Republished with permission from Steve Schmidt

I encourage you to read a Substack essay from an author named Josh of Arc, titled “Force and Freedom.”

It is a jarring and brilliant piece of writing.

Here is an excerpt:

Legend has it that the Roman elite once rejected a proposal to require all slaves to dress in red so that they could be readily identified because, as one member of the elite pointed out, it could cause the slaves to realize that there were an awful lot of other slaves.

Pivoting to the present and observing the seas of red hats, Trump’s exhortations to “FIGHT!”, his permanent campaigning, and his use of rallies as participatory emotive spectacles suggest this story’s relevance. Trump is, of course, inciting his base and priming them for action.

But he’s also encouraging them (as the Roman elites feared) to recognize their own numbers and strength and appreciate that this understanding is common knowledge among their compatriots.

His comments can be translated as follows: “Look around you. Our opponents are weak, feminine, and afraid of confrontation. The law is just words on a page. We can rip it up! If we stick together, what the hell can they do about it?”

Steve Bannon’s main ideological inspiration, Vladimir Lenin, emphasized revolutionary consciousness: This would be accomplished, Lenin believed, when the working class grew to collectively grasp their combined strength and achieve a collective agency.

They would thus become a single, self-aware social organism—empowering them to seize control of the state.

Trump has adapted this concept to 21st century America by encouraging his coalition to recognize that America’s two tribes are dealing in different currencies.

While the Right wields the implied threat of force, the Left deploys guilt, shame, and social ostracism—weapons that Trump has taught his base they can neutralize by being unshameable.

In this way, Trump has forged a new form of revolutionary consciousness.

MAGA has become enamored of its shame.

It is the product of a narrow electoral victory that has produced an unrestrained arrogance.

MAGA extremists are unconcerned about reality in a moment when they exist within the four walls of a “Truman Show,” where the mirage has overtaken everything.

This is a sick and demented world in which the pimp/rapist Andrew Tate is welcomed to the United States, and cheered by young MAGA men.

It is a world in which a Jew hater named Kingsley Wilson is the Pentagon deputy press secretary. It is a world in which the Ketamine-addled Elon Musk, who was elected to nothing, is cheered by the people who were for exercising powers given to them as he announced the birth of his 14th child.

How should we think about this?

How can this idiocy and venom be properly confronted and defeated?

Let’s examine MAGA through a telescope, by looking backward to see the forces that created it, and are linked by historic DNA.

When MAGA mobs attacked the Capitol they paraded the Confederate flag through the rotunda. It was not accidental. Rather, it was an achievement 165 years in the making.

Let’s examine what is happening in 2025 America by applying a contemporary filter to the pen of a writer for The Times of London in 1861, trying to explain the breakup of the United States 87 years after the Declaration of Independence.

Biden Democrats talked about democracy incessantly, but they did so without mentioning liberty very often.

Democracy alone is not liberty or freedom. It can be the gateway to despotism.

This American moment demands an opposition party and leaders who can speak about the concepts of liberty, freedom and democracy with fluency and ease, conviction and respect, certitude and awe—all together, all at once.

Most of the hapless Democratic leadership cannot do this.

They cannot seem to find their way to embrace this country’s ideals and values in a way that connects to the American people.

Let’s use America’s original sin—slavery—as the basis for a look at the difference between democracy, liberty and freedom.

From The Times of London in 1861, some things have not changed. Some delusions remain as grand as they ever were:

One of the prevalent delusions of the age in which we live is to regard democracy as equivalent to liberty, and the attribution of power to the poorest and worst educated citizens of the State as a certain way to promote the purest liberality of thought and the most beneficial course of action.

Let those who hold this opinion examine the quarrel at present raging in the United States, and they will be aware that Democracy, like other forms of Government, may coexist with any course of action or any set of principles.

Between North and South there is at this moment raging a controversy which goes as deep as any controversy can into the elementary principles of human nature, and the sympathies and antipathies which in so many men supply the place of reason and reflection.

The North is for freedom, the South is for Slavery.

The North is for freedom of discussion, the South represses freedom of discussion with the tar-brush and the pine fagot.

Yet North and South are both Democracies—nay, possess almost exactly similar institutions, with this enormous divergence in theory and practice.

It is not Democracy that has made the North the advocate of freedom, or the South the advocate of Slavery.

Democracy is a quantity which appears on both sides, and may therefore be rejected, as having no influence over the result.

From the sketch of the history of Slavery which was furnished us by our correspondent from New York last week, we learn that at the time of the American Revolution Slavery existed in every State of the Union, except in Massachusetts; but we also learn that the great men who directed that Revolution—WASHINGTON, JEFFERSON, MADISON, PATRICK HENRY and HAMILTON, were unanimous in execrating the practice of Slavery, and looked forward to the time when it would cease to contaminate the soil of free America.

The abolition of the Slave-trade, which subsequently followed, was regarded by its warmest advocates as not only beneficial in itself, but as a long step towards the extinction of Slavery altogether.

It was not foreseen that certain free and democratic communities would arise which would apply themselves to the honorable office of breeding slaves, to be consumed on the free and democratic plantations of the South, and of thus replacing the African Slave Trade by an internal traffic in human flesh, carried on under circumstances of almost equal atrocity through the heart of a free and democratic nation. Democracy has verily a strong digestion, and one not to be interfered with by trifles.

The writer is making the point that democracy in the South was the engine of slavery, while democracy in the North was the engine of liberty.

This frame is key to understanding the necessity of Governor Gavin Newsom’s actions in California, and the importance of his fighting stance.

Democracy in California remains the engine of American liberty, while MAGA democracy remains the engine of American tyranny:

But the most melancholy part of the matter is that, during the 70 years for which the American Confederacy has existed, the whole tone of sentiment with regard to slavery has, in the southern states at least, undergone a remarkable change.

Slavery used to be treated as a thoroughly exceptional institution—as the evil legacy of evil times—as a disgrace to a Constitution founded on the natural freedom and independence of mankind.

There was hardly a political leader of any note who had not some plan for its abolition. Jefferson himself, the greatest chief of the democracy, had in the early part of this century, speculated deeply on this subject; but the United States became possessed of Louisiana and Florida, they have conquered Texas, they have made Arkansas and Missouri into States, and these successive acquisitions have altered entirely the view with which Slavery is regarded.

Removing the word “slavery” from the above and replacing it with “Trump/MAGA,” and applying the devolution of moral opposition to an obvious moral issue provides an opportunity for comparison between the moral corruption that supported slavery.

It is driven by the same incentives that appeased MAGA.

What was accepted as obscene and understood as malevolent became accepted as necessary, and recast as noble because of self-interest, greed and ambition for power.

Here is how the writer put it then:

Perhaps as much as anything, from the long license enjoyed by the editors of the South of writing what they pleased in favor of Slavery, with the absolute certainty that no one would be found bold enough to write anything on the other side, and thus make himself a mark for popular vengeance, the subject has come to be written on in a tone of ferocious and cynical extravagance which is to an European eye absolutely appalling.

The South has become enamored of her shame.

What a pitch perfect indictment of the rancid lies, insanity and corruption of the Murdoch/NewsMax/MAGA/Trump/“conservative media” of 2025.

The description fits perfectly.

Cowardice has produced silence when there should have been a roar of defiance against injustice and evil. Instead, fear yielded capitulation to the most extreme sentiments and personalities of our time just at it did then.

The lack of response and defiance encouraged more than aggression.

It encouraged an aggression built on shame.

The MAGA movement has been analyzed in wonderment for 10 long years by an out-of-touch, corrupted and insular American media that looks at MAGA and can’t stop asking “why?”

They are blind.

The shame is the message.

The indecency is the cause.

Let’s read on to the end, which gets to the main point—where does the violence come from?

Why won’t one side accept the results of an election?

What happens when one side opts out of the agreement between us around sharing power and how to disagree in a free society?

The writer begins by asserting the South lost the election of 1860:

They have taken their chance of electing a President of their own views, but they have failed.

Mr. LINCOLN, like Col. FREMONT, fully recognizes the right of the South to the institution of Slavery; but, like him, he is opposed to its extension.

This cannot be endured.

With a majority in both Houses of Congress and in the Supreme Court of the United States, the South cannot submit to a President who is not their devoted servant.

Unless every power in the Constitution is to be strained in order to promote the progress of Slavery, they will not remain in the Union; they will not wait to see whether they are injured, but resent the first check to their onward progress as an intolerable injury.

This, then, is the result of the history of Slavery. It began as tolerated, it has ended as an aggressive institution; and, if it now threatens to dissolve the Union, it is not because it has anything to fear for that which it possesses already, but because it has received a check to its hopes of future acquisition.

This is the MAGA philosophy perfectly distilled.

It is a movement of extremism fueled by anger and fear that feeds on itself.

It becomes angrier and more extreme as it grows and grows, and demands and demands.

It can never be sated—only stopped.

This will be the test of the American people.

We must pass it, or the darkness will come.

Let me remind you of the American position regarding the test at hand during this time of worry, doubt, crisis and fear, according to Thomas Paine:

I once felt all that kind of anger, which a man ought to feel, against the mean principles that are held by the Tories MAGA a noted one, who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as I ever saw, and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, “Well! give me peace in my day…a generous parent should have said, “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace;” and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.