Is It Time to Take a Page from Abraham Lincoln? – PJ Media

It is well-known that Abraham Lincoln launched an invasion without consulting Congress as the Constitution stipulated, but what is less well-known is his instructing his police to imprison thousands of dissident Northerners, lettres de cachet flying fast and furious; suspending the writ of habeas corpus; arresting critical newspaper editors and publishers and shutting down their telegraph communications; using troops to intimidate voters; remanding dissenting “copperheads” to Fort Lafayette, an institution earmarked for political prisoners; and compelling the judiciary to adjudicate on his behalf — for the most part, the judiciary complied. As we find in Roy Basler’s The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln was even ready to imprison any citizen who had the temerity to remain silent and not support his war aims. After all, Lincoln had a war to fight.

When we survey the American scene today, there can be little doubt that President Trump also has a war to fight, a covert and widespread theater of hostilities which many consider a de facto civil war that has not been officially formulated as such. But it exists. The leftist political virus has been active at least since the time of “progressivist” (his word) educator John Dewey in the 1920s. We know that after 1945, the U.S. permitted the entry of the anti-Nazi, German socialist/Marxist Frankfurt School of scholars into the universities, who abetted the leftward trend in America’s political and academic communities. Joe McCarthy’s so-called “Red Scare” in the first half of the 1950s was both real and problematic, and led to his eventual castigation in the Senate and the press as a drunken red-baiter. But I submit that McCarthy was largely on track.

By the 1960s’ youth revolt, under the tutelage of Herbert Marcuse and his essay on repressive tolerance in particular, socialism had begun to spread infusorially in American political culture, sometimes violently. In the 1980s, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the America Mind documented the capitulation of the academic elite and much of the middle class to the counter-cultural revolution — now the cultural mainstream. In 2008, communist sympathizer Barack Obama, whom Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA, trained, was elected with his “we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America” speech and his “hope and change” spiel foremost in the mind of the electorate. Under Obama, America had approached the precipice to the dissolution of the republic.

To deny that a long-prepared but clandestine civil war is now in progress is the height or depth of folly. The only reason it appears stealthy to many is that a significant portion of the public, under the malign but influential shadow of the media, the universities, the “social justice” and woke activists, and the Democratic Party refuse to confront the facts manifestly at hand in the halls of power, the schools, and in the streets. Others, of course, simply do not want to admit the obvious. Ignorance and fear play their role.

Yet the evidence is indisputable that a coherent and sweeping assault on the American traditional fabric and social cohesion is taking place, as if installing the teachings of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci’s (and Rudi Dutschke’s) “long march through the institutions.” Gramsci adopted the physical “Long March” of Mao’s Communist Army as a metaphor for the protracted effort to conquer an enemy’s culture and dominate its public and political agencies. And he has been mainly successful. To mention just a few examples that will be familiar to everyone:

• the red/green offensive of the climate alarmists;
• the COVID dictatorship that deceived the people with manufactured fear;
• the advance of socially destructive feminism with its roots in Marx and Engels;
• the unchecked spread of violent rhetoric by partisans of the left;
• the growing spate of killings and assassinations;
• the infiltration of the southern border by millions of illegal migrants from Third-World nations;
• the legal immigration of people from the Third World backwaters who do not assimilate;
• the domestic attack on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials working to deport illegals and foreign criminals;
• the civilizational undermining both furtively and manifestly by the multiplying Islamic cohort intent on carrying out the Muslim imperium announced by Mohammed;
• the eruption of black violence against whites;
• the rogue judiciary assiduously frustrating the president’s executive authority;
• the malevolent effects of globalist institutions such as the United Nations, the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization on national sovereignty;
• the vast media outlet for leftist organizations and political parties’ endless violation of the Charter of Journalist Ethics;
• Marxist indoctrination in the Department of Education, the schools and universities — as Senator Tom Kennedy recently said, “If we’re going to clear up the water in the education system, it’s time to get the Marxist pigs out of the creek”;
• and most alarmingly, the socialist mafia that goes under the name of the Democratic Party, which represents neither the country nor its deluded constituents, but is the enemy within the gates.

This is an expurgated list; much more could be added, but it makes abundantly clear that the American republic is under sustained siege from inside its own borders, that a veritable but undeclared offensive is in progress with the obvious purpose of eroding and ultimately annihilating America from within.

The question is: what is to be done? The left has hobbled Trump by tarring him with the demonic stigmata of “Hitler” and “dictator,” thus preventing him from taking profoundly appropriate measures and acting with Lincolnesque decisiveness. Trump is a brilliant and effective leader, but his range of power-projection is regrettably diminished. His “reverse immigration” plan to “permanently pause migration from Third World countries” is a good start, but there’s another 90 yards to go.  

What is no less troubling is Trump’s ethical code as the nation’s leader, abiding by every judicial ruling regardless of how corrupt, disingenuous and constitutionally illegitimate it may be, while his legitimate agenda is repeatedly being stalled. These rogue jurists whom Obama and Biden appointed need to be stopped in their tracks, precisely as Lincoln would have done. Also disturbing is Trump’s tendency to waste too much time playing verbal table tennis with his adversaries, when more aggressive action is needed.

After a claque of six Democrats published their call on the military to disobey executive orders, Trump correctly said their actions were “seditious behavior from traitors,” and suggested the punishment in “the old days” was death, adding the “modern day is a lot softer.” Like many in the media, the Sacramento Bee, to cite only one instance, considers such subversive speech that the left practices to be a lawful expression of the First Amendment. That is another illustration of the problem we are facing. The Democrat Six are not ordinary citizens, or vocal dissenters claiming a charter right. They are members of an official party with legal prerogatives and political ascendancy, advising the military to commit insubordination. They are indeed engaging not only in delinquent, but felonious behavior, and those who support them are accessories after the fact, including the media. They are all liable.

The important question is: What would Lincoln have done? We know the answer. America’s most admired and beloved president would have had “The Six” sitting in Lafayette Prison awaiting trial, with their media apologists accompanying them. True, we are not living in Lincoln’s world. Our world is apparently much “softer.” But in our world, the writing is on the wall, not behind a paywall. Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin: “numbered, weighed, divided, and given.” The nation is approaching collapse. One or two future Democrat administrations, and the game is over. 

There is a civil war occurring, and it is not under the radar. There is an all-pervasive struggle for the soul of America, and it is not going very well for those who wish to preserve the nation from their congeners who hate it. Sen. Kennedy’s “pigs” are really a sounder of swine befouling every aspect of the culture. They need to be routed out. They need to be sent packing. The radical, nation-destroying pathology of the left has no place in the United States of America. There is little point in intimidating other nations or winning tariff wars if one is not resolute about one’s own. The time for courage appears to have come. 

Perhaps this is the moment to reconsider the Book of Daniel warning of the toppling of Babylon. Perhaps it is time for a wiser, more selective and more focused McCarthy to stride on the political stage. Perhaps it is time to take a page out of Abraham Lincoln’s book and for the much-regarded sixteenth president to inform the much-beleaguered forty-seventh. After all, Lincoln had a war to fight. And so does Trump.