Did America elect the Red Caesar?

As protests multiply, the impetus to a paternal dictatorship increases

One of the more morbid denials of the reality coming to us hails from a 2023 essay in The American Mind about the Red Caesar by a Claremont Institute alumnus. I quote: “In his typical hysterical fashion, Damon Linker warns [in The Week] that a Trump victory in 2024 will lead to martial law and soldiers in the streets. Such concerns ring hollow from those who supported the curtailment of civil liberties with Covid lockdowns…” yada yada, stuck pig screaming about vaccine mandates and looters.

Image: Grok

May I remind you that I just wrote about Gov. Gavin Newsom calling up the California National Guard in [checks notes] June 2020 to deal with looting in Los Angeles in the wake of George Floyd riots. Police powers, as envisaged by our founders, reside with the states. The kind of insurrections that would invoke federal power are the ones that would rend the union, like happened in 1861. Even then, President Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus was denied by the Supreme Court, because ultimately, this nation is founded on laws.

Donald Trump is the kind of man, and is without question the kind of president, who views lawyers as skilled skewers of the law, not followers of it. Therefore, the government’s lawyers argue how to navigate the cracks and crevices, forcing the Supreme Court to issue rulings based on ever more distasteful Hobson’s choice alternatives. This gives the color of law, the patina of legitimacy, to fiat decrees from the Red Caesar.

The impetus behind the Claremont piece I quoted is that the administrative state, the “deep state” had become the Blue Caesar before the Red Caesar was a concern in the first place. Casey Wheatland helpfully pointed out that it was Michael Anton, of “The Flight 93 Election” fame, who coined the terms “Blue Caesar” and “Red Caesar.” Anton meant it as an indictment about a crumbling republic that had decayed into an ossified conclave of bureaucrats increasingly empowered far beyond their ken.

So far had our nation descended into the morass of crowdsourced causes and interest groups, that the answer had to be the rise of a Red Caesar, since the Blue Caesar had already manifested, robbing the nation of liberty. You know, I really don’t have time to plunge the depths of irony coming from Casey Wheatland. But let me dip in a toe. Wheatland is an assistant professor of political science at New College of Florida.

New College is in Sarasota, and prior to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ gutting of that institution in order to remake it as a paen to reactionary conservatism, it was as liberal a place as you could imagine. It was the kind of place that produced and nurtured Professor Cris Hassold, who taught a kind of free, liberal, art with exacting standards. I mean “art” as the real thing: paintings and such. Hassold raised a family of students, which became her actual family, and many of her students went on to become professors in their own right.

Prof. Hassold, when she died, willed her entire life savings, which was substantial, to her students. One of them related a story of how “the cult of Cris” worked.

Dr. Archer is now an associate professor of art history and gender studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She recalled walking into one of those dimly lit sessions in 1995 as an ambitious but directionless freshman and seeing Professor Hassold behind a pile of oranges that she had harvested for the students in her surrealism class.

“Doesn’t your family eat all of the oranges?” a student asked.

“I don’t have a family,” Professor Hassold said.

“You’re not married?”

“What would I do with a husband?” Professor Hassold, who grew up in Louisville, Ky., scoffed in her Southern drawl. “That would just be a pain in the neck.”

No longer is New College the kind of place that the New York Times said was “a center of counterculture where gender studies courses filled up quickly and students wandered the campus barefoot, experimented with drugs and organized sex parties.” Now, after some retooling, it’s the kind of place that Claremont Publius Fellows write about the collapse of American liberty and democracy because of people like Cris Hassold.

Now pull your toe out of the water, take that thought, and expand it to the entire government, and from there, the entire country. That’s the vision of the Red Caesar and his minions, who brook no interference or opposition. Or at least that’s the vision people who hail from the Claremont Institute would like to believe.

What’s actually manifesting is a hammer and tongs to everything even smacking of what New College used to be. The entire Fulbright Scholarship board just resigned, because the State Department decided to pick and choose which scholarships to grant, or deny, based on their list of verboten topics like gender studies, climate change, or, you know, the kind of stuff they used to teach at New College of Florida. In all its history, the State Department, which administers the Fulbright program, but doesn’t actually select recipients, has never interfered in the bipartisan board’s decisions. But now, they’re citing the fact that the prior president, Joe Biden, appointed the board, and therefore he must have used an autopen, or something like that, so away with its legitimacy.

The mini-Red Caesar who controls our healthcare system just replaced the entire 17 member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), replacing them with eight vaccine critics and immunization quacks. Nice. He called it “unbiased science” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed purportedly about “restoring public trust” in vaccines. I think perhaps they didn’t teach the word “bias” in law school when RFK Jr. went, because “settled science” kind of means everyone shares the same consensus. RFK Jr. invokes the same logic used by Holocaust deniers who squeal “nobody ever talks about this” when they put forward terrible history regarding the Third Reich and its depraved leaders.

The Red Caesar is hitting boardrooms, and even the tiff with Elon Musk has gotten the world’s richest man offering his mea culpa, deleting tweets and announcing he regrets “some” of his posts about President Trump that “went too far.” And now, it’s hitting the streets, in exactly the way Professor Wheatland scoffed “ring hollow.”

I think it’s sad and sinful that this nation let in millions of immigrants without proper documentation and following the laws on the books. That has given the Red Caesar permission to arrest 18-year-old high school kids who grew up in suburban Boston, and shackle them, then confine them in conditions actual felons would find horrific. That people like Marcelo Gomes da Silva exist, driving cars, going to parties, playing varsity volleyball, attending high school, without even a Social Security Number, is not an indictment against da Silva or his parents, who came here illegally. It’s an indictment against our nation for not doing anything about it for decades.

Now, the elected Red Caesar is going to fix it. He’s going to fix it good and hard. I think as long as the effort is selective and sensitive to the human stories of people like young Marcelo, or the young bride in Fulton County, Georgia who was recently also freed from detention, the public will continue to support fixing our broken immigration system. But I think we’re at a tipping point, not because the deportations are not working—they are working very well—but because it’s the Red Caesar doing things that should not be done in America, which is a country of laws. We should not have to endure a phalanx of judges dealing with every abuse and mistake and overreach by this administration.

Now that is moving to the streets, as the “No Kings” protests are popping up in cities around the country. They are set to happen on the same day President Trump has scheduled a military parade through Washington, D.C. It’s also Trump’s birthday. They are calling it the “No Kings Day of Defiance” and it reminds me a bit of 1775. The group plans protest in 2,000 locations according to its website.

One of The Racket News™ stringers will be at one of the larger protest sites. I hope we will hear a report. I, for my part, am going on a family vacation, and we plan to avoid such things, in favor of sand and surf. The fish and lobsters don’t have any kings or Red Caesars to worry about, which is a good thing.

What we got in L.A. is not necessarily tyranny. The Blue Caesar is just as culpable for that conflict as the Red Caesar. But in Podunk, or Harrisburg, or your town, things might not be so crystal clear on the law and order wagon. This is what the nation elected, and here it is in its glory.

I expect that if what happened in Los Angeles is a template for the country, we might see the military deployed in many places. And as I wrote yesterday, the same people who elected the guy who is becoming the Red Caesar might not be too pleased when the Bradley Fighting Vehicle with its M252 Bushmaster comes rumbling down their road. The Red Caesar doesn’t care if you love your liberty when it conflicts with the State’s (capital “S”) needs.

And the United States is about to get really needful.

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