The Brion McClanahan Show

COVID-19 has changed American life. Studies suggest that many Americans will permanently alter the way they work. Commercial real estate, particularly office space, has taken a nosedive in the last year. This is also happening to education at all levels. Parents are questioning if they want to send their kids back to school, some because they are worried about public health, but others because the...

The Heritage Foundation sacked two members of their leadership team this last week, sparking discussion about the future of "conservative ideas." What are "conservative ideas"? Does a "conservatism" exist and should it? More importantly, where does this perspective on American conservative philosophy originate? I discuss this and more in this episode of The Brion McClanahan Show. https://mcclanaha...

Ty Seidule's new book, Robert E. Lee and Me, is nothing short of a long polemic based on sloppy research and saturated with his "opinion" on Lee and other Southern historical topics. It should be laughed off the shelves, but unfortunately has been embraced by the predictable nincompoops. I wrote a piece a few years back on Lee taking down the Twitter historian brigade. That same piece applies to G...

In 1887, President Grover Cleveland "infamously" vetoed the Texas Seed Bill. Why? Because it was an unconstitutional move to provide taxpayer funded government "relief" to a targeted group of Americans: Texas farmers suffering from a drought. Cleveland has been subsequently ripped by the left ever since. In light of the recent "COVID" relief bill, I thought it would be good to revisit this veto an...

If you ask Clyde Wilson--the definitive Calhoun scholar in the world--to choose one of Calhoun's most important speeches, you might be surprised to hear his response: "Calhoun's speech on the admission of Michigan as a State." Why? Because Calhoun defines what it means to be a conservative in this speech. I discuss the speech and Calhoun on his birthday in this episode of The Brion McClanahan Show...

Headline from last week at the AP: "160 years later, Confederate constitution an ignoble relic." The authors then proceed to show how little they understand American government and American history, and they base their arguments on perhaps one of the worst books ever produced on the Confederacy. I received about a dozen emails asking me to talk about this article, so here you go. https://mcclanaha...

For years, the radical environmentalists have been suggesting that modern comforts are destroying the environment. Case in point, in 2019 two establishment publications suggested that we need less air conditioning. Why? Because cooling our houses is making us warmer. They both suggested we take responsibility for this problem and cut back on our AC, but more importantly, they urged local governmen...

Understanding how we arrived in our current political mess allows us to change course. The communist revolution in Russia provided the blueprint for most of the problems Americans face today: censorship, cancel culture, technocrats, totalitarian authority, etc. I dive into one component of the American communist revolution in this episode of The Brion McClanahan Show. https://mcclanahanacademy.com...

Forget "Reagan Democrats," we now have "Biden Republicans," this according to a leftist pollster. Why? You probably guessed. Race. Are Biden Republicans the new Reagan Democrats and is that group here to stay? I talk about the GOP in this episode of The Brion McClanahan Show. https://mcclanahanacademy.com https://brionmcclanahan.com/support http://learntruehistory.com

Paul Gottfried wrote a splendid little piece for Chronicles Magazine in February on the neocon con on Martin Luther King and modern leftists in general. His point? American "Conservatives" just adopt an old leftist narrative and make it the new "conservative" standard. This is suicide, and I cover the essay in this episode of The Brion McClanahan Show. https://mcclanahanacademy.com https://brionmc...

The House of Representatives passed HR 1, the "For the People Act of 2021." The Left calls it a significant piece of legislation that will improve "democracy." It's significant, but only because it significantly destroys the original intent of the Constitution. I discuss the bill in this episode of The Brion McClanahan Show. https://mcclanahanacademy.com https://brionmcclanahan.com/support http://...

Most Americans don't think of the United States as an empire. We're a "republic," the good guys. Empires are bad. But is the United States an empire? Short answer, yes. I discuss a new book on the topic and why this is true in this episode of The Brion McClanahan Show. https://mcclanahanacademy.com https://brionmcclanahan.com/support http://learntruehistory.com

Why did Union soldiers go to war in the 1860s? No one really asks this question. The focus is typically on the South, but if Southerners went to war to "fight for slavery" as the establishment likes to wrongly suggest, then shouldn't we find that Union soldiers went to war to fight against slavery? Nope. In fact, William Marvel contends that the majority of Union soldiers went to war to because th...

What is a myth? To many Americans, a myth denotes a lie, a fairy tale that cannot be proven. Take for example the "Lost Cause" myth and how establishment historians use the term myth as a pejorative. But myths are the foundation of much of our historical consciousness, and a recent piece in The Smithsonian Magazine wants Americans to subscribe to a certain myth about American history, the Lincolni...

What did the authors of the Tenth Amendment intend it to do? We should just ask Samuel Adams who explained its meaning in February 1788. These are the most important documents on the Constitution because the men who ratified the document told us how it SHOULD be interpreted, not how some judge would late interpret the document. This is an important episode of The Brion McClanahan Show. https://mcc...

Clarence Thomas dissented from a recent decision by the Supreme Court not to hear several challenges to the 2020 election from Pennsylvania. This is different than Texas challenging Pennsylvania in court, a topic I discussed in Episode 387. But was Thomas's dissent correct from an originalist position? I talk about the case, the dissent, and originalism in this episode of The Brion McClanahan Show...

The "incorporation doctrine" is one of the greatest evils of the twentieth century and completely obliterates the original understanding of the Constitution. But it can be defeated. All we have to do is listen to St. George Tucker. I discuss Tucker, incorporation, originalism, and a great essay in this episode of The Brion McClanahan Show. https://mcclanahanacademy.com https://brionmcclanahan.com/...

Joe Biden should play more MarioKart and Ted Cruz should have gone to Mexico. Why not? The more Biden is out of the executive office the fewer executive orders he can sign. Likewise, Ted Cruz had no role in the power failure in Texas and was not responsible for getting the lights back on or turning on the water. Going to Mexico created bad optics, but Cruz couldn't do anything about the situation...

You know you are winning when so called "Blue States" want out of the Union. This would have been unheard of nearly a decade ago, but this week, the leftist publication The Nation ran an article calling for the "Blue States" to at least threaten secession. He doesn't really want it to happen, but the fact that progressives are talking about it is amazing, particularly because they control the gene...

If Confederate Monuments were erected to honor white supremacy and slavery, then Union Monuments should have been built to honor abolition and egalitarianism. Except they weren't, as anyone who has studied them knows. This is a big piece to the puzzle. Both Union and Confederate monuments were constructed to honor the men who fought and died in the War and to remember the respective causes for whi...

According to a poll from YouGov and The Economist, a plurality of respondents think Barack Obama is the best president in American history. This is stunning. Donald Trump was also ranked in the top five, which means most Americans don't know history beyond the last two decades. Sad, but true. Which is why you need this show. I talk about the poll and "President's Day" in this episode of the Brion...

You almost can't make up the hubris of the political left. No one holds them accountable, so they can be as corrupt (and stupid) as possible. Case in point, an article in Time Magazine that openly admits to a political conspiracy before the 2020 election in an effort to defeat Trump. The term is included in the title to the piece. What's funny, of course, is that the author suggests Trump had wild...

Nevada is going to allow large tech companies to create self-autonomous cities in order to lure them to the State. This prompted a listener to ask me if this was a think locally, act locally issue. Short answer, no, but there are some interesting things to discuss with the issue, so I covered it in the 400th episode of The Brion McClanahan Show. https://mcclanahanacademy.com https://brionmcclanaha...

Leftist "journalist" Casey Michel penned a piece for Politico insisting that Joe Biden take a page from U.S. Grant concerning potential "insurrection" in the United States. His solution? Use the military to bully people and then crush civil liberties. Michel sounds like a nice guy. This piece is nothing more than hysterical history and hyperbole masquerading as serious "journalism." I explain in t...

Sixty years ago, the left worried about the "Imperial Presidency" and put all their faith in the federal court system. Now, conservatives fret over Joe Biden's executive overreach while hoping that a newly "conservative" federal court system will provide a few victories. But what if the left was right sixty years ago on the presidency while the right correctly railed against "government by judicia...