Transcription
I'd like to talk about what I call insurrection sheet. By that I mean this strange new fashion on the American left, especially among Democrats, where undermining the jurisdiction of our own federal government is treated not as a crisis, not as a constitutional red line, but almost as a badge of honor. It's become stylish to talk about ignoring federal law, nullifying federal authority, and appealing to some vague higher justice somewhere above the Constitution. And what we're about to walk through is not theoretical. It's not a warning about something that could happen someday. It's already happening, just not in the places where the cameras like to point.
From the perspective of someone who has followed this closely, what's unsettled in all of this is what model they think they're imitating. Do they imagine themselves as Jefferson Davis who ordered South Carolina troops to fire on the federal garrison at Fort Sumpter in 1861 launching the Civil War in the name of state sovereignty against federal authority? Or do they see themselves as a kind of modern George Wallace standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama declaring that state law and state culture entitled him to defy federal mandates on desegregation. Or maybe they've internalized something like the story from the film Seven Days in May, where a decorated general decides he can nullify presidential directives and effectively overthrow the government because he's convinced he knows better than the elected commander-in-chief.
It's ironic because these are the same people who lectured the country for years about insurrection, insurrection, insurrection. They repeated the word like a mantra, as if pure repetition could turn every dispute or protest into a rebellion. Yet even Jack Smith, the special counsel, who threw everything he could at Donald Trump, did not charge him with insurrection. For all the rhetoric, the law itself, refused to follow the script. And yet now, many of the loudest voices who claim to be terrified of insurrection are very comfortable endorsing behavior that looks suspiciously like a slow motion version of exactly that.
This didn't start yesterday. In Trump's first term, we saw a number of retired four-star admirals and generals, people still governed in important ways by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, openly violate Article 88. That article is meant to protect civilian authority. It says that even retired flag officers must not publicly disparage the president of the United States. But they did. They called Trump Mussolini, compared him to the people who ran Oshwitz, called him a liar and a danger. One officer mused openly that the sooner Trump was removed, the better. Removed how exactly? We have elections for that. We have constitutional processes for that. You don't casually talk about removing a sitting president by some extra legal mechanism and still pretend you're safeguarding the republic.
It didn't stop there. We had two lieutenant colonels boasting that the 101st Airborne Division could beat the Secret Service and physically force Trump out of the White House if they decided he didn't belong there anymore. Think about that for a second. You have officers fantasizing aloud about using combat troops to overrun the president's protective detail. That's not edgy Twitter commentary. That is a direct attack on the bedrock principle of civilian control of the military. And yet, in the political and media class that now claims to shake at the mere mention of insurrection, these comments weren't treated as a scandal. They were treated as heroic, speaking truth to power.
You can keep changing the rules, shifting blame, rewriting the narrative, but reality has a habit of catching up with you. Every time institutional norms are eroded, every time the military is invited into partisan politics, it's not the pundits or the donors who pay the price. It's ordinary people. It's the soldier who now has to wonder whether his commanders are loyal to the Constitution or to a cable news narrative. It's the agents on the ground who have to enforce federal law while wondering if their own city and state will betray them to make a political point.
And in the last few years, the trend has grown more explicit, not less. We've seen the mayor of New York float the idea that federal law essentially has no standing within his city when it conflicts with his preferred moral framework. He talks instead about international law as though he governs a sovereign city state that can pick and choose between the constitution and whatever resolutions come out of multinational bodies. He went so far as to say he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, a foreign head of government under full diplomatic protection, if Netanyahu came to New York as a guest of the United Nations. How is that supposed to work in practice? Will he order the NYPD to confront the Secret Service? Will local officers be told to handcuff a visiting prime minister whose security detail is operating under federal authority? This isn't principal resistance. It's reckless fantasy.
Chicago's mayor has taken a similar posture, declaring that not only will he ignore certain federal laws, he will actively oppose them. When an ICE convoy was cornered and threatened in the Chicago area, local police did not come to their aid. That wasn't a misunderstanding. That was following explicit instructions not to assist federal agents in danger. In other words, they were told that protecting the lives and safety of federal officers was less important than signaling defiance of federal immigration enforcement.
Out on the West Coast, Los Angeles officials have openly admitted that they work to tip off illegal immigrants about upcoming federal enforcement efforts so they can evade arrest. In California, Nancy Pelosi, a former speaker of the house, who once tore up the State of the Union address on live television and called the president of the United States a vile creature, suggested that state law enforcement might arrest federal officials for carrying out immigration statutes, arrest them for enforcing federal law. What exactly does she imagine that confrontation looks like? Federal agents with one set of warrants, state officers with another, and a standoff in the street. How long before that kind of posture turns into something far uglier?
And this is where the story takes a darker turn. Because once local officials begin openly defying federal authority, the next logical escalation isn't theoretical anymore. It lands squarely on the shoulders of the people who wear the uniform. The step from mayors refusing to cooperate with federal law to members of Congress telling active duty troops they can disobey orders isn't a change of subject. It's the same principle pushed to its next stage. When political actors normalize selective obedience, they implicitly turn the military into the next battleground. That's exactly where the rhetoric has been drifting.
In a recent video, a group of Democratic senators and representatives addressed soldiers directly and told them they have the right to disobey unlawful orders. That statement in isolation is technically true. no soldiers required to carry out an illegal command. But they didn't cite a single example, none of any illegal order ever given by Trump, his cabinet, or senior officers. They didn't name one situation where a soldier was asked to commit a clear crime. They simply planted the seed. You might be given unlawful orders any day now, and you are empowered to ignore them. What was the purpose of that message? Was it legal education or was it political conditioning?
They did not quote article 90 or article 92 of the uniform code of military justice which lay out the precise rare circumstances under which a service member can legally refuse an order. Those provisions focus on obvious illegality. Orders to commit atrocities, to use violence unlawfully, to desert, to break clear criminal statutes. They are not catchall excuses for a soldier to say, "I disagree with this policy." So, I'll pretend it's unlawful and walk away. The bar is intentionally high because an army where everyone decides for themselves which orders count is not an army anymore. It is a mob with uniforms. Yet in this political climate, 1.3 million active duty troops were effectively told in soft and vague language that they should start thinking of themselves as moral arbiters standing above the chain of command whenever the other party holds the White House. You don't destabilize civilian control of the military much more clearly than that without actually marching tanks.
Meanwhile, across the country, we now have hundreds of jurisdictions, over 600 by some counts, where blue cities and states have declared that federal law simply no longer applies. They call themselves sanctuary cities or sanctuary states. They insist that federal immigration statutes are somehow illegitimate within their borders. This is not some spontaneous burst of localism. It is a form of neoconfederate nullification. The same logic that helped set the stage for the Civil War. Jefferson Davis claimed the federal government was acting outside its authority and therefore the states could defy it. Our modern mayors and governors make the same claim just with different slogans.
Ask yourself, do they intend this principle to apply to everyone or only to themselves? If a county in Utah said, "We're conservative. We don't believe in the Endangered Species Act and we're not going to stop construction to protect some rare amphibian. Would the left applaud that as an act of conscience? Of course not. They would denounce it as radical lawlessness. If a sheriff in Montana said, "We don't like federal gun regulations. We believe they infringe on our way of life, so we will no longer enforce them within our county." Would the same people who celebrate sanctuary policies for immigration congratulate him for his bravery? Not a chance.
So what's going on? Why is nullification treated as a moral imperative in Los Angeles but a constitutional crisis in Montana? Why is defiance applauded when it protects illegal border crossings but condemned when it protects second amendment rights? Once you recognize the double standard, the conclusion becomes unavoidable. This is not about principle. It is about power. Federal law is to be honored or ignored based not on its legitimacy, but on whether it helps or hinders the preferred political project.
And once local leaders redefine federal law as optional, they create space for something even more troubling, a parallel system of authority. When mayors and governors claim they will appeal to higher law or international norms, they are not just protesting policies. They are quietly proposing to elevate foreign bodies, activist networks, or international commissions above the constitution itself. You can see this clearly in the language some of them use. Why are they advising protesters in Portland on how to avoid arrest by federal marshals? Why are officials in certain cities promising that if federal agents act, local bodies will appeal to United Nations or international human rights commissions to intervene on behalf of their resident. One mayor said outright that he would call on the UN Human Rights Council, an entity that has included regimes like Communist China, North Korea, and Iran, to weigh in on American domestic policy. Are these the people he believes have higher moral authority than the citizens who elected our president? Is the Constitution now conditional on the approval of autocratic government sitting on foreign committees? This is getting very, very dangerous.
And underneath it all is a simple fact the left understands perfectly well. They do not currently control the legislative, executive, or judicial branches at the national level. Their agenda is not one most Americans want. So instead of persuading voters and winning elections, they look for ways to create pressure from below and from the side through street chaos, through sympathetic cities, through bureaucratic resistance, through cultural intimidation. In the past, that has included firebombing, targeted businesses, violent protests outside ICE facilities, mobs trying to storm federal buildings, and social media movements that glorify political violence when the victim is on the wrong side of the spectrum. Now, it includes the open nullification of federal law, even though the Constitution clearly states that federal statutes properly enacted are supreme over conflicting state and local law. When federal officers are trying to protect federal property or enforce duly passed laws, cities and states don't get to decide that the Constitution is on pause inside their zip code. In other words, the left that spent four years screaming about insurrection has embraced a neoconfederate mindset of its own. It is insurrectionary in spirit, if not yet in formal declaration. And it needs to stop before we find ourselves in something that looks uncomfortably like 1,861 all over again.
What makes the present moment so dangerous is not simply that city officials are defying federal law or that lawmakers are encouraging selective obedience or that activists are redefining the Constitution as a suggestion. It's that all of these threads are starting to weave themselves together into something far more combustible. What begins as rhetoric from a mayor becomes policy from a city council, becomes street level confrontation between federal officers and local activists, becomes federal agents left without support, becomes Congress whispering to the military that normal rules don't really apply anymore. And once those elements begin reinforcing one another, the boundaries that hold a republic together get thinner, weaker, easier to tear, take a look at the city streets where federal and local authority now collide.
In Portland, we witness scenes that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. protesters harassing ICE facilities night after night, shining industrial lasers into the eyes of agents, hurling explosives and incendiary devices, attempting to breach fences and barriers, and then in almost theatrical fashion, sprinting across the street to hide behind local police who had been instructed not to cooperate with federal officers. It was a performance of defiance. attack the federal government, then retreat to the shelter of a mayor who insists he will not allow federal law enforcement to operate freely.
Chicago took this dynamic even further when an ICE convoy was trapped by hostile cars, boxed in, their safety genuinely threatened. Local police failed to respond. Not because they were overwhelmed, not because they were confused, but because they were ordered not to help. Those officers were trapped in a situation where the people who are supposed to stand beside them chose politics over duty. Federal agents surrounded by danger, abandoned by local allies because the mayor believes cooperation with federal law is somehow immoral.
Los Angeles adopted its own twist. Officials admitted without embarrassment that they actively warn illegal immigrants about federal enforcement efforts. They coordinate with advocacy networks to tip people off, giving those who have violated immigration law a head start to escape arrest. That is not activism. That is obstruction. And it is a direct assault on federal authority. No matter how polished the rhetoric sounds, this pattern keeps repeating itself. Cities and states have begun treating federal law as a menu from which they can pick the dishes they like and send the rest back to the kitchen. and they justify it with moral language phrases like humanitarian duty, sanctuary, protection, as though those words erase the constitutional consequences of their actions. But what they are actually doing is resurrecting a 19th century doctrine that should have been buried with the Confederacy. The idea that a state or locality can nullify federal law whenever it finds that law inconvenient.
There is a temptation to dismiss these acts as isolated episodes or as fringe political theater meant to score points with certain voters. But when you put the pieces together, a clearer picture emerges. This is not random. It is a shift in posture, a systematic attempt to redefine the relationship between the federal government and its subdivisions. And it mirrors almost perfectly the logic that plunged America into its bloodiest conflict in the 1,850 seconds. The argument wasn't framed as rebellion either. It was framed as conscience, as local autonomy, as protection of community values. Leading Kansas didn't begin with official declarations of secession. It began with towns that refused to enforce federal law. With citizens who decided that violence was justified if it resisted Washington's commands, with a culture that quietly encouraged defiance until the violence became impossible to contain.
History doesn't repeat itself perfectly, but it rhymes in unsettling ways. Today we are watching officials in powerful cities, not backwoods, militia leaders, not fringe separatists, but mainstream mayors and state legislators tell their constituents that federal law is optional. They tell them that if agents of the United States government arrive in their jurisdiction, those agents don't have the same authority they do everywhere else in the country. And then they tell officers, whether police or military, that following their oath to the Constitution is a matter of personal judgment. This is how the slow erosion of order begins. It doesn't start with cannon fire. It starts with doubt. It starts with local leaders insisting their morality has higher standing than federal statute. It starts with the military being invited into partisan disagreements. It starts with mobs attacking federal buildings under the watchful eyes of city officials who refuse to intervene. And it escalates in predictable, dangerous steps. We don't have to guess where this road leads. The pattern is already visible.
In Portland, mobs pelted federal officers with rocks and fireworks, shining lasers capable of permanent eye damage directly into their faces. When pushed back, they claimed they were resisting occupation, a word chosen intentionally to invoke the idea that the federal government has no right to enforce its own laws on its own property. That is not protest. That is rebellion wrapped in catchphrases.
In Chicago, when ICE officers were trapped and threatened, local police did nothing. The message was unmistakable. If federal agents are in danger, that danger is their own problem. Chicago's government had effectively declared that cooperation with the federal government was no longer part of its obligations. That is not autonomy. That is defiance.
And in city after city, officials push the same narrative. We have our own culture, our own values, our own identity, and we refuse to allow the federal government to intrude. That is the language of secession spoken softly and dressed in progressive rhetoric. And yet woven into all of this is an extraordinary hypocrisy. The left claims to reject nullification when the nullifiers are conservative. Imagine for a moment a county in Utah declaring that it refuses to enforce federal environmental regulations. The outrage would be instant. Editorial boards would thunder about the collapse of the rule of law. Activists would march. Headlines would scream about threats to democracy. The same people who cheer sanctuary cities would demand immediate federal intervention. Or imagine a sheriff in Montana announcing that his county does not recognize federal firearms laws. Would the champions of local autonomy praise him? Would the same voices that celebrate defiance in California congratulate him for standing up to an overreaching government? Of course not. They would call him radical, dangerous, authoritarian. Their principles are flexible because their goal is not justice but power.
The deeper question though is why they are taking this route at all. Why reject federal law? Why elevate international bodies over American constitutional authority? Why encourage soldiers to second-guess their orders? Why turn local law enforcement against federal officers? The answer is not complicated. The left does not currently control Congress, the presidency, or the Supreme Court. Their legislative agenda has been rejected by the voters. Their judicial theories have been constrained by the courts and their executive power has been limited. So they seek leverage somewhere else. They try to create pressure from below, from cities, from activist groups, from bureaucracies, from cultural enclaves. When they cannot shape national policy through elections, they attempt to reshape it through defiance.
In the past, this has included firebombing businesses, assaults on federal buildings, and mobs trying to trap officers inside their own facilities. Social media influencers glorify political violence as long as it is directed at the correct targets. They applaud every act of resistance, no matter how reckless, if it weakens federal authority when the wrong party holds power. And now that same spirit has evolved into something subtler but more serious. The normalization of nullification. The idea that federal law can be ignored because it is politically unfashionable. The idea that cities can decide which parts of the constitution matter. The idea that violent activists are mere protesters while federal agents enforcing statutes are interlopers. This has a pedigree. It has a name. It is neoconfederate in structure and insurrectionary in spirit, and it should stop before the country finds itself reenacting chapters of history we all claim to have learned from.
Yet, the modern left insists on repeating the same patterns with a new coat of paint. Their defiance is presented as moral courage. Their nullification is framed as compassion. Their rejection of federal authority is sold as progress. But if you listen closely, you can hear echoes of long ago arguments. arguments used by segregationists, by secessionists, by those who place local sentiment above national unity.
Meanwhile, on a global scale, a different kind of recalibration is unfolding. One that reveals why American stability matters so profoundly. Consider the Middle East. After years of predictions that any confrontation there would ignite a world shattering war, the reality has been far more complex. When Iran was humiliated militarily, many expected Russia or China to leap to its defense. They did not. They watched. They calculated. They protected their own interests. Beijing made it clear. Keep the straight of Hormuz open. Beyond that, they had no appetite for becoming entangled in a conflict sparked by Thrron's miscalculations. Moscow, bogged down in its own war, saw no advantage in replacing Iran's destroyed air defenses. The Russian position was blunt. Why rearm a partner who keeps losing its equipment? Why risk further complications? Iran's proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis took the same lesson. They watched Iran sit back while they absorbed the consequences of their own aggression. They saw no reason to offer rescue when Iran itself had offered none. The entire region has been jolted into a new configuration, one shaped not by loyalty, but by self-preservation.
Europe has reassessed its stance, too. For years, European leaders complained about American pressure on NATO, about demands for higher defense spending, about Trump's blunt insistence that allies pay their share. But when it became clear that the United States had regained confidence in its strategic posture, the tone shifted. NATO members, once dismissive, now speak of increasing military budgets, fortifying capabilities, and preparing for a world in which deterrence must be real, not rhetorical.
This global recalibration matters because it underscores something the left often pretends not to understand. Stability is not maintained by moral slogans. It is maintained by functional government, by respect for law, by a clear chain of command, by a shared national authority. When domestic actors undermine federal law for short-term political gain, they don't just weaken the federal government, they weaken the country's ability to project stability abroad. And in a world filled with adversaries, that weakness does not go unnoticed. The irony is sharp. At the very moment when American leadership is needed to manage dangerous global realignments, parts of the country are busy reenacting a modern form of nullification, encouraging civil disobedience, not from citizens protesting injustice, but from officials entrusted with enforcing the law.
This is not sustainable. A nation cannot function if each of its cities imagines itself a sovereign state with its own foreign policy and its own constitutional interpretation. A nation cannot endure if members of Congress advise soldiers to second-guess orders based on political preference. A nation cannot remain stable if laws are obeyed only when they align with ideology. We know where selective obedience leads. We know where nullification ends. It leads from soft defiance to hard confrontation, from political gestures to real violence, from bleeding Kansas to Harper's Ferry to Fort Sumpter. Once the idea takes hold that federal law is optional, the bond that holds the republic together begins to fray. That bond is fraying now. Not because the country is destined for conflict, but because certain political actors have convinced themselves that rebellion is righteous when they are the ones rebelling. They believe that as long as their rhetoric is wrapped in compassion, their defiance cannot be insurrectionary. They are wrong. History does not care about the slogans people use to justify their behavior. It cares about the behavior itself. We're watching a political movement flirt with fire, then insist that the flames are harmless because they're meant well. But fire is not moral or immoral. It simply burns. And the closer this country drifts toward open defiance of the Constitution, the more likely it becomes that the sparks will find something to ignite. If the left truly believes insurrection is a mortal threat to the republic, they should look carefully at what their own leaders are doing. Because the most dangerous form of rebellion is not the kind shouted in the streets. It's the kind spoken softly in city hall, whispered in legislative chambers, encoded in policy, normalized through rhetoric, and justified through moral posturing. If they continue down this road, the consequences will not be theoretical. They will be real and they will be national. And the tragedy is that the country has already lived through a version of this once. We don't need to learn the lesson again the hard way.