#despotism

Ngl I would missed that question on my college Gov test without PnF

"A man must believe what his conscience dictates, and if he believes in pacifism, so be it. But I'd rather be shot down in a battle than live under the heel of an arrogant alien despotism."

The time has come for a frank conversation about American resistance and what the spirit of 1776 really means.

Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/solutions/a-call-for-common-sense-resistance-liberation-solutions-and-evolution-over-revolution

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson was 33, James Madison was 25, Alexander Hamilton was 21, John Adams was 40, and Thomas Paine was 39.

Rosa Luxemburg was 35 when she wrote The Mass Strike, Che Guevara was 28 at the Granma Landing, and Fidel was 30, Bill Gates was 19 when he created Microsoft and 31 when it went public. MLK Jr. was 26 when he led the Bus Boycott and 39 when assassinated, Malcolm X was 39 when assassinated, Martin Luther was 33 when he wrote the 95 theses in 1517.

When Robert Oppenheimer began his professorship at Berkeley, he was 25; when he spearheaded the Manhattan Project, he was 38. Napoleon became Emperor at 34. Chögyam Trungpa was 19 when he was bestowed the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages of Tibetan Buddhism to take to the West, and led a group of over 300 refugees on a dangerous journey across the Himalayas to India from Chinese-occupied Tibet. Jiddu Krishnamurti was 29 when he rejected his role and disbanded the Order of the Star. Ramakrishna was 25 when he met Bhairavi Brahmani. Mikhail Kalashnikov was 30 when he designed the AK-47.

Toussaint Louverture was age 33 when he commanded rebel forces in Haiti; Bhagat Singh was executed at 23 as an anti-colonial martyr against British Raj; Simón Bolívar, 36, liberated South America from Spain; Huey Newton co-founded Black Panther Party at 24.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when Joseph Stalin kicked the bucket at 74. Napoleon was 46 in 1815 when he was defeated at Waterloo and subsequently banished to Saint Helena for the second and final time. Hitler was 56 when he committed suicide in his bunker in April 1945 as Allied forces closed in on Berlin. FDR was 60 when he signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942 authorizing the internment of Japanese Americans. Rodrigo Duterte was 71 when he assumed the presidency of the Philippines in 2016 and initiated his controversial "War on Drugs." Bill Clinton was 52 when he was impeached in December 1998.

Mike Luckovich is on fire, today and EVERYDAY! Thanks, Mike.

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 23, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson

Jan 24, 2026

Tens of thousands of Minnesotans took to the streets today in bitter cold temperatures with wind chills of -20°F (–28°C) to protest the occupation of Minneapolis and St. Paul by federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Status Coup News interviewed a protester walking down the street holding a sign that said: “CLASSIC NAZI BLUNDER: INVADING IN WINTER.”

The protester compared ICE agents to the Ku Klux Klan, noting that both wore masks and raided immigrant communities. He went on: “You know, there’s like all this talk of revolution. We’re the counterrevolutionaries, right?”

He explained: “[T]here is a minority who is trying to create a post-law, orderless, lawless society, where their might makes right. And because, you know, they have guns and are willing to use them, they think they can suspend the Constitution, suspend habeas corpus…, suspend civil liberties, generally speaking.”

He continued: “[T]here was a memo that came out that said that they think they can break into people’s houses without warrants, you know, basically just like, trust us, which is, you know, fundamentally against the Fourth Amendment. And so if you look at the amendments, I mean, they’re trying to tear it down the First, they’ve gassed people, they’ve shot people, you know, hit people with beanbag guns and batons for exercising their First Amendment rights, they don’t want people to, you know, exercise their Second Amendment rights, and certainly their Fourth, but also the Fourteenth, you know, basically, they’re attacking the whole Constitution.”

In his assertion that the Trump administration is engaged in a radical attempt to remake the American government while those trying to stop them are protecting our traditional government, the Minnesota protester was echoing another midwesterner from our history who also had to contend with a minority that had seized control of the federal government and was trying to rewrite the history of the United States of America to justify using the government to enrich themselves.

On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois spoke at New York City’s Cooper Union.

Five years before, in his controversial annual message of December 1855, Democratic president Franklin Pierce had ignored the Declaration of Independence and, in service to the elite southern enslavers who ran the Democratic party, retold the founding of the United States as a republic of “free white men.” The rights and privileges of belonging to that republic did not include “the subject races” of Indigenous or Black Americans, the president said.

He called out as fanatics and partisans those northerners, living in free states, who obeyed state free laws and protected enslaved Americans who had escaped from the South. They were radicals who rejected the federal law demanding their return to their enslavers. Even worse, they opposed the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that overturned the 1820 Missouri Compromise prohibiting the spread of human enslavement to the American West.

At Cooper Union, Lincoln rejected Pierce’s rewriting of American history. He also retold the history of America. In his version, though, that history was one in which the Founders opposed enslavement and those who stood against those trying to create a white man’s republic were the nation’s true counterrevolutionaries.

Resting his vision on the Declaration of Independence, the nation’s foundational document, he defended the principle of human equality and told Democrats: “[Y]ou say you are conservative—eminently conservative—while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;’ while you with one accord…spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new…. Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated.”

Lincoln was on solid historical ground when he reminded Americans of his era that those trying to impose a new system of white nationalist oligarchy on the nation were the true radicals, while those defending equality were conservatives.

The colonists who threw off the rule of King George III also stood firmly on the idea that they were protecting longstanding principles of self-government that British officials were trying to replace with tyranny. In the Declaration of Independence, the Founders called out “a long train of abuses and usurpations [that] evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

After enumerating the many ways in which the king had usurped the powers of Englishmen that had been established over centuries, beginning with the 1215 signing of the Magna Carta, the Founders launched a new nation. And then, when the Framers wrote a constitution for that new nation, they were careful to place within it a bill of rights to protect Americans from the rise of another tyrant.

Now the Trump administration is made up of radicals who are ignoring that Constitution and that Bill of Rights in their open attempt to create a white nationalist nation.

The man on the streets of Minneapolis today was right to call out the administration’s assault on the First Amendment that protects freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right of people peaceably to assemble.

Thanks to an unsealed State Department memo, we learned today that the administration revoked the visa of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk and detained her for six weeks solely because she co-authored an op-ed in the student newspaper calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The administration concluded that her op-ed “may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization.”

ICE agents arrived in Maine this week, and one took pictures of a legal observer’s car, prompting her to remind him that it is legal to record their actions and to ask why he was taking her information. He answered: “‘Cause we have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.” He appeared to be referring to Trump’s September 25, 2025, memo NSPM-7 that describes opposition to the administration’s policies—opposition protected by the First Amendment—as “domestic terrorism.”

Rachel Levinson-Waldman of the Brennan Center noted that this dramatic expansion of the legal framework for domestic terrorism appears to be the administration’s argument for suggesting Renee Good was a domestic terrorist after ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed her. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem falsely claimed that Good tried to run over Ross, calling it “an act of domestic terrorism,” and Vice President J.D. Vance suggested that protesters are engaging in “domestic terror techniques.”

But, as Levinson-Waldman explains, domestic terrorism has a specific definition in the law: actions that are dangerous to human life, violate criminal law, appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, or to influence the government by intimidation or coercion, and occur primarily in the U.S. “To actually be called a ‘domestic terrorist,’” she writes, “an individual must commit one or more of 51 underlying ‘federal crimes of terrorism,’” which involve nuclear or chemical weapons, plastic explosives, air piracy, and so on.

The Minneapolis protester was right about the administration’s assault on the Fourth Amendment as well. On Wednesday, Rebecca Santana of the Associated Press reported that ICE has been breaking into homes under the authority provided by a secret memo of May 12, 2025, signed by the acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, saying that federal agents do not need a judge’s warrant to force their way into people’s homes.

This is a direct assault on the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which says the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,” and establishes that the government can violate those rights only after a judge agrees there is probable cause of a crime and signs a warrant.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) warned: “Every American should be terrified by this secret ICE policy authorizing its agents to kick down your door & storm into your home. It is an unlawful & morally repugnant policy that exemplifies the kinds of dangerous, disgraceful abuses America is seeing in real time. In our democracy, with vanishingly rare exceptions, the government is barred from breaking into your home without approval from a real judge. Government agents have no right to ransack your bedroom or terrorize your kids on a whim or personal desire.”

The Minnesota protester was also right to call out the administration’s assault on the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees that no state shall “deprive any person”—not citizen, but person—“of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” It is this principle that is at the heart of the challenges to the administration’s rendering of immigrants to foreign countries without due process.

Instead of rooting itself in the real history of the United States of America, Ali Breland of The Atlantic noted on Wednesday, the Trump administration is embracing Nazi propaganda, trying to convince Americans that the nation’s roots are not in human equality but in the hierarchical system of European fascism. Rejecting the idea of liberty and equality proposed in the Declaration of Independence and defended by people like Abraham Lincoln as the nation’s foundational principle, they are trying to define the United States of America in an entirely new way: one made up of white Protestants who, in their minds, “belong” to the land here. Rather than a nation based in ideals, they want a nation based in “blood and soil.”

In the 1770s, and again in the 1850s, everyday Americans recognized the radicalism of those extremists who were trying to erase the nation’s principles and the rule of law, ignoring the longstanding rights of the people to liberty and equality and instead trying to impose a despotism.

Today a protester in Minneapolis, one of those tens of thousands who filled the streets in below-zero weather to demand that ICE end its violent occupation of their city and its abuse of immigrants and people of color, made it clear that Americans in 2026 still believe in the nation’s founding principles of equality and the rule of law, and they utterly reject the right wing’s blood-and-soil radicalism.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

Darkness is encroaching on the Western world. France and Germany's governments have crumbled, England is adrift, doughty Sweden is succumbing to right-wing forces, Türkiye has followed Hungary into being an autocratic nation, Poland has turned inward and racist, Canada is on the verge of ousting a long-serving moderate Liberal and replacing him with an odious Trump-light figurehead.

And then there's the spectre of another four or more years of Trump-led nihilism based on an oligarchy and cult-like leader.