their citizens back. Imagine if Putin said, you know, I changed my mind. Send Brittney Griner back.

There are three branches of government and we are told they are equal. The legislative branch has stopped legislating, instead deferring to career government employees to write the rules, enforce them and then adjudicate them. Protected by Civil Service, they bob in the bowels of government like a fatberg and are accountable to no one.

The judiciary also writes laws, legalizing gay marriage, abortion and taxpayers paying for tranny surgery for military men with fetishes. No one holds them accountable. Oh, sure, we can amend the Constitution to get around the justices. The only time the politicians did that was to impose an income tax on us.

The lack of accountability in the bureaucracy and the imperial judiciary gunning for President Trump are why Erez Reuveni, Assistant Director of the Office of Immigration Litigation, felt he could get away with lying in court and saying the government made a clerical error in deporting of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran, back to El Salvador.

 … Judge Murphy in Massachusetts’ call for hearings and appeals before we deport anyone is an absurdity to the power of bizarre. The only process due them are two questions: Do you have a passport and a visa? If the answer is no, buh-bye, fella. You just won a one-way ticket home—or El Salvador, whichever Trump chooses.

As Chris Matthews said, 

“I think the country is going to get really ticked off at a government that won‘t do what they tell them to do. A country without borders is not a country. If you don’t have a border—I‘ve never heard of a country in the world that doesn’t have a border. That‘s what defines a country. If you don’t enforce it, you’re a joke.”

But that was nearly 20 years ago when liberals at least bothered pretending they supported the border. Now they want our country to be a joke—and it was under Biden.

We are in an emergency. Untold millions illegal aliens are wandering around the nation.

But the imperial judiciary’s actions eclipse the danger of this emergency by demanding that every one of these millions of criminals be granted a trial and the appeals that follow. Much to the delight of Democrats, the illegal aliens crisis has led to a showdown between the courts, which they control, and the president, whom they hate.

The 677 district judges are not the only threat. The Supreme Court is siding with the liars inside the government and the lying media.

 … Sundance called the attacks on Trump enforcing immigration law lawfare on steroids

  … But the ones breaking the rule of law are in the judiciary. And not just with illegal aliens but in the false insurrection cases, rejecting out of hand claims of fraud in the 2020 election, allowing Obama to spy on Trump, allowing Biden to raid his home, 91 counts in 4 indictments and trying to order military planes to turn around in midair.

The judges are the ones who should respect their authority first by recognizing the boundaries. The Constitution does not authorize judges to veto a president. District judges have taken it upon themselves to expand their districts to include the entire nation and in the case of Boasberg, El Salvador too.

We often hear that justice delayed is justice denied but this order underscores another saying: Time plus no answer equals no. A president has 4 years to fulfill his promises to the American people. Lifetime appointed judges can wait him out. They did that in his first presidency. 

The press is hunky-dory with judge-shopping by the Soros Left to block Trump from upholding immigration law and the like. 

 … Federal judges are not the only rogue elephants using their power to prevent elected officials from doing their job and enforcing laws. PJ Media reported, “Judge temporarily blocks Mayor Adams' administration from allowing ICE onto Rikers Island.”

 … I sure hope Tom Homan starts living up to his warnings about arresting officials who aid and abet illegal immigration.

There is hope. The Supreme Court is extending its schedule (delaying its three-month summer vacation) according to Fox

 … Make no mistake, this is an attempt to stifle the president and blunt his presidency. Elections have consequences? Hah! John Roberts has enabled the district judges to veto Trump over and over again. 

 … Some people advocate having the president ignore the courts. That reflects the corruption of the courts. 

In response to Don Surber's article, a reader by the name of Tmitsss quotes one of its lines as he goes on to refer to the Declaration of Independence:

“Do you have a passport and a visa? If the answer is no, buh-bye, fella.”

Due process applies to deprivation of life, liberty and property. Foreigners without a visa have no protected right to remain.

Not limited to slavery, Jim Crow laws, and legal segregation: Using lawfare against political opponents is nothing new for Democrats

In the American Spectator's This Mess Is of Your Own Making, Chief Justice Roberts (thanks to Sarah Hoyt), Scott McKay links to Francis P. Sempa's A Short History of Democratic Party Lawfare: 

The party’s use of the criminal justice system to maintain political power dates back to slavery.

Many Republicans and conservatives have accused today’s Democratic Party of using “lawfare” against President Donald Trump and his supporters. They claim that this use of lawfare against a political opponent is unprecedented. But it is not unprecedented. What follows is a short history of the Democratic Party’s use of lawfare to attain and maintain political power.

The Democratic Party’s use of law and the criminal justice system to maintain political power dates back to the “peculiar institution” of slavery. It is often ignored or deliberately forgotten that the Democratic Party was the party of slavery. In the states of the Deep South and elsewhere, Democratic Party legislators enshrined slavery into law, Democratic executives enforced those laws, and Democratic judges upheld those laws against legal and constitutional challenges. Democratic presidents like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson were slaveholders. So were many Democratic governors. It was Democrats who insisted on passage of the Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise of 1850. It was a Democratic Supreme Court Chief Justice (Roger Taney) who wrote the court’s opinion (Scott v. Sanford, known as the Dred Scott case) upholding slavery and declaring African Americans to be chattel.

It was Democratic Party state and local officials that in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction imposed so-called “Jim Crow” laws in many states of the Deep South. Indeed, as part of a deal for not continuing to challenge the controversial presidential election of 1876 (which included two sets of electors in three contested states and a Republican majority commission that awarded the 20 disputed electoral votes to Rutherford B. Hayes), Democrats insisted on an end to Reconstruction, which allowed them to pass and enforce segregationist laws. As African American populations rose in the south, this was a mechanism for oppression, control, and maintaining Democratic Party political supremacy. And when southerners took the law into their own hands by lynching African Americans, it was local, state, and national Democratic political leaders who ensured that anti-lynching bills did not become laws, and that rigged juries would acquit the murderers of African Americans. At the national level, Democratic control of key congressional committee chairmanships ensured the defeat of effective Civil Rights bills for decades until 1964 — Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson goes into great detail as to how this worked.

Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, a rabid racist, authorized segregation within the federal government. Franklin Roosevelt refused to support anti-lynching laws. Democratic Senate leader Robert Byrd was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan. So was Democratic Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Democratic governors like George Wallace and Lester Maddox — to name just two — were openly segregationist.

Lawfare was not limited to slavery, Jim Crow laws, and legal segregation. Democrat Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order that forcibly removed more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes on the West Coast and interned them in camps during World War II, a Democratic Party-controlled Congress legislated in support of that order, and a majority-Democratic Party Supreme Court upheld this massive legal and constitutional injustice. Democratic Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson used the IRS to investigate political opponents. More recently, Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did this, too.

Lawfare was also involved in the Democratic-led coup (known as Watergate) against President Richard Nixon, this time with the full-throated support of the mainstream media, who hated Nixon ever since he helped to expose Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. Geoff Shepard in several books has revealed the collusion between Democratic congressional staffers, the Democratic Party-staffed special counsel’s office, senior FBI agents, and federal judges, to prosecute Nixon’s staffers and ultimately remove Nixon from office.

So using lawfare against political opponents is nothing new for Democrats.

Related: A Century and Half of Apartheid Policies — From Its 1828 Foundation, the Democrat Party Has Never Shed Its Racist Past 

Also: • What Caused Secession and Ergo the Civil War? Was It Slavery and/or States' Rights? Or Wasn't It Rather Something Else — the Election of a Ghastly Republican to the White House?
• During the Winter of 1860-1861, Did the South's Democrats Obtain Their Aim — the Secession of 7 Slave States — Thanks to Elections Filled with Stealth, Lies, Voter Fraud, Intimidation, Violence, and Murder? (Wait 'til You Hear About… Georgia's Dark Secret)
• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"
• The Greatest Myth in U.S. History: Yes, the Civil War Era Did Feature Champions of States' Rights, But No, They Were Not in the South (Au Contraire)
• Harry Jaffa on the Civil War Era: For Democrats of the 21st Century as of the 19th, "the emancipation from morality was/is itself seen as moral progress"
• Why Does Nobody Ever Fret About Scandinavia's — Dreadful — 19th-C Slavery Conditions?
• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History
• How to Prevent America from Becoming a Totalitarian State
• Inside of a month, Democrats have redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy — And by “democracy”, they mean the Democrat Party
• Why They Don't Tell You the Whole Truth: The 1619 Project Summarized in One Single Sentence

Insurrection and Treason: What Did the Words of the 14th Amendment Mean in the 1860s?

Are these dozens of Capitol policemen lying dead or wounded
in the aftermath of the January 6th "insurrection",
or is it a scene from a Victor Fleming film?

The way the January 6 protests at the Capitol have been described by the usual Drama Queens, you would think that you are in Georgia when Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler are galloping through the flames devouring Atlanta and that, in the aftermath, dozens of Capitol policemen are lying dead or wounded like in the harrowing outdoors hospital scene of Gone with the Wind. 

As The Hill cites Article 3 of the 14th Amendment to urge Congress to block Donald Trump from returning to the White Hose (as reported by Yael Halon on Fox News), a central question (beyond double standards) arises: What did insurrection and treason mean to the authors of the 1868 Amendment as well as to the rest of the population, i.e., in the 1860s?  (Thanks for the Instalink, Sarah.)

Related: • The January 6 Protest Summarized in One Single Sentence
• Let's Stop Using the Words "Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election"; It's Unprofessional Journalism
Insurrection and treason meant raising armies, equipping them with uniforms, firearms, and artillery, and going to war and to the battlefield — resulting in a number of American deaths in four short years in the middle of the 19th century greater than that of all America's wars of the 20th Century (including World Wars I and II) combined. (The current post is a major update of a post that appeared almost one year ago, to wit on on January 6, 2024.)

Are these a mob of violent MAGA nuts, deranged Tea Partiers, and other
treacherous  "insurrectionists" on January 6, or are they extras in a Hollywood movie?

During the administration of James Buchanan (the 15th president preceding Abraham Lincoln), his secretary of war stealthily gathered large stores of government arms and sent them to federal arsenals in the South, effectively anticipating the outbreak of civil war.

After the conflict of 1861-1865, Ulysses S Grant wrote in his memoirs that John B Floyd, the Secretary of War, 

scattered the army so that much of it could be captured when hostilities should commence, and distributed the cannon and small arms from Northern arsenals throughout the South so as to be on hand when treason wanted them.

The name of John Floyd's predecessor as Secretary of War was Jefferson Davis, and when first seven, then 11, states attempted to secede over the winter of 1860-1861 (related: During the Winter of 1860-1861, Did the South's Democrats Obtain Their Aim — the Secession of 7 Slave States — Thanks to Elections Filled with Stealth, Lies, Voter Fraud, Intimidation, Violence, and Murder?), he would duly become president of the newly-formed Confederate States of America

So there you have it: To the people in the 1860s, to the writers of the 14th Amendment, insurrection and treason meant months and years of preparations, hoarding weapons, both light and heavy, raising armies, and engaging in warfare against the central government, the mother nation, and the Stars and Stripes, leading not to thousands upon thousands of deaths, but to hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Who in their right mind — besides the usual gang of Drama Queens, that is — could in any way reasonably compare January 6 to the Civil War or, for that matter, to 9-11 or to Pearl Harbor?

Indeed, only one words fits that comparison.

That word is: Preposterous.

CAPTION: Clark (Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn) Gable to Vivian Leigh,
sounding like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden: "With them
[the retreating USA-hating CSA rebel soldiers] goes the last semblance of law and order"

Related (Civil War era): • What Caused Secession and Ergo the Civil War? Was It Slavery and/or States' Rights? Or Wasn't It Rather Something Else — the Election of a Ghastly Republican to the White House?
• During the Winter of 1860-1861, Did the South's Democrats Obtain Their Aim — the Secession of 7 Slave States — Thanks to Elections Filled with Stealth, Lies, Voter Fraud, Intimidation, Violence, and Murder? (Wait 'til You Hear About… Georgia's Dark Secret)
• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"
• Why Does Nobody Ever Fret About Scandinavia's — Dreadful — 19th-C Slavery Conditions?
• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

To end this post, let us quote, approvingly, from (believe it or not) the New York Times. After spending half his column considering a counterfactual in The Antidemocratic Quest to Save Democracy From Trump, Ross Douthat gets to the main point:

Had [Hillary] Clinton explicitly tried to induce Congress to overturn the result of the 2016 race and had a left-wing protest on her behalf turned into a certification-disrupting riot, almost none of the people currently insisting that we need to take the challenge to Trump’s ballot access very seriously would be saying the same about a challenge to her eligibility. Instead, they would be accusing that challenge of being incipiently authoritarian, a right-wing attack on our sacred democracy.

And they would have a point. Removing an opposition candidate from the ballot, indeed, a candidate currently leading in some polling averages (pending the economic boom of 2024 that we can all hope is coming), through the exercise of judicial power is a remarkably antidemocratic act. It is more antidemocratic than impeachment, because the impeachers and convicters, representatives and senators, are themselves democratically elected and subject to swift democratic punishment. It is more antidemocratic than putting an opposition politician on trial, because the voters who regard that trial as illegitimate are still allowed to vote for an indicted or convicted politician, as almost a million Americans did for Eugene V. Debs while he languished in prison in 1920.

Sometimes the rules of a republic require doing antidemocratic things. But if the rule you claim to be invoking treats Jan. 6 as the same kind of event as the secession of the Confederacy, consider the possibility that you have taken the tropes of anti-Trump punditry too literally.

The term “insurrection,” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait wrote on Wednesday, is “a defensible shorthand for Jan. 6.” But it’s not “the most precise” term, because while “Trump attempted to secure an unelected second term in office,” he “was not trying to seize and hold the Capitol nor declare a breakaway republic.”

This concession prompted howls of online derision from his left-wing critics, but Chait is obviously, crashingly correct. There are arguments about precedent and implementation that tell against the case for Trump’s ineligibility and prudential arguments about the wisdom of suppressing populist fervor by judicial fiat. But the most important point is that there are many things a politician can do to subvert a democratic outcome, all of them impeachable and some of them potentially illegal, that are simply not equivalent to military rebellion, even if a bunch of protesters and rioters get involved.

To insist otherwise, in the supposed service of the Constitution, is to demonstrate yet again that too many would-be saviors of our Republic would cut a great road through reason and good sense if they could only be assured of finally getting rid of Donald Trump.

Related (January 6): • The January 6 Protest Summarized in One Single Sentence
• Let's Stop Using the Words "Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election"; It's Unprofessional Journalism
• The Central Absurd Inconsistency of the Ray Epps Conundrum Described in Two Sentences
• Kabuki Theater: the "top 12 strange, stand-out moments" of the January 6th Committee's interview with Ray Epps
• Only about 1% of the January 6 protesters actually entered the Capitol (often at the invitation of the Speaker's Capitol Police); In fact, it was the 99% who stayed out of the Capitol who heeded Trump's words
• Déjà Vu All Over Again in the Banana Republic of Biden: No, the Democrats did not run better campaigns in 2022; they cheated, as usual
• Isn’t it strange that in Florida, with all those strict rules against cheating, the GOP red tsunami happened as predicted? The Democrats have again fixed, rigged, and stolen an election
• Let’s dispense with the myth that liberals are really against voter fraud; Voter fraud is actually an essential part of their election strategy
• If the Democrats learned anything from their 2016 debacle it’s that they didn’t cheat nearly enough
• What the January 6th protest actually reveals is the criminal determination of the Democrats to establish a one-party state at whatever the cost
• Democrats don't support voter fraud; they just worry about disenfranchising the deceased
• Voter ID: Apparently not allowing minorities to cheat is a form of racial oppression
• Of the 47 countries in Europe today — the nations and the continent that the Democrats are always telling us to emulate — 46 of them currently require government-issued photo IDs to vote
• Joe Biden, Why Are You Calling Denmark a White Supremacist Country? And You, Barack Obama: Why Are You Calling Africa a Racist Continent?
• 2020: an almost totalitarian effort by the national political and social media to suppress and ridicule any doubt of the accuracy of the election result
The DOJ and the FBI "have no conscience or soul": “There is a fervor to attack the J6 protesters, ruin their lives, and bankrupt them”
• "I believed a farrago of lies" Writes VIP Whose Leftist Half of the American Electorate was "Taken in By Full-Spectrum Propaganda" Regarding the Jan. 6 (Non-)Riots
• Our élites constantly lecture everyone about "disinformation," about "big lies", etc; They're the biggest liars of all, with zero accountability
• Isn't America Being Governed by a Mafia Family Dynasty, setting things up so that there will always be Democrats in power?
• Inside of a month, Democrats have redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy — And by “democracy”, they mean the Democrat Party
• Voter Fraud: A Note to Leftists Who Claim that "Not a shred of hard evidence has been produced"
• Dennis Prager: The Numerous (and Sweeping) Anomalies Regarding the 2020 Election That Cannot Be Ignored
• How to Prevent America from Becoming a Totalitarian State