Facebook Removing Posts by Heather Cox Richardson...

[SorellaLaBefana]

60. 'Twas just a matter of time

We have her books. Wonder when those will be disappeared as well.
https://bookshop.org/contributors/heather-cox-richardson-ab470631-a289-4ada-90fd-5a1223000853

She's likely our main 'news' source. Even tho some days what she has to say is simply too painful to read. As she's a professor of political history we often learn something of how we have arrived at this point, and how this had been avoided in the past.

One of her powerful recent articles looked at the attempt by Secretary of State Seward (later of Seward's Folly—Purchase of Alaska— fame) to basically take over the government from Lincoln and start a war with *anybody* to convince the secessionist states to return to the Union to fight whatever foreign foe he could conjure up.

On April 1, 1861, Secretary of State William Henry Seward wrote an astonishing letter to President Abraham Lincoln. Less than a month after Lincoln had taken office, Seward had little faith in the apparently uneducated president from the raw West and was angry that the Cabinet had overruled him to provision South Carolina’s Fort Sumter rather than evacuating it. Seward was convinced that he, rather than Lincoln, should lead the administration.

Seward complained that Lincoln had not yet established “a policy either domestic or foreign” and said he had figured out the solution to the nation’s political crisis, in which seven states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—had seceded from the Union in the weeks after Lincoln was elected president but before he took office. “[W]e must,” Seward wrote, “Change the question before the Public from one upon Slavery, or about Slavery for a question upon Union or Disunion.”

The way to do that, he wrote, was to rally Americans around the flag. To do so, he told Lincoln, “I would demand explanations from Spain and France, categorically, at once. I would seek explanations from Great Britain and Russia, and send agents into Canada, Mexico and Central America, to rouse a vigorous continental spirit of independence on this continent against European intervention. And if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France, Would convene Congress and declare war against them.”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-31-2025

At the time, about 160 years ago, this failed. However, the current regime seems determined to try this ploy yet once again. After all, it worked fine a few decades later with the Spanish-American War around the turn of the last century when Gilded Age newspaperman Hearst (may have) said "You supply the pictures, I'll supply the war" after the USS Maine sank in Havana Harbour.

I'm unconvinced that if we invade Greenland (a territory with a population about the same as Carson City, Nevada—around 56/57K) using our military of around 1.3 MILLION active duty members that many (aside from MAGA Cultists) will find this reason to wrap themselves in the Stars and Stripes (well, more would, I think, be happy to wrap themselves in the Stars and Bars)

She is, for the nonce, still on YT as well
https://www.youtube.com/@heathercoxrichardson