Last week, I received an email from someone who liked one of my books, but who could not figure out why I would suggest that the “Civil War” wasn’t about slavery.

He wrote that he used to be a “neo-Confederate” like me, but after reading “all” of the primary documents, he changed his mind and now thinks that the War was about protecting the expansion of slavery, at least for the South.

He then wanted me to provide my best evidence that the War was not about slavery.

This made me laugh for several reasons, not the least of which being that he told me he wasn’t going to pay $500 for a class that was going to be providing “cherry-picked” information to fit my agenda all while asking me to give him some of the class free of charge because he challenged my views.

Let me tell you about my “cherry-picked” new class at McClanahan Academy, Causes of the Civil War.

I am going to give you the scoop on the several schools of thought on what caused the conflict, including those I don’t find particularly convincing. I’ll start with the “Lost Cause,” but we will discuss the “Slave Power” thesis along with the various branches of each position.

The interpretation of what caused the War is built from these two competing positions.

That includes the “blundering generation” and “neo-abolitionist” schools of thought along with the “reconciliationist” group of historians who sought to find complexity in the sectional conflict.

But most people don’t realize that all of these groups discuss about slavery. The “why slavery” question becomes the important one to ask.

Without giving too much away, I thought this would make for a good episode of the Brion McClanahan Show.

I missed “Constitution Day” last week.

It was on purpose.

It’s not that I don’t like the Constitution. I wrote a book on it, though I think Southerners wrote a better one in 1861.

I also think the proponents of the Constitution duped wavering ratifiers into believing that it would maintain the original federal republic.

It didn’t.

I have also argued it needs amendments, and that the general government and the federal courts have reduced it to a series of “clauses” that have no anchor to original meaning.

I also don’t think we should create a “national holiday” to celebrate the document.

“Conservatives” spend a lot of time applauding the Constitution. “If we could only go back to the way the Constitution used to be interpreted,” they say, “things would be better.”

That would mean we would have to skip over everything from 1789 to the present.

The general government destroyed the original Constitution with the 1789 Judiciary Act.

Notice the date. That was the First Congress.

Calhoun noted that the real problem in America wasn’t the presidency, though it could be excessive. No, it was the Congress.

Congress punts its responsibilities to every other branch including the Deep State, lovingly called the “bureaucracy” by the establishment.

Or maybe just non-essential employees.

They, of course, would call them essential.

Do you remember the last time the government “shut down”? I don’t either, because we never miss it, unless you try to walk in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The government shut down the sidewalk.

That kind of stupidity is driving people to our side. As I said yesterday, Trump and Biden have done more to de-legitimize the presidency than anyone in history, and the fact that millions of Americans just told the government to take a hike during the “pandemic” showed that Americans will stand up to tyranny.

They just have to be pushed.

This is precisely why we don’t need a national holiday in honor of the Constitution. Why would anyone celebrate the largest government in the history of the world, or the document that allows it to happen?

And why would we want a bunch of lunatic progressives teaching the Constitution to their students?

I don’t. Keep the Constitution in Philadelphia behind glass. It’s nice to talk about the document, and we should all know original intent, but unless we are willing to have a real discussion about unconstitutional federal power and a return to federalism, it’s better to just keep the document out of the public eye.

We haven’t followed it correctly since it was ratified.

I discuss the bad idea of a “national holiday” for the Constitution on episode 711 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

When I was in graduate school, my roommate and I used to joke about how to de-legitimize the American presidency.

We couldn’t have drawn up a better blueprint than Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Consider:

1. Both the 2016 and 2020 elections have been called illegitimate.

2. Trump was impeached twice, and if Republicans take control of the House in 2023, Biden will likely follow.

3. Trump didn’t gild the White House, but he certainly transformed the image of the office. It was more WWE than George Washington.

4. Biden rarely knows where he is or what to do. He is an empty suit.

5. Both Trump and Biden were constantly undermined by those in either the Deep State or their own administrations, meaning neither really ran the show.

6. Both Trump and Biden have been forced to admit that there are domestic decisions out of their control, i.e. “lockdowns” and “vaccine mandates”, and that the States need to do this work.

7. Questions about “foreign interference” dog both administrations.

8. Biden’s “Dark Brandon” speech in Philadelphia has been mocked as “authoritarian”, and Biden was forced to backtrack the next day.

9. Trump’s hammering of “fake news” led to extreme skepticism on both sides of the political spectrum. No one believes the media, and fewer the government.

10. The January 6 show trials have undermined confidence in the executive branch, the Congress, and establishment Republicans. Glorious.

I could go on, but you get the picture. The political class only knows how to destroy people, and Trump will certainly take the fall for his four years in office. He dared challenge their authority. At the same time, anyone with eyes can see that Biden is being controlled by outside parties, thus proving that the “President” is rarely in control of the executive branch.

These are great developments. Now we need to capitalize on them.

If we all thought locally and acted locally, the presidency would not matter except in regard to foreign policy. This was the founders’ design.

As I wrote yesterday, very few members of the founding generation wanted an American king, and George Mason argued that an elected king was the worst of the worst.

If Americans can get over their love affair with executive government and start thinking about real federalism, we could turn this ship around.

I discuss de-legitimizing the presidency on episode 710 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

The pomp and circumstance following Queen Elizabeth II’s death provided a once in a lifetime spectacle.

Tradition trumped modernism.

Just about everyone enjoyed watching the show. Some leftists and grumpy woke idiots chimed in to offer their tired “white supremacy” opinions, and certainly the Irish were not impressed, but overall the ceremony was well received. Over five billion people watched it.

That, more than anything else, speaks to the power of the British Empire.

This led me to think about a growing monarchist movement among some American conservatives, or at the very least, a call for a centralized right wing American nation.

That would be the most un-American thing imaginable.

In fact, the founding generation worked hard to avoid a monarchy, with Washington outright rejecting calls for his elevation to an elected king.

You know why? Because as George Mason argued, an elected monarchy is the worst kind. Americans have never had a hereditary aristocracy and extreme centralization would more likely lead to a left-wing fascist government than a limited constitutional monarchy.

Of course, we do have political dynasties, but does anyone want the Clintons, Bushes, Obamas, or some other American “elite” family elevated to a hereditary position?

That should be a rhetorical question.

Or how about Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos? Or the Rockefellers? No thanks.

Rather than an favoring an “American nation,” conservatives need to embrace the federal republic the majority of the founding generation fought to establish and preserve. Don’t let the Straussians and neoconservatives fool you.

Nationalism has never been an American “conservative” position.

I discuss the issue of an American “monarchy” on episode 709 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

What is “American conservatism”?

I’ve spent a lot of time on my podcast discussing this issue.

I also co-authored a book on the topic with Clyde Wilson about a decade ago.

If you haven’t picked that up, you should.

This a large topic, and no one can sufficiently answer the question in a podcast or two, or perhaps even a book.

But I know one thing that American conservatism is not: nationalism.

That hasn’t stopped modern American “conservatives” for hopping on that train.

Trump bought a ticket and rode it to success in 2016.

Two of the most important recent books on American “conservatism” have also suggested that in order for American conservatism to find success, it needs to hitch a car to the nationalism train.

That may or may not be true, but one thing is for certain, this train isn’t “American” at all.

In fact, most American “conservatives” have long identified with decentralization, not nationalism.

For example, John C. Calhoun described himself as a “conservative,” and because he was a “conservative” he was a “State’s rights man.”

Translation: that means he wasn’t an American “nationalist.” He was a “Unionist” but never a “nationalist” because Calhoun understood that an American “nation” by a traditional definition never existed.

This is what led John Taylor of Caroline, a “conservative”, to say that “America for Americans” was like a “Utopia for Utopians.” In other words, it never existed.

The “one people” theory works well for modern American “conservative nationalists,” but as Jesse Merriam points out in this excellent essay at Law and Liberty, conservative “nationalism” inevitably arrives at the same point as progressive “nationalism.” The “United State” which these nationalists champion will lead to the same nanny State we have today.

“Conservatives” will never control the center in the United States. This is why American “conservatives” have long relied on federalism to protect their communities from Ralph Waldo Emerson and President Brandon alike.

If you want to be a “conservative” in America, you should support decentralization, not the American centralized State.

Merriam’s piece did make for great Podcast fodder, so I covered it on Episode 703 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

Yesterday I discussed the impact of emotion on American politics.

No one can discount the power of the heart, even when it comes to a judge’s decision.

Take for example most of the leftist decisions of the 20th century.

They aren’t based on the Constitution. And one dean at a major West Coast law school admits it.

You see, if we based legal decisions on the Constitution, i.e. originalism, then almost everything the left fought for over the last half century would be unconstitutional.

He’s right, which is why he thinks “originalism” is dangerous.

And radical. And lunacy.

These are emotive arguments. They have a particular purpose. Originalism is bad because it is racist. Or sexist. Take your pick.

It doesn’t matter that it is the correct way to interpret the Constitution. Even the founding generation said as much.

Nope. What matters is the correct emotional–and political–outcome.

I almost wanted to give him a tissue.

But it did make for great podcast fodder.

Check out Episode 702 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

I’ve written two books with “The Politically Incorrect Guide” in the title.

No one ever said I wouldn’t say something about delicate subjects.

Today’s topic is one of those.

Over the weekend, Lew Rockwell republished a piece by Jack Cashill from The American Thinker.

The topic? Educated Leftist Females are destroying America. He calls them ELFs. Funny.

This is not going to make any feminists happy. It shouldn’t because he took direct aim at their supposed moral superiority and intelligence.

But Cashill was really attacking emotivism, what Alasdair MacIntyre defined as, “the doctrine that all evaluative judgements and more specifically all moral judgements are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.”

To put this simply, educated leftist females tend to ignore the real issues confronting them–crime, inflation, etc.–and instead focus on “moral” issues like racism and the oppressive patriarchy because they often vote with their heart and not their head. That, and they’ve been easily duped into becoming raging leftist activists by their leftist college and university professors in the “soft” areas like psychology and gender studies programs.

Reality does not often match what they think and how they vote because the bogeyman is so much easier to vote against.

And educated leftist females are the most important demographic for the Democrats. They are solidly Democratic, which is why the Democrats continue to pander to this group with platitudes and slogans and references to structural racism and sexism.

How do you feel is more important that what do you think.

I would argue that it’s not just ELFs that fall into this trap. Most leftist males suffer from the same problem. They are Victims who blame everyone else for their shortcomings and demand “equity” due to some fake crisis.

I would not argue that Americans were not racist in the 18th and 19th centuries. Heck, even well into the 20th, but to suggest that millions of Americans are held back because of a social bias today is just lunacy.

Just look at the way Americans idolize dozens of American minorities, from athletes, to political figures, to entrepreneurs and entertainers.

If racism was “structural,” then this would not be possible.

But an emotional appeal keeps the leftist activists voting for the faux crisis and often against their own interests.

For example, women are more susceptible to sexual assault then men, but less likely to be a victim of violent crime. Regardless, two lines of defense open to them are 1)firearm possession and training and 2) greater police presence. The left continually advocates against both measures because of “racism”, an emotional rather than logical charge.

Other issues like transgender athletes in women’s sports are a clear danger to “equity” in competition, but because of emotivsm, leftist women tend to avoid speaking out against it.

Cashill notes that not all women fall into this trap. Married women with children tend to be much more conservative, and not all college educated women are leftists. He is pointing to a specific group of college educated women, leftists.

That is a bigger problem than sex.

This piece made for great podcast material so I discuss it on Episode 701 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

John C. Calhoun is often regarded as the American Hitler, so much so that both “conservatives” and progressives go out of their way to portray him as the supreme evil doer in American history.

If it just wasn’t for that Calhoun, America would have been perfect!

This belief is a component of both the “proposition nation myth” and the “righteous cause myth” of American history.

The first suggests that America was founded on the “idea” of equality and as such, Calhoun’s speeches and positions were heretical to that idea. See President Brandon’s recent speech against MAGA Republicans.

The second argues that the War of 1861-1865 saved America from the heretics and forged a new Union dedicated to the proposition nation.

Lincoln made that myth popular, though he said that he never went to war to free slaves or to make anyone equal, at least not in the way we use that term today. This was a war on Calhoun. The Radical Republicans both constantly invoked his name as a pejorative, and as the spirit of disunion and treason. He was the “father of the Confederacy.”

This was and is a ridiculous conclusion. As Jefferson Davis pointed out, Calhoun was never a disunionist. He dedicated his entire political career to the preservation of the Union. That was the point of nullification. Nullification was designed to keep the Union together, not break it up. Even South Carolina fire-eaters thought Calhoun was too soft on secession.

But the most recent biography on Calhoun by Robert Elder supports the assertion that Calhoun and the Confederacy are synonymous.

He also argues that you can draw a straight line from Calhoun to Dylan Roof.

Both positions are laughable.

Calhoun is a statesman for any age. His positions on government, diplomacy, war, and economy still have currency today.

Hence, a new book by the Calhoun scholar in the Untied States, Clyde Wilson, Calhoun: A Statesman for the 21st Century.

You need to get this book. Dr. Wilson spent most of his academic career editing the Calhoun Papers. If anyone knows Calhoun, it’s him.

I discuss Calhoun and Wilson’s new book on episode 700 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

The idiotic neoconservative Max Boot recently penned a piece claiming that real America is in fact blue America.

You know, drag queens and blue haired zoomers.

He may not be wrong. This leads to an important questions: has America ever really been “conservative”?

Louis Hartz argued that America could never claim a real conservative tradition.

That may be true on the macro level, as an monolithic “America” has never existed. But on the micro level, there have always been conservative communities in America.

American “conservationism” has at its core a reliance on real federalism to protect the interests of regional cultures.

We know by the 1830s, Calhoun recognized that the Southerners would never be the majority section, which is why he formulated the “concurrent majority.” This would, in his mind, protect the conservative minority of the United States from numerical majoritarian democracy.

The left has always relied on “democracy” because they know they can generally obtain the 50% plus one needed to win.

No one can dispute that the Democrats have a clear numerical majority in America, and judging from the positions of modern American “conservatives”, there is very little hope doubt that the Radical Republican agenda of the mid-nineteenth century (the leftists of their day) have achieved a complete victory over real American conservatism.

This is why R.L. Dabney lambasted American “conservatism” in 1897. It conserves nothing and continues to promote the discarded fads of the Left.

Max Boot fits right in.

Regardless, the Left has clear control of major cities in the United States and several States. It has won the popular vote in the last several presidential elections. Leftist calls to eliminate the Electoral College, the Senate, and now the Supreme Court are only being made because they now feel secure they can win indefinitely with numerical majoritarianism, at least at the “national” level.

Polling suggests that a majority of Americans now accept several leftist positions in the culture war. But not in every State.

The media ensures that “wokism” will continue to be shoved down everyone’s throat.

Which makes Calhoun and thinking locally and acting locally that much more important today.

You can still protect your community from these jerks. Let Boot and his new blue friends stay in Massachusetts or New York.

Many Americans have already bolted. This is for the best. A division, balkanization if you will, would produce a better and happier America.

Let Alabama and Texas be Alabama and Texas and keep the loons in New England and the left coast.

This is the way.

I discuss Boot’s essay on episode 698 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

In cast you missed it, President Brandon declared “MAGA Republicans” to be enemies of the State.

Then he didn’t.

The Democrats realized they stepped in it and quickly tried to pivot by arguing that “MAGA Republicans” were not evil, just MAGA policies.

Except everyone knows that the speech was exactly what Democrats think. In fact, it was written by the doofus presidential historian John Meacham, a man who has called Trump supporters “lizard brains.”

It’s also fitting that Meacham produced this Lincolnian mess, and that “noted historians” had a long conference with Brandon just days before he delivered this disaster.

These “noted historians” are all Lincoln sycophants who think that the correct response to dissident voices is violence.

This is why I always say the Lincoln myth is more dangerous than any other political movement in America.

Those who believe it and genuflect to Honest Abe work from the premise that their political opponents must be crushed and that anyone who opposes the current leftist talking point is a traitor to the Government.

They are nothing short of heretics to the secular religion of the American State.

Brandon’s opening lines are straight from the “proposition nation” template. He then follows up with some good old fashioned “slave power” conspiracy theories sprinkled with “white supremacist” civil rights movement pejoratives.

Any neoconservative could have written the speech. Same for the West Coast Straussians, who, despite being pro Trump, are also pro-Lincoln myth.

Lincoln may have said he had “malice toward none” but his actions were always with malice toward anyone who disagrees with his administration.

Thirty thousand Northern political prisoners were a testament to his kind treatment of political opponents, as were hundreds of thousands of dead Southerners.

I discuss how this speech is fitting for our current political climate on episode 697 of The Brion McClanahan Show.