The New American Crisis
In 1776, pamphleteer Thomas Paine, in a series of essays entitled “The American Crisis,” exhorted the besieged colonists during the Revolutionary War to stand strong in their struggle for freedom. His opening line was “These are the times that try men’s souls.” The same is true today. However bleak conditions may appear, we must remain committed to victory. Paine said: “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.” The stakes are as high in 2026 as they were in 1776. We must not falter.
Thanks to Power Line and Ace of Spades HQ (here and here)!
A. What happens if the Republicans lose control of Congress in the mid-terms this November?
We don’t have to wonder, because the Democrats have told us. Expect a 180-degree reversal of everything President Trump has done. We can expect as abrupt a change, on a national scale, as the radical onslaught incoming Governor Abigail Spanberger is imposing on the commonwealth of Virginia. Elections truly have consequences.
And if the Democrats re-gain the White House in 2028, things will be even worse. President Trump’s historic victory in 2024, and the MAGA agenda in general, will be foiled by the Democrats’ radical policies, which include:
Granting statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico, adding four reliable Democratic seats to the Senate.
Expanding the Supreme Court to 13 or more, and packing it with left-wing activists.
Abolishing the filibuster, so the Senate can pass any law it wants with a simple majority.
Abolishing the “blue-slip” rule, so that red state Senators have no say in the appointment of district judges, U.S. Attorneys, or U.S. Marshalls in their states.
Impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, just like during Trump 1.0.
Hearings for all of President Trump’s cabinet officers.
De-fund ICE. Halt deportations. Open the borders. Resume the influx of refugees, asylum-seekers, and similar programs.
Crime, drugs, and homeless encampments will once again engulf our cities.
If Democrats win back the White House in 2028:
All of President Trump’s executive orders will be rescinded on Day One.
Amnesty for illegal aliens. All of them.
National ban on voter ID.
Trannies in the military.
All judges would be left-wing activists. The rule of law would end.
The U.S. Supreme Court, freshly packed with far-left ideologues, will reverse every favorable precedent decided under the Roberts Court. Among the casualties: gun rights (Bruen, Heller), race-neutrality in higher education (SFFA v. Harvard), protection against mutilation of minors (Skrmetti), religious freedoms, and many more. Dobbs would be overruled and Roe v. Wade would be reinstated. Chevron would be restored. No more First Amendment protection for public sector union members (Janus). “Transgender” status would receive constitutional protection.
All of this would happen in a jurisprudential tsunami, celebrated by the radicals who run legal academia, such as Harvard’s Marxist law professor, Mark Tushnet, who wrote the script in 2016, “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism.”
Tax increases, massive budget deficits, inflation, restrictions on energy production, and a weak national defense.
Massive, wasteful (and fraud-ridden) spending programs to address phony left-wing causes such as “climate change,” “affordability,” DEI, etc.
These changes would ensure perpetual rule by Democrats, who would no longer have to pretend to be reasonable on any issue.
The Constitution, as we know if, would be shredded.
The entire country would be run by woke mobs like those rioting in Minneapolis and L.A. Only instead of attacking ICE, the mobs would be coming after us—in our churches, homes, and workplaces. At the maniacal whim of some deranged misfit, we could be executed in cold blood like UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, or Charlie Kirk, or like they tried with President Trump. Am I exaggerating?
Anti-Trump extremists, such as Rick Wilson (co-founder of the Lincoln Project, along with alleged pedophile John Weaver), have called Stephen Miller a “killer” who should be hauled before a Nuremberg-style tribunal and tried, convicted, and “dangled” (i.e., hung at a gallows).
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (whose election was funded by George Soros) has vowed to “hunt down” and prosecute ICE officers, just as Nazis were after WWII.
Democrats are promising to conduct a purge of their political opponents. We should believe them. Crazed AWFL podcaster Jennifer Welch (“I’ve Had It”) advocates violent retribution against MAGA men, conservatives, and Christians.
They call us Nazis, fascists, oppressors, “white supremacists,” “Christian nationalists,” and similar terms of demonization. Why? To make us targets. If the Democrats regain power in Washington, D.C., the entire MAGA voting bloc will be hounded like the J6 defendants.
This will make the COVID response, the Biden administration, the 2020 “Summer of Love,” and the persecution by lawfare of President Trump look like a dress rehearsal. America as we know it will end. Forever.
We cannot allow this to happen!
Republicans and patriotic independents need to wake up and support the GOP. Internal divisions and internecine quarrels must stop. Apathy is not an option. The Democrats are the enemy. Unless MAGA’s “silent majority” wakes up and gets engaged, the Democrats’ “army of useful idiots” (discussed next) will prevail, and the nation, on its 250th birthday, will end up like a giant version of Minneapolis, Portland, L.A., or New York City.
B. What does the typical rank-and-file Democratic activist look like?
I recently heard a guest on Fox News refer to the Democrats’ base as an “army of useful idiots.” This is a term coined by Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, which became popular in the 1940s to describe social democrats in alliances with communists. It was heavily used during the Cold War to describe Western intellectuals, journalists, and sympathizers regarded as easily manipulated by the Soviet regime.
This label does not go far enough. What we see in blue cities (not just Minneapolis and Portland, but Nashville, L.A., New York, D.C., and other Democratic enclaves) is a full-blown mind virus that goes beyond the frequently-cited “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” TDS is a head-cold compared with the virulent psychosis afflicting large swaths of the American public. Certain generational cohorts (millennials, Gen Z) and demographic groups (young urban voters, single white women, AWFLs, or “Affluent, White, Female Leftists,” the LGBTQ community, etc.) have surrendered their reasoning capacity to Group Think in a manner indistinguishable from cult followers. They blindly obey; they act based on emotion and dogma rather than logic; and they not only disregard, but try to suppress, any contrary messaging.
They behave like spoiled children throwing a tantrum. Imagine growing up and reaching early adulthood, and never having heard the word “No.”
How did they get this way? There is probably no single explanation. Leftist indoctrination in K-12 and college play a big role. But so does feminist ideology; the toxic nihilism that results when love of country and devotion to God are extinguished; the ruinous effects of social media, exacerbated by ubiquitous smart phones; and living in a coddled bubble in which many chronological “adults” have never experienced scarcity, difficulty, disappointment, or physical or material discomfort. Because they have never had to experience or overcome hardship, they never developed the ability to cope with frustration or “not getting your way.” They are spoiled.
Spoiled people take things such as safety, security, and prosperity for granted, without ever having had to sacrifice, scrimp, save, defer gratification, work hard, persevere, or endure challenges with stoicism and grace. Half the population, in my estimation, are not only not assimilated into our culture as patriotic Americans, they are not even fully-functioning adults. We have many 20-somethings (and even 30-somethings) who live at home with their parents or are not otherwise self-sufficient, have no savings, are not married, have no children, etc. They have no stake in the future, instead spending all their money on travel, entertainment, fashion, convenience, and other indulgences.
These people have never grown up, and don’t want to. Like Peter Pan, they are children at heart, looking to the government to take care of them. They are tenuously connected to the routines of adult like, and therefore are easily “set off” (triggered, like a child throwing a tantrum) when they don’t get their way. In a democracy, citizens will not always get their way. Compromise, and even defeat, are common in political life. Disagreement exists. Living in a pluralistic society means different people will think differently.
In a word, a disturbingly large segment of the polity lacks “character.” Responsible self-governance depends on the very virtues the useful idiots lack.
In short, we have rot and dysfunction in the body politic. As Andrew Breitbart said, politics is downstream from culture. Our culture has gotten progressively worse in recent decades—possibly going back to the 1960s, but is certainly getting worse—and at a rapid pace—since the new millennium.
As a result, beneath the surface of many Americans is a deranged individual—unhappy, maladjusted, spiritually empty, nursing secret grievances, looking for answers, wanting to belong, quick to lash out. In the past, religion, family, love of country, self-reliance, and conformity to bourgeois values filled the void. Not anymore. The guardrails are gone. Without traditional cultural norms, the inner craziness that was once confined to the closet is now out and making up for lost time. Denying the biological difference between men and women is a delusion that the woke mob readily embraces.
Now, the hordes of misfits and malcontents can be easily summoned into action by well-funded organizers. George Soros and other leftist oligarchs finance the infrastructure for the insurrection movement. They have training, paid organizers, communication networks, and coordination worthy of a counter-insurgency operation.
The people pulling the levers have a political agenda—seeking or preserving control, siphoning money to feckless elected officials, creating a feudal structure full of dependent serfs. Some agitators are paid, but mainly the troops are an “army of useful idiots.” Throw in the usual moochers and looters, and fraudsters like the Somalis, and various special interests (trial lawyers, environmentalists, civil rights grifters, unions, government employees, welfare recipients) and you have the Democratic base.
Rene Good, Alex Pretti, the freaks in Portland, the rabble in L.A.—all “useful idiots.”
C. Soft-on-crime judges, the vagaries of the death penalty, and 8th amendment jurisprudence
Let’s begin with the fact that Luigi Mangione carefully planned the murder of health care executive Brian Thompson, tracked him across various state lines to New York City, stalked him and laid in wait, and then ambushed him on a public sidewalk and shot him in the back with a gun equipped with a silencer, after which he attempted a carefully-planned escape. The crime was captured on video, and the evidence against Mangione is overwhelming: fingerprints, ballistics, a manifesto, the murder weapon, etc. It is an open-and-shut case of cold-blooded assassination, warranting Mangione’s execution.
The crime met all the normal definitions of a first-degree murder: premeditation, malice aforethought, etc. The assassin’s spent shell casings contained words indicating his motive: revenge for delaying or denying the payment of insurance claims. Yet a federal judge in NYC, an unfit activist appointed by Biden, has ruled, prior to trial, that Mangione will not face the death penalty. The maximum sentence Mangione can receive is life without parole.
Judge Margaret Garnett concluded that Mangione’s assassination of Brian Thompson was not a “crime of violence” warranting the death sentence, an inquiry the court had the self-awareness to acknowledge was “apparently absurd,” with a result that is “tortured and strange.” The court blamed Supreme Court precedents and the federal statutory language for the absurd result, but other district courts have ruled differently, so this remains the discretionary decision of an activist judge who is soft on crime. Biden’s legacy lives on. (Judge Garnett cited the contrary rulings but concluded that “Respectfully, the Court cannot join this group” of district judges.)
Charges were filed in federal court because New York state law does not authorize the death penalty, and the state court judge inexplicably ruled out a first-degree murder charge (saying that the murder did not qualify as “terrorism”), meaning that the maximum punishment for the 27-year-old killer would be 25 years in prison, instead of mandatory life without parole. This is blue state justice, which is to say no justice at all.
The problem is, federal law has a peculiar definition of capital murder, since most homicides are prosecuted in state court. 18 U.S.C. section 924 (j) requires that the murder be committed with a firearm “during and in relation to” another federal crime (having an interstate nexus), which has to be a felony crime of violence. Judge Garnett found that the “other” crime with which Mangione was charged, “stalking” in violation of 18 U.S.C. section 2261 A, was not categorically a “crime of violence” sufficient to warrant the death penalty.
Clearly, Judge Garnett bent over backwards in her 39-page ruling to find a way to spare Mangione’s life. She should be scorned for the bad decision, which should have been left to the jury (or an appellate court, post-trial) to decide. But the case is being tried in her court only because the state of New York and the state court judge are soft on crime. As a result, a wealthy defendant who is an Ivy League graduate, and a darling of the Left, receives kid-gloves treatment. Mangione has raised over $1.4 million from sympathetic donors to fund his defense. No wonder many Americans have lost faith in our legal system.
Some of the blame for this nonsense must be laid at the feet of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Nothing in the Constitution prohibits the death penalty. Text of 8th amendment: “nor [shall] cruel and unusual punishments [be] inflicted.” The 5th amendment assumes capital punishment.
Yet judicial activism has muddied the waters. Furman v. Georgia (1972) overturned the death penalty, but then the Court changed its mind in Gregg v. Georgia (1976).
Mischief began earlier, in 1958 with Trop v. Dulles, which held that “cruel and unusual punishments” must be determined using “evolving standards of decency.” So much for “originalism.” Thus, the law is now totally subjective.
SCOTUS micromanages the imposition of capital punishment, specifying what crimes qualify (only murder, not rape or other violent offenses), the minimum age and IQ for offenders to be subject to the death penalty, how the statute must be drafted, the manner of execution, and detailed protocols that must be followed for the trial and sentencing of capital defendants. None of these “rules” are embodied in the 8th amendment, or the 5th amendment, which contemplates capital crimes. The Court’s rulings are arbitrary and not supported by the Constitution. The resulting morass invites mischief like Judge Garnett’s absurd ruling.
D. Ditching the American Bar Association
Tennessee Supreme Court is soliciting input on whether to replace the American Bar Association (“ABA”) as the accrediting authority for Tennessee law schools.
Tennessee has six law schools: Belmont, Lincoln Memorial, Nashville, University of Memphis, UT, and Vanderbilt. Two of the six are public; the rest are private.
Only Nashville, which is a night school in operation for over 100 years, lacks ABA accreditation. Nashville is “grandfathered” due to its history and proven track record, but otherwise, in Tennessee and most other states, only graduates of a law school accredited by the ABA are eligible to take the bar exam. Tenn. Sup. Ct. R. 7, § 2.02. Accordingly, the ABA has a monopoly on regulating legal education.
ABA accreditation is important for eligibility to take the bar exam, and for eligibility for federal student loans.
The ABA is as left-wing as the ACLU, if not more so. The original purpose of accrediting law schools was to ensure that they met minimum standards–in terms of facilities, faculty, and curriculum—to produce competent and ethical lawyers.
That mission has morphed into the ABA’s promulgation of accreditation standards that mandate racial quotas in law school admissions and faculty hiring; require speech codes to suppress the free exchange of ideas; dictate DEI and social justice indoctrination in the curriculum and clinical programs, and more. I have written about this for years, urging that the ABA’s monopoly status be terminated. Now, alarmed by the ABA’s Orwellian position that the Equal Rights Amendment should be deemed ratified–despite its expiration, based solely on an incompetent president’s lame-duck edict—other commentators, such as Iowa Solicitor General Eric Wessan, have joined the call.
Eric Wessan writes:
America’s law students deserve better. The venerable ABA has been completely consumed by activists unmoored from their goal. It has become a hyper-partisan organization that publishes articles endorsing filing ethics complaints against the sitting Attorney General for zealous advocacy on behalf of the President of the United States. During an unprecedented multi-year assault on the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court, the ABA has not once issued a statement in defense of Justices Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito. And a quick search of ABA’s website has never issued a statement condemning violence against judges in relation to Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Indeed, the selective commentary on attacks on the judiciary raise serious questions of ABA’s nonpartisanship. The ABA has critiqued statements made by Republicans about “impeaching ‘rogue’ judges.” That article includes a critique of the current Deputy Attorney General. But ABA has not called out Democratic senators that attack even Supreme Court justices — so long as they are Republican appointed. Nor does ABA condemn attacks on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court made by a former U.S. Attorney General.
Even outside the ABA’s ongoing partisan activities, the ABA imposes odd and expensive programs on law school curricula that do not improve the quality of law school. That raises law school prices, and thus increases the cost of access to our justice system. Even worse, ABA tried to impose illegal racist quotas and mandates on law schools until fear of President Donald Trump led them to drop the efforts.
The ABA’s stranglehold on legal education and professional standards must come to an end. Recently, Texas and Florida have admirably taken steps to break free from ABA’s law school accreditation monopoly. Advocates are pressing Ohio to do the same, after embarrassing disclosures that ABA was pressuring Ohio schools to engage in illegal race- and sex-based discrimination to maintain accreditation. They have been supported by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). President Trump and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon can take the first step to free the country, too.
The Tennessee Supreme Court should be commended for considering the elimination of the ABA’s monopoly over the regulation of legal education.
