by Victor Dais Hanson
Democrats now celebrate the very nullificationist tactics they once decried, embracing a neo-Confederate defiance of federal authority to undermine a president they despise.
Democrats weirdly boast of the subordination of the Constitution to international statutes. Our governors and mayors in blue states and cities take neo-Confederate vows to oppose the national government’s right to protect its own property, to direct its own employees, and to enforce our shared federal laws.
Over a decade ago, some 600 “sanctuary cities” declared that they were immune from the full enforcement of federal law. They further boasted that they would not hand over illegal aliens, detained by state or local authorities, to federal agents.
These were strange threats. Not long ago, at the 1992 and 1996 Democratic conventions, liberal grandees like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi had vowed to stop all would-be illegal aliens from unlawfully entering the U.S. Apparently, they all flipped to open borders when spiraling numbers turned the undocumented into a new Democratic constituency.
Moreover, being the left, their loud nullificationist vows were, of course, purely political and never principled.
Once, an exasperated Arizona governor, Jan Brewer, had beseeched the Obama administration in vain to enforce its own federal laws at the southern border. In frustration, she finally sought ways to use her own state’s resources to do what Obama refused.
And the reaction of the Obama administration?
It was certainly not gratitude for Brewer’s efforts to enforce federal law. Instead, the Obama crowd sued her. It successfully sought out left-wing judges to stay her state’s efforts.
How strange that our current “principled” district judges once ruled that states could not interfere with federal border policing—even in cases where the federal government was illegally refusing to enforce its own laws.
But now they’ve become neo-Confederates who routinely favor states blocking the federal government when it is finally fulfilling its constitutional duties.
Of course, if any rural red county decided that it could nullify the federal government’s laws governing handgun registration or EPA regulations, the projectionist left would deem them insurrectionary new Confederates and send in the FBI.
Coup Bluster
In Trump’s first term, some retired four-star admirals and generals—Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice be damned—talked of a sitting U.S. President Trump leaving office, the “sooner the better”—whatever that meant. Others libeled him as a “liar” and “Mussolini,” his policies comparable to those of the executioners at Auschwitz.
Some retired lieutenant colonels in 2020 even publicly advocated using military units to confront presidential security details. Did they want an armed showdown to forcibly remove Trump from the Oval Office? And in their madness, they bragged about the purported greater lethality of their army friends to defeat the president’s supporters or security details: “Trump’s little green men, so intimidating to lightly armed federal law enforcement agents, step aside and fade away, realizing they would not constitute a good morning’s work for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne.”
Do we remember the Obama-era Pentagon lawyer who, eleven days into the first Trump administration, speculated in print about how to remove an elected President Trump? She offered up the choices of Trump removal by either the 25th Amendment, the impeachment process, or a military coup: “[A] possibility [for removing President Trump] is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup…”
We also remember Gen. Mark Milley, the recent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
He once apparently diagnosed Commander-in-Chief Trump as unhinged.
So Milley took it upon himself to warn his communist Chinese counterpart that during any existential crisis, the People’s Liberation Army head would be first contacted by Milley—if Milley ever felt Trump was too erratic to be obeyed (in Milley’s nonprofessional medical judgment).
So Milley reported his call as follows: “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”
Milley apparently also decided that he was exempt from obeying federal laws.
As JCS chair, he also violated laws governing the chain of command. He unlawfully directed regional commanders to report to him first, should they receive a direct presidential order deemed lunatic by Milley. Yet the legal chain of command mandated that subordinate theater commanders report to, and receive presidential orders via, the Secretary of Defense.
Later, ex-generals like Milley and John Kelly routinely and emphatically blasted ex-President Trump as a “fascist.”
“Fascist” was just the sort of dangerous hyperbole that the left so often has warned us can prompt the unstable—like a Thomas Crooks or Ryan Routh—to emerge from their creepy shadows to “save the republic.”
Fort Sumter?
Democratic officials are also currently calling for organized and state-sanctioned opposition to the federal government, in near-Bleeding Kansas or Fort Sumter insurrectionary fashion.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson claims he will use his city resources to actively thwart ICE duties. In deranged fashion, he threatens to call in the UN to prevent federal law enforcement. He apparently treats the Constitution as nothing, as if Johnson were elected not by fellow citizens but by global voters from Iran to North Korea.
Johnson’s idiocy is no mere boast: when a trapped convoy of ICE vehicles was recently besieged by violent protesters, local Chicago-area police were told to stand down and let ICE fight its own way out.
In Portland, the local police sometimes advise violent Antifa-related protesters on strategies for their anti-ICE street activities, presumably to help them avoid arrest.
Consider the blather of the increasingly disturbed octogenarian Rep. Nancy Pelosi.
She recently boasted that “Trump is ‘a vile creature, the worst thing on the face of the Earth.” Then she doubled down and giggled that she “could have done much worse.”
But what exact epithet could Pelosi mean that is “much worse” than “vile” and “the worst thing on earth”?
The ‘vilest creature in the cosmos’?
Pelosi, remember, as Speaker of the House, set an embarrassing historic precedent by tearing up on national television the State of the Union address of the President of the United States when the text, as is customary, was ceremoniously presented to her by Trump. Should that now become a normal part of all SOTU addresses?
Recently, in a veritable paean to Jefferson Davis, Pelosi warned that federal agents might be arrested on her home turf if her state officers determine whether their enforcement of federal law violates California statutes.
If Pelosi’s confrontation materializes, will they use force?
Mayor-elect Zoran Mamdani has boasted in the past that he will soon override federal law as mayor of New York and arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he arrive at the UN headquarters in New York.
But what if the federal government says, “NO!” Will Mamdani then call in the NYPD?
Note, Mamdani did not issue a comparable threat to the communist Chinese UN delegations, whose government oversees a million Uyghurs in work camps, nor to the Nigerians who have allowed Islamic terrorists to kill over 150,000 Christians, nor to Vladimir Putin, who invaded Ukraine, causing over 1.5 million casualties in the greatest European slaughterhouse since World War II.
Instead, Mamdani appeals to a superior “international law.” In his unconstitutional mind, world law supersedes his own government’s constitutional authority.
As a de facto insurrectionist, Mamdani would claim that international human rights activists, or the International Criminal Court (?), deserve greater legal authority inside the U.S. than do Americans’ own elected federal government.
All that nonsense sounds like infamous Confederate Attorney General Judah Benjamin, who often bragged about how insurrectionary states could legally ignore federal authority.
Military Resistance?
Yet the most recent and dangerous example of insurrectionary nullification is an inflammatory video issued by Democrat and veteran politicos.
In it, Democratic lawmakers and veterans Sen. Elissa Slotkin, Sen. Mark Kelly, Rep. Jason Crow, Rep. Maggie Goodlander, Rep. Chris Deluzio, and Rep. Chrissy Houlahan appeal to U.S. soldiers to “disobey” their superior officers’ orders if, in their own legal opinion, they feel the orders are “illegal” by contravening the Constitution. How or why, they do not say.
Are we then to imagine an insurrectionary fantasy of 1.3 million active-duty soldiers, now each acting as his own lawyer, questioning daily orders from their officers? Not one of these elected officials provided a single instance of any past Trump order or Pentagon directive that would serve as an example of their nullificationist dogma.
When these Democratic officials also appealed to federal intelligence officers to likewise disobey orders, should we laugh or cry?
Did any of these moralists ever issue such a video when the Obama- and Biden-era Directors of the CIA, FBI, and National Intelligence all admittedly lied under oath?
How about when “51 intelligence authorities” deliberately lied in an open letter to the American people on the eve of the 2020 election to help elect Joe Biden? Or when the FBI agents worked with private social media to suppress the news?
In the video, did these officials mean that soldiers should resist presidential orders to employ federal troops to quell domestic chaos and rioting?
Lots of presidents have done just that from the Civil War to the present.
Would they have urged U.S. soldiers to disobey any order in pursuance of the use of force without congressional approval?
If so, why didn’t they damn past presidents like Harry S. Truman, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, who all directed the military to act abroad without the approval of Congress?
How about Barack Obama’s serial use of Predator assassination drones that, on at least one occasion, blew up an American citizen?
These sanctimonious Democrat officials did not outline any possible scenarios for their advocacy of insurrectionary disobedience—because they had no example to draw on.
Nor did they dare reference in any detail Articles 90 and 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which explicitly spell out when, in the rarest of cases, a soldier can disobey an order.
The officials had no concern that their video was endangering thousands—if someone might take their advice and, without cause, disobey an order, putting lives at risk, well beyond their own careers.
What the Democrats did not say is that they cut the video to implant a false narrative that Trump was on the verge of issuing unconstitutional orders, and they were encouraging mass and politicized disobedience, after the previous failure of the shutdown, mass street protests, attacks on ICE agents, and Tesla dealerships.
The New Secessionists
Leftists are now back to the same old, same old incendiary conspiracies and paranoias of Russian collusion, laptop disinformation, removing Trump from the ballot, impeaching him twice, indicting him 91 times, raiding his home with armed FBI agents, plotting stealthily to record him to invoke the 25th Amendment— and all the dangerous and often illegal ways it has sought to destroy a political opponent by any means necessary.
We certainly are in dangerous times. But the crisis is one of the left’s own making, in overtly inciting the country to a virtual rerun of 1861.
What else is urging American soldiers to defy the orders of their superiors without citing a single specific cause?
How about claiming by fiat that entire cities and states are immune from federal jurisdiction?
What about threatening to use state officers to arrest federal law enforcement officials?
Withholding local police help and thus endangering federal agents at the hands of violent protesters?
Making a mockery of the Uniform Code of Military Justice?
Advising violent protesters on how best to demonstrate against federal officials without being arrested?
Subordinating U.S. federal law to global legal authorities?
Using city resources to help illegal aliens evade federal law enforcement?
Arresting a foreign official with diplomatic immunity and under federal legal protection when he enters a local jurisdiction?
Freelancing by sidestepping the legal rights of the Commander-in-Chief and instead phoning to tip off an enemy general?
The common theme?
The desperate left feels the more insurrectionary tensions they can gin up, the more that the ensuing domestic crises hurt an elected president whom they loathe.
They assume they are exempt from following the law because they believe they are our moral and intellectual superiors.
And so for the next four years, they will once again insist they can ignore or violate with contempt any federal law they please—as the nation is heading toward widespread civil insurrection of the left’s own neo-Confederate making.
Is Jeff Davis the Model?
Who is the real, or fictional, inspiration for the new insurrectionary wing of the Democrat Party?
The fictitious Hollywood insurrectionist, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “James Mattoon Scott” (Burt Lancaster), who in the 1964 film Seven Days in May attempted to overthrow the presidency?
Or perhaps Jefferson Davis? He ultimately ordered the attack by South Carolina state forces against the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, which ignited the Civil War.
Or is the better inspiration the “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door?” Alabama Governor George Wallace likewise vowed to use his state’s law enforcement to nullify a federal law.
Yet how odd that the left, which had lectured us so often about a January 6th “insurrection”—a charge that not even the Javert-like special counsel Jack Smith ever lodged against Donald Trump—now talks frequently about the proud nullification of our nation’s federal laws.
The New Confederacy
Democrats weirdly boast of the subordination of the Constitution to international statutes. Our governors and mayors in blue states and cities take neo-Confederate vows to oppose the national government’s right to protect its own property, to direct its own employees, and to enforce our shared federal laws.
Over a decade ago, some 600 “sanctuary cities” declared that they were immune from the full enforcement of federal law. They further boasted that they would not hand over illegal aliens, detained by state or local authorities, to federal agents.
These were strange threats. Not long ago, at the 1992 and 1996 Democratic conventions, liberal grandees like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi had vowed to stop all would-be illegal aliens from unlawfully entering the U.S. Apparently, they all flipped to open borders when spiraling numbers turned the undocumented into a new Democratic constituency.
Moreover, being the left, their loud nullificationist vows were, of course, purely political and never principled.
Once, an exasperated Arizona governor, Jan Brewer, had beseeched the Obama administration in vain to enforce its own federal laws at the southern border. In frustration, she finally sought ways to use her own state’s resources to do what Obama refused.
And the reaction of the Obama administration?
It was certainly not gratitude for Brewer’s efforts to enforce federal law. Instead, the Obama crowd sued her. It successfully sought out left-wing judges to stay her state’s efforts.
How strange that our current “principled” district judges once ruled that states could not interfere with federal border policing—even in cases where the federal government was illegally refusing to enforce its own laws.
But now they’ve become neo-Confederates who routinely favor states blocking the federal government when it is finally fulfilling its constitutional duties.
Of course, if any rural red county decided that it could nullify the federal government’s laws governing handgun registration or EPA regulations, the projectionist left would deem them insurrectionary new Confederates and send in the FBI.
Coup Bluster
In Trump’s first term, some retired four-star admirals and generals—Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice be damned—talked of a sitting U.S. President Trump leaving office, the “sooner the better”—whatever that meant. Others libeled him as a “liar” and “Mussolini,” his policies comparable to those of the executioners at Auschwitz.
Some retired lieutenant colonels in 2020 even publicly advocated using military units to confront presidential security details. Did they want an armed showdown to forcibly remove Trump from the Oval Office? And in their madness, they bragged about the purported greater lethality of their army friends to defeat the president’s supporters or security details: “Trump’s little green men, so intimidating to lightly armed federal law enforcement agents, step aside and fade away, realizing they would not constitute a good morning’s work for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne.”
Do we remember the Obama-era Pentagon lawyer who, eleven days into the first Trump administration, speculated in print about how to remove an elected President Trump? She offered up the choices of Trump removal by either the 25th Amendment, the impeachment process, or a military coup: “[A] possibility [for removing President Trump] is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup…”
We also remember Gen. Mark Milley, the recent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
He once apparently diagnosed Commander-in-Chief Trump as unhinged.
So Milley took it upon himself to warn his communist Chinese counterpart that during any existential crisis, the People’s Liberation Army head would be first contacted by Milley—if Milley ever felt Trump was too erratic to be obeyed (in Milley’s nonprofessional medical judgment).
So Milley reported his call as follows: “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”
Milley apparently also decided that he was exempt from obeying federal laws.
As JCS chair, he also violated laws governing the chain of command. He unlawfully directed regional commanders to report to him first, should they receive a direct presidential order deemed lunatic by Milley. Yet the legal chain of command mandated that subordinate theater commanders report to, and receive presidential orders via, the Secretary of Defense.
Later, ex-generals like Milley and John Kelly routinely and emphatically blasted ex-President Trump as a “fascist.”
“Fascist” was just the sort of dangerous hyperbole that the left so often has warned us can prompt the unstable—like a Thomas Crooks or Ryan Routh—to emerge from their creepy shadows to “save the republic.”
Fort Sumter?
Democratic officials are also currently calling for organized and state-sanctioned opposition to the federal government, in near-Bleeding Kansas or Fort Sumter insurrectionary fashion.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson claims he will use his city resources to actively thwart ICE duties. In deranged fashion, he threatens to call in the UN to prevent federal law enforcement. He apparently treats the Constitution as nothing, as if Johnson were elected not by fellow citizens but by global voters from Iran to North Korea.
Johnson’s idiocy is no mere boast: when a trapped convoy of ICE vehicles was recently besieged by violent protesters, local Chicago-area police were told to stand down and let ICE fight its own way out.
In Portland, the local police sometimes advise violent Antifa-related protesters on strategies for their anti-ICE street activities, presumably to help them avoid arrest.
Consider the blather of the increasingly disturbed octogenarian Rep. Nancy Pelosi.
She recently boasted that “Trump is ‘a vile creature, the worst thing on the face of the Earth.” Then she doubled down and giggled that she “could have done much worse.”
But what exact epithet could Pelosi mean that is “much worse” than “vile” and “the worst thing on earth”?
The ‘vilest creature in the cosmos’?
Pelosi, remember, as Speaker of the House, set an embarrassing historic precedent by tearing up on national television the State of the Union address of the President of the United States when the text, as is customary, was ceremoniously presented to her by Trump. Should that now become a normal part of all SOTU addresses?
Recently, in a veritable paean to Jefferson Davis, Pelosi warned that federal agents might be arrested on her home turf if her state officers determine whether their enforcement of federal law violates California statutes.
If Pelosi’s confrontation materializes, will they use force?
Mayor-elect Zoran Mamdani has boasted in the past that he will soon override federal law as mayor of New York and arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he arrive at the UN headquarters in New York.
But what if the federal government says, “NO!” Will Mamdani then call in the NYPD?
Note, Mamdani did not issue a comparable threat to the communist Chinese UN delegations, whose government oversees a million Uyghurs in work camps, nor to the Nigerians who have allowed Islamic terrorists to kill over 150,000 Christians, nor to Vladimir Putin, who invaded Ukraine, causing over 1.5 million casualties in the greatest European slaughterhouse since World War II.
Instead, Mamdani appeals to a superior “international law.” In his unconstitutional mind, world law supersedes his own government’s constitutional authority.
As a de facto insurrectionist, Mamdani would claim that international human rights activists, or the International Criminal Court (?), deserve greater legal authority inside the U.S. than do Americans’ own elected federal government.
All that nonsense sounds like infamous Confederate Attorney General Judah Benjamin, who often bragged about how insurrectionary states could legally ignore federal authority.
Military Resistance?
Yet the most recent and dangerous example of insurrectionary nullification is an inflammatory video issued by Democrat and veteran politicos.
In it, Democratic lawmakers and veterans Sen. Elissa Slotkin, Sen. Mark Kelly, Rep. Jason Crow, Rep. Maggie Goodlander, Rep. Chris Deluzio, and Rep. Chrissy Houlahan appeal to U.S. soldiers to “disobey” their superior officers’ orders if, in their own legal opinion, they feel the orders are “illegal” by contravening the Constitution. How or why, they do not say.
Are we then to imagine an insurrectionary fantasy of 1.3 million active-duty soldiers, now each acting as his own lawyer, questioning daily orders from their officers? Not one of these elected officials provided a single instance of any past Trump order or Pentagon directive that would serve as an example of their nullificationist dogma.
When these Democratic officials also appealed to federal intelligence officers to likewise disobey orders, should we laugh or cry?
Did any of these moralists ever issue such a video when the Obama- and Biden-era Directors of the CIA, FBI, and National Intelligence all admittedly lied under oath?
How about when “51 intelligence authorities” deliberately lied in an open letter to the American people on the eve of the 2020 election to help elect Joe Biden? Or when the FBI agents worked with private social media to suppress the news?
In the video, did these officials mean that soldiers should resist presidential orders to employ federal troops to quell domestic chaos and rioting?
Lots of presidents have done just that from the Civil War to the present.
Would they have urged U.S. soldiers to disobey any order in pursuance of the use of force without congressional approval?
If so, why didn’t they damn past presidents like Harry S. Truman, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, who all directed the military to act abroad without the approval of Congress?
How about Barack Obama’s serial use of Predator assassination drones that, on at least one occasion, blew up an American citizen?
These sanctimonious Democrat officials did not outline any possible scenarios for their advocacy of insurrectionary disobedience—because they had no example to draw on.
Nor did they dare reference in any detail Articles 90 and 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which explicitly spell out when, in the rarest of cases, a soldier can disobey an order.
The officials had no concern that their video was endangering thousands—if someone might take their advice and, without cause, disobey an order, putting lives at risk, well beyond their own careers.
What the Democrats did not say is that they cut the video to implant a false narrative that Trump was on the verge of issuing unconstitutional orders, and they were encouraging mass and politicized disobedience, after the previous failure of the shutdown, mass street protests, attacks on ICE agents, and Tesla dealerships.
The New Secessionists
Leftists are now back to the same old, same old incendiary conspiracies and paranoias of Russian collusion, laptop disinformation, removing Trump from the ballot, impeaching him twice, indicting him 91 times, raiding his home with armed FBI agents, plotting stealthily to record him to invoke the 25th Amendment— and all the dangerous and often illegal ways it has sought to destroy a political opponent by any means necessary.
We certainly are in dangerous times. But the crisis is one of the left’s own making, in overtly inciting the country to a virtual rerun of 1861.
What else is urging American soldiers to defy the orders of their superiors without citing a single specific cause?
How about claiming by fiat that entire cities and states are immune from federal jurisdiction?
What about threatening to use state officers to arrest federal law enforcement officials?
Withholding local police help and thus endangering federal agents at the hands of violent protesters?
Making a mockery of the Uniform Code of Military Justice?
Advising violent protesters on how best to demonstrate against federal officials without being arrested?
Subordinating U.S. federal law to global legal authorities?
Using city resources to help illegal aliens evade federal law enforcement?
Arresting a foreign official with diplomatic immunity and under federal legal protection when he enters a local jurisdiction?
Freelancing by sidestepping the legal rights of the Commander-in-Chief and instead phoning to tip off an enemy general?
The common theme?
The desperate left feels the more insurrectionary tensions they can gin up, the more that the ensuing domestic crises hurt an elected president whom they loathe.
They assume they are exempt from following the law because they believe they are our moral and intellectual superiors.
And so for the next four years, they will once again insist they can ignore or violate with contempt any federal law they please—as the nation is heading toward widespread civil insurrection of the left’s own neo-Confederate making.
Victor Dais Hanson
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/11/24/insurrection-chic/
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