Maybe we are winning.

When a mainstream conservative can write glowingly about John C. Calhoun, perhaps the Straussian smear tactics against the man aren’t having the desired effect.

Good.

This helps American conservatism.

I know the other argument. Calhoun was a racist. How can we support that?

This is a stupid argument made by historically ignorant and stupid people.

You could probably count on two hands the number of prominent people who weren’t racists in the 19th century.

And that list doesn’t include St. Abraham or Burn ‘Em All Billy Sherman.

Calhoun was arguably the most important and original American political thinker of the nineteenth century.

His prognostications about the Union and the nature of democracy and the Constitution have been proven correct too many times to count.

Of course, SLAVERY!

When you can’t win the argument, use pejoratives.

Calhoun thought a dual presidency might be a good idea. He also favored checks on simple “numerical majorities” in order to protect minority rights.

That is why “conservatives” despise the man. They can’t see that American conservatives are, in fact, a numerical majority that needs protection. When all you care about are progressive talking points, you are going to lose the war. They think of “minorities” in 1960s terms.

We don’t live in 1960s America and the “silent majority” isn’t the majority any longer.

Calhoun, of course, did not favor this type of system at the State level, because the States were the check on unconstitutional federal power. His focus was always on the impact of one section plundering the other.

Either way, the fact that a real mainstream conservative penned an article in a mainstream conservative publication praising Calhoun is noteworthy.

Keep it going.

I discuss the article on Episode 804 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

During the 1980 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan continually hammered President Jimmy Carter for being too soft on communism and too weak in the Middle East.

He was on to something with the Reds, though you could make a case that Carter wasn’t really aware of how many commies were floating around D.C.

But the charge against Carter’s policies in the Middle East were based on several brewing problems in the region and amplified by the Iranian hostage crisis.

For nearly a year, Americans had been held by the Iranian government, and Carter seemed unable to bring them home.

That was supposed to be the “October Surprise.” Carter would secure the release of the hostages in time to win the 1980 election.

Except it never happened, and according to a new bombshell accusation, the Reagan campaign is the reason.

This was an open secret in D.C., but no one had any conclusive proof. Congress investigated. A major book charged the Reagan team with underhanded activities. But no one could find a smoking gun.

Lips were sealed and pinky promises were made. It probably helped that the C.I.A. was potentially involved. No one crosses them and lives to tell about it.

At least one Republican who really wanted to be in the administration made sure Reagan would not be undercut by Carter. Former Texas Governor John Connally took a little trip to the Middle East during the election to let it be known that Reagan would cut a better deal for the hostages than Carter.

It worked. Carter lost, Reagan immediately capitulated to the Iranian demands once he was sworn in and the hostages came home.

This was his first glorious victory as President, and Reagan took a victory lap.

Zero evidence exists that Reagan knew exactly what was happening, but he probably knew something, just not enough to destroy deniability. But these decisions weren’t make in a vacuum.

At the very least, his team knew what they were doing.

And Jimmy Carter paid the price. This does not mean Carter would have won had the hostages come home. He was defeated in a landslide, but the hostage crisis didn’t help his chances.

We like to think of politics as a principled game where people run on the issues and are upright members of society who want to do what is right for “the people.”

If they are in politics, think twice.

I discuss this new hostage crisis revelation on Episode 803 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

According to a recent poll, over 60 percent of Americans want a national divorce.

This is significant. This is probably the largest percentage of Americans who are contemplating the value of union since 1860.

I know there are some righteous cause mythologists on this email list who will immediately cry, “TREASON”, but not so fast.

Many members of the founding generation openly discussed secession. Most did not think it was a good idea–the ratification of the Constitution took place because they feared the effects of disunion–but virtually no one thought it was illegal.

Unwise, but not illegal.

And certainly not treason.

Staunch New England Federalists maintained a secessionist stance until 1815, include “Mr. Union” Daniel Webster.

So did New England abolitionists well into the late antebellum period, which makes you wonder why they were such staunch Unionists during the War.

Perhaps they just hated Southerners enough to kill them. Terrorist John Brown certainly did. The War offered a license to kill.

Either way, their reversal on the issue is telling.

Southerners threatened secession several times leading up to the War and finally pulled it off in 1860-61.

Even Thad Stevens recognized this. He may not have agreed with de jure secession, but he certainly agreed it happened de facto.

The evidence is clear secession was never illegal, no matter what the modern righteous cause dopes suggest.

If it was, no one in the Founding generation would have advanced the idea–and as early as 1794.

Even Washington’s Farewell Address, so often cited as an argument for Union, is in reality a recognition of, and an argument against, secession.

He knew it could happen, legally.

How this would work in 2023 is a bigger mystery. We might have too many “secession is treason” idiots running around to have a serious conversation about the issue, or maybe that is just social media where righteous cause mythologists like to let their stupid show.

If 60 percent of Americans are ready for the conversation, these righteous cause fools aren’t winning.

The States, even if they are divided among red areas and blue areas, are still the best vehicle to pull it off. They are the building blocks of the Union and have all the power.

And by the States, I reference the people of the States, who through popular conventions can pull a State out of the Union. If they can accede to a document, they can certainly secede from it.

That is a reserved power.

We know that most of the American States would be economic powerhouses compared to many other countries around the globe.

I am not sure that all of the issues are going to be easy to solve, but at least we are having the conversation.

That is a start. This couldn’t have happened thirty years ago, and that is why so many of these lunatics on social media are frothing mad. They are losing, and they know it.

I discuss a “National Divorce” on Episode 800 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

Many of us spend a lot of time looking to the founding generation for answers to contemporary political problems.

The left doesn’t care.

In fact, they don’t think the founding generation matters. Period.

You see, for years progressives have conditioned people to think of the founding generation as little more than a bunch of dead slave-owning white men who never believed in progressive ideals.

When it became clear that our side was making an impact by pointing out how the founding generation would have recoiled at the size and scope of our current government, they changed the game.

That’s right, they would say, and so what?

The United States was refounded in 1863 with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and then codified by the “Civil War Amendments.”

Many scholars are starting to emphasize this point, including “conservatives” like Randy Barnett.

In other words, they would argue that we have been right about the founding–to the sheer horror of the Straussians and neocons–but that everything changed in the 1860s, just as the Straussians and neocons have argued.

That is why I have been hammering the point that if you put your faith in some fantasy Lincolnian “conservatism,” you get progressivism.

This is why the Michael Anton’s of the world will always lead us to more progressivism.

You can’t conserve a radical revolution, and that is exactly what the 1860s did to America.

I discuss this point on Episode 796 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Confederate soldiers were proto-Nazis.

This is the worst charge progressives level against the South. You see, if those evil white supremacist Southerners (as opposed to the good white supremacist Northerners) had won the War, Northern Americans would have been plagued with Adolf Hitler Calhoun right on their doorstep.

It doesn’t help that you have some truly lost Southerners running around today claiming to admire Adolf Hitler.

I won’t even talk about the Yankees who do such things. I expect that. They’ve never had much sense.

But the Confederates=Nazis argument is baseless and driven by pure emotion.

The comparisons just don’t exist.

It doesn’t stop people from trotting it out there on a regular basis. They know it will score political points with the emotionally and intellectually immature segment of the American population.

In other words, progressives–and unfortunately, there are a lot of those dopes on the left and the right.

There are several easy rebuttals to this proposition:

1. Southerners didn’t commit genocide, ever.

2. Southerners weren’t driven by ideology.

3. Southerners weren’t anti-Semitic.

4. Southerners didn’t believe in massive centralization of power and international imperialism.

5. Southerners weren’t trying to conquer anyone.

Clyde Wilson wrote an excellent piece on this topic several years ago.

Paul Gottfried published one recently.

Both destroy the Confederates=Nazis thesis.

But don’t worry, someone else will make this claim in short order, and now you will have the intellectual ammo to fight back.

I discuss this stupid argument on Episode 793 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

An Obama appointed federal judge has declared a Missouri law in opposition to federal gun control to be unconstitutional.

Why? SUPREMACY!

This argument is the weakest in the national arsenal. Even Hamilton said unconstitutional federal legislation should not be enforced, and Hamilton never met a nationalist argument he didn’t like.

It never stops dopes from being dopes, even when they have law degrees and wear black robes.

Heck, Obama claims to be a “constitutional scholar”, and I have a hard time believing he fully understands real originalism.

Most don’t.

Then we have Texas. A Texas State legislator has proposed a bill requiring a vote on Texas secession.

The result was predictable. A Republican automaton masquerading as a “conservative Texan” took to Twitter to declare that anyone who supports this bill is committing treason and sedition against the United States.

When people pointed out that the Texas State Constitution explicitly contains language that would lend to secession arguments, he doubled down saying that the Texas Constitution also made it clear that Texas could never leave the Union because it mentions the supremacy of the United States Constitution.

Clearly this mentally challenged “lawyer” can’t get it that if the general government is abusing the United States Constitution, then Texas would be doing the proper thing by leaving. Nothing is supreme if it is unconstitutional.

He also doesn’t seem to understand reserved powers, but I don’t blame him for that. They don’t really teach that in law schools.

Both of these issues allowed me to explain how both the left and right fail Constitution 101 on a regular basis.

Get my thoughts on Episode 792 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

I know “Presidents Day” was last week, but an idiotic article at the New York Times had to get some time on The Brion McClanahan Show.

Alexis Coe–self proclaimed “leading presidential historian of her generation”–claims that George Washington would have hated Presidents Day.

This might be true, or it might not. Washington and the Federalists had a grand time marking his birthday while he was still alive, a tradition that began as early as the 1770s. This was similar to celebrations in Great Britain for the king. The Jeffersonians hated it and preferred to celebrate July 4.

But that wasn’t really the main point of her piece.

It was generally a confusing and disjointed attack on Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Trump Derangement Syndrome runs deep with these people.

I am honestly unsure what she intended to do with this garbage op-ed other than whine about January 6.

She opens the piece saying she doesn’t like “Presidents Day” or “George Washington’s Birthday” and wishes we wouldn’t celebrate it,  but then argues that we need to celebrate Washington’s Birthday because Americans have forgotten the importance of the executive branch.

I wonder if she uses genius level reasoning in her New York Times bestselling biography of Washington, You Never Forget Your First.

The fact that her book reached the top of the bestselling list illustrates how far that award has declined (and also that the woman is in a state of arrested development).

She also included this gem: “National indifference to Presidents’ Day should be, at this critical moment, embraced as a rare opportunity to return to a founding ideal we should all be able to get behind: democracy.”

Last time I checked, the founding generation were generally not too keen on the “ideal” of democracy. The Constitution was explicitly written to check too much democracy at the State level. They said it.

But who cares about real history? January 6!

I take apart Ms. Coe’s idiotic drivel on Episode 786 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

What did Lincoln propose to do with freed slaves?

The answer might surprise you. He famously told Alexander H. Stephens they could “root, hog, or die”, but Lincoln had another idea.

He wanted to ship them out of the country to anywhere that would take them.

When a trial run in Haiti failed about mid-way through the War, Lincoln supposedly backed off of his colonization dream, but as Sebastian Page and Phil Magness have shown, Lincoln pursued colonization until the day he was assassinated.

What does this mean? Lincoln never deviated from his long standing “white dream” as Lerone Bennett called it.

He always wanted colonization to be a voluntary process, as did every proponent of the plan, but he always hoped that freed slaves would take him up on the offer.

This nicely fit with Northern Republican visions–particularly in the Midwest–of a free white Western expanse. Free soil, free labor, free men had a white basis.

Lincoln could have opened this land to former slaves, but no Republicans would have supported this move. They also wouldn’t support compensating former slave owners, either. Lincoln tried that, too. Republicans didn’t want to prop up former slaves in a Northern back yard, and they certainly didn’t want to help Southerners who to them were subhumans.

Instead, Lincoln looked to foreign land to rid the United States of a potential race war.

This was not unlike his idol, Henry Clay, who actively promoted colonization while in Congress and worked with the American Colonization Society.

When voluntary colonization did not seem to be popular, Lincoln fell back on his quip to Stephens.

The Washington Post published a nice little essay on the topic which made for good Podcast fodder.

I discuss it on Episode 784 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

Last night the SOHO Forum in New York City hosted a debate with the prompt: Is Secession Workable and Would it Benefit Liberty?

One of the original panelists had to back out, and I was asked to replace him. I couldn’t do it, either, but I thought it would make for a great episode of The Brion McClanahan Show.

Without stealing my own thunder–I want you to listen–I argue that secession is both workable and would benefit liberty because each political community would reflect the cultural values of the people it represents.

As I have discussed before on my show, “liberty” is a loaded word that can mean several things to different people.

Massachusetts never had the same concept of liberty as Virginia as Thomas Jefferson famously told John Adams in 1813 (I cover this in my latest class at McClanahan Academy, Reading Thomas Jefferson. See below).

That does not mean that Massachusetts should not be able to have a political society that best suits the needs of its people.

It does mean that Massachusetts should not be able to dictate the terms of liberty to any other political community.

Hence, the primary benefit of secession.

I also think the process would be entirely workable based on the populations and economies of the American States. Many are larger than major States around the world, and even the smaller States would be able to go their own way.

I would think that you would see some type of confederacies form in each region, and you could always have a defensive pact among the several federal republics.

That wouldn’t be a bad idea, though there would have to be limits.

If we had just maintained the original Constitution, this wouldn’t be an issue, but that ship sailed as early as 1789 and definitely by 1865.

This was a fun episode to produce.

Last week, C-SPAN released the results of a survey which polled American historians on the question: “Who was the best president at crisis management?”

The results should not surprise you.

#1 was good ol’ Honest Abe.

American historians are a pitiful bunch. They are worse than sheep. Follow the leader would be their favorite game, and unless their “cutting edge” conclusions are focused on race/class/gender, they really don’t know much.

Sure, someone who writes a book on black homosexuals in the British Navy might be able to tell you a lot (or very little) about that topic, but get them outside of their “expertise” and it’s a crap shoot.

But these people teach survey courses, and because they teach survey courses they simply regurgitate the mainstream trends.

That includes what Lincoln worshipers have said about St. Abraham the Wise.

Abraham Lincoln did not manage a crisis very well. He moved the United States into the bloodiest war in American history.

That ain’t crisis management.

He could have avoided the entire thing if he just let Congress do its job in 1860 and 1861, but Lincoln was insisting that congressional Republicans should not compromise with the South.

He could have listened to his Cabinet and not provisioned Ft. Sumter and Pickens.

He could have allowed the South to peacefully secede. The United States would not have been “destroyed”, and who knows, the South might have returned to the Union at some point.

Unlikely, but still possible.

Yet, by placing Lincoln at the top of this list, American historians show why no one should trust them. Most just worship power while shilling for the “common man.”

As usual, this made for great Podcast fodder. I take down this idiotic poll on Episode 781 of The Brion McClanahan Show.