Tag: state nullification of unconstitutional federal laws

What Will the Revolution Look Like?

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Civil War, Great Divorce, Loosened Federalism, The Big Crack Up, Bill of Rights Sanctuary States?  I hear so many people talk about the changes that are coming.  But nothing I read seems at all specific about what will happen and how it will end up.  And there’s nothing surprising about it.  It’s because nobody really knows what will happen.  So, what do we know?

I think one thing that is crystal clear is that the most progressive 30% of the country despises the most conservative 30% of the country.  And at this point, vice versa.  We also know that the 40% left over in the squishy middle are hopeless idiots that ricochet back and forth from election to election.  Because of this no hope exists that we’ll be able to resolve the differences between the Left and Right through the election process at the federal level.  But we do know that the elites control all the institutions that dictate how we live our lives; the schools, the colleges, big business, the media, etc.

The only way forward that I can see that will move things forward is for the states to put together an agenda of changes that they will drive within their boundaries and change the way life is lived by their citizens.  This is in line with what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida.  He is working with his legislature to defend his citizens from being forced by the federal government to surrender their freedoms.  He has outlawed mask mandates and vaccine mandates and that has been a boon for his state.

But what needs to be done is for the Red States to organize and go after other obnoxious targets.  For instance, almost every college in America is a bastion of woke ideology where normal young people are brainwashed and bludgeoned by Leftist professors and administrators.  Why?  Florida has an enormous number of colleges, about one hundred and thirty of them, and there are millions of students.  Why shouldn’t there be a bill of rights for college students?  The state could regulate the misbehavior of administrators and professors by bringing fines and even jail time in cases where the civil rights of non-leftists are being attacked.  And since these schools are in fact large scale conspiracies of Leftist propaganda, I could see organized crime laws being used to threaten them with a permanent shut down.  That would be something to see.  And beyond that even their use of affirmative action could be attacked at the state level.

I’m aware that the feds would try to intervene.  And that’s where this would have to break new ground.  The states would have to resist any attempts by the feds to intervene.  Not caving to the Justice Department; this would be the revolution.  It’s never been done, except by the Left.  Look at sanctuary cities, marijuana laws.  These are examples of states saying no to the federal law.  This is what the revolution would have to be.

And it’s not just restricted to colleges.  The states can take control of the public schools, the welfare programs, corporate policies on affirmative action, tech companies discriminating against conservatives, obscenity laws, even things as controversial as gay marriage and adoption.  All these parts of life can be addressed by governors and legislatures.  And these things would be wildly popular.  They could even use referendums to gauge the relative popularity of different problems and use this information to decide which initiatives to address first.

Controlling the federal government is still something we can attempt to do.  But in the meantime, waiting for this to happen is a mistake.  The states will have to lead the way and free their people.  That is the revolution we are waiting for.

More Motes and Oxen

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I was on a zoom call with a couple of friends who live in central Massachusetts and they were telling me that the pot business is a howling success.  There are billboards on all the state highways.  The “dispensaries” as the pot shops are known are doing a land office business.  And we discussed how exactly the “growers” managed to protect their crop.  The theory was that although there were probably some crops outdoors, hidden from the view of the populace, mostly the stuff is being grown in locked greenhouses.  And we assumed this means that the “farmers” must have fairly robust security and probably a few guns thrown in for good measure.  One of the guys said that the biggest problem that’s become apparent is that the stuff being sold today is many times more potent than the stuff that used to be sold before legalization.  He mentioned THC levels that were near 90%.  And the upshot of this is psychological symptoms among the users are much worse and much more prevalent than in the past.  Anxiety and paranoia manifest at levels that render the users incapable of normal life.  They can’t keep a job or maintain relationships.

And it just struck me that here is a blue state policy to contrast with their alleged commitment to safety on the COVID front.  They’ll force you to be vaccinated and wear a mask against your will supposedly for your own good but they’ll allow a practice that they know is a mental and physical health threat and also a public safety hazard from the consideration of people driving under the influence and walking among us in a mentally unbalanced state.  In addition, since the FDA still considers marijuana illegal, they won’t get involved in regulating the safety of the pot that’s being sold and so any terrible mistake involving pesticides or other toxins finding its way into the drug cannot be prevented or adjudicated.

So here is the double standard.  They get to decide when freedom is important and when it’s not.  Freedom for me but not for thee.  But this definitely opens up the model for how the red states can change things in their favor.  Pick and choose the places where they will obey or defy federal law.  As an example, Texas needs to close their border with Mexico.  They should build their own wall a mile inside the federal wall.  They should arrest all illegal aliens and jail them until they agree to leave the country and if they come back make their next stay in jail very uncomfortable.  They should force all employers to obey immigration laws under the penalty of massive fines.  If the federal government squawks flip them the bird and continue on with real life.  And there are other things that make sense.  Welfare needs to be tightened up to the point where those who refuse to work should be so hard-up that they decide to leave and go to a blue state like California on their own.  Hell, that could be part of the policy to offer them bus or plane tickets to the blue state of their choice.

So that was what I was thinking about today.  Instead of freedom for thee but not for me let’s make it you live your life your way and I’ll live my life mine.

Putting Things in Perspective – Part 2 – Civil War Analogy

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After discussing the Revolutionary War last time, the next major historical comparison I’d like to look at is the one comparing our situation to the mid-nineteenth century American Civil War.  In this comparison the Left is equated with the historical “North” and the Right with the “South.”

We’ll start with things that do align in this comparison.  The cultural and intellectual elites of the Abolitionist Movement do line up well with the modern Left.  In fact, there is probably a decent number among today’s Woke Left that are direct descendants from the Abolitionists themselves.  And certain historians believe that the culture of New England and its exports to areas like the Great Lakes area and the Pacific Coast states have preserved the viewpoint and authority of the nineteenth century elites from that region of the country.  From that point of view there is a certain direct analogy between the Northern Abolitionist Leadership and the Modern Left.

But let’s look at some of the other factors.  First of all, let’s look at the driving force of the cause.  The Abolitionists wanted to end slavery.  It’s hard to over stress just how popular this cause was.  It was evident to even many Southerners that slavery was an evil that could not be justified by its benefits to the economy.  For a country whose whole existence is expressed in the single word freedom, slavery is anathema.  Therefore, the moral underpinnings of the Civil War were very powerful.  Certainly, the Southern States were able to muster a justification for the practice of slavery but at no time did this justification convince anyone outside of the South and not even everyone inside.  So, the abolition of slavery was a cause that resonated broadly around the United States outside of the Deep South.

But look at the current agenda of the Woke Left.  It is a rag tag grab bag of radical ideas and identity politics grievances that isn’t even rationally self-consistent.  Feminism and even lesbian feminism are at odds with transgender “rights.”  And the BLM agenda of eliminating the police won’t stand scrutiny by other communities like Asians and Hispanics now that they see that it equates to wholesale criminal anarchy.  It is far from certain that even in the “Blue States” that the whole agenda of the radical Left is entirely acceptable.  This is a major difference between the Civil War situation.  The Left’s agenda today is far less popular than the abolition of slavery was back then.

The next consideration is the location of each “side.”  The Confederacy was never able to convince even some of the slave states to join in its revolt.  The border states Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland never seceded.  And even an area of Virginia refused to join and “seceded” from Virginia to become West Virginia and remain with the Union.  Inside the free states there weren’t any large areas that would have joined the South or opposed the abolition of slavery for the most part.

But look at today.  Instead, the Red and Blue States are only an indicator of the majority status of each side in a state.  But geographically we can see that this is really a city versus countryside polarization.  The cities in the Red States are full of Leftists for the most part and even deep Blue States like California and New York have rural areas that are completely red.  This definitely helps our side.  These concentrated populations of Leftists work well when you want to cheat during an election but it doesn’t help much when you are trying to control a population that is diffused over thousands of square miles in some cases.  Controlling the back country especially when it is adjacent to a Red State may turn out to be an impossible job.

And finally in the 1860’s the slave states were so afraid of a Republican holding the White House that they seceded before Lincoln could even assemble his government.  We’ve seen two truly woke administration already.  Obama and now Biden.  And Biden is using all the force of the federal government to destroy our way of life.  But what it seems to show is that determined state leaders can use the state laws to combat these Woke orders and possibly nullify their effects without having to leave the Union.  This is still a preliminary evaluation but I think it is worth seeing if the lessons learned from Sanctuary Cities can be applied to other issues like Second Amendment Rights and First Amendment Freedoms.

So, from the point of view comparison, it seems to me that our side is significantly better off in the present situation than the South was during the Civil War.  And that is definitely a thing to be happy about.

Noem in South Dakota is Going to Have to Make Up Her Mind

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South Dakota’s legislative bodies wrote a law to keep boys and men from competing in school sports as women.  Fearing that the NCAA and their corporate sponsors would punish South Dakota she caved and attempted to neuter the bill at the collegiate level.  That bill has now died in the veto override process.  Noem has supposedly covered the two age groups, college and pre-college, with separate executive orders to achieve the same effect as the original bill and is reconvening the legislature in May to address this issue again.

So, what happened here?  I think the firestorm of criticism that she received from conservatives has frightened her.  She has been rightly applauded for her intelligent and courageous handling of the COVID crisis.  This has raised her national profile to a level where lots of people are mentioning her as in the running for the 2024 republican presidential nomination.  The last thing she can afford to do is look like a waffler on a social conservative hot button issue.  This is very similar to what happened to Mike Pence when he had to walk back the religious freedom law in Indiana when the LGBTQ mafia threatened him.  I think what she’s hoping to do is get a do-over.  I think she knows now there is no way to finesse this thing.  If she takes a strong stand and the federal government comes after her, she’s still better off than just caving ahead of time.  Plus, several states have also signed similar legislation.  Joining with them to come up with a united front to promote their position and maybe brain-storm a common strategy to combat the federal attack is a reasonable approach.

Even if Governor Noem does manage to walk back her earlier cowardice I don’t have confidence that she’ll have the courage it will take to stare down the feds once the guaranteed Supreme Court betrayal occurs.  But it is possible that one of the other governors will have the cojones to tell Washington where to go.  That would be something to see and could act as the first example of state nullification of unconstitutional federal laws.

At this point I think it’s only a fifty-fifty chance that any of these politicos have the grit to stand their ground but at least it shouldn’t take too long before we know the answer.  And from my point of view that’s all we’re looking at here.  We’re waiting to see if there is any leader who wants us to rally around him.  The common people are no match for the KGB.  We don’t have the resources to win a war against a well-armed and well-organized secret police force.  It’s going to take the legitimately elected governor of a state along with the backing of the legislature and people of a state to stand down the FBI when a gangster administration decides to crush us.  That’s what it will take.  But do those things exist anywhere in this country?  I assume we are about to find out.  And once we find out that answer each of us can then make our own decision.

So good luck Kristi Noem.  Choose wisely.  Your political career and a lot more depends on whether you pass the test you are about to take.  You flubbed it the first time but you’re going to get a do-over.  Don’t waste the chance.