Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I’m trying to make one of my haphazard appearances, depending my energy level, after all these medications they put me on, after this lung cancer surgery. But I’m here on the farm, and I’m doing my best.

I wanna talk a little bit about the open defiance of the federal government. I’ve mentioned that earlier, but when you collate everything that Attorney General of Minnesota Keith Ellison has said, Gov. Tim Walz, Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, it’s unabashed, unapologetic, insurrectionary rhetoric.

It’s not just that they’ve told Immigration and Customs Enforcement to leave. It’s not just that they’ve told their own police forces and law enforcement in Minnesota, in general, not to come to the aid of ICE. It’s that they’re actually working hand in glove with people on the street.

In other words, they encourage them to take pictures, to harass, to block ICE law enforcement activity. And you get the impression that they feel there’s no consequences.

In other words, they’re saying to the rest of us, the 330 million people outside Minnesota, that we, Minnesota elected officials, have the God-given right to pick and choose which federal laws we’re going to obey. And we are just not going to obey the enforcement of federal immigration law. We don’t really care about 10,000 people coming across the border during the Biden administration per day, but we do care about the federal government rectifying that lapse or that crime, by trying to find out where and who and how to get these people out, in Minnesota.

Nor do they care that ICE, according to its own figures, has rounded up 4,000 people with various criminal misdemeanors and felonies, and got them out of Minnesota. And that has contributed to Minnesota’s low crime rate.

But the problem is this, that they understand that the Trump administration, if they were to enforce immigration law to the full letter of the law, that would include collateral people, that when they’re going after criminals, they say, “Or how about you? You’re in the house. Do you have ID?” And if they’re not, then we’re going to deport them. They don’t want any of that. And they don’t want to turn over people, as I said, in the jails.

And that is a model for what I would call the blue states. Is it new? I mean, the Democrats get very upset when you say, you’re the party of insurrection, going back to the civil rights movement and before, the Civil War.

You know, April 12, 1861, when state’s righters in South Carolina said that we’re not going to honor federal law within the confines of South Carolina, along with six other Confederate states, at that time, who had seceded. And we don’t think federal property belongs to you.

So, this is the tradition that Walz, Frey, and Ellison are relying upon. And it’s an unbroken tradition going all the way from John C. Calhoun, as I said, all the way to Orval Faubus, George Wallace, Lester Maddox, segregationists of the 1960s. And the Left has never really confronted it. They said, well, these were just Dixiecrats or Southerners, and we were on the vanguard of civil rights.

No, but when you look at the actual vote of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Act, the Democratic Party voted 60% to 65% in the House and Senate, maybe a little higher, 67%, in one case, to pass those legislations. But the Republicans had a much higher percentage—80% in the Senate and the House on the particular votes were for civil rights.

So, this is something that’s disturbing, that it’s a trademark of over 150 years that the Democratic Party has, maybe it feels that it’s more a people’s party, but they feel they can defy federal law at their own volition.

And again, how do you respond to it? If you don’t respond to it, then you set the precedent that states that are blue can arbitrarily pick and choose which federal laws they want. Although, of course, they want federal monies to come back. And it’s a very dangerous precedent because we’ve seen it in the 1860s, where it led to.

And finally, something else to keep in mind: It’s symptomatic of a larger problem in the blue states. And we’ve kind of flipped the blue/red state paradigm in which we’re seeing 3 million to 4 million people fleeing, for the most part, northern industrial, what we would call in the old days, Yankee blue states, going to the South, which were, traditionally, up until the 1960s, less dynamic societies—more rural, more pyramidal in their economic classes: small group of wealthy, large group of poor, very little middle class—dating back to the Antebellum states.

But what we’re seeing is a complete failure of the blue state model. And the failure is ironic because it’s neo-Confederate. Just like the old Confederacy and the Antebellum South, these blue states are obsessed with race. This is where DEI comes from. This is where, if you’re one-sixteenth of this, or you have DNA of that, you identify, primarily, by your ethnic or racial background and not your common humanity or your common American citizenship. Very similar to the South.

In these blue states and California, from where I’m speaking, there is no middle class. It’s disappearing. It either leaves or realizes that the high tax, highly unregulated, high crime paradigms, and high deficits as well, high debt obligations, in all of these places, like Chicago or Minneapolis or Washington or Baltimore, it’s not a very conducive atmosphere—in Portland, Seattle—for the middle class.

Their downtowns are dying. People are leaving. That’s another trace that we see going back to the neo-Confederate period, that there wasn’t a middle class in the early South. By the way, it’s very ironic that there is a middle class in the South. There is a dynamic economy and there’s less emphasis on race.

Of course, the main neo-Confederate characteristic, all these states feel that they’re unique, they’re chauvinistic, that Minnesotans or Californians or Oregonians are superior morally. And therefore, they have the moral, spiritual, the intellectual right to say, I’m not gonna follow the federal government, if I decide not to.

Now, of course, it’s pick and choose. During the Obama period, they wanted the federal government to suppress state rights, in cases where people question the federal government, who were conservative. But for the larger part, they feel that they’re a law and a culture unto their own.

In conclusion, what’s gonna stop it? People have to identify this blue state model for what it is. It’s a desperate anger, sense of failure, frustration that they cannot create heaven on earth. The high tax, high regulation, green frenzies, woke ideology, DEI, anti-business, billionaire’s tax—all of this is drying up the economy. The crime policies that George Soros DAs, prosecutors—there’s high-crime areas and people don’t want to be there. And they understand that. And their reaction to it is to get angrier, more chauvinistic, and more defiant, especially of the federal government.

If they would relax and say, my gosh, President Donald Trump is gonna send people in to lower our crime rate, to get criminals off the street, to work with us—you think they would enjoy that? No. It’s nihilism. And it’s spreading.

And unfortunately, as I said earlier, in an earlier podcast, there’s nothing in the Constitution about a state leaving the Constitution, the Constitution of the states. But there is something about how federal law, the supremacy clause, supersedes state law.

So, what I’m getting at is all of these states, and Minnesota, now, in particular, are openly defying the federal government, in the tradition that led up to the Civil War and after the Civil War, led to Jim Crow and the crisis and the confrontations of the 1960s.

Final irony: This is all from left-wing, liberal, progressive, enlightened people. And they have chosen a most unenlightened, backward position because the common denominator is they feel that this is a source of power and continuity of their control of government.

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