School Board Protests and Southern Autonomy

The latest act to provoke the outrage of the faux conservative punditry is the National School Board Association’s letter to President Biden, requesting that he use the massive weight of the federal security apparatus – DOJ, FBI, Dept. of Homeland Security, Secret Service, and others – to squash the frightening terror that threatens the well-being of Americans everywhere:  informed, caring parents who want a proper, moral education for their children.
 
On one hand, this is a serious matter.  Any moves in this direction by the federal government would be yet more evidence of the brazen totalitarianism it has embraced as its guiding philosophy in recent months.
 
On the other hand, this shouldn’t be shock to anyone.  During the misnamed Civil War, President Lincoln set the precedent for just this sort of unrestrained, unlawful federal activity.  Professor Thomas DiLorenzo gives a helpful summary of Honest Abe’s virtuous acts while in the office of president (‘The Great Centralizer: Abraham Lincoln and the War between the States’, p. 263):

Among the unconstitutional and dictatorial acts performed by Lincoln were initiating and conducting a war by decree for months without the consent or advice of Congress; declaring martial law; confiscating private property; suspending habeas corpus; conscripting the railroads and censoring telegraph lines; imprisoning as many as 30,000 Northern citizens without trial; deporting a member of Congress, Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, after Vallandigham—a fierce opponent of the Morrill tariff— protested the imposition of an income tax at a Democratic Party meeting in Ohio; and shutting down hundreds of Northern newspapers (Randall 1951). Lincoln’s Republican Party associates in Congress created three new states—Kansas, West Virginia, and Nevada—which helped them rig the 1864 election (Donald 1956, 79).
 
Voters were routinely intimidated and compelled to vote Republican by federal soldiers. “Under the protection of Federal bayonets, New York went Republican by seven thousand votes” in 1864 (Donald 1961, 81).
 
In Maryland, federal troops arrested and imprisoned without trial thirty-one state legislators, the mayor of Baltimore, a congressman, and dozens of newspaper editors who opposed the war. Even the grandson of Francis Scott Key was thrown into prison at Fort McHenry (Talbert 1995; Hummel 1996). All these actions were taken in the name of preserving constitutional government.

​The problem for many of the professional conservative commentator class is that they revere Pres Lincoln and honor him as one of the greatest leaders of the united States.  They have trapped themselves in a contradiction:  They laud one dictator (Pres Lincoln), but then turn right around and decry another (Pres Biden). 
 
Where were these ‘conservatives’ when another idol of theirs, Pres Reagan, vastly expanded the reach of the panopticon spy-state by issuing Executive Order 12333?
 
Where is their outrage over COINTELPRO, the FBI’s project in the 1960s and 70s to secretly infiltrate and bring down various left-leaning figures and groups which that agency found distasteful?
 
Most of the professional conservative class cares about only one thing:  Preserving and promoting Yankeefied America as the sole exceptional, indispensable nation with the right to ownership of the whole globe.
 
Thus they can praise Lincoln (and Teddy Roosevelt, Reagan, etc.) for putting the States on this course, overlooking his criminal acts, but they will excoriate Biden (and Carter, Cleveland, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, etc.) for restraining American ambitions, magnifying any and all indiscretions.
 
Or said another way, anyone who uses federal power (whether allowed by the Philadelphia charter or not) to expand the influence of the American Empire in the world is virtuous in their eyes; those who restrict its influence are enemies.  Ergo, smashing the South and her centuries-old Christian agrarian culture, or Native American tribes with their even older pre-Modern cultures – which were and remain just such impediments – and ‘Americanizing’ them, are also virtuous acts.
 
However, now that the well-meaning parents rightly giving their school board members a hard time for their pro-CRT, pro-LGBT curricula are being threatened by the federal storm troopers just as the South was 160 years ago, perhaps they will give a second thought to the narrative they have been told about the South and the War of Northern Aggression.
 
Perhaps they will now be sympathetic to the Southern desire to be left alone by the tirelessly meddlesome Yankees.
 
Perhaps they will understand why the South wanted to separate from the North and the federal government.
 
Perhaps they will reconsider the delusional Puritan myths about ‘America’s destiny’ and ‘greatness’ ballyhooed by so many fake conservatives.
 
Perhaps all the cultural regions of the current unnecessary, involuntary American union will now be free to discuss a way to separate peacefully, or, at the very least, to strip a great deal of power from Washington City and the various giant corporations that control most of the officials there, allowing all a measure of cultural autonomy unknown since the current federal constitution was adopted in 1788.