PrairiePundit

 Steven Hayward: Let’s set the scene: American democracy is said to be under threat from a political party that questions the legitimacy and outcome of a presidential election, that incites and justifies lawless “insurrectionist” actions and undermines American democratic institutions and processes, threatening the continued existence of the Constitution itself. If this state of affairs continues unabated, experts claim, the United States might well lapse into a second Civil War, as argued in Barbara F. Walter’s new book “How Civil Wars Start.” Yes — that’s a pretty good description of the Democratic Party. You were expecting something else around the anniversary of Jan. 6 ? Let’s do the checklist. A Washington Post/University of Maryland poll in 2017 found that 67% of Democrats and 69% of Hillary Clinton voters said Donald Trump was not a legitimately elected president, and Hillary herself told CBS News that Trump was not a “legitimate president” because he stole the 2016 elect...

 Thomas Sowell: It is amazing how many people seem to have discovered last Wednesday that riots are wrong -- when many of those same people apparently had not noticed that when riots went on, for weeks or even months, in various cities across the country last year. For too many people, especially in the media, what is right and wrong, true or false, depends on who it helps or hurts politically. Too many media people who are supposed to be reporters act as if they are combatants in political wars. Someone once said that, in a war, truth is the first casualty. That has certainly been so in the media -- and in much of academia as well. One of the most grotesque distortions growing out of this carelessness with the facts has been a removal of Abraham Lincoln's name and statues from various places, on grounds that he saw black people only as property. Such criticisms betray an incredible ignorance of history -- or else a complete disregard of truth. As a lawyer, Abraham Lincoln knew tha...

 Paul Bedard: Soul searching and lecturing following the election and Wednesday’s Capitol protests and riots have done nothing to tamp down GOP outrage. According to a new survey, a record high 71% of President Trump's supporters believe the country is headed toward civil war. What’s more, 40% of President-elect Joe Biden's supporters agree. Trump has done little to cool feelings, today tweeting that he plans to stay in the fight after leaving office. The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)  January 8, 2021 The poll from the  Frontier Center’s Ear to the Ground,  shared with Secrets, is the latest to show the deep division in the nation and likely support Trump has. Frontier Center’s Ear to the Ground project The Center’s Anne Sorock Segal told us...

  Stu Cvrk: “Civil war” has been a term much in use by both the Left and the Right these days. Try a web search on “civil war in America 2020,” and the result is dozens/hundreds of links to commentators speculating about the “coming war between Left and Right and who will ignite the spark” (and a lot of other related themes). The Left claim that “white supremacist and white nationalist militias” will get things started, and the legacy media have produced dozens of articles “investigating” militias and propagating that false narrative. One of the latest investigative reports on Oath Keepers and militias along those lines  was published in the November issue of  The Atlantic . It conveys the leftwing view of militias: crazy, fringe, gun-toting elements itching to start a civil war, and whom polite society should shun (and then disarm at the very least).   Funny how no “right-wing militia” has been responsible for the unchecked violence in Democrat-run cities and states...

 Paul Bedard: A majority of Americans are bracing for the possibility of a politically-fired civil war, and more than half are already stockpiling food and other essential items to survive and fight back, according to a new survey shared with Secrets. In the survey, 61% said that the United States is nearing a second civil war, including a shocking 41% who “strongly agree” with that assessment. And 52% are so convinced that it is just around the corner, or after Election Day, that they are putting away food and other essentials, an historic expansion of the prepper movement that has been brewing for years, now driven by fear and coronavirus-induced shortages. ...   “This is the single most frightening poll result I’ve ever been associated with,” said Rich Thau, president of  Engagious,  one of the three firms, along with the  Sports and Leisure Research Group  and  ROKK Solutions,  that conducted the “Back-to-Normal Barometer” survey. ...  Th...

Frank Miele: Jonathan Karl of ABC News asked an interesting question of White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany at last Tuesday’s press briefing: “Where in the Constitution does the president derive the authority to send federal law enforcement officers to the streets of American cities against the will of the elected officials in those cities?” McEnany, as it turned out, was prepared. Section 1315 of Title 40 of the U.S. Code, she explained, “gives DHS the ability to deputize officers in any department or agency like ICE, Custom and Border Patrol and Secret Service … for the duties in connection with the protection of property owned or occupied by the federal government.” She added, “When a federal courthouse is being lit on fire, commercial fireworks being shot at it [and] being shot at the officers, I think that falls pretty well within the limits of 40 U.S. Code 1315.” Since violent thugs have targeted the federal courthouse in Portland, Ore., it was an appropriate r...

NY Times: Cities in Bind as Turmoil Spreads Far Beyond Portland Galvanized in part by the deployment of federal agents in Portland, Ore., protesters have returned to the streets in Oakland, Seattle and elsewhere. The Democrat insurrection against the rule of law has spread, but it is still in Democrat-controlled cities.  It is one of the nuttiest insurrections in history.  It also should be a challenge to Democrats who think they should be in charge of the nation if they can't even control their own cities.

NY Times: Stonewall Jackson Statue in Richmond Taken Down to Cheers A monument to the Confederate general was pulled off its pedestal after Mayor Levar Stoney used emergency powers to order Confederate monuments removed from city grounds. Jackson was one of the few generals who understood how the machinery of warfare had changed the battlefield.  He would have his troops dig in and fight from fox holes and trench lines rather than exchange fire with enemy troops as had been the nature of battle up until the Civil War.  He was also a master of maneuver warfare to get his troops into position to deal with enemy forces.  He was killed in a friendly fire accident.  If he had not been killed I suspect he would have talked Lee out of his suicidal Picket's charge at Gettysburg against dug-in Union forces. His statue was taken down because of the side he fought on. What is little understood about the Civil War is how the Confederacy actually sped up the end of...

Just the News: The FBI has release a poster with the pictures of 15 people on which the agency seeking information in connection with the attempted destruction Monday of a monument to former President Andrew Jackson near the White House.  President Trump on Friday tweeted a picture of his poster to his roughly 80 million followers.  Protesters gathered in D.C.'s Lafayette Square Monday in an attempted to bring down the statue of Jackson, which has been at that location since 1852, seven years after the former president's death. The would-be destroyers struggled and ultimately failed to tear the monument down with ropes.  The FBI has since opened up an investigation into the incident, which they said might constitute a felony offense. In his tweet Trump  wrote  that "MANY people [are] in custody, with many others being sought for Vandalization of Federal Property in Lafayette Park." "10 year prison sentences!" he also said, referring to an ex...

NY Post: Attorney General Bill Barr said Friday he was forming a new government task force to take aim at “anti-government extremists.” Barr outlined the new group in a memo obtained by the Washington Post. “Although these extremists profess a variety of ideologies, they are united in their opposition to the core constitutional values of a democratic society governed by law,” Barr wrote. “Some pretend to profess a message of freedom and progress, but they are in fact forces of anarchy, destruction, and coercion.” The new task force comes as the United States faces weeks of racial and civil unrest, which has stemmed from the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer last month. The task force is the latest action by the Justice Department to rein in looting and lawlessness, which has gripped cities across the country. ... The group already has 500 active cases.  They need to quickly bring them to justice to stop the Democrat wreck and ruin strategy. ...

Washington Post: ‘A moment of indescribable joy’: The history of Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating slavery’s end It has its roots in the long-awaited moment of emancipation in Texas, where more than 250,000 enslaved black people received news on June 19, 1865 — more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation — that they were free. Slavery was formally ended with the 13th Amendment in 1865.   When Lincoln was crafting the Emancipation Proclamation he had to be wary of the prohibition against the taking of property without due process so he limited the application of his move to states that were in rebellion.  It was a move to strike at the financial backbone of the Confederacy.  It did not end slavery in states that were still in the union. It is not clear when states other than Texas found out about the freeing of the slaves.

Mackubin Owens: The orgy of destruction that has occurred in the wake of George Floyd’s death has been justified by a lie — that the United States is irredeemably racist to the core. Unfortunately, our educational system has peddled this lie for more than a generation. It has now achieved official status by means of The New York Times’ risible 1619 Project, which claims that the United States was founded on slavery and racism. The truth is exactly the opposite. America’s Founding — the real one, in 1776 — expressly rejected the argument that political systems should be based on oppression, including racial oppression. The essence of such systems was best summarized by the argument of the Athenians at Melos as recounted by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War: “Justice arises only between equals. As for the rest, the strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must.” Before the creation of the United States, the world was divided between those “born booted an...

Washington Post: President Trump said on Twitter he was against a growing effort to rename Army installations bearing names of Confederate commanders, two days after Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper signaled he was open to the idea. “These Monumental and very Powerful Bases have become part of a Great American Heritage, and a history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom,” Trump said, adding that the administration “will not even consider” renaming them. Esper and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said Monday that they were open to “bipartisan discussion” of the issue, which was first reported by Politico. Defense officials declined to comment on plans for the installation names after Trump’s remarks. The GOP-led Senate Armed Services Committee adopted an amendment for the Pentagon to strip the names from the installations within three years, CNN reported Thursday. ... Aside from Robert E. Lee most of the generals the bases are named after were not distinguished military men.  Som...

Stephen Green: The NYT editorial board chose Memorial Day weekend to smear the U.S. military with the Ku Klux Klan’s “blood-drenched tradition of racial terrorism.” Maybe when they wrote “military” they meant to use “Democrats,” because as more people ought to know, the Klan was founded to serve as the Democratic Party’s shock troops against freed blacks in the South. Pulling zero propaganda punches, the NYT’s banner art included an image of a white bullet with eyeholes cut out to look like a Ku Klux Klan hood. Never mind, I guess, that the military was one of the first segregated American institutions to be fully integrated, and with almost mind-blowing speed following President Harry Truman’s order to do so. If there are any formerly segregated institutions in this country that need to be held to account for their current treatment of black America, it’s the Democratic Party. While there are serious doubts about whether President Lyndon Johnson ever claimed he’d have “n***...

PJ Media: ... However, Buttigieg was entirely off base to suggest the Founders did not understand the evils of slavery. In fact, many of them acknowledged the evils of slavery, but they compromised in order to hold the new nation together. As Matt Spalding wrote for the Heritage Foundation, "Those who founded this nation chose to make practical compromises for the sake of establishing in principle a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Ted Cruz rebuked Buttigieg by posting a string of direct quotes from the Founders. "Slavery is an evil of Colossal magnitude & I am utterly averse to the admission of slavery into the Missouri Territories. It being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law," Cruz quoted from John Adams, a Founding Father and the second president. "Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the ...

Karl W. Smith: ... One school of thought argues that slavery in general, and cotton in particular, was the driving force behind the development of America’s distinctive brand of capitalism. (The New York Times’s ambitious 1619 Project contains a good encapsulation of this argument.) But not only has this theory come under fire for inaccuracies, its central narrative is incorrect. The reality is that cotton played a relatively small role in the long-term growth of the U.S. economy. The economics of slavery were probably detrimental to the rise of U.S. manufacturing and almost certainly toxic to the economy of the South. In short: The U.S. succeeded in spite of slavery, not because of it. ... Still, it might be argued that the growth of a textile industry — in either the U.S. or Great Britain — would not have been possible without mass quantities of U.S. cotton. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be true. Following the Civil War, the production of cotton in the U.S. continue...

Jeff Dunetz: Trump Creates 1st National Monument Celebrating African-American Civil War Soldiers The President engages in more outreach to the black community.  It is not surprising that his polling in that community has increased significantly.

Charles Hurt: ... And there is no one more racist to these sheltered snowflakes than Don from Queens. To these elite, the “otherness” of President Trump makes them feel so uncomfortable it drives them utterly mad. The fact Mr. Trump beat the whole political system and sits across the Resolute Desk from Kanye West is simply more than they can bear. So he must be racist. And, somehow, so is Kanye. Then Mr. Trump wanders into one of the most epic moments of Civil War history during a speech last week in Ohio, birthplace of legendary Civil War Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. “So Robert E. Lee was a great general,” Mr. Trump said. “And Abraham Lincoln developed a phobia. He couldn’t beat Robert E. Lee.” Cue the media, who somehow went wild over Mr. Trump complimenting Gen. Lee as a “great general.” As anyone who has ever studied four minutes of Civil War history knows, of course, Mr. Trump’s comments are totally and completely factual and accurate. Lee was a brilliant tactician whose ...

Kurt Schlichter: It’s obvious that the central tenet of the Democrat Party platform is now hatred and contempt for Normal Americans. Taking their cue from the elites in Europe and Canada who are stripping dissenters of their free speech rights and religious freedoms, the leftist elite is moving to solidify its hold on power here with the eager assistance of tech companies and the moral support of the Fredocons who yearn to return to pseudo-relevance as the ruling class’s slobberingly loyal opposition. In California, the leftist government is practically firing on Fort Sumter. And nationally, these aspiring fascists are especially eager to disarm Normal Americans – doing so would be an object lesson in who’s the boss, as well as solving that frustrating problem of the Normals having the ability to resist. Probably because I’ve spent time where they actually had a civil war, many people ask me – people whose names you know – whether I think this turmoil will all end in a Second Civ...

BBC: The University of Texas has removed four Confederate monuments overnight in the wake of violent clashes in Virginia earlier this month. A statue of General Robert E Lee was among those taken down from the Austin campus early on Monday. Monuments to Confederate figures are symbols of "modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism", the college said. ... As well as Lee, who was military commander during the 1861-65 American Civil War, a statue of another rebel general, Albert Sidney Johnston, and of Confederate postmaster John H Reagan were taken down. They were moved to a centre for American history on campus. A statue of Texas Governor James Stephen Hogg, who served from 1891-95, was also removed and will be considered for re-installation at another site. ... I got my undergraduate degree and law degree from UT and would be hard-pressed to tell you where these statues were located on the campus.  The most prominent statue on Campus is that of George Washington that overlooks...