Hero or Traitor: From Benedict Arnold to John Thune and the writing of history

Dear Leader Thune,

From 1776 to today the total number of Americans is estimated to have been around 600 million.  That’s about twice what the population is today.  One wonders how many historical figures most Americans can name.  There are of course the obvious ones like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and MLK who are probably at the top of the list for most Americans.  They were all known for having done great things. 

Most of the rest no one remembers.  According to Grok “The average American can likely freely name 10–30 historical figures without much prompting—mostly U.S. presidents, Founding Fathers, major civil rights icons, and a few global names like Einstein, Hitler, or Napoleon—depending on education, age, and interest in history.”  Sure, guys like Victor Davis Hansen and Al Franken could probably rattle off thousands, but for the mere mortals among us, a hundred or two probably tops us out. 

There is one name however that, while it likely doesn’t come up in the first go around for most Americans, is certainly known by a majority:  Benedict Arnold.

Arnold was a brilliant general and a true American hero.  In fact, the United States may never have succeeded in defeating the British had it not been for him.  He was the second in command to the feckless and incompetent General Horatio Gates at Saratoga in September of 1777.  At the time the Americans were on the ropes, they had lost New York, had just taken another beating at Brandywine and were in the process of losing their capital, Philadelphia, for the second time in less than a year. 

What’s more, their pleas for assistance across Europe were falling on deaf ears.  No one wanted to waste resources on some bedraggled rebels who didn’t have enough munitions, supplies or experience to take on the most powerful military in the world.  Giving them money was a great way to go broke while antagonizing an enemy. Things were looking very bleak indeed.

So this was the background in mid-September when General Gates wanted to take a cautious approach at Saratoga, despite having the British General John Burgoyne’s troops outnumbered 9,000 to 7,000. Arnold was vociferous about being more aggressive and eventually Gates relented.  The battle ended as a draw, but the patriots had held their ground and survived. Nonetheless, Gates’ and Arnold’s relationship had deteriorated to the point that Gates dismissed him. 

Three weeks later the second of Saratoga’s battles would take place and Arnold wasn’t about to stand around and do nothing. Without authorization he rode out into the battlefield, led the men on horseback and played a pivotal role in the decisive assault that resulted in the British surrender and the capture of 6,000 of Burgoyne’s men.

The victory at Saratoga, something of a shot heard round the world, was very possibly the single most important engagement in the war. That battle signaled to the rest of the world that the rebels just might be able to beat the British and convinced European powers, particularly the French, to support the Americans with men and money.  And without Arnold, it’s possible that none of that would have come about. We can’t know for sure, but Arnold, was hailed as a hero.

But that’s not how he’s remembered. No, the hero who played what might have been the most critical role in the most important battle of the American revolution is instead remembered as a traitor. 

Unhappy with the way he was treated by Congress and highly in debt, Arnold allowed his loyalist wife to lead him to betray the country by attempting to give the British the fort at West Point, which was strategically located above the Hudson River.

Sure, that was 250 years ago, but the name Benedict Arnold is one of the very few that Americans still remember. And it’s not just because he was a traitor. We’ve had lots of traitors, from the Rosenbergs to Aldrich Ames to half the Obama and Biden administrations, but Arnold’s name endures because of when he played his role, at the moment the country was being born.

Which is where you come in.  The United States is at a precipice. If we learned anything from 2020 it’s that there is a massive cheating machine running through the heart of America.  Across the country Americans watched as that election was literally hijacked. For four years anyone who suggested the country had been the victim of a coup d'état were called conspiracy nuts and insurrectionists.

Today we know it’s true and a vast majority of Americans – tellingly, including Democrats, who will likely lose votes – support Voter ID and the SAVE Act. The reality is, if you do not pass the SAVE Act, America will go the way of Virginia and New York City, where a small concentrated elite will convince a majority of the population they are moderates and then govern like Communists once they get in office. A free United States will not survive another wave of elections where just enough fraudulent votes are manufactured that “moderate” Democrats are installed and who then rule as tyrants.

And once the American Republic has collapsed and the country is thrown into a hot civil war, history will wonder how the greatest nation in the world shattered into a million pieces without anyone stopping what was so obviously a fatal condition.   

History will then look back on 2026 and find its villain, in the person of John Thune, the man who stood in the way when 85% of the American people wanted to fix this fatal flaw.  Think about that. Benedict Arnold’s name lives on as a symbol of treachery when in fact at the time between 1/3 and ½ of the country wanted to remain loyal to Britain. And here you are defying the wishes of 85% of the American people for God knows what reason. You will be to the American Republic what Brutus was to the Roman Republic. For generations your progeny will be labeled as the spawn of a traitor. 

The incredible thing is, you have the opportunity to do something that most Senators, indeed, most men, never get a chance to do: Impact history writ large.  Few men in history have stood where you do, at a crossroads where the choices are so stark and monumental for the future. One road leads to a leftist dystopia in which freedom and prosperity are extinguished under a Democrat tyranny imposed under the guise of diversity, equity and inclusion.  The other leads to the messy chaos of freedom and Capitalism, an imperfect combination that nonetheless powers the long-term march of prosperity.

Most men don’t get the opportunity to write their story on the stage of history. You actually do, in real time. There have been a few dozen men who have occupied the position you hold, and probably less than 1% of Americans can name a single one of them.  You have the opportunity to embrace saving America, becoming the champion of freedom and literally saving the Republic. In a universe where very few legislators can be seen as champions for freedom, you have the opportunity to become one. Sure, getting the SAVE Act through the Senate is probably a lot like herding cats, but that’s the job you signed up for. 

Which legacy will you leave behind, freedom and prosperity or a dystopian tyranny? Because that’s the choice you’re faced with.  Choose carefully, because history’s being written, both yours and ours.

The American people.

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

Watching The Founding Fathers' Fatal Oversight Playing Itself Out Right In Front of Us

Our Founding Fathers were geniuses.  They were far from perfect, but they were generally virtuous men, and they gifted us with a constitution far superior to anything that had ever been written.  The document they wrote was imperfect, as all things that men create are, but it was extraordinary nonetheless – even with the 3/5 Compromise. 

They gave us a system with a separation of powers, both within the federal government and between the federal and state governments. The Bill of Rights, which was basically the quid pro quo agreed to for ratification, extended that distribution of powers by recognizing that some rights belonged to the citizens and were largely beyond the power of government to impeach upon.

In hindsight however, the Founding Fathers made one fatal error, and we’re seeing it play out right in front of us today.  And it’s somewhat curious that they made it…

James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, read widely in preparation for writing it.  He read the writings of Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Montesquieu.  He looked at the Constitutions of the various American states.  And he studied governments throughout history such as the Dutch Republic, the Achaean League and of course, as practically all of the Founders did, the Roman Republic. 

And this is what puzzles me.  A critical element of the success of the Roman Republic was term limits, which were adopted for the specific purpose of preventing an individual from accumulating too much power and leading to a new monarchy.  Magistrates, from Quaestors (the entry level bureaucrat workhorses) to Consuls (highest ordinary office; supreme executive/military authority) whose terms ran 1 year each, were generally forbidden from being reelected to the same office for a decade. This ensured that the power remained with the office itself rather than the individual.

With very few exceptions – largely dictatorships, an office rarely called upon and usually for military emergencies – this system of checks allowed the Roman Republic to survive for half a millennium (509 – 27 BC).  What’s more, it was when these limits started to be ignored, first with the Gracchi Brothers and then Marius & Sulla, that the precipitous collapse of the Republic began.  Of course the Gracchi Brothers in particular were responding to a Senate that was intransigent about sharing power – and wealth – with the rest of Italy. (The Senate was largely hereditary and made up of the oldest families and richest men in Rome.)

It’s curious, knowing that Madison and the Founding Fathers were well aware of this history, that they didn’t feel the need to include term limits in our Constitution, particularly as they had included them in the Articles of Confederation.

There are of course reasons for that. Our Founding Fathers never imagined Congress would be a full-time endeavor.  It was a part time job, usually meeting maybe 6 months a year as travel was slow and most congressmen had farms or law practices or businesses that needed to be attended to back home. What’s more, initially there was not a great deal for the federal government to do.  Indeed, state governments, particularly Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York were far more compelling destinations for powerful men than Washington. Demonstrating this, John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court stepped down to become Governor of New York, and when later President Adams reappointed him and the Senate confirmed him, he declined, citing the court’s lack of "the energy, weight and dignity which are essential to its affording due support to the national government."

At the end of the day, these combined to suggest to a majority of the delegates that term limits would be unnecessary and overly restrictive.

Sadly, that oversight is today starting to hemorrhage and the Republic’s future is at stake. 

From Georgia to Arizona to Minnesota, Americans are watching in real time as revelations about the coup d'état in 2020 finally see the light of day. Suddenly we’re seeing massive amounts of proof that that thing that Democrats warned about for years before the 2020 election, then swore was impossible after it, happened regularly.  Across the country and always in one direction.

Americans see this. And want to fix it, or at least 85% of the population does.  But they can’t. 

Why?  Because we have a handful of GOP senators who simply don’t care and there is little Americans can do about it.

But we have elections you might say. Sure, but they had elections in Soviet Russia too, and their incumbents won only slightly more often than ours. Soviets, with only one name on the ballot, invariably won reelection with averages of 99% of the vote.  “But this is America and we have real competition and freedom of choice” you say.  And what is the average reelection rate for members of Congress?  Well, in 2024 it was… 97% for the House, up slightly from the 94% over the previous 3 decades and 87% in the Senate, down from the 100% in 2022 but exactly what its average was over the previous 35 years.   

As it relates to the problem at hand, the House has recently passed a revised SAVE Act which mandates Voter ID for voting and citizenship proof to register. One would think with 53 seats in the Senate the GOP should be able to pass the act and get it to President Trump’s desk in a New York minute.  But no. Why, because at least 3 senators with a combined tenure of 94 years have decided that they don’t care about honest elections, regardless of what the American people want.  Indeed, 85% of Americans support Voter ID. That level of support is extraordinary. You couldn’t get 85% of Americans to agree on the color of the sun, but they agree on Voter ID. 

But somehow, Susan Collins – 29 years in the Senate, Lisa Murkowski – 24 years, and Mitch McConnel – 41 years (and a revolving cast of a few other vacillating GOP Senators have decided that they know better than the American people.  They don’t care.

These three GOP Senators and a few vacillating others, along with every treacherous Democrat senator – other than maybe John Fetterman, are giving the American people the middle finger.  And they all can do so because they have a close to zero chance of ever facing consequences over their decisions.

And that’s where the problem is. Our Founding Fathers wrote a Constitution to control the nature of man. But they miscalculated. They thought the federal government would remain relatively weak compared to the states and the people. Today it’s anything but. Indeed, Washington has become the most powerful city in the world, controlling most of our lives and literally spending more money than the GDP of every country on Earth besides the US and China.  And because of that, serving in Congress today is the opposite of the part time civic duty the Founders had envisioned. It’s a vehicle for unprecedented power and the riches that brings.

The reality is, Washington has become a cesspool of corruption and the fact that half of Congress feel comfortable stonewalling an issue more popular than baseball and apple pie demonstrates that reality.   

The old saying goes “Power corrupts & absolute power corrupts, absolutely.” 90-98% reelection rates are about as close to absolute power as you can get in a theoretically “democratic” form of government. 

If America has any hope of saving itself on the eve of its 250^th anniversary, this needs to be fixed, and there’s only one way to do it: Term limits.

America Should Look to 19th Century Utah to Understand How to Deal with the Threat of Islam

In 1899 Winston Churchill wrote the following: “Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die: but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”

I find this quote to be quite compelling. The most prescient aspect of it is this: “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.” If Churchill is paying attention at all in Heaven, he’s banging on the podium saying “See, I told you so!”

The other, more troubling element of this quote is this: “and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall,” If anything characterizes western civilization in 2025 it is an almost complete absence of “the strong arms of science.”

Emotion has replaced science, rational thought and common sense as the guiding principle in the Christian dominated, i.e. western world.  No longer are chromosomes determinative of a person’s gender.  A series of ever evolving fictional climate emergencies are used to force western nations into handicapping their economies and reducing prosperity. Nations that took centuries or a millennium to coalesce are being shredded in a few years or decades as they import millions of third world immigrants who share neither their cultural norms nor values.

Even in areas where science is literally part of the function of the organization, science is sidelined for empathy.  Here in America we have doctors, pilots, air traffic control officers and myriad others who are regularly being hired because of the pigment of their skin or some other irrelevant demographic characteristic. 

It’s clear that the world Christianity built is no longer the bulwark against the invasion of Islam it once was.  Actually, it’s just the opposite. In 2001, the year of 9/11, there were 1.5 million Muslims in America.  Today there are four million, an increase of 150%, eight times what the population at large grew.  In Europe, over the same period the number of Muslims has gone from 15 million to more than 45 million, essentially tripling. This while Christianity declined from 78% to 63% of the population in the US and dropped by both a percentage of the population and absolute numbers in Europe.

What, if anything should the United States do about this?  The first question to ask if it’s a problem.  I’d suggest it is.  There are countless resources that track the impact on nations as Islam becomes more entrenched, and those impacts are never good. Not to mention the terrorist attacks or the ongoing threats of such. Or the violent campus (and beyond) protests after the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 to see that this is a problem.  And finally, at the end of the day, there’s the fact that Islam seeks to obliterate western civilization.

One might point out that Islamist terrorist attacks only killed a few thousand Americans over decades, out of a nation of 350 million people. That’s true, but that’s only because we have avoided another 9/11 thanks to the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people working hard to keep such an occurrence at bay.

Should something be done?  Yes.  Can something be done?  Yes. What?  Look to history. 

The first item of note is that for most of 20^th century Communism was rightfully seen as evil and anti-American.  And although the Communist Party was free to exist on free speech grounds, it was hindered in almost every way possible.  From not allowing Communists to work for the government and trying to root them out everywhere to the FBI surveilling them, Communism was anathema to American values and almost everyone agreed with that.  Islam is not Communism, but it has at its core the goal of eliminating all other religions, quashing free speech, relegating women to 2^nd class status and replacing secular government with Sharia law.  Those goals are equally as dangerous to the Republic as anything Communism ever dreamt of doing. The difference is, while the former was shunned or even denounced in the media, in academia and among most of the citizenry, the latter is celebrated by the media and the intelligentsia while being supported by NGOs and leftist government bodies across the country. 

Of course we have a 1^st Amendment that promises a freedom of religion... That’s true, we do, but it’s not an absolute. The latter half of the 19^th century saw the United States government essentially wage a 50 year war against the Mormon Church over polygamy, a core tenant of the faith. From outlawing the practice via law and arresting violators while Utah was just a Territory to refusing to allow it to become a state until the practice was officially expunged, the United States did everything within its power to eradicate the practice.  The Church finally relented and in 1890 banned the practice, thus clearing the way for Utah to be admitted as a state in 1896. 

Polygamy – a practice that is explicitly part of Islam – is indeed problematic, but certainly far less dangerous to the nation than the threats that Islam writ large poses for America.

So, what can be done? The first thing to do is explicitly recognizing that Sharia – the moral and religious law of Islam – is wholly incompatible with the Republic of the United States. From there a few things follow: 

1)      Explicitly outlaw Sharia law nationally and in every state.

2)      Monitor and close any mosque that hosts a speaker or features an imam who calls for Sharia law.

3)      Ban all funds to organizations in the US coming from nations that have Sharia law.

4)      Close any school that teaches or encourages Sharia law.

5)      Demand every mosque and Muslim affiliated organization affirm that the supreme law of the United States is the Constitution and they will not seek to undermine it, replace it with Sharia nor to engage in or support terrorism in any way. 

6)      After designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, do the same for organizations in the United States and beyond who support it or any other terrorist organizations.

Just as Mormons integrated into the United States after accepting the reality that the law of the land is founded on the Constitution, Muslims could do the same if America is really where they want to live.

Far from a mere mental exercise, this is a clarion call for the survival of the Republic. In little over a month, arguably America’s most important city is poised to elect as mayor an Islamist who also happens to be a Communist. In previous times those who advocated for overthrowing America were called traitors and were dealt with accordingly.  Doing so now will most certainly result in being called racists and Islamaphobes, but not doing so will be another step in bringing the Republic to an end.  Which is a better long-term outcome? 

 

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA