Radical Overreach: A lesson from History
In November 2020, the people who voted for Joe Biden believed they were electing a moderate – a middle of the road, get back to the status quo working class guy who rejects the radical overreach of lunatic Leftists like the Squad.
Those voters were wrong.
Biden scoffed at the idea that he would be a radical President fueled by Marxism – going so far as to look into the camera and say “Do I look like a socialist with a soft spot for rioters?”
The answer he wanted was “No. You don’t.”
The reality, however, is another story.
The first one hundred days of this so-called “Biden Administration” has seen overreach after overreach – a Radicalism delivered with near religious zeal.
Obama promised to “fundamentally transform” the nation; the Biden Administration is actually following through, and doing it at breakneck speed.
During the campaign Biden scoffed at the Green New Deal; now he is looking to implement it in the form of a so-called “infrastructure bill.”
Before the election, Biden poo-pooed the packing of the Supreme Court and the removal of the filibuster. But post-election, Senate Democrats wasted no time in pursuing those ends – not to mention pursuing the end of the Electoral College and making DC a State (both of which would require Constitutional Amendments, but they’re not letting that stop them).
Biden vowed to “restore the soul of the nation” when he ran for President. But as President, his administration is pushing the divisive race politics of the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement and the equally Marxist “critical race theory” charlatans. Meanwhile, this Department of Justice under this so-called “Great Uniter” is pursuing political retribution against Trump supporters while Congressional Democrats pursue a “domestic terrorism” bill that would criminalize their political opposition.
All the while, Biden continues to accuse us of “systemic racism.” But not just him. Everyone in his Administration from his Vice President to the UN Ambassador do as well.
This week his Department of Education announced that a divisive “Critical Race Theory” curriculum for History and Civics would be implemented in public schools around the nation.
And it’s all happening at breakneck speed.
People as a general rule do not respond well to drastic and sudden change. And all we’re getting from the White House is drastic and sudden change.
This kind of overreach never ends well.
It’s science, really. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And the more radical the initial action, the more radical the reaction will be.
If children were taught history in school – not the fictionalize garbage version of history spawned from critical race theorists, but actually history – they would see that this kind of extreme overreach is always met with pushback. And the pushback can be ugly.
I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I’m reading the 8-volume History of the English People by 19th Century British historian John Richard Green. This week I got to the Tudor Dynasty. And while most of us know a lot about Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, I confess, I didn’t know nearly as much about the brief reign of Henry’s son Edward VI until I read about it this week.
Edward was all of nine years old when he came to the throne. Since Henry VIII knew his time was short, he instructed that a Council of Regents be established to guide Edward VI during his minority.
But then Henry died, and Edward’s uncle the Earl of Hertford didn’t let the grass grow under his feet before he began radically altering everything.
Hertford, tossed aside a Council of Regents and instead made himself Lord Protector. Then he went to town.
Henry’s Church of England was not radical enough for Hertford who was a staunch Protestant. So he tossed it aside and decreed that England was now a Protestant country. Catholics who weren’t fortunate enough to flee the country were arrested and some were executed. To ensure he had support, the Lord Protector bestowed titles and land on his allies to keep them loyal to him. Hertford even gave himself a new title – Duke of Somerset. Hey, if you can’t profit from government, what’s the point, right? When Parliament balked at all this radical overreach, the Duke packed the Parliament with supporters loyal to him.
Parliament packing. Court packing. Radicals love to pack.
This radical overreach didn’t end even when the Duke of Somerset was executed for treason. Instead, it went on apace under a new Protectorate, John Dudley Duke of Northumberland.
The English people held out hope that when Edward VI reached his majority he would put a stop to the radical overreach done by his uncle and his allies. But Edward was raised as a staunch Protestant. There really was no hope that things would be different when he came of age and began to rule in his own right.
But Edward never came of age. His reign ended when he was but fifteen years old.
And as he was dying, Edward himself eschewed the Act of Succession that named his older sister Mary as his successor. He didn’t want the Catholic Mary to follow him on the throne. Nor did his very Protestant Council. Instead, Edward named his sister Elizabeth (the daughter of Ann Boleyn) as his successor.
But Northumberland feared Elizabeth would have no use for him, so he convinced the dying King to name instead Edward’s distant cousin, Lady Jane Grey, as successor. Jane Grey was the granddaughter of Edward’s aunt Mary Tudor and naming her successor against an Act of Parliament was flat-out lawless.
Upon Edward’s death, Jane was crowned Queen. But it didn’t last. By then, the English people had enough of this radical overreach and the pushback was immense. The people rallied behind Henry VIII’s eldest daughter Mary who marched on London. The supposed “Queen” Jane was sent to the Tower, and Mary crowned Queen.
Green summarizes this era of radical overreach during the reign of Edward VI this way, and while you read it think of the overreach and radicalism of the Biden Administration:
For great as were the changes which Henry had wrought in the severance of England from the Papacy and the establishment of the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown, they were wrought with fair assent from the people at large; and when once the discontent roused by Cromwell’s violence had been appeased by his fall England as a whole acquiesced in the conservative system of the king. This national union however was broken by the Protectorate. At the moment when it had reached its height the royal authority was seized by a knot of nobles and recklessly used to further the revolutionary projects of a small minority of the people. From the hour of this revolution a new impulse was given to resistance. The older nobility, the bulk of the gentry, the wealthier merchants, the great mass of the people, found themselves thrown by the very instinct of conservatism into opposition to the Crown. It was only by foreign hirelings that revolt was suppressed; it was only by a reckless abuse of the system of packing the Houses that Parliament could be held in check. At last the Government ventured on an open defiance of law; and a statute of the realm was set aside at the imperious bidding of a boy of fifteen. Master of the royal forces, wielding at his will the royal authority, Northumberland used the voice of the dying Edward to set aside rights of succession as sacred as his own. But the attempt proved an utter failure. The very forces on which the Duke relied turned against him. The whole nation fronted him in arms. The sovereign whom the voice of the young king named as his successor passed from the throne to the Tower, and a sovereign whose title rested on parliamentary statute took her place. [Emphasis Dianny’s]
Note that emphasized passage: “the royal authority was seized by a knot of nobles and recklessly used to further the revolutionary projects of a small minority of people.”
Boy, does that sound familiar.
The Biden Administration is pushing an agenda that is devoid of what Green calls a “fair assent from the people at large.”
Like the actions of Edward’s Protectorate, the radical overreach of the Biden White House is destroying any national unity we may have.
And like Edward VI himself, Biden is not the one wielding the authority here. He too has let the government of, by and for the people be “seized by a knot” of radical Leftists looking “to further the revolutionary projects of a small minority of people.”
I think it’s safe to say that the American people will only put up with so much before we, like the English people at the time of Edward VI, will tolerate no more.
My biggest concern is just how much of this history will repeat?
When Mary I ascended to the throne, she didn’t simply restore the country to the Church of England as envisioned by her father. Instead, she overreached in the extreme opposite direction. Mary restored Roman Catholicism and this time it was Protestants who were burned at the stake. There’s a reason Mary I became known as “Bloody Mary,” and it wasn’t because it was her favorite drink.
The only thing that saved the English people from the push and pull of this kind of religious extremism and radical overreach was the ascension to the throne of Elizabeth I eleven years after the death of Henry VIII. But in those eleven years a hell of a lot of damage was done.
Extremism is always met with extremism.
You know, Jesse Kelly has said on numerous occasions that there will be an equal and opposite reaction to the unfettered advance of Marxism in this country. And that reaction will be so extreme that people will realize the American First nationalism of President Trump was as harmless as a kitten.
It’s the way of the world.
You can’t push people to the brink and not expect pushback. But the Biden Administration, the Democrats in Congress, even the American media, are pushing us too hard and too far. And their extremism may very likely be met with a reactionary extremism that pushes us just as hard and just as far in the opposite direction.
Are there ways to put the brakes on this radical overreach from the White House and the Democrat Left as a whole? Are there ways to do it before we get to the point of reactionary extremism?
Boy, I hope so. To put it in the context here, it would be nice to go from Edward VI directly to Elizabeth I and skip the radical reactionary overreach of Mary I entirely.
At this point, however, I’m not sure if we can.
Sure, we could wrest control of Congress out of the hands of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats, and that might slow things down. But it won’t stop it. Too many elected Republicans simply accept the radical narrative of the Left and refuse to fight back against it.
There’s no better example of that than the Senate Republicans. Time and again, Senate Republicans have proven themselves feckless and timid. After all, the radicals running the Biden Cabinet were confirmed by both Democrat and Republican Senators. Only twenty Republicans voted against the confirmation of that radical crank serving as Biden’s UN Ambassador. Fourteen Republicans voted to confirm the Critical Race Theory-spouting Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. And the Defense Secretary who is seeking to purge the military of non-Democrat voters was confirmed with a vote of 93 to 2.
The truth is, the solution will not be not found on the Federal level. In my opinion, Washington DC is lost.
So what are our options?
Well, as Jesse Kelly puts it, “Balkanize. If you can, move to an area that is red and make it redder. You will absolutely need the protection of likeminded people in the days to come.”
Biden, that so-called “Great Uniter” who is “restoring the soul of the nation” is in reality polarizing and dividing the country at breakneck speed. Better to get yourself to a safe place before the choice to leave is taken out of your hands.
The benefit of living in a Republic rather than a Monarchy is we have a great deal more autonomy (at least for now). We can (at least for now) vote with our feet. Perhaps that is the one thing that will prevent the coming pushback like the kind seen in sixteenth century England when Mary ascended to the throne.
Or perhaps it is already too late. Perhaps the die is cast and America is heading for an inevitable split.
Though at this point, I’m not sure America splitting into red and blue is a bad thing.
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