Why the American Republic Survived for 250 Years

 

person 2: So , I guess the first question maybe we could discuss is how have we made it in 250 years, this republic, a rare thing historically that a republic could go for so long?

person 1: Well, the secondary reasons are—we had not the primary, but I’ll get over very quickly review the secondary. We had a huge North American continent.

It was richly endowed with natural resources, farmland, etc. We didn’t fragment into European warring states, but we were the size of Europe, but we were one complete nation thanks to people like James K. Polk and [Thomas] Jefferson and other people who saw that we needed to have the whole continent or end up like Europe.

Number two, we had two oceans, so we were protected from what was going on in Asia and Europe. But that is secondary to the Constitution. So we took the Spartan, Cretan and then Roman idea of mixed constitution—a legislative, executive and judicial branch. But unlike some of the mixed constitutions, we put a number of checks and balances in.

So the whole point of it was to slow down radical changes through the president’s power to veto legislation, the Congress’s power to impeach him, the president’s power to pick judicial appointments, the Congress not to approve them, and the judiciary to strike down laws as unconstitutional. And they can impeach—the legislative body can impeach judges. The president cannot appoint people he thinks would be bad judges. There’s—it’s all intricate checks and balances.

Number two is we were the only country to really have a Bill of Rights, so there were certain issues in other countries that have never been up for—I mean, they’re nuances, and everybody reinterprets them, but they’re not up for discussion as far as eliminating them.

The Bill of Rights—the ability not to have your house searched and seized, the right to bear arms, the right not to have to testify against yourself, the right of habeas corpus—that’s all documented.

And then with the amendment system, we have further rights. The other things are more intangible, but that revolution was never a French Revolution.

person 2: One moment, though, just to clarify for the audience, that the Bill of Rights for the United States is the first 10 amendments, and then they flow after that.

person 1: There are 17 other ones that followed, and they’re very hard to pass. You need a two-thirds vote of Congress, and then you need three-quarters of the state legislatures. So unless it’s something like the 18-year-old vote or women’s suffrage or repealing prohibition, it’s very hard to do—to get an amendment.

person 2: And you were saying that it’s not like the French Revolution either.

person 1: No, it’s not like the French Revolution because it was limited. In other words, the colonists were not objecting to British free market capitalism. They were not objecting to the language. They were not objecting to the role of religion.

They were not rejecting—claiming that they wanted the poor to take over from the rich. They were not angry at both the British colonialists and the large landowners like Washington and Jefferson.

So it was basically a one-dimensional political revolution, and it said we want autonomy and to be self-governed.

We do not want to be a colony of Britain and have no say in taxation or representation, et cetera, et cetera. That was a much easier revolution.

But what I’m saying is it kept intact the strengths of the British system, the British Enlightenment. And so when we became a nation, there was Christianity, there was Anglicanism—there was all these religions.

They were all tolerated. Nobody had gone out in the countryside and lynched nuns or beheaded priests as had happened in the French Revolution. There was no year zero. There was no renaming the months, the days. There was no god called Ratio that everybody bowed down to.

There was nothing like—I mean, Thomas Paine was the most radical of the founders, but he was nothing like the Robespierre brothers.

He wasn’t even like [Georges] Danton. He was a much more reasonable person in comparison. So that was a big step—that we kept the traditions of the Anglosphere, except political.

And then there were cultural things that were embedded from the beginning. One of them was that there was no peasantry.

There was no serfdom. Those were European ideas. So Jefferson especially said the country was based on the nuclear family and the independent agrarian—the farm—and that person was self-sustained.

He was autonomous, self-supporting. He could feed his own family from his farm. He could control his own destiny, and these were the ideal citizens then to be entrusted with voting and making their own laws and directing their own affairs.

So it was a republic of virtue, and that stayed through—that in the United States, nobody—I’m not Sir Hanson. You’re not Lady Sami. And we have no class distinctions formally. We have a fluidity of classes. Wealthy people have children that are bad seeds, or they don’t want money, and they get poor. Poor people have children, and they become millionaires.

So there is fluidity, but we are not based on class. We’re not based on race. We champion the middle class, but we don’t institutionalize it. Nobody asks in America, “Where was your father born? How many acres does your grandfather have? What was your parents’ education?” Maybe the East Coast or West Coast elites do, but that’s not American tradition.

And then finally, we’re a nation of emulation, not envy. So we’re not like the British. I’ve said that before in this broadcast. It was the old maxim that if you go to Britain and somebody sees a Bentley, they want to kick it in.

And they come to America, they want to know how much a Cadillac—or maybe now it would be a BMW or something—costs and how you finance it.

And I can remember, when I was a young person, we had no money. We lived in a 1,100-square-foot home. My mom stayed home with us. My dad was a high school teacher initially, and then a junior college teacher, but he was a coach, and he tried to farm on the side.

But we would get in cars when we went to Disneyland or we went up to San Francisco, and my mom insisted we drive through wealthy neighborhoods and not say, “Oh my gosh, look at that. Look at how much money the Gettys have.”

She would say, “Oh wow, I love those cypress trees, the way they’ve done that. That’s a good idea. When we get home, let’s plant some. Or then she would say, I love those colors—that gray and white. I like that match.”

Or she’d say, “Wow, some of those Victorians are tacky. They’re overdone with that gingerbread cut. I don’t want that.” In other words, that was a very common thing.

That’s why the Wall Street Journal has one of its most popular features, Mansions USA, because people love to go in there and look at these beautiful lakes and tennis courts and gables. But then they look at the price—Montecito, 30 million.

It’s not that they can ever buy it, but they get little ideas. So say that they’re in Fresno with a 1,500- or 1,600-square-foot tract house, and then they go there and they look at these places and see how they park their car there. Maybe I can make a little version of it.

So in Europe, I don’t think that would be the reaction. That would be the aristocracy, and you’d say that we should burn those houses down.

And I’m kind of worried because that is sort of the attitude of Los Angeles to Pacific Palisades—not that this was a great asset to have these beautiful homes, but, “Oh, they lost their home. Too bad. Let’s not rebuild them.”

When we get to be an envious country, we won’t succeed.

And by the way, when we used to nation-build, or any country used to nation-build, they never said to Iraq or Afghanistan or South Korea or Vietnam or Europe itself after World War II, “We’ve got a really good system for you. It’s called a Senate, a lower house, a Supreme Court, a president and a Bill of Rights, and here’s how you do it with a two-party system.”

No. They have a parliamentary system because it’s much easier.

Ours is a very complicated system. It’s very hard to reproduce. It’s designed on one principle: people are no blank good.

And I think many of the founders said if we were angels, we wouldn’t need a constitution. But it assumes that unlike the French Revolution, Rousseau—you know, we’re all born into chains—that we’re not.

We’re all born evil, bad, fallen—the Christian notion—and we need to be redeemed. We need to curb our appetites and our excesses, and one of the things we have to curb is the desire to power and to tyrannize others.

So we’re going to make a constitution where you cannot have a dictator. And they can say all they want about Trump. The closest we’ve ever had was FDR. He had four terms, but he did things that are just unthinkable.

You know, go to The New York Times and say, “If you write another bad op-ed about me, I’m going to pass antitrust legislation or inheritance taxes that’ll ruin your family.”

So it’s a wonderful system, but it’s very intricate and complex, and it requires an educated populace, and we don’t seem to have that to the degree sufficient anymore.

So I’m kind of worried. That’s how we survived for 250 years.

Breaks Down the Decline of Race Relations in America

 

Recently, we’ve had a lot of discussion about racial relations, and the consensus from left to right seems constant and uniform that they’re getting much worse. 

There were two or three iconic events this last week that emphasized that pessimism. One was the Juneteenth celebration in Chicago, which commemorated the official end of slavery in the 1860s and is now our newest national holiday. 

It ended up with 39 people wounded, seven dead, semiautomatic gunfire. It was almost like a war zone. The mayor of Chicago, Mayor [Brandon] Johnson, did not comment on what was the cause of this or the pathologies that would lead people to slaughter. This was entirely 100% Black-on-Black crime, but he was talking about illiberality and discrimination against trans people when his city is under siege. 

At the same time, or prior to that, was the Karmelo Anthony murder, where Karmelo Anthony, a young Black teenager at a track meet, ventured over to the opposing side by intent, carrying a knife in his backpack, went into a tent where the entire group there was from the opposite team that he was playing, and then said he would not leave when asked 10, 12 times, and finally said, “Somebody,” he said, “push me out or try it and you’ll find out.” 

And a young man by the name of [Austin] Metcalf slightly touched him, and he stabbed him in the heart, killed him, ran away, and the result was the Black community has championed Karmelo Anthony. Not all of the Black community, but a sizable portion, and it’s gotten to the point where they believe that he was justified because the so-called white community doesn’t understand Black pride, and you don’t interfere with the space, et cetera. 

In other words, ignoring all the details that he deliberately ventured over to cause a confrontation which could have been settled peacefully if he just left. But the reaction was what was disturbing. 

And then in addition to that, there was the Caitlin Clark incident. She is, remember, the superstar of the Women’s National Basketball Association, and she came out of a fantastic college career. 

She’s very tall, kind of thin, not frail, but not muscular, but she’s a wonderful outside shooter. And somebody with that height and the ability, who’s quick, and the ability to pass has revolutionized the Women’s Basketball Association. And the result is she is gaining, not just for herself and her team, but for the entire league, enormous increases in revenue. 

Some people believe that she’s responsible for 25% in increased revenues. So all the players are getting raises. They have increased stature. They have bigger audiences. They have bigger ad opportunities. They fly not passenger class commercial anymore. It’s been a win-win. 

And yet systematically Black players, women have been trying to hurt her. 

And the most recent incident was that we had a Black player from the opposite team knock her down, and then when she tried to get up, another player may have tried to stop her, but one player took her fist and hit her in the neck or pressed her in the neck, and there were also a knee involved, and it was pretty clear that there was a deliberate attempt. 

And this is one of, according to a lot of news accounts, 10 or 12 incidents where there has been flagrant fouls issued because the players are trying to hurt her. 

So what was the commentary? The commentary was, well, the teams in the WNBA are mostly Black. They’re mostly, to be candid, lesbian, and Caitlin Clark is white and straight, and therefore, this supposedly racist audience has flocked to the WNBA to cheer her on in a divisive standard. 

There’s no evidence that that is true, but the reaction from the Black women and the majority of them, probably not so, but from a sizable minority of them, is to hurt her and damage her even though they know that that is not in their interest. 

I’m gonna talk about that a little bit later, but when you add up all of these incidents, you get the impression that something has gone wrong. 

And usually, the standard exegesis is given the traditions of slavery that have been gone for 160-plus years, Jim Crow in the South, and then this new term systematic racism, white privilege, etc., etc., then there’s a justified rage. 

But that rage and what I just outlined were way in the distant past. 

We’re talking about the present and how the Black community can flourish like every other community, given it has shocking crime statistics, shocking divorce statistics, shocking illegitimacy, single-family parenthood, etc. 

And how did we get here? How did we get to this mess? 

I think we were making pretty good progress in the ’80s and ’90s with a whole new generation of Black politicians, Black athletes, Black actors, Black everybody. 

And there was a growing sense that race was incidental, not essential to who we are. It was essential in a multiracial society. After all, we don’t want to end up like India or Indonesia or Brazil, where we’re racially obsessed, or we have caste, or we have classes. It doesn’t work in a democratic society. 

But Barack Obama came in and said he was going to heal all of us in 2009. He did just the opposite. 

Almost immediately with the Louis Henry Gates incident, the beer summit, he emphasized race. He said things that were not true, that the police systematically are more likely to shoot young Black men who are unarmed versus white men, given the incidence of who is arrested. 

Statistics do not bear that out. 

Pretty soon, affirmative action, which was a black/white solution of some 60 years to past discrimination, morphed into diversity, equity, inclusion. 

And under Obama, he had this vision that anybody who was not white… Of course, he was half white, but he never identified as white. 

He always identified sort of like the one-drop rule of the old Confederacy. If you had one drop of non-white blood, then you were non-white. 

But he identified as non-white, but he said that 30% of the country, that was the basis of DEI, these would be immigrants from India, immigrants from Mexico, people from China, Japan, had a sort of updated Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition, and they had legitimate grievances for past sins against the 70 or 65% white population. 

So in all of these cases, the universities and the political system and the bureaucracies institutionalized that anger and that binary. 

It comes out of Marxist ideology that there is no middle, no middle class. There are oppressed, oppressors, victimized, victimizers. 

But this was new because they substituted race for class. 

This is not sustainable because we are now in the seventh decade of the civil rights movement. 

We’ve had about $25 trillion invested in Great Society programs. We’ve had set-asides. We’ve had affirmative action. We’ve had theme houses, separate graduations, separate dorms, separate safe spaces. 

We’ve had a whole litany, and what’s happening now is there is an identifiable weariness, fatigue with all of this. 

It’s not just from so-called white people. It’s  not from racists. It’s from the Black middle class, and you can see the Black middle class is getting very angry because they are more prone to encounter Black youth, and they are the victims disproportionately of Black crime compared to other minority groups. 

And there’s conservatives in the Black community who are now looking at what Tom Sowell, Shelby Steele, Glenn Loury have warned us for years, and that is during the worst moments of segregation, the Black community had created paradigms of success, nuclear families, fathers present in the household, strict discipline for the children, like all other communities. 

And that was sort of wiped out or at least crippled during the Great Society where the government replaced the parents. 

So where are we now? 

If Black politicians of the left continue to not look at what’s causing these shootouts or this racism from Black people, then they’re only gonna further alienate the majority of Black people who want truth and they want change within the Black community. But more importantly, they’re gonna alienate 70% of the population who does not agree with them. 

Hispanics, Chinese Americans, Asian Americans, white Americans do not believe that society forces Black people to shoot each other or to commit crimes at higher rates than other communities. 

That solution has to come from the Black community, and it’s not any longer a result of historic transgressions or injustice more than a century and a half ago. 

That’s not the answer. The answer is here and now, and it’s a self-help, self-discipline within the Black community, and calls for such reform are coming from the Black community. 

The New Socialists—Elite, Ungrateful, and Toxic as Ever

 

Win some blue-state and blue-city races, and the cocky new socialist Jacobins believe that they have either already taken over the Democratic Party or will soon absorb it. And in reaction to these new swarms, an increasingly terrified and ossified old Democrat guard either limps away from the hive or invites them in to take over more.

It is fascinating but ultimately depressing to watch old-style Democrats say or do anything to avoid the new mob of Robespierres. Democrat candidates who recently begged for a Schumer/Pelosi/Jeffries endorsement now are telling them to get in line at the guillotine.

Jewish American Democrats are terrified that what happened to the primaried and defeated Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, an arch-Trump hater, could befall them. Goldman’s obnoxious showboating hatred of Trump and championing of neo-socialist agendas offered no defense against the Jacobins’ antisemitism and hatred of Israel.

A number of Jewish Democrat candidates, like wannabe California congressman Scott Wiener, are backing off from Israel and now join the “genocide!” mob. Wiener hopes that the throng will reward his new anti-Israel position by overlooking the now inconvenient fact that to the antisemitic Democrat base he is still Jewish.

Some of the rich, likewise, think they can escape the guillotine—the various proposed taxes on “billionaires” and “millionaires” on their net worth or unrealized capital gains or plans to confiscate private properties deemed “not in the people’s interests.” They will either flee to Florida or join the mob and hope their donations spare them from the blade.

The hard socialist agenda, which lacks even 50 percent popular support, is often recognizable despite efforts to conceal it until after elections. Given the clickbait lunacy of these socialists’ mindset, their true views often trickle out from prior social media posts, hot mics, leaks, and occasional temper-tantrum outbursts (cf. [Zohran] Mamdani’s “monsters” or [James] Talarico’s “I hate Christianity” or [Graham] Platner’s litany of unapologetic racist, antisemitic, and misogynistic outbursts).

In general, the socialist challenge is to “fundamentally transform America” into a statist, inert redistribution machine—nuttier than socialist Europe, a prescription for North Korean-style poverty, and completely unrecognizable to the Founders and most contemporary Americans. As far as we can distill, here are their agendas:

1. The new demography

Open borders, massive, unaudited new immigration ending the distinction between mere residence and citizenship.

2. Dismantling the “system”

Packing the court, destroying the Electoral College, ending the filibuster, bringing in new left-wing states, defunding the police, ensuring same-day registration/voting, no voter ID, foreign nationals residing here being eligible to vote.

3. The Islamization of America

Ending America’s traditional friendship with Israel and realigning the U.S. with the West Bank, Hamas, Hezbollah, and their autocratic and illiberal, terrorism-sponsoring Muslim regimes. Restoring massive USAID subsidies to fund left-wing takeovers abroad and mainstreaming now overt harassment of Jews at home.

4. Old Communism

The government takeover of housing and utilities, targeted expropriation of private property, new punitive taxes on net worth and unrealized capital gains. Wild talk of nationalizing airlines and all health care.

5. Statism

Massive new entitlements, free college, canceling $1.7 trillion in student loans, more federal acquisition of private lands, rent freezes.

6. Reparations

Compensation for victims of alleged “white privilege,” institutionalization of radical identity politics, and racial, ethnic, and sexual orientation chauvinism. Third world hatred of supposed white oppressors, justifying reparatory preferences for the non-white “oppressed.”

7. Globalism

Pledging solidarity with socialist/communist movements abroad while despising Western civilization in general and the U.S. in particular.

Once “Mayor” Zohran Mamdani took control of New York, he began promising to confiscate rental properties from landlords and to focus on “white” neighborhoods, and he no longer disguised his innate hatred of Jews.

Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia dropped her moderate false face and began radically ramming through hard-left executive orders to ensure more DEI, higher taxes, and anti-ICE hysterics. After being elected, Seattle Mayor Katie Willson gushed “bye-bye” to the billionaire entrepreneurs who are fleeing from Washington state’s new “millionaire’s tax.” She mocked their departure and cared not a whit that her now-socialist city would further descend into a West Coast Detroit or Baltimore.

Socialists hide their revolutionary anger with banal pleasantries. We have become well accustomed now to the “socialist smile,” emblemized by the grinning Mamdani or the faux-happy face of James Talarico. Usually, the new touchy-feely socialists chuckle loudest when a rare reporter presses them on their past lunatic harangues, which are then laughed off as hysterias from paranoid right-wing minds.

Sometimes socialists embrace the hard commissar style, like the perpetually venomous Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, who ridicules journalists, lies flagrantly, and takes back none of his hate-filled rants.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-MI, perpetually screams rather than talks, usually venting her monotonous hatred for the Jewish state. Her latest socialist champions are the Antifa criminals just sentenced to long prison sentences for their conspiracy to murder ICE officers.

The more Ilhan Omar is caught trafficking in antisemitic tropes, denying alleged immigration fraud schemes, or filing preposterous federal financial disclosure forms, the more defiant her shouts of “racist” become.

The newly emerging socialists, like recent congressional nominees Darializa Avila Chevalier or Analilia Mejia, can never explain why their parents left socialist paradises in Latin America to come to cutthroat capitalist America.

Nor do they explain to us why and how such a supposedly toxic, racist nation would extend such generous scholarships and DEI preferences to both. They suffer from the Joy Reid/Ilhan Omar/Rashida Tlaib/AOC socialist syndrome: parents flee socialist paradises of indigenous peoples to ensure their children might thrive in a settler/colonialist and capitalist U.S. whose magnanimity they interpret as proof of guilt that is therefore to be reciprocated not with gratitude but with ever more venom.

And once the second-generation socialists joined the privileged elite classes of America, these boutique radicals decided to tear down the very system that nurtured them, without ever expressing a wish to return to the socialist paradises of their parents’ homelands.

What drives the sheer hatred of the new upscale socialists, and why are they in vogue now?

There are three constants in all these new socialists, as we have seen recently from the recent nationwide primary elections, as well as the daily street theater.

One, they hate the United States—loathe its foundation, hate its maturation, and despise the current American nation. They detest especially the middle classes, who lack both the romance of the dependent poor and the supposed “refinement” and “culture” of their own elite socialist aristocracy.

And the more they demagogue “white privilege” and “white supremacy,” the more they feel that the river of exemptions, set-asides, preferences, and special considerations will flow to them from a supposedly guilty nation.

The socialists’ hatred of America is becoming clearer as middle America embraces the 250th anniversary of the nation, highlighted by throngs of World Cup tourists who cannot praise highly enough the decency, amicability, and prosperity of America between the coasts.

So, what is a perennial socialist PhD candidate, or a failed “community organizer,” or NGO flack to do when millions happily suffer from “false consciousness” and have failed to listen to their Marxist handlers?

The socialist architects of the current Jacobin takeover see no contradiction in that, like moths harkening to flames, they cannot get enough of the American good life, conspicuous consumer consumption, and merit badges of success like their Ivy League-branded kids, letters and titles after their names, and the right zip code for their first and second homes.

Every socialist buffoon reminds us almost daily of Alexis de Tocqueville’s droll warning that most people would prefer everyone to be absolutely equal and worse off than all better off, but with some better off than themselves.

The socialists’ hatred of America is also revealed in their envy. Unlike the poet Hesiod’s notion of a “good” envy—embodied in the American tradition of emulation and admiration of those richer than themselves—they buy into the “bad” envy of wanting to destroy those who are brighter, more successful, richer, and more essential to America than themselves, whether an Elon Musk, a Larry Ellison, or a Jeff Bezos.

Second, socialists still have little current power other than their control of institutions such as K-12 education, academia, the media, foundations, the bureaucracies, the corporate boardrooms, professional sports, entertainment, and popular culture.

Perhaps they wish to end up like the lifelong government employee, Bernie Sanders, who for a half-century shook his two upraised fists at America, screamed at the greed, and ended up with three homes and membership in the millionaire class.

Socialists and communists have no confidence in winning over the majority of the American people, at least outside blue-city and blue-state districts. Hence, their efforts to change balloting laws, destroy the border, import angry, poor, new constituents, stage violent street confrontations, and either celebrate or contextualize assassinations from the attempts on [Donald] Trump to the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Sane Democrats would reexamine 2024 and conclude the party was far too left-wing and the antidote was a return to the winning formulas of Bill Clinton. But unhinged socialists and communists would claim that 2024 was lost because they were not far-left enough. So we are to believe that Americans scared of Harris’s poorly disguised radicalism can be won over by scaring them even further? A communist in 2028 can win over America when a socialist in 2024 could not?

Third, Donald Trump has driven the Left so crazy that they have gyrated from Obama’s four-mansion socialism to unapologetic hardcore Trotskyism. Why? Their pathological hatred transcends Trump’s background, his appearance, his accent, his tweets, and even his appeal to the despised “clingers, irredeemables, deplorables, chumps, dregs, and garbage.”

Of course, Trump is a conservative, so he suffers the same left-wing slurs of “fascist” and “Nazi” that met Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. But in his second term, Trump, quite unlike most Republican presidents, is not addressing just symptoms but also the causes and fuel of the socialist project.

Trump did not just jawbone the “fake news” but cut off subsidies to NPR and PBS, suing the media when they deliberately engaged in baseless character assassination. He did not just close the border but began deporting the criminal cohort of Biden’s 10 million illegal entrants, sought to end birthright citizenship, made would-be refugees apply for entry in their home country, ended catch-and-release, and will wall off or electronically secure the entire southern border from the Pacific to the Gulf of America.

He did not just rhetorically critique DEI; he banned it from the federal bureaucracy. Unlike past Republicans, Trump did not merely critique elitist campuses; he leveraged them to behave like normal people–taxing endowments, banning racist DEI protocols, prohibiting grant surcharge scamming, and demanding they abide by the Bill of Rights. He slashed the left-wing USAID money machine rather than just whining that it subsidized America’s worst critics abroad.

In other words, the socialists are enraged not just because they despise the U.S. and lack the power to turn America into Cuba or because they have not yet stabbed, poisoned, shot, decapitated, or blown up the hated Trump, as their followers, celebrities, and a few of their leaders have so often boasted.

The real rub is that Trump is their flip side—not a revolutionary but a counterrevolutionary. He seeks to overturn root and branch the entire 100-year progressive project and ensure America’s insidious slouching toward socialism ends with his term—for good. The more they brag about our collective socialist tomorrow, the more Trump incessantly dismantles socialism today.

So far, they haven’t stopped him yet—but their lidless eyes never close.

The Legal Reality of Birthright Citizenship and the Supreme Court’s Defection

 

person 2: Your thoughperson 1ts on this birthright citizenship decision by the Supreme Court?

person 1: Well, what the minority of [Clarence] Thomas, [Samuel] Alito, [Neil] Gorsuch, and, to a certain extent, [Brett] Kavanaugh—he had a qualified dissent—was that they are originalists, and they said if you look at the Fourteenth Amendment, it came in the aftermath of the Civil War and the increasing pacification of Native American tribes.

So what are we going to do with people who were traditionally not considered citizens of the United States? And so we said if you were a former slave and your parents were here, then you were a citizen; i.e., you didn’t just come in.

A court case sometime later reinterpreted that as anybody born here could be a citizen, but it emphasized the original wording of the amendment that says, “and not subject to the jurisdiction of another country.” But, in fact, everybody knows that if you come in here and you’re a foreign national, you are subject to the jurisdiction of another country.

What do I mean by that? I mean if Mexico has an extradition or a hold on somebody and they come in here, and they come to us and say, “We’re going to extradite him back to Mexico as a Mexican national,” we say, “Okay.” If Mexico says Victor is going to be extradited, I’m not subject to their jurisdiction.

And so, to simplify things, every single person knows three things about this.

Number one, it was never the intent—never the intent—of the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment to give automatic birthright citizenship.

Number two, everyone knows it is widely abused and not sustainable. People are flying in from China in their third trimester, having a baby, and flying back with the baby so that that baby—who might not know English or anything about the United States—at any time in his or her life, if things get bad in China, can come over here or can come over here and sponsor their children. The same is true south of the border.

So everybody knows it’s an unsustainable, crazy idea that has greenlighted a very pernicious habit of coming here in your third [trimester].

Three, everybody knows while there are a number of nations that technically allow it, usually they require both parents—we don’t—to be citizens, or at least one.

So if you come into the United States and you’re born on this—you know, most countries, I think the majority, require either one parent or two to be a citizen.

And if you’re born in France, you can only be a French citizen if one of your parents is French. Some require two, but it’s not the norm. It’s not that it doesn’t exist anywhere else, but it’s not the norm for a person to be born here to two foreign nationals.

Born here in the United States—or anywhere—it’s not the norm.

A lot of people say, well, a lot of Latin American countries are doing it. But, yes, it’s still not the norm.

So just to recap: Everybody knows it was not the intent of the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment to have this “anchor baby” malady we have.

Number two, we know it’s not sustainable because we’re handing out citizenship to people—we have no idea who they are. They have no affinity with the United States. The parents don’t. They can leave.

Number three, most countries—not all, but most countries—understand that and don’t do it.

So then the question is why, in a conservative court with a 6-3 majority, would you have two justices defect—Amy Coney Barrett, and John Roberts?

That, I think, is a political decision. I think that they understand that this is, right up with the Dobbs case, one of the most controversial cases that would radically change things immediately.

It would tell the Dreamers, for example—not all of the 20 million—but it would say to some Dreamers who are now in their 30s or 40s, you came when you were two, and so you’re not a citizen, but you were born here.

You’re not a citizen. You think you’re a citizen. You’re not.

I shouldn’t say Dreamers. I should say a lot of immigrants right now, as we’re talking, have parents who are either illegal or legal aliens, and they will be born immediately, and now they’re going to be told, “You’re not a citizen. You have no right to be here unless you apply for a green card or something.”

So I think the court, like in the case of abortion, they could outsource it to the states so they could get the heat off them. They can just say, “You know what? We’re not banning or we’re not approving abortion. Under our federalist system, we’re allowing regional control.”

They can’t with this. It’s going to be a fundamental change, and we have 53 million immigrants here, and we have a million coming every year, and the Democratic Party would go ballistic.

So I’m just conjecturing. I have no evidence, but I think that in their way of looking at saving the court’s reputation—not allowing it to be viewed as biased, perception-wise—they were going to rule in favor of the left on this issue, and they were going to rule in favor of the right on the trans issue and say that states, locales, regions, and organizations have a perfect right to say if you’re not a biological female, you’re not going to compete in female sports.

And that was controversial.

The problem with all of this is that’s not the purpose of the Supreme Court: to adjudicate what’s politically feasible or tolerable.

Number two, [Elena] Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and [Sonia] Sotomayor—they don’t defect. They’re lockstep.

They would be dead in Democratic circles. They wouldn’t be able to go speak. The left—the socialist, the Democratic-socialist-communists now—they’re intolerant.

They would not, if Sotomayor or Kagan voted for this, all their speaking invitations would be withdrawn. They would be persona non grata.

And so they stay that way.

They’re enforced by—the Democrats enforce cohesiveness and unanimity.

We don’t on the conservative side. So we get these constant defections.

And we’re always told that they’re to save the court or the reputation of the Supreme Court or not to be partisan. But this is not a partisan issue. This is something that affects the well-being of the United States.

Then they criticized Trump—I think Kavanaugh did, but others on the left—and said that he had issued an executive order stopping it, which precipitated the lawsuit.

And he can’t do that.

And they cited evidence where you have constitutional edicts in the Constitution—or by way of an amendment—that cannot be overturned by a presidential order. They need an act of Congress or maybe even another amendment, which is about impossible because you require three-quarters of the state legislatures and, I think, two-thirds of Congress.

But what they’re missing here, I think, is when they are saying you want to change the law, you have to bring either an amendment or maybe an act of Congress.

And the conservatives are saying we don’t want to change the law—not at all. We want you to obey what is written in the law.

The law says that if you were born in the United States and you’re subject to the jurisdiction of another country, you’re not going to be a citizen.

And everybody knows that if you come across the southern border from Venezuela and you’re here and Mr. Chávez or Mr. Maduro—or whoever the government is—says, “I want you extradited because you’re a citizen,” that will be adjudicated.

Nobody will doubt that.

And so what I’m getting at is the conservatives were saying, well, we don’t need an amendment. We just need an act of Congress to enforce the law or something like that.

The other thing is, very quickly, it wasn’t too handled by conservatives. All I think they should have said is we just want reciprocity.

If China allows somebody to be born in China to be an automatic citizen of the People’s Republic, OK, maybe we’ll extend the same.

What they’re saying is we have been taking on tariffs, technological appropriation, all of these issues, and we’re taking on birthright citizenship.

So any country that does not allow birthright citizenship whose people come over here and take advantage of our allowance shouldn’t do that.

If they did something like that and broadcast that fact, I think they would have gotten a lot more support.

More Antifa Terrorists Were Just Sentenced in Texas

 

A little over a week ago, several Antifa terrorists were sentenced to a collective 450 years in prison. One of them, the convicted ringleader of the 2025 ambush of an ICE detention facility that saw a law enforcement officer get shot, received a century behind bars. The shortest sentence was 30 years.

Antifa and their Leftist allies in the Democratic Party were not happy about these sentences. They really believed they were above the law, and are threatening the federal judges who put their comrades behind bars.

More Antifa terrorists were sentenced today. Andy Ngo, the independent journalist who's reported on Antifa for years, says there was crying in the courtroom and that one Antifa convict attempted suicide before sentencing.

Seven more convicted members of a North Texas Antifa terror cell were sentenced Wednesday in federal court, less than two weeks after one of the convicts allegedly attempted to kill herself while in custody.

U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman and Chief U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor handed down the sentences in Fort Worth following last week’s 450-year prison sentence, a historic punishment of the Antifa group’s first batch of trial defendants.

With the exception of Ines Soto, all of Wednesday’s defendants had accepted plea agreements before trial.

Ngo reports that the seven Antifa terrorists received sentences ranging from 22 months to 50 years. Ines Soto, who did not accept a plea agreement, was sentenced to 50 years. The other six defendants did accept plea deals. Their sentences are:

• Nathan Baumann — 22 months
• Joy Gibson — 15 years
• Rebecca Morgan — 15 years
• Lynette Sharp — nine years
• Seth Sikes — six years and ten months
• John Thomas — nine years

Another defendant, Susan Kent, had her sentencing rescheduled to next week. Ngo reported that defendant Rebecca Morgan tried to harm or kill herself prior to sentencing, but no additional records were available. Of the 16 defendants, at least a quarter identify as trans, but they are all being housed in a facility matching their biological sex.