Tag Archives: Abraham Lincoln

How Lincoln Created Two New States for Partisan Political Advantage, by Thomas DiLorenzo

Posted on December 14, 2020 | Leave a comment

Lincoln was the true father of centralized government power and statism in America. From Thomas DiLorenzo at lewrockwell.com:

The Democrat party hopes to add Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico as the 51st and 52nd states of the American union.  Since both are completely dominated by Leftist politics and politicians, that would guarantee four more Democrat senators, additional Democrat members of Congress, and additional guaranteed Democrat electoral college votes in future presidential elections.  If they succeed, they may well give up all of their belly aching and complaining about the electoral college and threats of abolishing it.  It will become yet another constitutional rubber stamp of approval for any and all acts of governmental tyranny.

If the Democrats, who I prefer to label Demo-Bolsheviks succeed, they will be following a precedent established by Lincoln and the Republicans during the War to Prevent Southern Independence.  Lincoln first orchestrated the addition of the last slave state to enter the union – West Virginia.  His policy was always that any state could keep its slaves as long as its citizens kept paying federal taxes and obeying Washington, D.C.’s dictates, especially those that called for higher taxes.  West Virginia was explicitly exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation right in the text of the documnt, as were all other areas of the South where the Union Army was in control at the time.  This guaranteed that the Proclamation would emancipate no one.

The way in which West Virginia was created was blatantly unconstitutional, but then so was nearly everything else Lincoln did, from shutting down opposition newspapers in the North, imprisoning newspaper editors and owners, suspending the writ of habeas corpus and mass arresting and imprisoning without due process tens of thousands of Northern-state political dissenters, and committing treason by invading the South.  Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution defines treason as “only” levying war upon “the United States” or giving aid and comfort to “their enemies (emphasis added).  The word “their” signifies “United States” is in the plural, meaning the individual, free and independent states — as they are called in the Declaration of Independence — and not something called “The United States government in Washington, D.C.”  Lincoln’s levying war upon the Southern states was the precise definition of treason in the U.S. Constitution.

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Why the Marxist Left Loves Lincoln, by Thomas DiLorenzo

Posted on July 13, 2020 | Leave a comment

It’s not just that Marxists would approve of many of Lincoln’s policies, but Lincoln had an actual affinity for the work of Karl Marx. From Thomas DiLorenzo at lewrockwell.com:

“No leader of a powerful nation” should allow such a thing as “the dismemberment of the Soviet Union.”

–Marxist “Civil War” historian Eric Foner, The Nation, Feb. 11, 1991

A July 27, 2019 article in the Washington Post by Gillian Brockell was headlined, “You Know Who Was into Karl Marx?  No, not AOC.  Abraham Lincoln.”  Following up on the New York Times’ 2017 weeks-long celebration of the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Post was doing its part to celebrate and promote Marxian socialism by crowing that “the first Republican president . . . was surrounded by socialists and looked to them for counsel.”  The message being conveyed by the Post was that this is what all American presidents should do.  They should listen to and obey the Washington Post, in other words.

Much of Lincoln’s socialilstic “counsel” came from Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, described by the Post as “the newspaper largely responsible for transmitting the ideals and ideas that formed the Republican Party in 1854,” many of which were “overtly socialist.”

It is little wonder that the ideas promulgated by the New York Tribune, the mouthpiece of the Republican Party, were overtly socialist:  Karl Marx himself was a twice-weekly columnist for the paper from 1852 to 1862, contributing over 500 articles.  An April 1957 article in American Heritage magazine entitled “When Marx Worked for Horace Greeley” spoke of how “the organ of . . . the new Republican party, sustained Karl Marx over the years when he was mapping out his crowning tract of overthrow, Das Kapital . . . The Tribune was not only Marx’s meal ticket but his experimental outlet for agitation and ideas during the most creative period of his life.”  Without this financial support, “there might possibly – who knows?—have been no Das Kapital” and maybe even no “Lenin and a Stalin as the master’s disciples . . .”   Much of what was written in The New York Tribune by Karl Marx “went bodily into Das Kapital.”

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Secession Fever in Today’s America: What Would Lincoln Think? by Thomas DiLorenzo

Posted on February 27, 2020 | 1 comment

Lincoln prevented secession in America by going to war, but it’s an idea whose time has come. From Thomas DiLorenzo at lewrockwell.com:

A February 19 article in The Washington Times announced that “Secession Fever Spikes” in five states where “conservatives” are attempting to escape neo-Stalinist policies of the Democrat Party majority there, now that the mask is finally off and the Democrats are the proud party of socialism and omnipotent government.  Long gone are the days when they hid their true beliefs by calling themselves “liberals” and their brand of fascism “The New Deal.”  They are now the party of the Green New Deal, the crazed, Soviet-style government plan to totalitarianize all of American society under the dishonest guise of “saving the planet.”  In other words, they are all card-carrying “watermelons” – green on the outside, red on the inside.

As soon as they took control of the Virginia state government, helped along with mega-donations by billionaire fellow totalitarians Michael Bloomberg and George Soros, among others, they immediately waged political war on the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution.  Their governor, Ralph Northam, is on record in a publicly-recorded video as supporting infanticide in cases where babies survive abortions.  That’s just for starters in the first month of their rule.

Virginia politics is now dominated by the heavily-populated D.C. suburbs composed of hundreds of thousands of deep state bureaucrats, government contractors, and Third World immigrants promised the riches of the American welfare state by the Democrats.  Most of the rest of the counties in the state have declared themselves to be Second Amendment sanctuaries.  Most strikingly, there is a “Vexit” movement whose goal is for those counties to secede from Virginia and become a part of more Constitution-friendly West Virginia.  The governor of West Virginia, Jim Justice, joined with Liberty University president Jerry Falwell, Jr. in a press conference at which they invited the more conservative Virginia counties to secede.  The West Virginia legislature is on board.

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Six Big Lies About Abraham Lincoln, The Slaves and The War, by Chris Leithner

Posted on July 25, 2019 | 1 comment

Napoleon purportedly said that history was a lie agreed upon. You’d be hard pressed to find more agreed upon lies than what passes for the history of Abraham Lincoln. Those who have done their homework and debunked Lincoln for themselves will recognize the truth in the following article, but trigger warning for anyone who still believes the myths. From Chris Leithner at theferalirishman.blogspot.com:

  The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know. Almost everything that Americans in general and Republicans in particular think they know about Lincoln is a toxic mixture of myths, distortions and wicked lies.
          Founded in 1854, the Republican Party rose to prominence and power when its nominee, Abraham Lincoln, won the presidential election of 1860. To this day, many people regard it as the “Party of Lincoln” and historians and the general public have long considered Lincoln, next only to Washington, as America’s greatest president (see also “Rating the Presidents” by Pat Buchanan and “Down With the Presidency” by Lew Rockwell). 
          The first big lie, which is universally believed, is that Lincoln, dubbed the “Great Emancipator” by his cult of worshippers, went to war in order to free slaves. The abhorrence of racial injustice and the desire to abolish slavery played no role in the Union’s determination to strangle the Confederacy in its cradle. What did? One factor was Lincoln’s determination to preserve the Union at any cost – including the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. In 1862, Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley (the leading Northern newspaperman of the day): “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.”
          Similarly, in 1861 Congress resolved that the purpose of the war was not “[to interfere] with the rights or established institutions of those states,” but to preserve the Union “with the rights of the several states unimpaired.” On the day that hostilities commenced at Fort Sumter (12 April 1861), only the seven states of the Deep South had seceded, there were more slaves within the Union than outside it and Lincoln hadn’t the slightest intention to free any of them. Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation in Democracy in America (1835-40) remained true: “The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists.”
          Another factor that motivated war was the Republican Party’s lust (which, with few and brief exceptions, it has retained to the present day) to tax and spend. The North waged war against the South in order to regain the federal tax revenue that would be lost if the Southern states seceded peacefully. Republicans were then, and remain today, a Party of Big Government. In Lincoln’s time, Republicans championed a high (i.e., protectionist) tariff. They used the proceeds – which were laundered through roads, canals, railways, etc. – to dispense lavish corporate welfare to their backers. To Republicans, the fact that tariffs, corporate welfare and the like favoured an anointed few (whose residences, factories, etc., were overwhelmingly in the North) and punished a benighted many (Southerners were mostly “outs” rather than “ins”) was inconsequential. What was essential, however, was that consumers, Southern as well as Northern, subsidise Republicans’ wealthy backers. Southerners’ unwillingness to subjugate themselves to Republicans ultimately drove them to secede.
          In Lincoln’s view, only by keeping the Union intact – by force of arms if necessary – could Republicans’ lust to tax, dispense largesse and build an empire be sated. In his First Inaugural Address (4 March 1861), Lincoln threatened to invade any state that failed to collect federal “duties and imposts.” On 19 April, he rationalised his order to blockade Southern ports on the grounds that “the collection of the revenue cannot be effectually executed” in the states that had seceded.

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Lincoln and Trump: Two of a Kind? by James Bovard

Posted on July 5, 2019 | Leave a comment

Although Lincoln has a nice memorial in Washington, he was a thoroughgoing authoritarian, even more so than Donald Trump. From James Bovard at mises.org;

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President Trump has outraged legions of political opponents with his plan to give a Fourth of July speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A Washington Post columnist frets that Trump’s speech will leave a “stain” that “won’t ever completely wash away.” But before any more teeth-gnashing occurs, we should recognize the surprising parallels between Trump and President Lincoln.

Trump sparked an uproar in 2017 by tweeting derisively about the “so-called judge” who blocked his order severely restricting immigration from seven nations. Twitter was not around in the 1860s so Lincoln never took online swipes at the judiciary. However, when Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled in 1861 that Lincoln had no right to suspend habeas corpus along a railroad corridor, Lincoln ignored his decision. The following year, Lincoln greatly expanded the suspension, resulting in the arrest and military trials of people who had done nothing more than insult the president. Up to 15,000 northerners became political prisoners as a result of Lincoln’s orders.

Trump mortifies the press corps and millions of non-ink-stained wretches when he denounces that the media is “the enemy of the American people.” Lincoln refrained from such rude comments during his four years in the White House. However, on May 18, 1864, Lincoln issued an executive order for “arrest and imprisonment of irresponsible newspaper reporters and editors” after the New York World and Journal of Commerce published an incorrect report on a pending expansion of conscription. Lincoln forcibly shut down 300 newspapers in the North that were insufficiently supportive of military policies and hundreds of editors, publishers, and reporters were tossed into prison without charges.

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The Lincoln Option, by the Zman

Posted on December 2, 2018 | 2 comments

Sometimes you have to break the whole frigging carton of eggs. From the Zman at theburningplatform.com:

After two years in office, Donald Trump finds his presidency at a crossroads. His mode of operation as president has been a continuation of his style as candidate. He says a lot of flippant things about the establishment, many of which are true, but the response is mockery or possibly some pearl clutching. Otherwise, from a policy perspective, the Trump era looks like the Jeb Bush era. The donor class got tax cuts and regulatory reform, while the voters have thus far gotten nothing, other than more of the same.

He can continue down the same path he has been on, reacting to the machinations of his enemies, like a hyper-active version of Richard Nixon, but that promises he will be a one-term president. While the political class ignores him on policy, the Mueller investigation operates like an anaconda wrapped around his administration. It is squeezing the life out of his agenda, by filling the media with salacious nonsense stories and reactions to them, while scaring off serious people interested in joining the administration.

A strange result thus far is that Trump is bad at the thing he was elected to do. That is confront the political class. From the beginning, he has allowed them to push him around and bluff him into bad policy. For example, the Mueller fiasco could have easily been avoided by refusing to appoint the guy. Was the GOP House really going to start impeachment hearings? Would the media be worse on him for not signing off of this ridiculous idea? At every turn, Trump has taken the advice of his enemies.

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He Said That? 11/6/18

Posted on November 6, 2018 | Leave a comment

From Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), American statesman and lawyer who served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865:

Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.

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Political Corpses as Propaganda Props, by Thomas DiLorenzo

Posted on September 3, 2018 | Leave a comment

John McCain and Abraham Lincoln had similarities in life—they were both committed statists—and in death—they were both deified. From Thomas DeLorenzo at lewrockwell.com:

The week-long deification of the late John McCain was quite the deep-state performance:  Three “state funerals”(in Phoenix, D.C., and Annapolis) accompanied by the constant clucking of the “mainstream” media about how the epitome of a deep-state insider — son and grandson of U.S. Navy admirals, mass murderer of Vietnamese peasants, “Keating Five” criminal conspirator, friend of “the right kind” of Middle East terrorists, lifelong government employee whose senate office was ground zero for defense industry lobbyists for the past several decades — is somehow an anti-establishment “maverick.” The televised sobbing of the very appropriately named Senator Jeff Flake was rich, as were proposals to name a government building after McCain and the seemingly endless feigned sorrow in the voices of  television talking heads.

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America’s Most Deified Politician . . . by Thomas DiLorenzo

Posted on February 12, 2018 | 1 comment

Thomas DiLorenzo sees no reason to deify Abraham Lincoln, and a number of reasons to villify him. From DiLorenzo at lewrockwell.com:

. . . has a birthday today that is celebrated throughout the land, especially at neocon think tanks and tabloids.  I speak of course of the man the “Straussian” wing of neoconworld refers to as “Father” Abraham Lincoln.  So I thought I’d offer some reading suggestions as part of today’s birthday celebration.

Lincoln was by far the most hated, despised, and reviled of all American presidents during his lifetime, as historian Larry Tagg documents in The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: America’s Most Reviled President.  His deification was the posthumous work of the Republican Party propaganda machine.

Lincoln was very careful with his language when he explained to the world in his first inaugural address and other speeches that he was willing to enshrine slavery explicitly in the text of the Constitution (with the “Corwin Amendment”), but that he would invade any state that refused to collect the newly-doubled federal tariff tax and send the proceeds to Washington, D.C.  So-called “Lincoln scholars” lie though their teeth about this, in other words.

Lincoln’s invasion of the “free and independent” Southern states, as all states are called in the Declaration of Independence, was the very definition of treason under Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution,which defines treason as “only” levying war upon the United States, or giving aid and comfort to “their” enemy.  The word “their,” signifying the states in the plural, means treason is waging war against South Carolina, Virginia, etc.

Lincoln was the biggest enemy the First Amendment ever had, even worse than John Adams, who enforced the Sedition Act that made criticizing his administration a crime.  Adams only imprisoned a few critics, whereas Lincoln illegally suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus and had his military imprison tens of thousands of Northern-state critics while shutting down over 300 opposition newspapers.  He imprisoned newspaper owners and editors, deported Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, his harshest congressional critic, most of the Maryland legislature was imprisoned, as was the mayor of Baltimore, and he declared that anyone who merely remained silent while his administration was being discussed was guilty of “treason.”

To continue reading: America’s Most Deified Politician . . .

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