If you thought the case fatality rate of 1-in-1000 from Covaids was bad, you should have seen what the case fatality rate of having Abraham Lincoln as a President was like.
About 3% of Americans died in the 4-year period from 1861 to 1865.
They weren’t just any Americans who died. It was often the most capable members of society — young and male.
They died because 1.) Washington DC could not play nice, 2.) Washington DC was very arrogant, 3.) Washington DC refused to allow states to dissolve a dissolvable compact.
Sound familiar ?
Abraham Lincoln Was The Antithesis of July 4
Monday, July 4, some bozo will inevitably put on an Abraham Lincoln costume.
In fact, approximately 10,000 bozos will do that across the country.
In a bozo’s head, it is all one patriotic brou-ha-ha: Constitution, July 4, the Air Force, and hot dogs. And who can blame him because that is what the schools teach, but truthfully, Abraham Lincoln was not George Washington 2.0; he was King George 2.0.
Lincoln was holding the central government intact, rather than letting the thing devolve into its appropriate component parts. He was a centralizer, not a decentralizer. He held people captive by force rather than letting them make choices through their state governments. He was more of the spirit of 1787, rather than the spirit of 1776 — a lot more about the controlling and centralizing spirit of the US Constitution than the freeing and decentralizing spirit of the Declaration of Independence, which is commemorated on July 4th.
But What About Fighting Slavery — That Is Freedom
And was slavery the central issue that motivated the war? No. That might make for a pretty romantic story, though. Surely that topic played a role for some, but fifteen percent of American fighting age men did not perish in the first half of the 1860s for the purpose of squabbling over slavery. There were lots of prickly issues — taxes among them, which makes for a lot less sexy of a story. Unfair legislation was a big issue — boring. Agricultural versus mercantile interest was a repeated theme — YAWN-fest!!!
Some even considered it to be a Second American Revolution, more local autonomy from a far-off, out-of-touch, practically foreign, and corrupt central government.
You can imagine how even the most well-intentioned school teachers, historians, authors, and film-makers, trying to convince future generations to care about the Civil War from the victorious Union perspective, might make it about slavery to simplify the issue and make it more appealing. Within twenty years, that was taking place.
It was hard to convince someone born in 1866 why he should give two hoots about some old dead guy with a squeaky voice named Abe Lincoln, or why he should care about a war he never had a thing to do with.
The World War Two Narrative Contains Similar Lies
World War Two, we are told, was about saving the Jews. In reality, there might have been more decision-makers in Washington DC in the 1940s than in Berlin who were happy to see the Jews go bye-bye.
Literally.
Literally.
Do you get that?
Being Jewish was not pop culturally cool in 1940 the way it is in 2022.
That part of the story somehow got appended way later. And truthfully, it is an easy to dramatize part of the story. The salvation of the Jewish people was not at the top of the casus belli for Americans in the 1940s.
Two Fun Source Texts For Your Fourth of July Enjoyment
As we face a string of lies all around us on July 4, there are a few source texts I like to read to remind myself of the root of the American experience.
Thomas Jefferson’s third draft of The Declaration of Independence is one of them. Though our present version is a thing of beauty, and contains wonderful flowery turns of phrase, it is worth remembering — the current version is a draft that went through committee. So much was sapped from the document, as is natural for any project that passes through committee. For a taste of the radical young Jefferson’s work, see his third and final draft before it went to committee. I like to read it every Fourth of July. Jefferson, recognizing the inconsistency of the idea of human freedom and slavery, went so far as to call for the freeing of the slaves in July 1776. The committee nixed that one.
And though it is thematically a little different, I also like to read a piece each July 4 from a New Englander who understood the decentralized spirit at the heart of American independence — “Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau.
It is also called “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” or “Resistance to Civil Government.” It is a spicy and good read for anyone who has ever said to himself, “There is just something that does not feel right about following along with this plan being laid out for me.”
In addition to that reading, this weekend, I will launch Project Pureblood. To learn more, sign up here. (https://realstevo.com/purelrc)
A New Test Of The American Experiment
We are faced this July 4 with an exciting new test of the American experiment. Can the center hold and freedom be had?
Under the control of bureaucrats at many federal, state, and local level institutions, the greatest tyranny America has ever known was visited upon civilians over the past two years. It has been a tyranny that has not waned, but has grown over the ensuing months — though to some it may feel like exactly the opposite. From the very beginning, they told anyone who would listen, exactly what their plan was.
The Steps They Told Us Were Coming
In the official public health bureaucracy channels, in full view of the public, they shamelessly said there would be rolling lockdowns that ebbed and flowed to allow for increasingly more tyranny. Here is how we were told it would work —
Step 1.) Tell people one thing, do another.
Step 2.) Keep it up until there was so much pushback that it seemed like compliance mechanisms might crack and trust in the system would be widely harmed.
Step 3.) Pull back.
Step 4.) Tell people one thing, do another.
Step 5.) Keep it up until there was so much pushback that it seemed like compliance mechanisms might crack and trust in the system would be widely harmed, however, this time taking it far, far further than last time.
Step 6.) Pull back.
Step 7.) Repeat until desired outcome is reached.
Why This Works So Well
Researchers in a field known as public health motivation theory recognized that massive compliance could be achieved by means of these rolling methods of applying pressure, but they would hardly be the first to recognize this.
Marathon runners, psychologists, and human traffickers all recognize the same in their respective fields — take a person to the limits, let him relax, and when you come back to the previous limits, the limits are then far more permissible than they had been before.
This recognition can be used for good or ill. If you are reading this, you likely recognize the ways it can be used for ill.
Fauci, like a human trafficker, uses it for ill as a way to incrementally get his subject to say yes to things that he or she would never have said yes to just six months earlier.
Why This Matters In Your Life
And recognizing that about this intrusive incrementalism, gets to the heart of why it is so important to say, “No!” to face masks and to do so each and every time. As you say, “Yes,” or “Sure,” or “Fine,” or “I guess,” to minor evils, you become acclimated to saying “Yes” to major evils. As you say, “No!” to minor evils, you become acclimated to say, “No!” to major evils. With every step through the day, with every decision, you get to choose which way you prefer to head. Do you prefer to train yourself for incremental manipulation, or do you plan to build an impressive fortification around the psychological drama that this era seeks to drag you through?
If you have said, “No!” to the mask, if you have said, “No!” to the jab, you have shown a great deal of resilience. A trillion dollar media machine has come to bear down on you.
Why July Fourth Is A Perfect Day To Reflect On & Celebrate This Steady Victory
With Independence Day here, and keeping in mind the true spirit of the day is not one to celebrate the United States but one to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a document of decentralization — with that in mind, it is important to look around the world around us at the decentralizing that is happening, the uncoupling.
Somewhere between 20% and 70% of the population no longer believes the Covid narrative.
That number may be even higher in specific areas of the narrative, and it can be lower depending on how specific you want to get with how you define that narrative. We have meaningful percentages of the population that do not wish to even remain in the same country as Washington DC. We have meaningful percentages of the population that do not want to remain in the same state as their state capital.
The State of the Union is awful, but the state of freedom in this land is on quite a powerful upswing.
But Where Does This Conflict Lead?
The only problem is that there is no clear geographic boundaries between those groups. A turn toward freedom by centralized authorities will reliably preserve the Union. Agreed upon freedom allows all manner of people to get along. Something very different appears to be occurring, though. A hodgepodge of geographically interspersed pro-freedom and pro-totalitarian areas have formed and the more the central governments at the state level and federal level push, the more likely they make secession and in many areas.
I do not know where that leads.
I know this: we will go in a good direction if the lions of this era will rise up and lead.
And that is needed of you, dear lion — to rise up and lead.
You may not change the whole world overnight, but you can change the world as you know it.
Recognizing this, I have a special project for a subset of lions — the so called Purebloods, those who have never taken the shot. It is called Project Pureblood and the doors on Project Pureblood open this weekend. If you wish to learn more about Project Pureblood, sign up here (https://realstevo.com/purelrc) before the doors close.
Allan Stevo [send him mail] writes about international politics and culture from a free market perspective at 52 Weeks in Slovakia (www.52inSk.com). He is the author of , , and numerous other books.