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.

We often hear that the United States is a “republic not a democracy.”

This has great rhetorical effect for “conservatives”, and when I published my first book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers, I often had to use the same language on radio interviews.

That is what “conservatives” understand.

I remember one leftist journalist asking me at a book signing, in an attempted gotcha moment, to describe the difference between a democracy and a republic, because after all, you vote for people in a republic and isn’t that democratic?

Bless his heart. Of course “democracy” exists in a “republican system” of government but he clearly confused the process of selecting people to serve in government with the system of government, i.e. not a monarchy or an oligarchy–though that is precisely what we have in a soft form today.

But that doesn’t really tell the whole story.

If the United States general government disappeared today, we would still have republican government in America.

In some cases it would even be more democratic.

That’s because the United States is a federal republic, or a republic of republics.

Every State already has a republican form of government mandated by its own constitution. That would not change in the event we had a State or a group of States secede from the Union or if the people of the States through a convention decided to abolish the entire central government.

Federalism, the glue that held the Union together until 1861, allowed for the States to handle most domestic concerns with the singular voice of the general government in foreign policy and trade.

That’s it.

This worked because the States had republican governments. The Constitution guaranteed that each State maintained a republican form, but no State wanted otherwise, not even if the righteous cause mythologists somehow think that governments in the South were “oligarchies.”

History does not support this claim. Thomas Jefferson, of course, insisted that New England, not the South, shaded closer to a monarchical system than any other region in America.

You don’t hear much about this anymore.

Republican governments is in the Anglo-American political DNA. That could change with the massive cultural shift taking place in the United States, but it would not entirely disappear.

Opponents of decentralization and federalism just don’t get it. They think the Sun rises and sets in Washington D.C.

We know otherwise, which is why you are thinking locally and acting locally.

I discuss republican government on Episode 780 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

Any honest person knows the answer to the subject line is no.

But that hasn’t stopped “conservatives” from insisting the opposite.

This is a curious phenomenon tied directly to the “proposition nation” myth of America history.

Lincoln proclaimed that he was fighting for government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” in order to maintain the proposition that all men are created equal.

Even Thad Stevens, the “Great Commoner”, argued that Lincoln didn’t free a single slave.

So why do conservatives continue to peddle in this lie? They think it deflects the charge of racism and frees them from being tainted by evil men like John C. Calhoun.

This is why Harry Jaffa argued that equality was in fact “conservative.”

Now, granted, these conservatives are not promoting the “idea of equality” that ministers from the Church of Woke ram down our throats, but they opened a Pandora’s box by even partly siding with these dopes.

Equality naturally leads to “equity” and all of the Marxist-Leninist misery that follows.

“Conserving” nineteenth-century leftist claptrap is not really conservative.

Disney released a kids show recently that had the nerve to argue that Lincoln did not free the slaves. This was the one thing this woke abomination stated correctly.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave. Yes, slaves would abandon the plantation as the Union army moved through an area, but they quickly found out that refugee camps weren’t really bastions of freedom. They were selection camps designed to pick the most able-bodied people to dig ditches and fortifications.

The rest were left to get sick and die.

Of course, many slaves stayed on the plantations even with Union soldiers in the area and refused to work. They didn’t want any money. They weren’t Yankees, and Yankee work patterns did not neatly fit with Southern paternalism.

These truths make self-righteous “conservatives” uncomfortable. It’s really hilarious if you think about it.

The proposition nation Girondins cannot understand why their ungrateful woke subjects are lining up the guillotines for them, too.

In the end, no apostate is safe.

I discuss Lincoln and emancipation on Episode 777 of The Brion McClanahan Show.