Conservatives should generally support state and local sovereignty, but when states and cities can’t control violent mobs, that’s not an exercise of sovereignty, and the federal government should step in to protect American citizens and property.
The following is a transcript of the above video:
Hey guys, hope you’re doing well. I just want to talk to you very briefly about President Trump sending troops into these cities. And I have to tell you, these cities have needed federal intervention since well before George Floyd was killed. I mean, let’s just be honest. We accept way too much in terms of death and violence and crime in these cities and nobody cares. And the Republicans don’t care because none of them can win those cities anyway.
So it’s not like they even represent those cities. And even where you have senators from states that have dysfunctional cities like that, they win despite the cities, not because of them. And so they don’t care and they don’t even know how to talk to anybody in those cities anyway, even if they did. And the Democrats don’t care because they win anyway. And in fact, it seems like the worse a city is, the more likely it is that a Democrat’s going to win.
So nobody’s really incentivized to solve the problem. And now that President Trump is actually doing something about it and the left has decided they’re going to resist everything and anything President Trump does, all of a sudden now everybody on the left is a Federalist. Everybody on the left is preaching state sovereignty and this is some kind of constitutional crisis, and they could not possibly be more wrong. And I’ll give you two reasons why.
Number one, when I see all these ridiculous levels of crime and these mobs just running the place and just vandalizing constantly and just destroying everything in sight, I got to tell you this: I’m not seeing a whole lot of sovereign states there. I’m actually seeing a bunch of failed states and failed cities. Sovereignty means you’ve established the rule of law and order, not you’ve been overrun by lawless mobs. So you can’t preach state sovereignty when the states aren’t sovereign, when the mobs themselves are sovereign.
Solving this problem needed to have been a top priority for the president. And it’s a shame that it had to get this point before he was doing it. But it’s exactly why we have a federal government. And this brings me to my second point. This is not an abuse of the Constitution. In fact, this is the very reason we have a Constitution. Let me explain.
Before we had a Constitution, we were well actually for a brief period of time by something called the Articles of Confederation, which may be a lot of you have heard of. And basically the Articles of Confederation create a very, very weak central government and gave the states a lot of autonomy. But a bunch of things started happening that showed we needed a stronger federal government, not the least of which was something called Shays’ Rebellion.
And without getting into too much detail, basically you had a bunch of soldiers who had fought in the Revolutionary War, who had all these economic grievances and social grievances. And they started causing, well, causing a rebellion. That’s why it’s called that. And the federal government was impotent to do anything about it. And the states really couldn’t do anything about it. And so you had these people in government trying to raise like a private militia. And it was just causing all kinds of chaos.
People were being killed. It was just absolute pandemonium. And eventually things die down. And it was determined in large part because of that, that we couldn’t have that anymore and we really needed a Constitution that the Articles of Confederation were too weak. And so we created a Constitution so that we had a centralized power, so that amongst other things, it could put down domestic disturbances like this.
And so a few years later when we had a Constitution and George Washington was president, when we had something called the Whiskey Rebellion, he didn’t have this problem. He mustered up a bunch of troops at the federal level. He brought in soldiers from all kinds of different states to fight under him. This is actually the only time in American history that an American president who was obviously Commander-in-chief of the military actually led the military towards battle. He mustered up like 13,000 soldiers and went to fight in the Whiskey Rebellion or fight against the Whiskey Rebellion. And the very sight of that caused the rebellion to dissipate.
So the point is not only is this not an abuse of the Constitution, this is one of the main reasons we have a Constitution so that when states get overrun like this, when state sovereignty is no longer sovereignty, when in fact what happens is the lawless become sovereign that the federal government can step in and actually do something about it. Because let’s not forget, we’re not just citizens of the states. We’re citizens of the United States and our government at the federal level has an obligation to secure our rights, our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And when mobs of criminals and vandals have taken over the streets and are terrorizing entire cities and the cities won’t do anything about it, either because it’s not politically popular for their base or they’re just impotent or any combination of that, then it’s absolutely the responsibility of the president to step in and do something about it. Now, is that a long-term solution sending federal troops in? Probably not.
I think you actually need something very similar to the much bemoaned Clinton crime initiative that supplies funds for far more police officers in these cities. Okay? And actually builds more jails and provides for more judges and more prosecutors and more public defenders and things like that. Because for as much as the left wants to say that we have a problem with too many people in jail, just look at those streets.
It seems like we have a lot of people who should be in jail who aren’t and that looks like the real problem to me. I know it’s not a popular thing to say, but it’s not law-abiding citizens who are causing these problems right now. When I look at Chicago, when I look at these other cities and we pick on Chicago, but it’s all over the place that have these record levels of shootings, and crime and things like that.
That’s not a function of too many criminals being in jail. That’s a function of too many criminals being on the street and we need law enforcement to do something about that. And we need more law enforcement, but it’s going to require a lot of initiatives at the federal level because the states, in particular these totally useless and uniformly Democrat mayors, are just proving that they can’t handle the situation or won’t, and that’s just untenable.
So that’s my message for you guys tonight. Hope you guys are all doing well. See you later and God bless.
