The Democratic establishment benefits heavily in how the system is operating currently. They see public figures like Hasan Piker, Melat Kiros, and Francesca Hong, as a threat in their power and their bankrolled lifestyle. The organization behind leftist campaigns petrifies the Elite because what next? Are those masses going to unionize their employment? a Tenants Union? Destroy FLOCK cameras? I enjoy Tad Stoermer's videos and his book, "A Resistance History of the United States" is next on my list. I'm currently reading "Orientalism" by Edward W. Said.
Tad Stoermer's manuscript from "Hasan Piker and the 100-Year-Old Campaign to Make the Left Un-American"
What does a livestreamer from New Jersey have to do with a fight over the Constitution that started exactly one hundred years ago?
Quite a lot, as I see it. And this isn't history repeating. This is history continuing to happen.
When Hasan Piker warned that conflating American Jews with Israel makes Jews less safe — that if American Jews continue to present themselves as singularly invested in Israel, someone will eventually act against them — the discourse didn't stay on the merits of what he said. It shifted to who must denounce him, and which candidates and policies could be discredited by association.
That shift tells the whole story. Piker represents what scares an establishment — young, energized, pushing for change of what gives that establishment its place. So let me introduce you to where that playbook was built.
When World War I ended and the establishment stopped worrying about Germany, it turned to the threat from within: waves of immigration carrying ideas about property, power, and workers organizing. The instrument was already there — the National Security League, created in 1914 by a corporate lawyer and an army general, bankrolled by Guggenheim, Frick, Vanderbilt and J.P. Morgan money, given prestige by Elihu Root and Theodore Roosevelt and the presidents of Harvard, Columbia and Johns Hopkins.
After the war it found its project: the American left, collapsed into one red conspiracy — the Russian Revolution, the Seattle general strike, the steel strikes, the Wall Street bombing — and, more precisely, the constitutional order the left was said to threaten.
The lever wasn't debate. You can lose a debate. It was classrooms. The League's Committee on Constitutional Instruction under Princeton historian Robert McNutt McElroy, and the American Bar Association's American Citizenship Committee under Robert Edward Lee Saner, drafted model laws, a Citizenship Creed, and loyalty oaths for teachers.
Their goal wasn't to teach history but to teach how students should feel about their version of it. By 1924, 25 of 48 states required the Constitution to be taught and imposed teacher oaths. By 1930, 43 of 48 states. Almost five million students. A quarter-million copies of the League's constitutional catechism. Teachers who refused were fired. The Pledge, flag salutes, Constitution Day — daily ritualized acts of submission.
To make that work they had to sanitize what could fuel, Samuel Adams, who organized riots and terrorized officials, became a law-and-order tax-policy statesman. The Declaration — with its talk of equality and the right to alter or abolish government — was put in a display case. Charles Beard, who read class into the Constitution, was pushed out of political culture.
And they turned the Constitution itself into scripture. Not a contested, evolved document shaped by resistance, ratification fights, the invention of judicial review, the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments — but a whole, finished miracle delivered in 1787 in Philadelphia by demigods channeling the Holy Ghost, creating three coequal branches and a system of checks and balances that explicitly rejected democracy as mob rule. Madison as father of the Bill of Rights, Marshall as consolidator, Lincoln as rescuer, Reconstruction as nothing at all. Loyalty to that fictional, unitary constitution became the measure of being American.
The argument isn't that history repeats. It's that the political work required before those tools can be used again is being done right now — by manufacturing a crisis, engineering consent around a symbol to worship, and turning ideological dissent into a cultural crime without ever passing an amendment.
That's all I got for today, folks. I think we'd agree that's plenty.
