Conservatives turn their fire on each other after Charlie Kirk’s assassination



The horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk in September should have united Americans. Instead, it split them even further. Conservatives watched too many of their countrymen on the left openly cheer the murder, and even weak denunciations often suggested Kirk got what he deserved.

For a time, the right rallied — praising Kirk and demanding justice. That unity didn’t last. A furious fight over Kirk’s legacy followed, and that’s worse than politics: It’s destroying the movement he built.

Charlie Kirk’s death was a monstrous crime. Let it not become the occasion for tearing the movement he led to pieces.

George Washington spent much of his Farewell Address warning the young republic about foreign entanglements. He praised American separation from Europe’s great power intrigues and warned that making any foreign state a favored nation would corrupt domestic politics. Washington foresaw factions forming around foreign loyalties and predicted patriots who raised concerns about foreign influence would be branded traitors.

His warning applies now, and the fracture cuts through conservatism itself. The United States has long allied with Israel — sharing intelligence, aid, and military cooperation. Many conservatives, especially evangelicals, treat support for Israel as near-religious obligation. Others point to practical security benefits in the Middle East. That religious devotion makes criticism of the relationship politically perilous. You can denounce Britain or Germany without being vilified. Question our alliance with Israel, and you risk immediate slurs — racist, anti-Semite, bigot.

As Washington warned, centering policy on a foreign nation invites domestic discord and foreign meddling. Qatar and other Gulf states now pour money into U.S. institutions. Diasporas like India attempt to consolidate as a power bloc. None of this would surprise Washington. It was predictable. Still, both sides chatter past his counsel — and refuse the restraint he urged.

Anger misdirected

Charlie Kirk excelled at coalition building and peacemaking. He united disparate conservatives behind Trump and MAGA. That’s why the civil war over his death is so corrosive. Conspiracy theories swirl. Former allies denounce one another in his name. Private texts between Kirk and fellow influencers have been leaked and used as weapons. The spectacle is inhuman.

The impulse to treat Kirk’s private words as scripture echoes how people now treat the Constitution — stripping context until the document becomes a cudgel for whatever program you prefer. Left and right both reduce texts to proof texts; neither seeks the actual meaning.

Kirk’s position on Israel was complicated. He loved and supported the state and saw biblical significance in its existence, yet he also held America First concerns about military commitments and complained about pressure from Zionist donors who pushed TPUSA to cancel conservatives. He sought to defuse right-wing animosity toward Israel through messaging at home and tempering excesses abroad. His views were nuanced — like most people tend to be when the shouting stops.

Instead of using the outrage over his assassination to crush the left-wing terror network behind it, too many conservatives turned inward and drew long knives. One faction hates Israel so fiercely it would harm America; another treats any deviation from absolute support as treason.

At the moment, conservatives should unify for survival, they trade blows over purity tests.

Opponents or enemies?

The reality is simple: Israel will remain. The conservative movement needs a coherent strategy. Religious devotion among evangelicals will persist, but it’s waning among younger Christians. Pro-Israel advocates must make a practical case to younger conservatives if they want broad support. Those who question the tie to Israel will keep growing in number.

If pro-Israel conservatives want to avoid the radicalization they fear, they must tolerate dissent within the coalition without staging public witch hunts. Those who seek to re-evaluate the relationship should keep arguments factual and pragmatic. Washington’s cautions about favored nations and about letting hatred sabotage the country remain relevant.

RELATED: Christians are refusing to compromise — and it’s terrifying all the right people

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We saw, after Kirk’s killing, how large segments of the left revealed a murderous contempt for conservatives. That truth cannot be unseen. But within conservatism, the critical question is whether your rival on the right is an opponent to debate or an enemy to be excised. Zionist or skeptic, neither camp is calling for your child to be shot. That low bar — refusing to wish literal violence on fellow citizens — must hold if conservatives hope to form a durable coalition.

This is not an appeal to centrism. I have my views and have argued them plainly. But Kirk wanted a movement that could hold together. He worked to build a broad tent. The conservative civil war must end because the stakes are too high.

If conservatives continue sniping through Kirk’s memory, they will squander their political capital and invite worse divisions. Washington warned us what happens when foreign loyalties and religious fervor distort public life; he warned that factional hatred breaks nations. Conservatives ought to remember that now — not to moderate principle for its own sake, but to preserve the only structure that allows principle to matter: a functioning political majority.

Charlie Kirk’s death was a monstrous crime. Let it not become the occasion for tearing the movement he led to pieces. The left must be opposed forcefully and without mercy in politics, but infighting on the right hands them victory. Put down the knives. Honor Kirk by building the coalition he believed in — or watch the movement dissolve into impotence.

Is it time to prepare for civil war? Glenn Beck's answer might surprise you …



As the gap between the right and left continues to widen, whispers that we’re on the verge of civil war are rumbling across the nation. Some people are even wondering if they should start preparing.

Is this wisdom or folly?

Glenn Beck’s answer: Both.

“We must win the midterms, and we must win 2028,” Glenn emphasizes.

President Trump designating Antifa as a terrorist organization and vowing to investigate and potentially prosecute George Soros via his Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, and other nonprofits for allegedly funding Antifa and related left-wing violence is a public declaration of war.

“When they have the opportunity to punch back, they are going to punch back. God help us,” Glenn says ominously.

He warns that if Trump doesn’t completely “wipe [the Antifa network] out,” retribution will rain like fire when the political tides turn.

In other words, civil war won’t look like citizens fighting in the streets; it’ll be warfare at the administrative level.

In some ways, it’s already happening. “They are blocking the feds from actually doing constitutionally what they're supposed to do,” says Glenn. “And that then triggers the Constitution on an insurrection, which would mean the government then has the right and the power to go into those states and put down an insurrection.”

The fact that we’re even having to ponder the possibility of a civil war means that we’re close to one, he says frankly. “The likelihood of going into a civil war is higher than any other time in my lifetime because we're all asking that question of is this going to lead to a civil war?”

The fact that Democrat officials are “using police to go against federal police” is a sign things are headed in the wrong direction.

Glenn estimates that the chances of civil war breaking out are sitting at about 15%-20% right now. “We now have proof that they are doing a color revolution here in America,” he says.

Meanwhile, X is saturated with posts encouraging people to riot and loot if SNAP benefits run out in the midst of the government shutdown.

“The perception here for a lot of people on the left is: The only way to solve [problems] is through violence,” says Glenn.

“That number is growing, and the apathy toward political violence is growing probably faster than the actual people that would commit the violence,” he adds.

But even if all of this does point to imminent civil war, Glenn urges his listeners to hope and pray against it.

“They're dead serious about color revolution. ... We have to go the opposite direction and try at all costs to hold things together, keep people peaceful as long as possible, to hopefully turn this corner because a corner is being turned,” he warns.

To hear more, watch the clip above.

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Democrats once undermined the Army. Now they undermine the nation.



America again stands on the edge of betrayal, watching mobs assault federal officers while judges call it “restraint.”

This is not new. Between 1876 and 1878, the same script played out as those sworn to uphold the law were branded as tyrants and those undermining it claimed the mantle of freedom. When the federal government lost the will to enforce its own laws, violence filled the vacuum.

How the first ‘Redemption’ worked

After the Civil War, Republican coalitions in the South — freedmen, poor whites, and Northern reformers — were crushed by white Democrats who called themselves “Redeemers.” They promised “home rule” but delivered a racial caste system enforced by terror and political exclusion.

The Redeemers invoked ‘home rule’ to dismantle Reconstruction. Today’s Democratic left invokes ‘human rights’ to paralyze national defense.

The last obstacle to that counterrevolution was federal protection of black voters. During the disputed 1876 election, President Ulysses S. Grant stationed troops at polling sites across the South to deter fraud and Ku Klux Klan violence. Democrats in South Carolina vowed to “wade in blood knee-deep” if necessary to reclaim power.

Those troops were the only shield between freedmen and their former masters. But in the Compromise of 1877, federal forces were withdrawn to buy political peace. Reconstruction governments collapsed, schools for freedmen closed, and voting rights vanished. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

Southern Democrats soon made that withdrawal permanent. Wrapping themselves in the rhetoric of liberty and “local control,” they pushed the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, criminalizing use of the Army for domestic law enforcement except when Congress expressly authorized it.

The narrative was set: Federal troops at the polls meant “tyranny”; “home rule” meant “harmony.” In truth, the act cemented the collapse of Reconstruction and led to the birth of Jim Crow, which paralyzed federal defense of civil rights for nearly a century.

RELATED: Stop pretending Posse Comitatus neuters the president

Photo by Interim Archives/Getty Images

The rhetoric of reversal

Debates over the Posse Comitatus Act dripped with moral inversion. Southern Democrats like Rep. John Atkins of Tennessee and William Kimmel of Maryland denounced President Rutherford B. Hayes as a “monarch” who preferred bullets to ballots. Federal soldiers protecting black voters were smeared as bloodthirsty brutes and “tools of despotism.”

In that twisted language, enforcing the law became tyranny, while mob rule became freedom.

It was early information warfare: delegitimize the protectors, vindicate the aggressors, and freeze lawful authority into submission.

Photo by Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images

The new paralysis

A century and a half later, the pattern repeats. Democrats, left-wing activists, and their media allies now use essentially the same language to delegitimize immigration enforcement. ICE and Border Patrol agents, upholding laws passed by Congress, are branded as “fascists.” Federal defense of government facilities is denounced as “militarization.”

Judges cite the Posse Comitatus Act to block National Guard deployments meant to protect ICE offices from violent assaults. In Illinois, U.S. District Judge April Perry ruled that deploying the Guard could “add fuel to the fire that they started,” claiming no evidence of impending “rebellion.” The ruling came days before No Kings Day demonstrations.

The Department of Homeland Security had extended fencing around its Broadview facility after earlier attacks — rioters hurling fireworks, bottles, and tear gas while local officials looked away. When the DHS finally reinforced its defenses, the courts ordered them torn down.

Since June, ICE and Border Patrol have endured shootings, arson attempts, and coordinated ambushes. In Dallas, a sniper targeted an ICE field office. In suburban Chicago, federal agents were rammed and pinned by cartel-linked drivers before returning fire. Local police en route to assist were told to stand down.

Within hours, left-wing outlets and activist networks declared the clash proof of “authoritarianism.” The strategy is deliberate: manufacture chaos, provoke a lawful response, then cite that response as evidence of tyranny.

This is a textbook reflexive control operation — using perception to paralyze power. The Redeemers of 1878 called federal troops “despots” and “usurpers.” Their descendants call federal agents “fascists.” The aim is identical: Erode public trust in lawful authority and make enforcement politically impossible.

Citizenship as the battlefield

Then, as now, the real fight centers on citizenship itself.

In the 19th century, freed black Americans embodied the principle that allegiance and equality before the law, not race or birth, define membership in the republic. That ideal shattered the old Southern order, so Redeemers destroyed it.

Today, citizenship threatens a different order — the globalist one. Citizenship implies borders, duties, and distinctions. So progressives seek to redefine it as exclusionary or immoral. Illegal aliens become “newcomers.” Enforcing the law becomes oppression. The federal obligation to protect citizens morphs into a liability.

What began as Redeemer propaganda has evolved into a post-national orthodoxy: Sovereignty is shameful, and the citizen must yield to the “world citizen.” The result is the same — federal paralysis, selective law enforcement, and mobs empowered by moral cover.

RELATED: A president’s job is to stop the burning if governors won’t

Photo by Minh Connors/Anadolu via Getty Images

Lessons from the first betrayal

The parallels are precise. The Redeemers invoked “home rule” to dismantle Reconstruction; today’s left invokes “human rights” and “de-militarization” to paralyze national defense.

The Posse Comitatus Act was never a sacred constitutional barrier — it was a political tool of retreat. Then it left freedmen defenseless; now it hinders protection of federal agents, citizens, and borders. By turning law into spectacle and restraint into virtue, it leaves our republic unguarded.

History teaches a blunt lesson: Retreat invites terror. When the state retreats, mobs rule. When courts mistake optics for justice, defenders become defendants. The same moral inversion that once enslaved men through “home rule” now threatens to enslave the republic through lawfare.

To survive, America must recover what it lost in 1877 — the courage to act as a nation. Withdrawal is not peace. Compromise, in this instance, is not order. The freedman of this century is the American citizen himself — and the question, once again, is whether the nation that freed him will defend him.

Dems Rebelling Against Trump Resurrect Confederate Talking Points

Democrats are using arguments for states' rights as a cynical ploy to paint themselves as victims of an oppressive federal government.

Don’t let rage blind you: A national divorce is a death wish



Over the last few months, Glenn Beck has heard many fed-up conservatives float the idea of a “national divorce.” After the slew of left-wing violence, including the murder of Charlie Kirk and the relentless attacks on ICE officers and facilities, he understands their frustration.

However, a national divorce or, more frankly, a civil war “must never be considered,” he says.

Before such talk gets picked up and circulated by the algorithmic powers that create trends by fueling rage, Glenn wants to ensure that his audience has it straight: A national divorce isn’t some new “season of television.” This is about “your life — your ordinary, miraculous, taken-for-granted life — ending.”

“Everything you grew up knowing, believing in, having, having the opportunity to have, be, do — over. It won’t change; it ends. That’s what civil war means,” Glenn warns.


Birthday parties, backyard barbecues, little league, school plays — all “gone,” he says.

“And it doesn’t come back with an election or a speech or a victory parade. It doesn’t come back at all,” he adds.

Our government is special, Glenn reminds: “A government of, for, and by the people has never been done before.”

The people carelessly throwing around the idea of civil war need to understand the reality of what they’re suggesting, he says. “It’s neighbors. It’s cul-de-sacs. It’s the grocery store and the gas station and the pharmacy. It’s the lights you never think about until they don’t turn on, the water you never worry about until it comes out brown, if it comes out at all.”

It means banks shut down, gas stations run dry, 911 call centers don’t answer, pharmacies board up, and grocery store shelves empty and aren’t restocked.

Too many people think their “side” will protect them, but “here’s the truth,” Glenn says: “Sides protect themselves, and both sides will ask you to prove your loyalty with things you promised yourself you would never, ever do. Good people, just like you, will do them because fear is a sculptor, and it carves away at conscience first.”

And then there are “the guests who arrive when a great house is on fire — the cartels, the opportunists, the foreign intelligence services, the war tourists with passports and GoPros.”

“They don’t choose sides. They just choose opportunities and openings,” Glenn warns. “And they open the opportunities you didn’t even know you had — your grid, your water plants, your data center, your port. And they don’t fly flags. They fly yours and then let you blame one another to fuel the fire.”

While “it is reasonable to ask, ‘What do we have in common anymore?’” our next questions should always be: “How can we find common ground? How can we understand each other?”

“Before you retweet bravado, count the cost of where we could be headed — and not in abstract numbers, but in faces: the old man on your street who needs oxygen, the single mom who works at night, the kid who just made the team, the clerk at the corner store,” Glenn urges.

“These are the times that try men’s souls. ... Those who stand today and do the hard work — God’s work of love and peacemaking and uniting and speaking the truth — they will be owed a thanks for generations to come. Turn down the algorithm, and turn up the conversation.”

To hear more of Glenn’s passionate monologue, watch the video above.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

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Liberty cannot survive a culture that cheers assassins



When 20-year-old loner Thomas Matthew Crooks ascended a sloped roof in Butler County, Pennsylvania, and opened fire, he unleashed a torrent of clichés. Commentators and public figures avoided the term “assassination attempt,” even if the AR-15 was trained on the head of the Republican Party’s nominee for president. Instead, they condemned “political violence.”

“There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,” former President Barack Obama said. One year later, he added the word “despicable” to his condemnation of the assassin who killed Charlie Kirk. That was an upgrade from two weeks prior, when he described the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School by a transgender person as merely “unnecessary.”

Those in power are not only failing to enforce order, but also excusing and even actively promoting the conditions that undermine a peaceful, stable, and orderly regime.

Anyone fluent in post-9/11 rhetoric knows that political violence is the domain of terrorists and lone wolf ideologues, whose manifestos will soon be unearthed by federal investigators, deciphered by the high priests of our therapeutic age, and debated by partisans on cable TV.

The attempt to reduce it to the mere atomized individual, however, is a modern novelty. From the American Revolution to the Civil War, from the 1863 draft riots to the 1968 MLK riots, from the spring of Rodney King to the summer of George Floyd, the United States has a long history of people resorting to violence to achieve political ends by way of the mob.

Since the January 6 riot that followed the 2020 election, the left has persistently attempted to paint the right as particularly prone to mob action. But as the online response to the murder of Charlie Kirk demonstrates — with thousands of leftists openly celebrating the gory, public assassination of a young father — the vitriol that drives mob violence is endemic to American political discourse and a perpetual threat to order.

America’s founders understood this all too well.

In August 1786, a violent insurrection ripped through the peaceful Massachusetts countryside. After the end of the Revolutionary War, many American soldiers found themselves caught in a vise, with debt collectors on one side and a government unable to make good on back pay on the other. A disgruntled former officer in the Continental Army named Daniel Shays led a violent rebellion aimed at breaking the vise at gunpoint.

“Commotions of this sort, like snow-balls, gather strength as they roll, if there is no opposition in the way to divide and crumble them,” George Washington wrote in a letter, striking a serene tone in the face of an insurrection. James Madison was less forgiving: “In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob,” he wrote inFederalist 55. Inspired by Shays’ Rebellion and seeking to rein in the excesses of democracy, lawmakers called for the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787.

Our current moment of chaos

If the United States Constitution was borne out of political chaos, why does the current moment strike so many as distinctly perilous? Classical political philosophy offers us a clearer answer to this question than modern psychoanalysis. The most pointed debate among philosophers throughout the centuries has centered on how to prevent mob violence and ensure that most unnatural of things: political order.

In Plato’s “Republic," the work that stands at the headwaters of the Western tradition of political philosophy, Socrates argues that the only truly just society is one in which philosophers are kings and kings are philosophers. As a rule, democracy devolves into tyranny, for mob rule inevitably breeds impulsive citizens who become focused on petty pleasures. The resulting disorder eventually becomes so unbearable that a demagogue arises, promising to restore order and peace.

The classically educated founders picked up on these ideas — mediated through Aristotle, Cicero, John Locke, and Montesquieu, among others — as they developed the structure of the new American government. The Constitution’s mixed government was explicitly designed to establish a political order that would take into consideration the sentiments and interests of the people without yielding to mob rule at the expense of order. The founders took for granted that powerful elites would necessarily be interested in upholding the regime from which they derived their authority.

Terror from the top

History has often seen disaffected elites stoke insurrections to defenestrate a ruling class that shut them out of public life. The famous case of the Catilinarian Conspiracy in late republican Rome, in which a disgruntled aristocrat named Catiline attempted to overthrow the republic during the consulship of Cicero, serves as a striking example.

In the 21st century, we face a different phenomenon: Those in power are not only failing to enforce order, but also excusing and even actively promoting the conditions that undermine a peaceful, stable, and orderly regime.

The points of erosion are numerous. The public cheerleading of assassinations can be dismissed as noise from the rabble, but it is more difficult to ignore the numerous calls from elites for civic conflagration. Newspapers are promoting historically dubious revisionism that undermines the moral legitimacy of the Constitution. Billionaire-backed prosecutors decline to prosecute violent crime.

For years, those in power at best ignored — and at worst encouraged — mob-driven chaos in American social life, resulting in declining trust in institutions, lowered expectations for basic public order, coarsened or altogether discarded social mores, and a general sense on all sides that Western civilization is breaking down.

Without a populace capable of self-control, liberty becomes impossible.

The United States has, of course, faced more robust political violence than what we are witnessing today. But even during the Civil War — brutal by any standard — a certain civility tended to obtain between the combatants. As Abraham Lincoln noted in his second inaugural address, “Both [sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same God.” Even in the midst of a horrific war, a shared sense of ultimate things somewhat tempered the disorder and destruction — and crucially promoted a semblance of reconciliation once the war ended.

Our modern disorder runs deeper. The shattering of fundamental shared assumptions about virtually anything leaves political opponents looking less like fellow citizens to be persuaded and more like enemies to be subdued.

Charlie Kirk, despite his relative political moderation and his persistent willingness to engage in attempts at persuasion, continues to be smeared by many as a “Nazi propagandist.” The willful refusal to distinguish between mostly run-of-the-mill American conservatism and the murderous foreign ideology known as National Socialism is telling. The implication is not subtle: If you disagree with me, you are my enemy — and I am justified in cheering your murder.

Fellow citizens who persistently view their political opponents as enemies and existential threats cannot long exist in a shared political community.

“Democracy is on the ballot,” the popular refrain goes, but rarely is democracy undermined by a single election. It is instead undermined by a gradual decline in public spiritedness and private virtue, as well as the loss of social trust and good faith necessary to avoid violence.

The chief prosecutors against institutional authority are not disaffected Catalines but the ruling class itself. This arrangement may work for a while, but both political theory and common sense suggest that it is volatile and unlikely to last for long.

The conditions of liberty

Political order, in general, requires a degree of virtue, public-spiritedness, and good will among the citizenry. James Madison in Federalist 55 remarks that, of all the possible permutations of government that have yet been conceived, republican government is uniquely dependent upon order and institutional legitimacy:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.

In short, republican government requires citizens who can govern themselves, an antidote to the passions that precede mayhem and assassination. Without a populace capable of self-control, liberty becomes impossible. Under such conditions, the releasing of restraints never liberates — it only promotes mob-like behavior.

RELATED: Radical killers turned campus heroes: How colleges idolize political violence

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

The disorder of Shays’ Rebellion prompted the drafting of the Constitution, initiating what has sometimes been called an “experiment in ordered liberty.” That experiment was put to the test beginning in 1791 in Western Pennsylvania. The Whiskey Rebellion reached a crisis in Bower Hill, Pennsylvania, about 50 miles south of modern-day Butler, when a mob of 600 disgruntled residents laid siege to a federal tax collector. With the blessing of the Supreme Court Chief Justice and Federalistco-author John Jay, President George Washington assembled troops to put down the rebellion.

Washington wrote in a proclamation:

I have accordingly determined [to call the militia], feeling the deepest regret for the occasion, but withal the most solemn conviction that the essential interests of the Union demand it, that the very existence of government and the fundamental principles of social order are materially involved in the issue, and that the patriotism and firmness of all good citizens are seriously called upon, as occasions may require, to aid in the effectual suppression of so fatal a spirit.

Washington left Philadelphia to march thousands of state militiamen into the rebel haven of Western Pennsylvania. The insurrectionists surrendered without firing a shot.

Our new era of political violence rolls on, with Charlie Kirk’s murder being only the latest and most prominent example. Our leaders assure us they will ride out into the field just as Washington once did. Whether they will use their presence and influence to suppress or encourage “so fatal a spirit” remains an open question.

Editor’s note: A version of this article was published originally at the American Mind.

The American Left Is Resurrecting The Bloody Legacy Of John Brown

We should take the left’s invocation of John Brown seriously. It’s a call to murder anyone who opposes their agenda.

American History’s Stark Warning Against Tolerating Political Violence

In the runup to the Civil War, the beating of a U.S. senator nearly to death was celebrated across the South.

Stop pretending Posse Comitatus neuters the president



President Trump drew heavy criticism for calling up the California National Guard to confront anti-ICE rioting in Los Angeles in July. On Sept. 3, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer blocked the move, claiming it violated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. He delayed his order until Sept. 12, but the administration immediately appealed, and the Ninth Circuit has already granted a partial stay while the case moves forward.

Critics insist Trump is misusing the military as some kind of “secret police.” They invoke the Posse Comitatus Act as if it were an absolute ban on military involvement in domestic affairs. That is flatly wrong. The Act does not prohibit the president from using the Army, Marines, or National Guard to enforce federal law. It simply requires that such forces be deployed under the president’s authority, not at the whim of a sheriff or local marshal.

The real danger comes not from Trump’s use of the National Guard, but from a judiciary willing to invent limits the Constitution never imposed.

The Constitution itself grants the president this power. Article IV, Section 4 reads:

The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.

Congress reinforced that authority in the Insurrection Act of 1807, which authorized the president to use the Army when it became “impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State or Territory by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” In short: When mobs threaten federal law, the president has the duty — and the power — to act.

What Posse Comitatus really meant

Before 1878, federal marshals could deputize Army units as a local posse. That pulled soldiers out of their chain of command and placed them under partisan officials. Officers objected, rightly fearing the practice would corrupt the Army. They welcomed congressional intervention.

The Posse Comitatus Act corrected that flaw. It barred the military from being drafted by civil authorities except when the Constitution or Congress explicitly authorized it. The Act did not strip the president of power. It reaffirmed that only the president, acting under constitutional authority, could commit troops to restore order.

History bears this out. The U.S. military has intervened in domestic affairs 167 times since America’s founding. Soldiers put down the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s, enforced fugitive slave laws in the 1850s, and captured John Brown at Harpers Ferry in 1859. After the Civil War, troops secured polling places so freedmen could vote. The Act was not written to stop such uses, but to prevent local abuse.

As scholar John Brinkerhoff explained in 2002, “All that [the Posse Comitatus Act] really did was to repeal a doctrine whose only substantial foundation was an opinion by an attorney general. ... The president’s power to use both regulars and militia remained undisturbed.”

Why Breyer is wrong

Judge Breyer’s ruling misreads both history and law. By treating Posse Comitatus as a blanket prohibition, he ignores the Constitution and the Insurrection Act. His injunction assumes any federal troop support is unlawful. But the law says otherwise: Troops cannot be used under lesser authority than the president’s. Trump acted as president. That is the highest authority the law contemplates.

The Ninth Circuit has already acknowledged the seriousness of the case by issuing a partial stay. That matters. Pulling remaining troops before the courts finish their review risks chaos. Keeping them in place while the appeal proceeds protects public order.

RELATED:A president’s job is to stop the burning if governors won’t

Photo by SAHAB ZARIBAF/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

Prudence, not prohibition

The Posse Comitatus Act never emasculated the presidency. It preserved the president’s authority while removing soldiers from the clutches of local sheriffs. The only real limitation is prudence. Presidents must decide when the threat justifies force and when restraint serves the nation better.

I have opposed proposals to use the military in the so-called war on drugs and other ill-considered campaigns. Prudence matters. But the Constitution is clear: When federal law is under assault, the president can act.

The real danger comes not from Trump’s use of the National Guard, but from a judiciary willing to invent limits the Constitution never imposed. Los Angeles cannot be allowed to burn while mobs terrorize federal officers. The president has the duty to restore order.

That is why the administration is right to appeal. The courts should correct this error and reaffirm what the Constitution already guarantees: the president’s authority to protect the republic against domestic violence.

Why the English flag now terrifies the regime



The United Kingdom is embroiled in a strange controversy: Officials are trying to ban the English flag from the public square.

As immigration-driven violence rises, national identity has become central. Many Englishmen, watching as immigrants pour in and grooming gangs prey on their daughters, have begun raising the red-and-white St. George’s Cross. Officials invent excuses to tear those flags down — even as immigrant groups replace the Union Jack with the flag of Pakistan. To outsiders this may look like a petty fight over fabric, but it is a symbol of the existential struggle gripping Britain. When citizens clash over flags, it signals that civil war could be near.

In a regime that sacrifices free speech for 'multiculturalism,' flying the English flag has become an act of rebellion.

Modern elites tell us flags are meaningless scraps from a barbaric age. The notion that a simple banner could hold sacred status seems absurd in an era that prizes materialism. Yet ruling classes know symbols matter, which is why activists worked to replace national flags with the Pride flag in so many public spaces. Joe Biden’s administration gave the rainbow banner a place of honor at the White House and at U.S. embassies around the globe.

Swapping a flag is never a trivial gesture. Battles are fought in the spirit as well as on the field. When a flag falls, so does the resolve of the people behind it.

Britain’s history rests on forging many peoples into a single polity. The English flag merged into the Union Jack as the emblem of that union. As the empire expanded, “Britishness” widened in scope, but English identity remained its core. Today that identity is under attack from the very state the English created, with politicians insisting that the English “ethnos” does not exist. The Union Jack, once imposed on conquered peoples, now serves as a symbol of English subjugation.

This is not mere neglect. The U.K.’s leadership often appears actively hostile to its majority people. Immigrants refuse to assimilate, demand special treatment, show open contempt for the English, and commit horrific acts of violence — yet the government welcomes more boatloads. Social media is censored to shield newcomers from offense. Protests are suppressed. In a regime that sacrifices free speech for “multiculturalism,” flying the English flag has become an act of rebellion.

National media scorn this flag-waving trend, but the state has wisely avoided an outright ban. Instead, local officials hide behind obscure ordinances to force flags down — all while Pride banners and foreign symbols fly unchallenged. Each removal is met with more flags raised. This is a clever, nonviolent protest that exposes the regime’s double standard. Every crackdown vindicates the English right to resist.

Immigrant communities have noticed. Coming from societies where ethnic solidarity is openly encouraged, they know what the St. George’s Cross means. In response, some have stripped Union Jacks from poles and replaced them with Pakistani flags. For all the insistence that flags are “outdated,” people show their true loyalty when conflict looms. They fly the banner they are prepared to defend.

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We’ve seen this dynamic in America too. When anti-deportation riots broke out in Los Angeles earlier this summer, protesters flew the Mexican flag, not the Stars and Stripes. They weren’t signaling solidarity with the country they demanded to remain in, but dominance in the name of another. Until very recently, everyone understood that raising a foreign flag on someone else’s soil was a declaration of conquest.

The situation in Britain today is much worse than circumstances in the United States. Despite the best efforts of the media, judges, and even a would-be assassin’s bullet, Americans re-elected Donald Trump to secure the border and deport illegal aliens. His administration has largely shut crossings and begun deportations (though not nearly enough). Still, the people here found a political solution — or at least the beginning of one.

In the U.K., no such option exists. Conservatives broke their promises and imported record numbers of migrants. Labour under Keir Starmer has gone to authoritarian lengths to suppress opposition. Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has softened its stance to avoid being called “radical.” Only Rupert Lowe seems to understand the crisis, but he lacks the political infrastructure to change course. The absence of representation has led experts like David Betz, a professor of war at King’s College London, to warn of civil war ahead.

Yet even in this bleak landscape, the persistence of the flag-flyers signals hope. Elites may seek to crush the English in pursuit of a multicultural utopia, but the native people refuse to yield. Protesters are jailed, flags are torn down, posts are censored — yet the banners keep going up. That stubborn spirit is dangerous to ignore. The English still know who they are. Unless their rulers recognize it soon, the conflict now symbolized by a flag will erupt into something far more serious.