In this speech Abraham Lincoln explained his objections to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and resurrected his political career. In the speech Lincoln criticized popular sovereignty. Questioned how popular sovereignty could supersede the Northwest Ordinance and the Missouri Compromise. Lincoln dismissed arguments that climate and geography would keep slavery out of Kansas and Nebraska. Most importantly, Lincoln attacked the morality of slavery itself. Lincoln argued that the slaves were people, not animals, and consequently possessed certain natural rights. "If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that `all men are created equal;' and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another."

Source: Neely, Mark E. Jr. 1982. The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia. New York: Da Capo Press, Inc. //

The argument of “Necessity” was the only argument they ever admitted in favor of slavery; and so far, and so far only as it carried them, did they ever go. They found the institution existing among us, which they could not help; and they cast blame upon the British King for having permitted its introduction. BEFORE the constitution, they prohibited its introduction into the north-western Territory—the only country we owned, then free from it. AT the framing and adoption of the constitution, they forbore to so much as mention the word “slave” or “slavery” in the whole instrument.

In the provision for the recovery of fugitives, the slave is spoken of as a “PERSON HELD TO SERVICE OR LABOR.” In that prohibiting the abolition of the African slave trade for twenty years, that trade is spoken of as “The migration or importation of such persons as any of the States NOW EXISTING, shall think proper to admit,” &c.

These are the only provisions alluding to slavery. Thus, the thing is hid away, in the constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time. Less than this our fathers COULD not do; and NOW [MORE?] they WOULD not do.

Necessity drove them so far, and farther, they would not go. But this is not all. The earliest Congress, under the constitution, took the same view of slavery. They hedged and hemmed it in to the narrowest limits of necessity.

In 1794, they prohibited an out-going slave-trade—that is, the taking of slaves FROM the United States to sell.

In 1798, they prohibited the bringing of slaves from Africa, INTO the Mississippi Territory—this territory then comprising what are now the States of Mississippi and Alabama. This was TEN YEARS before they had the authority to do the same thing as to the States existing at the adoption of the constitution.

In 1800 they prohibited AMERICAN CITIZENS from trading in slaves between foreign countries—as, for instance, from Africa to Brazil. In 1803 they passed a law in aid of one or two State laws, in restraint of the internal slave trade. In 1807, in apparent hot haste, they passed the law, nearly a year in advance to take effect the first day of 1808—the very first day the constitution would permit—prohibiting the African slave trade by heavy pecuniary and corporal penalties.

In 1820, finding these provisions ineffectual, they declared the trade piracy, and annexed to it, the extreme penalty of death. While all this was passing in the general government, five or six of the original slave States had adopted systems of gradual emancipation; and by which the institution was rapidly becoming extinct within these limits.

Thus we see, the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the PRINCIPLE, and toleration, ONLY BY NECESSITY.

Abraham Lincoln recalls some facts that the left would rather not hear. //

Like any good person trying to change the world, Lincoln had to put forth many arguments in favor of his position and debunk many other ideas to boot.

Lincoln is still debunking arguments to this day, believe it or not. Today, Lincoln’s old adversaries, the Democrats, have crafted a narrative proclaiming that our nation was founded on white supremacy. They often cite the fact that our founders owned slaves themselves.

Like many leftist arguments, this is only partly true. It’s true that our founders did own slaves, but to say that our nation was founded on “white supremacy” and the idea that men aren’t really created equal despite their most famous document saying so is fully off the mark.

I could explain it myself, but I’m just going to step aside for a moment and let Lincoln himself explain and defend our founding fathers and the government they created during his 1854 Peoria speech.

https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm

Thus we see, the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the PRINCIPLE, and toleration, ONLY BY NECESSITY.

It should be understood that the founding fathers were exceedingly brilliant men who knew they were also limited by the power and culture of their time. Nevertheless, they planted seeds that would soon grow into what Lincoln would reap.

So the purpose of America was not the equality of white men, but the equality of all peoples. That’s what America was built on. To say otherwise is factually incorrect.

Nearly every harbinger of the republic’s implosion prophesized by the founders has come to pass. Our laws and legal system have grown so vast, overcomplicated, and burdensome that no citizen without expensive legal muscle can navigate the maze or know what’s expected of him–an eventuality about which James Madison cautioned. The popular moral and religious counterweight to the government’s secular liberalism has evaporated, as John Adams worried it might. Thomas Jefferson’s concern that the legislature would devolve into a tool of majority tyranny has come to pass in spades. Rivalries among American groups have resulted in toxic sectionalism and the rejection of American unity, just as George Washington feared. The list goes on and on. //

BLM was not the first to popularize America’s brokenness. Donald Trump beat them to it in his own subtle way, but stated the problem without denigrating some or all of the American people. Trump said, “Make America Great Again.”

Think about it: what kind of country needs to be made “Great Again”?

A country in less than great shape. //

Polite think-tank conservatives want reform; but reform works on institutions that are deformed. The United States government is not deformed–it’s broken, lying in scattered pieces. Recent symptoms include: Congress has largely ceased to perform lawmaking and spends its time bickering and posturing. The Justice Department and its FBI subsidiary have suffered an infestation of political activism. The Supreme Court and federal judiciary now fill in for Congress and make laws rather than interpret them. A zombie administrative state controls the lives of Americans like a network of cartels. Don’t even get me started on the dysfunction and corruption within government-adjacent institutions like nonprofits, university systems, and mega-corporations.

Donald Trump may wind up being know as the president of Deconstruction, as President Ulysses S. Grant was know for Reconstruction after the Civil War. Trump’s peculiar genius lies not in recognizing the need for deconstruction of the government–the Joe on the street, progressive or conservative, sense that much–but rather in his tactic of allowing the government to deconstruct itself. Like a conductor who wants to stop a runaway orchestra, all the president need do is wave his hands so that the instrument sections conflict with one another, then step back and watch the arguments erupt.

The president’s deconstructive strategy is hard to bear, because it grinds against the all-too-human need for harmony and stability at any cost. Many Americans can’t stand the conflict. //

Americans now live as hostages to institutions that were supposed to serve and protect them. If something is not done to disrupt the spiral, the orchestra will be hanging audience members and one another with piano wire very soon. //

Today, only the very wealthy and the technocratic/managerial upper class in the United States experience reliable prosperity and security, a responsive government, a comprehensible legal system, a wholistic culture, and a commodious society. Everyone else is struggling to figure out how to resuscitate the American dream or just scrape by. The formerly hale and robust American middle class is scrambling to avoid melting into the lower class and vanishing. The lower class for their part are scrambling to avoid falling into third-world poverty, a modern-day multi-generational serfdom. //

Were establishment conservatives instead to drop the ‘America is just fine because it’s not North Korea yet’ act, they would find themselves inundated with popular support and attention. They could very well suck the wind out of BLM’s Marxist, racist, prevaricating sails. The hugely successful lie peddled by BLM is that black Americans are the only ones really suffering from the effects of a broken system on account of their race. A grain of truth–the broken system part–keeps this lie afloat. The solvent to this lie happens to be the full truth: 90% of ALL Americans are worried and suffering, and no party speaks for them the way BLM purports to for black Americans.

In short, African Americans were not passive in the face of slavery, but they could not and did not end it by themselves. Black abolitionists, slave rebellions, and fugitive slaves all put moral and political pressure on the American system. But how the system responded, and the choices and sacrifices it made, were the result of American ideals, American popular opinion, Republican political leadership, and the Union Army.

“The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”—George Orwell

According to The New York Times, the true founding of the United States of America did not begin with the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Rather, the Times informs us, the founding occurred in 1619, the year 20 or so African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia. The American Revolution occurred, the Times says, primarily because of Americans’ desire to keep their slaves. Consequently, “America is irrevocably and forever rooted in injustice and racism.”

My guests Robert Woodson and Kenneth Blackwell emphatically do not agree, and Woodson has launched the 1776 Project to refute the Times’ claims in its 1619 Project.

“I was particularly outraged that The New York Times would exploit America’s birth defect of slavery and weaponize race and use the conditions of the black community as a bludgeon against this country’s character, almost defining it as if it’s a criminal organization,” Woodson says. “What they are doing is insulting by implying that all blacks are victims and should be pitied.”

Blackwell says: “The 1619 Project is nothing but a group of apologists for the expansion of the welfare state. What we should be doing, and what Bob’s 1776 Project is about, is the creation of opportunities and individual empowerment in society. As Frederick Douglass said, we all have to be agents of our own well-being.”

In the wake of recent Black Lives Matter protests—in response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer and the important dialog that has resulted—I am inclined to revisit The New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project.

This project propagates a popular narrative, which has taken hold among many in the media, politics, and education, to link the foundational origins of the American experiment not to the context of the American Revolution of 1776 but to 1619, the year that enslaved Angolans arrived on the shores of colonial Jamestown, Virginia.

In this view, all of America’s current institutions, public attitudes, economics, and social structures—or, perhaps more pointedly, the alleged horrors and woes therein—are a result of slavery.

Among other claims, it credits slavery for the dismal state of America’s prison system, for suburban traffic congestion, for the prevalence of obesity and diabetes, even for capitalism itself. All this, even though many of this narrative’s adherents belong to the most respected, most lucrative institutions in the country—which is a testament to the unique constitutional freedoms that Americans enjoy.

Many who hear or read such views are incredulous, including the founders of the 1776 Project, who are attempting to dispel the belief that black America’s destiny has been shaped in the crucible of slavery and racism.

Bob Woodson, the 1776 Project’s founder, objects to the argument that the “shadow of slavery and Jim Crow” hangs over the destiny of black Americans.

“Nothing is more lethal,” he says, “than to convey to people that they have an exemption from personal responsibility.”

The 1776 Project’s organizers, for example, criticize the characterization of America as a place in which all whites are villains and all blacks are victims. It is easy, they argue, “to point to slavery and Jim Crow and then be done with your account of black American history. But that is lazy thinking.”

In fact, despite what the liberal media would have you believe, many African Americans have bitterly fought the narrative that blacks are eternally constrained by the attitudes and structures of racism.

A pivotal moment in world history occurred when Mary Ball Washington forbade her eldest son from joining the British navy as a cabin boy—one-third of whom died at sea.

After obeying his mother this time, George Washington lived to fight and lead another day. Despite a sometimes complex relationship with his mother, he said a maternal hand led him to manhood, Craig Shirley writes in “Mary Ball Washington: The Untold Story of George Washington’s Mother.”

Shirley joins “The Right Side of History” to talk about the book and why the mother of the Father of Our Country was a far more nuanced person than the “June Cleaver” or “Joan Crawford” depictions in other Washington biographies.

"As the mob rises, civilization recedes." //

Peaceful protests are guaranteed under the First Amendment. Rioting, looting, vandalism, and destruction of private and/or public property is not a First Amendment-protected “right” in any way, shape, form or fashion. //

As all of this has played out, there have been precious few leaders on either side of the aisle who have been willing to step up and say “enough” and to call for action. Tucker Carlson has talked about this numerous times during his opening monologues since the riots started.

“If you can’t tell the truth when the truth actually matters, then nothing you say matters,” he stated last week about people who were unwilling to stand up to rage mobs out of fear of being canceled. //

FortesFortunaJuvat
2 hours ago
It is not the role of government to protect citizens. The role of government is to protect the rights of citizens, to protect and defend the entirety of the Republic, and to ensure representative government within all of the states. The failure of government - local, state, and federal - to enforce existing law against those who are attempting to destroy the United States leaves it to the citizens to not only defend themselves but to defend their way of life.

Unless or until government acts to enforce the laws against those who seek anarchy and destruction then the people are left to rely on themselves to do so.

The man in the arena

What will be next?

The Chinese Communist Party is punishing India for working with America, and the President should show the nation stands by its friends.

The U.S. is slowly opening back up for business. But we’re far from coming out of this tunnel. About 20 million Americans remain unemployed compared to just six months ago.

Despite this sobering number, we can take heart in a silver lining: The U.S. will recover, and it’ll recover before China, the place of origin for the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

Recovery can mean a lot of things. Generally speaking, let’s assume it’s a return to pre-COVID-19 levels of gross domestic product and regaining at least 80% of economic activity lost during the first half of 2020. 

To reboot the abruptly halted economy, America needs to advance pro-people, pro-free enterprise economic policies.

In Lincoln Park, Washington DC stands a statue called Emancipation Memorial, showing Abraham Lincoln and a freed slave. Activists want it down.

Two hundred thirty seven years ago, our forefathers sat in a hot room with closed windows arguing over the future of the thirteen colonies they represented. For a while they had thought of reconciliation with their motherland. But over time it became clear that neither King nor Parliament were interested in anything other than submission.

These fifty-six men did what had not been done before them.

They outlined their grievances on paper, declared their independence, and signed their names so both King and Parliament would know who the traitors were. The act was treason punishable by death. Some of them did die. Some were bankrupted. Many lost their homes and property. Some saw their wives and children taken and abused. But none recanted. All held firm.

237 years later we view the unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America in the abstract. The grievances are distant if not surreal. But it was very real to them.

The United States of America today stands 69 years removed from D-Day.

D-Day was 79 years from the end of the Civil War, and 81 years removed from Gettysburg, which we are now 150 years separated from in time and history.

The beginning of the Civl War was 85 years from 1776 and only 72 years from the constitution being enacted.

The Revolution was only 88 years from the Glorious Revolution — a revolution from which we are separated by a chasm of 325 years.

It was the Glorious Revolution that so influenced our founders. It was not abstract to them. It was not far removed. It was an event in the lifetimes of some of their grand parents. Parliament’s supremacy was asserted. The British subjects became citizens and acquired certain rights under the Bill of Rights of 1689 while others from the Magna Carta were reinforced. Among the rights derived from the Glorious Revolution were prohibitions on taxation without representation in Parliament, prohibitions on a standing army, the right to petition the King without prosecution, the prohibition on dispensing with Acts of Parliament, and the prohibition of fines and forfeitures before convictions of crimes.

The colonists engaged in a conservative revolution — a revolution not for something wholly new, but for something 88 years old. They only rebeled for “new Guards for their future security” when neither King nor Parliament would grant them what they thought they already had: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What we find today to be so abstract — gun rights written into our constitution, prohibits on quartering soldiers, checks and balances and clear limits on power drawn up by men deeply skeptical of themselves and others with power — were not abstract notions to our founders. They were real. They were present. Most importantly, they were worth fighting for and, if need be, dying for.

“The United States didn’t inherit slavery from anybody. We created it,” Sen. Kaine said.  //

Virginia was a black man named Anthony Johnson. There are also other accounts of black men owning slaves in early Virginia.

James Madison hated fighting in the world of public opinion and parties until he was left with no other choice. //

There are no roads in the American journey that we have not passed by before, and this time the subject of use is James Madison. During the Constitutional Convention and the ratification process, Madison believed that the structure of the document and new government it framed would be strong enough to protect against public opinion, party, or faction.

So diffused was the representation he thought, and so limiting of power the checks and balances that no one interested party or set of interested parties would be able to steer the ship of the state alone. But by the early 1790s, Madison found himself in Congress as the leader of the opposition to the Washington administration and the Alexander Hamilton-led Federalists. The mercantile class, in Madison’s view was running roughshod over the agrarian South and he believed violating the constitution.

It is at this point that Madison makes an astounding reversal. Suddenly he needed public opinion. Furthermore, the founder who most detested political parties was about to found one with Thomas Jefferson. What Madison learned was that no system, regardless of how magisterial, could on its own secure the freedom and liberty of its citizens. The best it can do is to offer a fair marketplace of ideas.

Conservatives need to ponder and understand this Madisonian moment. The fault of Frenchism is that it relies upon the structure of the Constitution, just as Madison had, to protect against government overreach. But it does so at a time when the marketplace of ideas is shrinking into a progressive media culture that brooks no opposition. The Constitution is a backstop, but it does not in and of itself create the common good, it leaves that to us.

Conservatives must demand to be part of the conversation about drag queens preforming for toddlers, or kids being taught they are inherently racist. We have to be loud when addressing those who would censor newspapers or defund websites. A robust and effective conservative movement founded on the reverence of Western values cannot be achieved by treating the Constitution as the Alamo, just waiting to get wiped out. //

It’s time to stop playing defense. Like Madison, we must open our eyes to the fact that politics is inherently about power, not just resisting power, but also asserting it. If we go too far, let the other side rely on the courts and the constitution for a little while.

Madison would go on to become president, but perhaps more importantly his Democratic-Republican Party would as the name suggests eventually branch into both of our modern parties. He knew when to fight. That is a lesson the right is badly in need of today.

What does any of this have to do with healing our nation? The answer is, 'nothing.' And that’s the point.  //:

You’d think the way some in the media talk about this country that they’re sad we’re still not fighting the Civil War. They would like us to fight a new civil war in our culture, day and night, without end.

I’d suggest to my colleagues that the Civil War not only gave us villains, it also gave us heroes and a more perfect union to love.

Maybe we should learn from those heroes. We should learn from Lincoln, who called our nation to unity at Gettysburg.

“It is for us the living,“ he told us, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced … to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” //

The Americans who visit these hallowed grounds, all across our country, want to know why this nation fought a war against itself — why brothers could not live under one flag together. We teach them there, in those places, how we became a better nation through the crucible of that terrible war. And we teach them there to be proud that we did so.

One of the more heartbreaking things we’re witnessing in the current unrest is the inclination to silence certain aspects of the discussion on race and healing. The “silence is violence” crowd is ironically the worst offender, immediately stepping in to silence voices and points of view that don’t begin and end with getting white Americans out of the way and defunding the police. //

terry crews
@terrycrews
·
Jun 7
Defeating White supremacy without White people creates Black supremacy. Equality is the truth.

Like it or not, we are all in this together. //

Crews has always been vocal about his belief that the forgiveness and healing offered by God to all who ask is really the only thing that can keep us from destroying ourselves. He believes in equality as laid out in the Good Book – that all of us are created by a loving God who so desperately treasures each and every one of us that He did not rule man but became man. He made himself equal to us even though surely not one of us deserves to share the same status as Creator of the universe. As we say in the church…

But God…

But God… //

True equality requires that we all follow the example of our Lord…that we become each other. We can’t trade one type of superiority for another, and if anyone thinks that minority Americans are immune to feeling superior just because we don’t occupy the position of the majority they’re fooling themselves about human nature.

I loved what Crews expressed here. It doesn’t seem to be unreasonable in the least. We can’t erase white people from the equation of racial healing. That makes no sense. We all live in this country together. No one is leaving so get used to it. If we don’t tackle this problem together we will fall together.