The recent leak of the potential reversal of Roe v. Wade has the left going nuts and predicting the apocalypse.

It’s pure stupidity.

On the other hand, as Michael Boldin at the Tenth Amendment Center likes to point out, it’s usually “constitutional conservatives” that have the hardest time coming to grips with real federalism.

They want nationalism as much as the next Yankee.

But I have hope. For years, my podcast theme has been “think locally, act locally.” It seems that a lot more people are thinking this way, not because they listen to my show, but because it makes sense.

You know what? If we just listened to the Old Republicans–along with John C. Calhoun–we probably could have avoided much of the political mess of the last 200 years.

And if you yell “SLAVERY,” then you really don’t understand Calhoun or any of the Old Republicans. Did most of them own slaves? Yes, but did that drive their worldview? No.

Calhoun spilled more ink talking about the structure of government than he did slavery. A lot more.

He was concerned with a real union and made some of the strongest arguments in American history in favor of the original federal republic.

His Disquisition and Discourse are political science masterpieces. By the way, my next class at McClanahan Academy, out later this month, covers Calhoun at his best. You won’t want to miss it.

But in saying all of this, I wouldn’t spike the football yet.

It’s not set in stone that the SCOTUS will come to its senses on any issue. And real federalism is still on life support, though it appears that someone has used an AED, at least for now.

But consider that Ron DeSantis has made federalism a priority, the SCOTUS seems to be taking it seriously, and in many ways COVID rekindled interest in federalism across the United States.

That’s good. But there is always room for more. And who knows, if SCTOUS does go through with its decision in June, we may be seeing a lot more talk about leftist secession.

Good riddance.

I talk about these issues on Episode 627 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

I’m constantly amazed at how many Americans are perplexed by the South.

It is the curious specimen that must be viewed under microscope. The curiosity that just doesn’t mesh with American norms.

John C. Calhoun, according to a recent biography, is an “American heretic,” as if the entire South was heretical.

Hillary Clinton certainly let the cat out of the bag when she called Trump supporters–and Trump found his greatest support in the South–a basket of deplorables.

This has led to countless “Southern studies” programs across the United States. Every university has one. It’s mandatory.

They invite some carpetbag scholar from some Northern institution to the South so that these enlightened academics can tell the rest of the world why the South is so strange.

It never occurs to any of these people that they are the oddballs.

Consider that the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, written by New Yorker Washington Irving, was intended to poke fun at New Englanders.

They were always considered to be an odd bunch. This is why for much of early American history everyone hated them. They, of course, could never figure this out. They always considered themselves to be the enlightened representatives of a shining City Upon a Hill, the true Americans.

Southerners were just ostentatious aristocrats who mucked up the system.

Except neither characterization is true.

Which is why a recent piece at The American Thinker contains so many errors. I am not sure why the author found it necessary to write under a pseudonym. He doesn’t say much of anything that mainstream academics don’t spout on a daily basis to their mostly brain dead students.

He does lament the human cost of the War, but he finds it curious that attachments to the South still exist. After all, the War nearly produced a cultural genocide. Nearly is not strong enough. It did.

But a people with such a heroic and substantial past will always find it useful to transmit to the next generation, even if only a few can do it.

The Yankee class understands this. Their shift to “memory studies”, i.e. an effort to “scholarly” show that the South lied and didn’t remember anything properly like a good Yankee, shows that they are worried a real understanding of American history still exists.

Either way, such dopes make for good podcast fodder, so I discuss this “Thinker” piece on episode 622 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is currently on trail for being an “insurrectionist.”

A federal judge allowed Greene to stand trial in State court in an effort to have her removed from the November ballot for violating the 14th Amendment.

There are several legal problems with this line of thinking, as legal scholar Jonathan Turley recently pointed out in a piece on his website.

Greene is a lightning rod for the left. She was banned from Twitter (recently reinstated after Elon Musk purchased the website), and while she is not the sharpest knife in the drawer–she is the right wing version of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez–her voting record is relatively stellar.

That’s why the Left wants her removed from office.

But their tactics are illegal and frankly stupid.

Greene is not an “insurrectionist” and her social media posts cannot be considered “insurrectionist.”

Challenging the legitimacy of the election is not “insurrectionist.” It has been the American way for centuries.

The real issue, however, is the 14th Amendment. The Amendment clearly defines “insurrection” and requires Congress, not a State election board, to label a sitting member of Congress as an “insurrectionist.”

The Supreme Court has made this clear, for whatever that is worth.

Congress could end this charade by simply charging anyone who opposed Biden’s election and posted on social media that the electoral count should be challenged as an insurrectionist.

But they won’t do that because they know it would not stick and would be a political disaster. The best move, they think, is to make the accusations and let others hash this out either in court or in the court of public opinion.

Image is more important than substance.

Which is why this is another ridiculous episode in our American political theater.

It does make good podcast fodder, so I cover the event on Episode 621 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

If Kevin Levin wasn’t bad enough yesterday, Lindsay Chervinsky upped the ante.

Chervinsky is a well regarded popular historian. She wrote a little book on Washington’s cabinet that generated some buzz and has a fairly prominent public speaking routine. She is good on media and has a nice personality.

But she’s not a great historian.

Case in point, a recent post at her substack account on secession.

Chervinsky calls the idea “insane” while just finding out that Northerners wanted to secede in the 1790s.

I’ll get to that tomorrow, but the real problem is her improper use of primary documents.

She has been called out for it before on Twitter, and this recent piece on secession is another illustration of her habit to truncate quotations to make a point that the can’t be made from the primary document.

You see, Chervinsky somehow thinks that Northerners were perhaps willing to go to war over slavery in the 1790s, or at the very minimum they would have considered secession because of it.

But that’s not exactly what the document states, and if you read the entire piece (which to her credit she provides a link), you wouldn’t gather that same interpretation.

These people are typically the first to stand up and say, “You neo-Confederates don’t read primary documents! Look at the secession declarations! Just read them!”

That’s their “gotcha” position because they believe most of us have never read them before or don’t know what’s in them.

Just as with those documents, these historians often pick and choose what they consider important.

If it doesn’t support their ideological position, truncate, cut, and provide “interpretation.”

Another word for that is “contextualization.”

Regardless, such tripe is great for podcasts, so I discuss her piece on episode 619 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

I almost feel sorry for these people. Almost.

I’m speaking of the righteous cause mythologists, people like Kevin Levin who think they are “bringing their A game” when attacking “Neo-Confederate Lost Causers.”

What would constitute Levin’s “A game”? Pointing out that there were pockets of Union sentiment in the South during the War.

No way! You got us, Levin. No one knows this!

Of course, what Levin leaves out is that there were more anti-Lincoln and anti-war people in the North than Unionists in the Confederacy.

When 75% of the white male population of the South is in the army, and the population is enduring deprivations unseen since the American War for Independence–and they keep fighting–that is dedication.

You can’t say the same for the North. At least 45% of the Northern voting population opposed Lincoln and the Republicans in 1864. Democrats picked up 27 seats in the House in 1862 (they did lose many of these seats in 1864), but there are some serious questions about voter fraud in the ’64 election, and not in favor of the Democrats.

We know the Republicans intimidated voters in border States like Delaware.

This doesn’t take into account the large numbers of Union soldiers who signed up for a paycheck.

Take this patriotic Union soldier in 1862, for example, trying to persuade his buddy to join the “cause”:

“If you woud a went with me, I think you woud see more then you wood by staing at home, and wood have plenty to eat and to wear, and plenty of foun in the camp, and git 13 dolers a month, and won’t haf to dow enny thing.”

Food, clothes, fun, and cash with no work! Sounds like welfare.

Unfortunately, the poor sap took his friend up on the deal. He died in Mississippi from dysentery.

Don’t forget rich Northerners who bought immigrant substitutes for $300. And we know the real reason black soldiers were sent to the front lines in the War. White Northerners were tired of getting blown apart. Blacks were expendable cannon fodder.

$13 bucks a month doesn’t sound so good when the payoff could be an evisceration by a cannon ball.

Levin’s blabbering about the futility of secession is sophomoric at best and just plain stupid at worst.

But of course he makes great podcast material.

I discuss Levin and his recent article on secession on Episode 618 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

In 1999, no one would have believed that in less than 25 years, secession would be a topic of discussion in the United States, so much so that major pollsters are starting to ask questions about it.

A lot has happened since the late 90s, particularly the growth in the size and scope of the general government.

But many Americans are finally getting it. They understand something is out of whack, they just don’t know how to respond.

Our dabble with authoritarian lockdowns, massive inflation, a potential World War III, the woke summer of love, immigration, and don’t say gay, among other issues, have prompted a number of Americans to rethink the value of Union.

And not just on the right. To some on the left, the tepid response to these issues by their people in power has them thinking that perhaps it would be better to have a leftist Utopia out of the Union.

That’s fine with me. If every blue State skedaddled, real America could get back to normal.

The Front Porch Republic, not known for anything too controversial, even produced an entire journal dedicated to the topic recently.

The lead essay was written by Bob Elder, author of a book on John C. Calhoun. I have been hard on this book, and rightfully so, and Elder would never be confused for a “conservative,” but his essay was a thoughtful evaluation of the history of secession and current American political culture.

He doesn’t think it’s a wise move, and he might be right in our current political and educational environment, but at least he is discussing it.

About a dozen other scholars added to the discussion with pieces of their own, and the result was an interesting and diverse look at the topic from several viewpoints.

I have always been fine with secession. It should always be on the table, even if it is not the right move at the time, and more importantly should never be considered illegal.

It never was and still isn’t.

The establishment twerps who grumble that Lee was a traitor by quoting Lincoln never have a clue.

That’s why I go back to the topic on a regular basis and why the theme of my show is “think locally, act locally.”

I discuss secession on episode 615 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

About a week ago, Michael Boldin at The Tenth Amendment Center asked me to explain why George Washington was a nationalist.

Good question. After all, Washington hailed from Virginia, and to many men from the Old Dominion, Virginia was a fine enough country without another central government telling it what to do.

But Washington wasn’t alone. John Marshall was a nationalist, so was Robert E. Lee’s father, “Light Horse” Harry Lee.

James Madison really wanted a national government when he arrived in Philadelphia in 1787, and even Patrick Henry dabbled with nationalism after the Constitution was ratified.

Why?

Simple answer, they feared a potential “French Revolution’ in America and saw the Jeffersonians as little more than American Jacobins bent on lopping off some heads.

Washington had other concerns. He understood the diversity of the United States and worried that without some type of national authority, it would go flying into separate pieces to be picked off by foreign powers.

That is the same argument Edmund Randolph made in the Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788, the same Edmund Randolph who refused to sign the Constitution in Philadelphia in September 1787.

To Randolph and Washington, the prospect of disunion led them to support a stronger central government–even a national one.

Of course, Randolph eventually opposed Hamilton’s push to invade Pennsylvania during the “Whiskey Rebellion,” and even Washington worried about the perception of unconstitutional federal power. But that ever present fear of an American Robespierre forced some of Virginia’s finest men (that doesn’t include John Marshall) to support a national government.

Marshall was just a slob who wanted to expand his own power.

The evidence is clearly in Washington’s Farewell Address. He worries about factions and sectionalism, i.e. real threats to Union, and encourages his fellow citizens to remember the common cause of liberty.

To Virginian’s like John Taylor of Caroline, this was all just bunk. You couldn’t have unity if that unity was directed by sectional partisans like Oliver Ellsworth or Fisher Ames.

Or John Marshall. Or Joseph Story.

The New Englanders thought that unity may not be in the best interest of their section. To these men, “nationalism” should be “Yankeeism.”

New England ascendancy was at the core of Daniel Webster’s “nationalism” in the 1830s.

Washington was the only man who kept these factions quiet. Once he was gone, the sections started chewing at the fabric of American nationalism.

Marshall and Story hoped the Supreme Court would quell future sectional violence, but they did more to promote it than they realized. By taking State action against unconstitutional laws off the table, they created the environment which eventually led to war.

Either way, the topic made for a great podcast, so I thank Michael for throwing me the suggestion.

I discuss Washington’s nationalism on Episode 614 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

Were “black Confederates” a myth?

If you listen to Kevin Levin, then yes. In fact, he wrote an entire polemic, published by the University of North Carolina Press, on the topic.

Problem is, he didn’t really write on the topic.

Most of the book is a screed against “neo-Confederates” and in particular the UDC, SCV, and UCV and anyone who dares utter a sentence that might be construed as “Lost Cause” mythology.

This New Englander decided to write the book because he was concerned that too many Americans believed that black people actually served the Confederacy in some capacity and that organizations like the SCV wrote that there were, in fact, black Confederate soldiers! Gasp!

This irritated his righteous cause Yankee mentality, and it had to be disproved.

Levin centers his argument on semantics. You see, until 1865, the Confederate government did not recognize blacks as soldiers, even if they did things soldiers do. In fact, they vehemently rejected the notion that blacks were serving in the army.

That is Levin’s proof. That’s it.

Even when he found that blacks wore the uniform or did things that soldiers do, they didn’t willingly do this because they were slaves. Slaves can’t do things willingly so they weren’t soldiers.

I wonder about conscripts in the Union army?

If slaves or free blacks seemed to do something in favor of the Confederacy or white Southerners in general, he chalks it up to coercion or some self-interested motivation.

For a book that purports to be searching for black Confederates, Levin didn’t do a whole lot of searching. The first three chapters are based almost exclusively on secondary sources. Those are the chapters that document the “myth” of black Confederates. It’s hard to take someone seriously who didn’t do any serious research.

One chapter in particular had me laughing out loud. Levin cites his own articles as evidence in nearly half the notes. And by articles I mean blog posts.

But it’s peer reviewed, something Levin proudly states any time you attack this worthless piece of garbage.

So what? Most of his “peers” are also worthless establishment hacks who agree with him based on ideology and not evidence.

I have one question in particular for Levin: why does he want to deny black people their history? If in fact many blacks served the Confederacy in some fashion, even as slaves, why does he want to tell them their story doesn’t matter? That seems very racist.

Simple answer, because that is what Yankee imperialists do.

But since Levin keeps insisting I haven’t read his book, I decided to review it on episode 613 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

Sometimes you win, and sometimes you have to take a victory lap for even small things.

Like Bill Maher admitting that local government is more important than the “national” stupidity in D.C.

Maher is a staple for the left, though he has fallen out of favor with the more idiotic progressives because he has hammered woke cancel culture and the loss of free speech.

He has been trying to get solar panels installed at his property for years but has been blocked by the dopes in California.

This has led to a type of epiphany. He recently said that he now understands that local government should be the focus.

If more Americans thought this way, no one would care who sits on the throne at 1600 PA AVE.

Now, I don’t expect Maher to become a local or State government warrior, but it’s nice to see someone finally getting it.

That doesn’t include most of you, my loyal listeners and readers.

Take for example an email I received the other day from a listener in Texas.

Small victories. This Brion McClanahan Show fan ran for a local position in the Republican Party and not only won, but was able to have an impressive Calhounian rule change added for consideration.

Nothing may come of it, but when you are working hard for local victories, dreams can come true.

This would never happen in Washington D.C.

Perhaps in Texas.

This is the kind of stuff I like to hear. Send me those show requests and your small victories. I like to talk about them on the show every now and then.

And particularly when I can couple it with a Bill Maher news story.

I discuss Maher and Texas on episode 611 of The Brion McClanahan Show.