When the 55 delegates to the Philadelphia Convention assembled at the Pennsylvania Statehouse in May 1787, only a handful knew that the gathering would potentially be a seismic shift in American politics. The majority of the delegates believed they attended to simply review the Articles of Confederation and present amendments.

Not so for the nationalists bent on “remaking” America. As John Dickinson warned once their plans were fulled laid before the Convention, “Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.”

Most of the men did not want to navigate without a compass. That compass was the Anglo-American political tradition, a tradition built by the blood of patriots from the Magna Charta to the Articles of Confederation. 

James Madison’s Virginia Plan smacked of innovation, a departure from the political traditions that “made America great.” The key to that tradition was federalism.

Massachusetts could be Massachusetts and South Carolina could be South Carolina. Forging an “American nation” on the ruins of a federal republic would have been a thorny and seemingly untenable project.

Very few members of the founding generation wanted a “national” government. They didn’t get one, of course.

The Senate–the most detestable part of the general government according to every nationalist–preserved the federal nature of the system and ensured the States controlled the system.

And the States were the primary agents in the process. This is made clear by Article V and Article VII of the Constitution. The States, without the input of the general government, can abolish the entire system.

No one thought the Constitution would go unchanged, and the powers of the general government vis-a-vis the States were always a bone of contention.

When seven States bolted the Untied States and drafted their own Constitution in 1861, they had history and experience on their side. The Confederate Constitution built on the Anglo-American tradition and made improvements to the original, most importantly by codifying the federal nature of the instrument.

American’s haven’t had a meaningful discussion about the Constitution since. Lincoln and the Republican Party bulldozed federalism following the War, and the progressives used the 14th Amendment to gut any vestige of State powers in the 20th century. That might be swinging in the other direction, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

This brings us to 2022 and the ongoing discussion about another “Constitutional Convention.”

In contrast to 1787, a convention called by the States would be an open review of the Constitution with clear plans to change it. No one would be meeting in dark rooms by candle light without public knowledge of the actual proceedings.

And they would have over 200 years of American experience to drive the event. In other words, they could undo the damage of the anti-Constitutionalists from the last 150.

Lincoln’s nationalist myth could be decapitated.

It could also go the other way. That would be more likely given the prevalence of the the “proposition nation” nonsense in American society.

Regardless, federalism would be back on the table as even the most indoctrinate proposition nation acolyte thinks federalism might be a good thing for their pet project.

Progressives like it, too, for theirs.

Maybe we could have a real meeting of divergent views and understand that “live and let live” could mean “Get Off My State” to quote one of my listeners.

Either way, this is a healthy and necessary thing for Americans to be doing in a federal republic. At the end of the day, it places the focus back on the States where it belongs.

To nationalists, that might be “scary” or “dangerous,” but to real Americans, it’s the American way.

I discuss the prospect on episode 678 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

When I was a young lad in graduate school, I wanted to to write my dissertation in Abraham Lincoln. This was post Tom DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln, and I wanted to focus exclusively on Lincoln’s abuse of power.

This had already been done, at least to an extent. One faculty member at South Carolina pulled me aside and told me not to do it, not because he didn’t think the material was there, but because he wanted me to do something fresh.

I was glad I listened.

I kicked around a couple of ideas and settled on James A. Bayard of Delaware. This was the home run, at least from an academic standpoint.

Nothing much had ever been written on the man. He had piles of primary documents, and he was an important, albeit forgotten, Lincoln opponent.

The same can be said for dozens of Lincoln’s opponents, dubbed the “Copperheads” by the opposition press. These people are the key to understanding the Lincoln administration, the Republican Party, the war effort, and Reconstruction.

Why?

Because they point out all the shady and illegal acts of the Grand Old Party. And there are many.

I fell in love with the topic and the broad subject.

You should, too.

If you are in graduate school or thinking of graduate school, you should pick out one of these people and give them a proper history.

I discuss the Copperheads on episode 677 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

American conservatives seemed to be confused about the real goal of American education.

It isn’t to foster creative thinking or problem solving skills.

It isn’t to introduce students to the classics or a wide range of topics.

It’s to “educate,” and by educate, I mean “indoctrinate.”

That means having the “correct” opinion on every important subject. Nothing is safe.

You see, every subject in most American education institutions is “history.”

You don’t take “science.” You take the “history of science,” and in most instances this is loaded with references to a political agenda, like anthropocentric climate change or “pandemic” science.”

You don’t take mathematics. You take the “history of mathematics,” and that involves introducing students to obscure and virtually unimportant mathematicians who fit the woke agenda.

We all know history and civics are loaded courses, and that is where most conservatives focus their attention.

This is by design. The system is created to ensure that the next generation of Americans have little or no curiosity and are compliant little sheep who lack independence and the knowledge necessary to cause trouble for the ruling class.

It’s also been this way for a long time. Some men in the founding generation wanted to ensure that Americans received the “correct” opinions about government and society. That was the only way to continue the “revolution.”

Sure, some people can see through the stupidity, but most of these people also hold the “correct” views on just about everything. That is how they “network.”

You are the resistance, which is why you are reading this email.

But the next time someone complains that teachers are not properly educating their students, remember that they are doing exactly what American education is supposed to do. They are doing it correctly.

You just know it is wrong.

I discuss American education on episode 669 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have the progressive left apoplectic.

They almost can’t understand how their monster, the federal court system, has gone rabid and turned against them.

I say almost because they believe they know the culprit.

You.

You vote for conservatives who in turn have had the chance to nominate dozens of justices to the federal courts.

That has turned their baby against them. The child that gave them victory after victory in the twentieth century is now a heretic, warped by the enemy, the deplorable American population that exists outside of the urban progressive enclaves.

If only the Court had gone to public school instead of some fancy progressive Utopia like Harvard.

Oh wait.

Even that firewall failed them.

So they have to come up with a new way to rig the system in their favor.

The States won’t work. As this piece points out, if the Court had not made “gay marriage” legal, it still would be invalid in over 30 States. The same holds for abortion and a host of other “woke” issues.

Clearly the Congress is dead. They can’t get a scrap of progressive legislation to Biden’s desk. This is why Obama had a pen and a phone.

Biden just can find either one.

Progressives have been saying “Help me Obi Won SCOTUS. You’re our only hope.” for so long that when it fails, they don’t know what to do.

Except talk about what progressives do best: wreck the system.

Ezra Klein offers several bad ideas at the New York Times.

Court packing can’t work, Klein thinks, because once the Republicans take control of the government, they’ll just keep expanding the court. The Democrats will follow suit, and we’ll eventually have a 100 member Supreme Court.

But he can’t see the real problem because he is blinded by ideology. The real problem is not the federal court system. It’s nationalism.

The very thing he argues cannot save the system–the States–is the very thing the founding generation KNEW could save the system. But these progressive nincompoops began wrecking it in the 1860s.

Regardless, Klein’s piece makes good podcast fodder, so I discuss it on episode 665 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

On Jul 4, 1976, President Gerald Ford addressed a large crowd at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

His advisors worried that his previous speeches on the meaning of the founding were getting lost in the media shuffle, and they wanted him to make a definitive statement about the bicentennial.

This was his chance. Everyone would be watching and the media had to cover this speech. One advisor wanted him to hit a policy home run by announcing something substantive at the event.

Ford delivered a confusing speech long on platitudes and short on history.

No one remembers it today because very few people remembered it just a few days after it was over.

It was vanilla and typical neoconservative nonsense based on the “proposition nation myth” of American history.

Ford’s flop exemplified his entire administration but more importantly the infiltration of the neoconservatives into American policy.

You see, one of his advisors was none other than Dick Cheney. His policy wonks were a “Who’s Who” of Lincolnian nationalists bent on centralization of power in Washington D.C.

Ford’s speech, however, is why most Americans find the Declaration to be so confusing.

One the one hand, he mentions the importance of American independence, i.e. secession. On the other, he plays up the proposition nation myth.

He references Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Adams, and FDR in a nationalist romp through American history.

You would think that the Declaration was designed to create big government in America.

Or at the very least you might be inclined to support some leftist reform movement.

I wanted to highlight this speech because every politician will make a similar speech today, and in four years, when we have the 250th celebration of independence, every politician will make a terrible speech that will be forgotten in a few days.

Independence Day has no meaning because American’s don’t value independence.

I discuss Ford and the holiday on episode 661 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

I predicted in 2015 that the woke mob would not stop at Confederate monuments.

Neocons didn’t listen and instead hid behind their self-righteousness and moral preening. You see, they loved Abraham Lincoln, so they were on the right side of history. Confederates were Democrats (or Nazis) who deserved to be purged.

And what American doesn’t love the “Great Emancipator”?

They forgot that Lincoln had some nasty things to say about black people, and that he said these nasty things almost until the day he died in 1865.

Lincoln wasn’t a 21st century moralist. He was a 19th century man with 19th century views on race.

The social justice warriors would eventually come for Honest Abe.

I was right. Just this week, someone complained about a bust of St. Abraham at Cornell University. The school quickly capitulated and took it down.

The righteous cause warriors threw a fit. Social media was aflame yesterday as these guardians of American history expressed their outrage at the commies who dared remove the American demi-god.

But if you accept the take ’em down Confederate narrative, then Lincoln must go, too.

He said whites and blacks were not equal, cracked jokes about not wanting to marry a “negro wench,” insisted that he never favored political or social equality of the races, and proposed to leave slavery intact until the 20th century if the South would just come back in the Union. He also said that if whites didn’t like blacks, they could just ship the blacks out of the country.

The left knows it, and this is why they want to cancel Lincoln.

One part of me loves it. It’s always fun to dig at the neocons and watch them throw fits.

The other knows that from the beginning, we should have been saying “No, shut up.”

Confederate monuments should still be prominently displayed. So should Abraham Lincoln. So should members of the founding generation. The left wants to start at year zero, around 1975, or maybe at Obama’s inauguration in 2009. Even then, some still need to be purged. That would be us.

You see, when dopes like this writer at The Root think that the Constitution is worthless because it was written by slaveowners, that John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Tom Paine were present during its drafting in 1787, and that the 12th Amendment created the Electoral College, we know what we are up against. It would be laughable if we didn’t hear Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez try to wax poetic about history. Don’t you know that the Confederacy controlled the Supreme Court, leading them to issue the Dred Scott decision while Lincoln was president and that forced him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation?

Birds of a feather. And these are the morons trying to tear down history.

I discuss these idiots on episode 660 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

A few weeks ago I talked about Harvard’s $100 million project to atone for their complicity in the institution of slavery.

That isn’t good enough, at least according to one lawsuit.

The original suit was filed in 2019, long before Harvard pledged the mea culpa dough, but a Massachusetts court recently held that Harvard could be sued for “emotional distress” over a couple of 1850s images it holds among is rare collections archive.

You see, these two images depict two South Carolina slaves and the descendant of these slaves claims that they make her feel terrible every time she sees them.

How often does this happen? Only when Harvard charges people to use the images or when it holds a conference featuring the images.

They are rarely in public, but when they are, this descendant of slavery wants a cut of the profits.

In fact, she claimed to be the proper owner of the images because they are her ancestors.

This would be laughable if the court didn’t side with her. Call it the snowflake ruling.

The court did rule that the Harvard rightfully owned the images, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the potential multi-million dollar shakedown getting ready to take place.

You can probably imagine where this will go in the future. As her lawyer suggested, this was only the beginning and a great start for “justice.”

It also raises several questions. Are there not other descendants of these slaves? Do they get a cut? Can every descendant of slavery sue Harvard because no matter if you are related to these two South Carolina slaves, the images are shocking. Doesn’t it make everyone feel terrible?

What about other slave images? Can the descendants of slaves sue Google to have them removed from image searches? How about the Library of Congress or the National Archives? Are images in their possession now fair game for lawsuits because they could cause emotional harm?

How about other types of images? What about the famous Dorthea Lange images from the Great Depression? Or the Jacob Riis photographs from the late 19th century?

They certainly show people in distress, and their descendants may not be happy about their ancestors being paraded about as symbols of poverty in America.

No one cares about them because there’s no money in it, but $100 million at Harvard will certainly get people interested.

This is a potential path to a reparations shakedown. It is only the beginning.

I discuss the suit on episode 659 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

Damon Root at Reason.com thinks the recent Dobbs decision is an “insult to the 9th Amendment.”

His position is based on two faulty premises:

1. That “originalism” is based on what the opponents of the Constitution worried the document would do rather than what the proponents swore it would not do, i.e. consolidate all power in the hands of the central government.

2. Incorporation

The first is the result of Joseph Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution. Progressive SCOTUS justices created the second problem in the twentieth century.

Incorporation makes Story’s nationalist dream much more likely if not probable.

Root claims that because opponents of the document said a Bill of Rights was necessary to secure all unenumerated rights, that means that the general government under the Constitution had the authority to infringe upon those unenumerated rights.

Except the proponents of the document swore a Bill of Rights was unnecessary because the Constitution could do no more than what was enumerated–granted–in the document.

That is originalism.

That gets us to the issue of a federal negative of State laws, the real issue at hand, as the Dobbs decision did not have anything to do with a federal law. You would need to believe that incorporation of the Bill of Rights in order to take a 9th Amendment approach to abortion, and as the preamble to the Bill of Rights states, the list was intended to prevent “misconstruction,”  meaning centralization of power in the general government.

John Rutledge said a federal veto of State laws should “damn” the Constitution, and a proposal to do just that went down in flames at Philadelphia in 1787.

The 14th Amendment was never intended to incorporate the Bill of Rights into the State constitutions. The record is clear, regardless of what the Supreme Court has said. Every State already had a bill of rights. They still do, making incorporation redundant.

And we know SCOTUS can change their mind.

Root’s piece was great podcast fodder, and I discuss these issues in better detail on episode 568 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

Welcome to the new establishment Republican talking point: Joe Biden is Jimmy Carter 2.0.

When I tell people I wrote a book about bad presidents, the first question I usually get is something like this: “Is Jimmy Carter at the top of your list?”

No. He doesn’t even make the top fifteen worst presidents.

Carter was a symptom of the disease in office, but as a man was one of the finest people to ever live in the White House.

He is an authentic Southern gentlemen who will be the last farmer to ever hold the office.

That says a lot.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, is a charlatan, a demagogue, and a power hungry politician who was willing to cheat his way to the Oval Office.

And I’m not talking about 2020. Just look at his 1987 campaign where even the Democrats dumped him because he was a literal plagiarist.

Biden would not be anyone significant without his “service” in Washington D.C.

Carter would still have been an important man without politics.

This piece does a nice job explaining how Carter was the better president–and unquestionably is the better man, even today.

It also gave me some great podcast fodder, so I take on Biden vs. Carter on episode 653 of The Brion McClanahan Show.