Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Is Jeff Davis the Model?
Who is the real, or fictional, inspiration for the new insurrectionary wing of the Democrat Party?
The fictitious Hollywood insurrectionist, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “James Mattoon Scott” (Burt Lancaster), who in the 1964 film Seven Days in May attempted to overthrow the presidency?
Or perhaps Jefferson Davis? He ultimately ordered the attack by South Carolina state forces against the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, which ignited the Civil War.
Or is the better inspiration the “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door?” Alabama Governor George Wallace likewise vowed to use his state’s law enforcement to nullify a federal law.
Yet how odd that the left, which had lectured us so often about a January 6th “insurrection”—a charge that not even the Javert-like special counsel Jack Smith ever lodged against Donald Trump—now talks frequently about the proud nullification of our nation’s federal laws.
The New Confederacy
Democrats weirdly boast of the subordination of the Constitution to international statutes. Our governors and mayors in blue states and cities take neo-Confederate vows to oppose the national government’s right to protect its own property, to direct its own employees, and to enforce our shared federal laws.
Over a decade ago, some 600 “sanctuary cities” declared that they were immune from the full enforcement of federal law. They further boasted that they would not hand over illegal aliens, detained by state or local authorities, to federal agents.
These were strange threats. Not long ago, at the 1992 and 1996 Democratic conventions, liberal grandees like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi had vowed to stop all would-be illegal aliens from unlawfully entering the U.S. Apparently, they all flipped to open borders when spiraling numbers turned the undocumented into a new Democratic constituency.
Moreover, being the left, their loud nullificationist vows were, of course, purely political and never principled.
Once, an exasperated Arizona governor, Jan Brewer, had beseeched the Obama administration in vain to enforce its own federal laws at the southern border. In frustration, she finally sought ways to use her own state’s resources to do what Obama refused.
And the reaction of the Obama administration?
It was certainly not gratitude for Brewer’s efforts to enforce federal law. Instead, the Obama crowd sued her. It successfully sought out left-wing judges to stay her state’s efforts.
How strange that our current “principled” district judges once ruled that states could not interfere with federal border policing—even in cases where the federal government was illegally refusing to enforce its own laws.
But now they’ve become neo-Confederates who routinely favor states blocking the federal government when it is finally fulfilling its constitutional duties.
Of course, if any rural red county decided that it could nullify the federal government’s laws governing handgun registration or EPA regulations, the projectionist left would deem them insurrectionary new Confederates and send in the FBI.
Coup Bluster
In Trump’s first term, some retired four-star admirals and generals—Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice be damned—talked of a sitting U.S. President Trump leaving office, the “sooner the better”—whatever that meant. Others libeled him as a “liar” and “Mussolini,” his policies comparable to those of the executioners at Auschwitz.
Some retired lieutenant colonels in 2020 even publicly advocated using military units to confront presidential security details. Did they want an armed showdown to forcibly remove Trump from the Oval Office? And in their madness, they bragged about the purported greater lethality of their army friends to defeat the president’s supporters or security details: “Trump’s little green men, so intimidating to lightly armed federal law enforcement agents, step aside and fade away, realizing they would not constitute a good morning’s work for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne.”
Do we remember the Obama-era Pentagon lawyer who, eleven days into the first Trump administration, speculated in print about how to remove an elected President Trump? She offered up the choices of Trump removal by either the 25th Amendment, the impeachment process, or a military coup: “[A] possibility [for removing President Trump] is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup…”
We also remember Gen. Mark Milley, the recent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
He once apparently diagnosed Commander-in-Chief Trump as unhinged.
So Milley took it upon himself to warn his communist Chinese counterpart that during any existential crisis, the People’s Liberation Army head would be first contacted by Milley—if Milley ever felt Trump was too erratic to be obeyed (in Milley’s nonprofessional medical judgment).
So Milley reported his call as follows: “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”
Milley apparently also decided that he was exempt from obeying federal laws.
As JCS chair, he also violated laws governing the chain of command. He unlawfully directed regional commanders to report to him first, should they receive a direct presidential order deemed lunatic by Milley. Yet the legal chain of command mandated that subordinate theater commanders report to, and receive presidential orders via, the Secretary of Defense.
Later, ex-generals like Milley and John Kelly routinely and emphatically blasted ex-President Trump as a “fascist.”
“Fascist” was just the sort of dangerous hyperbole that the left so often has warned us can prompt the unstable—like a Thomas Crooks or Ryan Routh—to emerge from their creepy shadows to “save the republic.”
Fort Sumter?
Democratic officials are also currently calling for organized and state-sanctioned opposition to the federal government, in near-Bleeding Kansas or Fort Sumter insurrectionary fashion.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson claims he will use his city resources to actively thwart ICE duties. In deranged fashion, he threatens to call in the UN to prevent federal law enforcement. He apparently treats the Constitution as nothing, as if Johnson were elected not by fellow citizens but by global voters from Iran to North Korea.
Johnson’s idiocy is no mere boast: when a trapped convoy of ICE vehicles was recently besieged by violent protesters, local Chicago-area police were told to stand down and let ICE fight its own way out.
In Portland, the local police sometimes advise violent Antifa-related protesters on strategies for their anti-ICE street activities, presumably to help them avoid arrest.
Consider the blather of the increasingly disturbed octogenarian Rep. Nancy Pelosi.
She recently boasted that “Trump is ‘a vile creature, the worst thing on the face of the Earth.” Then she doubled down and giggled that she “could have done much worse.”
But what exact epithet could Pelosi mean that is “much worse” than “vile” and “the worst thing on earth”?
The ‘vilest creature in the cosmos’?
Pelosi, remember, as Speaker of the House, set an embarrassing historic precedent by tearing up on national television the State of the Union address of the President of the United States when the text, as is customary, was ceremoniously presented to her by Trump. Should that now become a normal part of all SOTU addresses?
Recently, in a veritable paean to Jefferson Davis, Pelosi warned that federal agents might be arrested on her home turf if her state officers determine whether their enforcement of federal law violates California statutes.
If Pelosi’s confrontation materializes, will they use force?
Mayor-elect Zoran Mamdani has boasted in the past that he will soon override federal law as mayor of New York and arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he arrive at the UN headquarters in New York.
But what if the federal government says, “NO!” Will Mamdani then call in the NYPD?
Note, Mamdani did not issue a comparable threat to the communist Chinese UN delegations, whose government oversees a million Uyghurs in work camps, nor to the Nigerians who have allowed Islamic terrorists to kill over 150,000 Christians, nor to Vladimir Putin, who invaded Ukraine, causing over 1.5 million casualties in the greatest European slaughterhouse since World War II.
Instead, Mamdani appeals to a superior “international law.” In his unconstitutional mind, world law supersedes his own government’s constitutional authority.
As a de facto insurrectionist, Mamdani would claim that international human rights activists, or the International Criminal Court (?), deserve greater legal authority inside the U.S. than do Americans’ own elected federal government.
All that nonsense sounds like infamous Confederate Attorney General Judah Benjamin, who often bragged about how insurrectionary states could legally ignore federal authority.
Military Resistance?
Yet the most recent and dangerous example of insurrectionary nullification is an inflammatory video issued by Democrat and veteran politicos.
In it, Democratic lawmakers and veterans Sen. Elissa Slotkin, Sen. Mark Kelly, Rep. Jason Crow, Rep. Maggie Goodlander, Rep. Chris Deluzio, and Rep. Chrissy Houlahan appeal to U.S. soldiers to “disobey” their superior officers’ orders if, in their own legal opinion, they feel the orders are “illegal” by contravening the Constitution. How or why, they do not say.
Are we then to imagine an insurrectionary fantasy of 1.3 million active-duty soldiers, now each acting as his own lawyer, questioning daily orders from their officers? Not one of these elected officials provided a single instance of any past Trump order or Pentagon directive that would serve as an example of their nullificationist dogma.
When these Democratic officials also appealed to federal intelligence officers to likewise disobey orders, should we laugh or cry?
Did any of these moralists ever issue such a video when the Obama- and Biden-era Directors of the CIA, FBI, and National Intelligence all admittedly lied under oath?
How about when “51 intelligence authorities” deliberately lied in an open letter to the American people on the eve of the 2020 election to help elect Joe Biden? Or when the FBI agents worked with private social media to suppress the news?
In the video, did these officials mean that soldiers should resist presidential orders to employ federal troops to quell domestic chaos and rioting?
Lots of presidents have done just that from the Civil War to the present.
Would they have urged U.S. soldiers to disobey any order in pursuance of the use of force without congressional approval?
If so, why didn’t they damn past presidents like Harry S. Truman, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, who all directed the military to act abroad without the approval of Congress?
How about Barack Obama’s serial use of Predator assassination drones that, on at least one occasion, blew up an American citizen?
These sanctimonious Democrat officials did not outline any possible scenarios for their advocacy of insurrectionary disobedience—because they had no example to draw on.
Nor did they dare reference in any detail Articles 90 and 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which explicitly spell out when, in the rarest of cases, a soldier can disobey an order.
The officials had no concern that their video was endangering thousands—if someone might take their advice and, without cause, disobey an order, putting lives at risk, well beyond their own careers.
What the Democrats did not say is that they cut the video to implant a false narrative that Trump was on the verge of issuing unconstitutional orders, and they were encouraging mass and politicized disobedience, after the previous failure of the shutdown, mass street protests, attacks on ICE agents, and Tesla dealerships.
The New Secessionists
Leftists are now back to the same old, same old incendiary conspiracies and paranoias of Russian collusion, laptop disinformation, removing Trump from the ballot, impeaching him twice, indicting him 91 times, raiding his home with armed FBI agents, plotting stealthily to record him to invoke the 25th Amendment— and all the dangerous and often illegal ways it has sought to destroy a political opponent by any means necessary.
We certainly are in dangerous times. But the crisis is one of the left’s own making, in overtly inciting the country to a virtual rerun of 1861.
What else is urging American soldiers to defy the orders of their superiors without citing a single specific cause?
How about claiming by fiat that entire cities and states are immune from federal jurisdiction?
What about threatening to use state officers to arrest federal law enforcement officials?
Withholding local police help and thus endangering federal agents at the hands of violent protesters?
Making a mockery of the Uniform Code of Military Justice?
Advising violent protesters on how best to demonstrate against federal officials without being arrested?
Subordinating U.S. federal law to global legal authorities?
Using city resources to help illegal aliens evade federal law enforcement?
Arresting a foreign official with diplomatic immunity and under federal legal protection when he enters a local jurisdiction?
Freelancing by sidestepping the legal rights of the Commander-in-Chief and instead phoning to tip off an enemy general?
The common theme?
The desperate left feels the more insurrectionary tensions they can gin up, the more that the ensuing domestic crises hurt an elected president whom they loathe.
They assume they are exempt from following the law because they believe they are our moral and intellectual superiors.
And so for the next four years, they will once again insist they can ignore or violate with contempt any federal law they please—as the nation is heading toward widespread civil insurrection of the left’s own neo-Confederate making.
It would be one thing were the rabblerousers bent upon their own states seceding and going into home rule. Then draw a line round about them, end ALL US govrnment money, close their borders, and let them phester.
Michigan can have their salami phiephdumb, including ridding the rest o us o that incestuous Omar thing. Let them learn the value o work, the key to eating.
But the problem is, the corruption seems to be in more or less contained pockets, then outside those zones are more normal people. So I suppose the real answer is that the US government continue to move, slowly and deliberately, to quell the blatant insurrection and restore peace and security.
Will Professor Hanson, it’s on us the American People with the power of the vote to fix this situation. You’re doing your part to get the message out and I truly appreciate that!
The Deep State and the corrupt political class has brought us to the precipice. I hope cooler heads will prevail, however the Democrats seem hell bent on plunging this country in to crisis. The Left no longer cares about anything but winning, no matter the cost.
get it published !!!!! WHERE YOU CAN !!!!!!!!!!!! Is the culture that low now?
Victor, your likening of the Confederate States of America to purple-haired, property-destroying Antifa crazies & Nancy Pelosi is very unfair, to put it politely and is personally insulting to the 10s of millions of Americans (including me) that have Confederate ancestors. Argument by analogy hardly counts as an argument at all, but to make it work the comparison has to be apt. Would-be Confederates were not rioting in the streets. The decisions to secede were made by state-wide conventions and determined by democratic votes. The legal case was quite clear in their eyes: the 10th Amendment clearly states that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Since the U.S. Constitution did not specifically prohibit secession, the right to secede was reserved to the States.
As for Fort Sumter, imagine if after the Mexican War, the Mexicans maintained a fort on Alcatraz Island loaded with cannons capable of blasting any shipping going in or out of San Francisco harbor. Do you think the Americans would let that stand? Tactically, the reducing of Fort Sumter was a great success. Not one person was killed in the actual attack, the attack allowed the Yankees to surrender with honor, and the Confederates magnanimously allowed the Federals to evacuate instead of taking them all prisoner. The CSA did not want war; they wanted peace.
Please forgive this comment. It’s unrelated to the topic.
I used to enjoy listening to Professor Hanson on Apple Podcasts on my phone while working around the house or long bus rides into town. It was one of many in my podcast library. My favorite.
Now that the podcasts are on YouTube it’s confusing. There are many 7 – 10 minute snippets of the Professor and Jack or Sammy, the long ones and also the Professor soloing it and it’s confusing which is a repeat or an original. There’s something here and something there and it doesn’t seem to be organized. Rather it seems peace meal.
I’m also guessing it was financially better to make the jump to YouTube and I’m happy for you all if it is.
Still, it’s kind of a hassle now and I’m a little sad to be missing shows because so many are lost in the shuffle.
‘The common theme here is Democrats violating the law however they like and nothing happening to them. Because there have been no consequences to their actions for decades before now.
This needs to change.
If Chicago police block ICE from their jobs, where are the arrests running up the chain of command to Mayor Johnson?
Two Antifa are on trial. That’s not even a good start. 200 is a good start. 2000 is even better.
1 of the 6 people who made the video asking the military to disobey orders is being court marshalled. Why not all 6?
Doubt that arrest warrants will be issued. However, stripping those six of any seat on any committee of the Congress would render them feckless and subject to recall by their respective states. Sen. John Thune, Majority Party of the Senate, and Speaker Johnson have that authority. Use it!
Prof. Hanson, perhaps we should call them “Copper Heads 2.0”
You say they assume they are exempt from following the law. Well, apparently they are. They continue to ramp up their seditious activities and so far face no consequences.
Why do courts spend more time judging technicalities than actualities? The recent seditious video of the 6 may be defended, in court hopefully, in its technical differences but what it actually did was suborn action of military members.
Will they ever be prosecuted? Why weren’t their immediate arrests broadcast on every medium? If justice never decides Leftist’s actions are due punishment, what will ever stop them?
It’s all to avoid accountability for their past coup crimes . Accountability scares the guilty:)
That, and to slow the American Restoration to Greatness!
Lock’em up and let’s prosper again!
Insurrection or sedition?
SEDITION Definition & Meaning
Merriam-Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com › dictionary › sedition
The meaning of SEDITION is incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.
It’s hard to know what the Democrats truly want. Is it a clean break from the Union so through democratic means they can form their own nation and laws like the Southern Confederacy wanted in 1861 or do they want to stay within the U.S. constitutional system but merely nullify inconvenient laws that they find disadvantageous or which impede their frightening ambitions to take over our government?
Why hasn’t the Supreme Court ruled long ago that sanctuary states and cities are not only patently unconstitutional and a perverse idea, but pose a clear and present danger to the Republic?
Having to vote and raise billions of dollars every two years creates unnecessary fatigue within the electorate and leads to wide pendulum swings of power that do little to solve real problems.
My solution, based on Occam’s Razor, would be to have one chamber with most of the governing power not four or five (when you include the courts and bureaucracies) that each have their own powers and agendas. Have one election every five years and get rid of rules that allow billionaire donors and super PACs to influence our elections. Make elections about party manifestos, and less about individual personalities. This way the people speak directly about what the majority wants and the ruling party is given sufficient time and power to implement that agenda.
The current system will lead to certain ruin.
For a decade or longer it has seemed to me that we were engaged in a civil war – cultural and political – for power over the people versus freedom of the people. We were being diverted from not only common sense but from natural law that the Declaration refers to. When Trump entered the arena and started to change course, mayhem broke loose with violence and destruction in our cities and on college campuses. Others had tried to ignore it and hoped it would go away. Instead, it grew stronger and led to the conflict, both vocally and physically, that we find in society today. Yes, we are ‘at war’ with each other over the distribution of power and the cultural values of this country.
Dr Hanson you’ve reminded us all how human beings have only perfected one behavior over millennia of our presence on this planet …. repeating the same mindless mistakes of history while expecting a different outcome …. tried & true definition of insanity
So we have:
– Obscure messaging either intended as a wrench in the gear box or draw out POTUS to say something deemed inappropriate, most likely both.
– Intentional civil disobedience as a false flag and call to arms
– The cloak of legitimacy coupled with pretentious seizing of the high moral ground
– Followed up with the circle of atrocity:
rapist/pedophile/misogynist -> fascist/authoritarian -> oligarch/favor the wealthy/disregard for the poor -> Russian/Communist Sympathizer -> unstable mental health/dementia then we cycle back. Some times there all in play, usually focused on one or the other. In past few weeks we went from no budget (he is starving the poor), the second the budget was passed it was “release Epstein files” (he is a pedophile), once he signed that release it went right into fascist/authoritarian (Remember you don’t have to follow illegal orders). Too bad the media didn’t remind everyone that they do have to follow legal orders. Predication for this week, since negotiations with Ukraine and Russian are possibly moving forward POTUS will be framed as a Russian Sympathizer with unstable mental health as undertones. Week after that we should be back to the rapist/pedophile/misogynist thing again.
We, actually Pam Bondi’s DOJ, should not be merely thinking about these accurate and detailed charges that are indicative of treason against the Republic, there should be quick and decisive action to arrest everyone of these seditious actors! Many months ago, in fact, which means that DC has already been overthrown and I’ll tell you when that occurred, Nov 22, 1963. A coup that has never been adjudicated!
I’m not sure this analogy of compering new insurrections of the day to Jefferson Davis is proper.
South at that time did not want to nullify federal laws but rather to secede from the union.
Whether they have legal right to do it is still questionable.
New insurrectionists do not want to secede from union but rather to fit execution of federal law to current ideological tendencies.
This is such a well written article. ‘Insurrection Chic’ should be published in major newspapers across the country and not just for VDH readers.
And, the infuriation continues thanks to you Dr. H! As I commented before, no offense against you, Sami or Jack, but every time I read your rational, reasonable and analytic discourse regarding the left wing lemming mentality, my blood boils! I marvel at the fact that my blood does not ooze out of my orifices as I consume your keen insights. The six ‘Benedict Arnolds’ video regarding our military was, needless to say, just another paragon of left-wing, pseudo intellectual stupidity the left seems to possess the lions share of. My question? Does the ethics committee really exist or just another government department in name only? I’m on the down slope of my life now, but I have two kids (one with a baby on the way) in the prime of their lives and the only thing I do is pray daily for them and our great country. I come from a military family and those six should be ousted from any service to our country and as a matter of fact, ousted from our country period!! Blessings to you, Sami, Jack and your families for the upcoming holidays. Stay healthy!
As usual, the professor is “spot on.”
I was in the military. I was trained to understand and recognize an unlawful order. It’s dangerous for high profile people to speak directly to our military members that way. They know that it’s not a wise thing to do. I believe they have ulterior motives. And by the way….were they speaking to the top brass of the armed forces, or to all members including those who are still in boot camp???!!!??? Unbelievable!!!
Much to think about here. Thank you Dr. Hanson