History of the Democratic Party: Part I

Progressives have mastered the language of manipulation, always finding a way to turn the narrative in their favor. Remarkably, the party with deep roots in slavery managed to rebrand the Republican Party as racist --- a problem that plagues conservatives to this day. Join Glenn in this serial as he revisits the true history of the Democratic Party and corrects the record.

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GLENN:  Rising from the ashes of the Democratic Republican Party in 1830.  Yeah, the name.  They were together at one time.  Vastly different than they are now.

However, the Democratic Party, now by itself, is by any account unrecognizable from the party at its founding in 1830.

Martin Van Buren built the party around the principles of Thomas Jefferson, intending to follow current president and war hero Andrew Jackson.  So let's cross the threshold of truth here first.

The Democratic Party was pro-slavery, period.  Democrats can say whatever they want about the G.O.P. today, but the fact is, the Democrats were the ones who were pro-slavery, and the Republican Party was instituted to stop slavery.

On the other hand, the early Democrats wanted to emulate Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson and the early party leaders viewed the central government as an enemy of liberty, which is, oh, I don't know, going in the other direction from the Democratic Party today.

They actually believed that government intervention in the economy benefited special interest groups.  Thus, it was to be avoided at all costs.

Now, imagine a Democratic Party that actually feared the concentration of power in Washington.  A Democratic Party that wanted to restore the liberty of the individual, that wanted to end federal support of banks and corporations.

In other words, the Democratic Party wanted government out of the lives of people and out of the economy.

I don't even know what that looks like.  But it certainly doesn't have Chuck Schumer hanging around.  This was a party that disliked the public education reform programs because they feared public schools would interfere with parental responsibility and undermine freedom of religion by replacing church schools with public schools.

It is really hard to imagine any of that, yet that was the initial Democratic Party.  The Democratic Party of today is virtually the antithesis of its 1830 founding principles.  So what happens?  Six words:  William Jennings Bryant and Woodrow Wilson.

But we'll cover that in an upcoming episode.  The Democrats of today like to ignore, even sweep under the rug, the horrible racist origins of their party.  Democrats treated blacks and American natives terribly.  In fact, the first official Democratic president, Andrew Jackson, immediately set the tone for what was to come.

VOICE:  Jackson's administration immediately began expelling Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River.  An issue that defined the new administration.  After he signed the Indian removal act into law in 1830, five large tribes were rounded up and forcibly marched into territories and camps further west.

GLENN:  That action, rounding up minority groups and sending them to camps would become a blight and an ugly stain on several Democratic presidencies, but there was more.

VOICE:  The Democrats' ambitions didn't stop there.  In the 1840s, the party adopted the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the idea that Americans, white Americans, were divinely entitled to dominate the whole North American continent.

Democratic president James K. Polk put this idea into action, massively expanding US holdings by annexing Texas, acquiring Oregon, and winning much of what's now the southwestern US in a war with Mexico.

GLENN:  Andrew Jackson was so dedicated to this hatred of the American native and to removing the Indians from the United States, that he even defied a US Supreme Court ruling against him and the removal.

VOICE:  First major piece of legislation that he recommended and got passed was the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

VOICE:  This act empowered Jackson to forcibly evict all the Indian tribes living east of the Mississippi River.  Five Indian nations were directly affected.

GLENN:  In the beginning, while some of the policies of the Democratic Party, if they had been put in practice, would have led to limited government, a government too small to oppress its people, but in reality, the racism at the heart of the party led to rounding up the Native American, repeatedly lying to them and forcing them from their lands.

VOICE:  Instead of going on the warpath, the way their fathers and grandfathers might have done, this generation of Cherokee Indians took Georgia to court.

VOICE:  The case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court.  In a historic decision, chief justice John Marshall ruled in favor of the Cherokee saying they didn't have to move.  But Andrew Jackson thought differently.

VOICE:  Jackson sent a marshal.  He made his ruling.  Now let him enforce it.

VOICE:  The result was that they were rounded up at gunpoint and forced to move.  Their property was seized, and they were forced west, of course, on the Cherokee's forced march, about one out of every four Cherokees died en route, which is why they called it the Trail of Tears.

GLENN:  Democrats also supported and continued the policy of enslaving an entire race of people, the despised Confederate flag, came from, say it with me, the Democrats.  Secession, Civil War, Democrats.  David Barton picks up the story in 1854, during the formation of a new party.

VOICE:  In May of 1854, a number of the anti-slavery Democrats in Congress formed a new political party to fight slavery and secure equal rights for black Americans.  The name of that party, they called it the Republican Party.  They called it that because they wanted to return to the principles of freedom and equality, first set forth in the governing documents of the republic, before the pro-slavery members of Congress had perverted those original principles.

One of the founders of that new party was US senator Charles Sumner, who had taken the seat of the great anti-slavery senator, Daniel Webster.  Sumner had a record of promoting civil rights.  In fact, he championed the desegregation of public schools in Boston.  Here is his argument before the state Supreme Court on that issue.

In 1856, Sumner gave a two-day long speech in the US Senate against slavery.  Following that speech, Democratic representative Preston Brooks from South Carolina came from the House, across the rotunda of the capitol, and over to the Senate, where he literally clubbed down Sumner on the floor of the Senate, knocked him unconscious, and beat him almost to death.  Many Democrats thought that Sumner's clubbing was deserved, and it even amused them.

It was three and a half years before Sumner recovered himself sufficiently to return to the Senate.  And not surprisingly, the first speech he delivered on his return to the Senate was, again, against slavery.

GLENN:  It's almost unthinkable that the Democratic assailant was never even charged with the attempted murder of a United States senator on the Senate floor.

In 1856, America would have to elect a new president.

VOICE:  In 1856, the Republican Party entered its first presidential election, and that election, the Republican Party issued this, his first party platform.  It was a short document.  There were only nine planks in the platform, but significantly, six sent forth bold declarations of equality and civil rights for African-Americans, based on the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

The Democratic platform of that year took an opposite position, strongly defending slavery.  Amazingly, according to Democrats in 1856, attempting to end slavery would ruin the happiness of the people.  Despite such clear differences, the Republicans lost that election.

The next year, 1857, a Democrat-controlled Supreme Court delivered the Dred Scott decision, declaring blacks were not persons or citizens, but instead were property and therefore had no rights.

In fact, quoting from this infamous decision, Democrats on the court announced that blacks had no rights, which the white man was bound to respect and the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.

GLENN:  In the historic election of 1860, the Democratic Party continued its proud support of slavery.

VOICE:  In the 1860 presidential election, Republican Abraham Lincoln ran against Democrat US senator Steven Douglass of Illinois.  Both parties, again, issued platforms.  The Republican platform of 1860 blasted both the fugitive slave law and the Dred Scott decision and it announced its continued intent to end slavery and secure equal civil rights for black Americans.

On the other hand, the Democrats and their 1860 platform praised both the fugitive slave law and the Dred Scott decision.  In fact, Democrats handed out copies of the Dred Scott decision, along with their platform, to affirm their belief that it was proper to have slavery and to hold African-Americans in bondage.

GLENN:  Abraham Lincoln won the election, receiving just 40 percent of the popular vote, with almost no support in the South, but 59 percent of the electoral college vote.  By the time he took the oath of office, seven Southern states had already seceded from the Union, and the stage was set for the darkest period in American history.

Next time, we explore the Democratic Party following the Civil War, through the formation of the Klan.  And on to Woodrow Wilson.

VOICE:  Tomorrow on the Glenn Beck Program, in chapter two of the history of the Democratic Party, you'll learn about the racist roots of the party.  Listen live or online at GlennBeck.com/serials.

How America’s elites fell for the same lie that fueled Auschwitz

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The drone footage out of Gaza isn’t just war propaganda — it’s a glimpse of the same darkness that once convinced men they were righteous for killing innocents.

Evil introduces itself subtly. It doesn’t announce, “Hi, I’m here to destroy you.” It whispers. It flatters. It borrows the language of justice, empathy, and freedom, twisting them until hatred sounds righteous and violence sounds brave.

We are watching that same deception unfold again — in the streets, on college campuses, and in the rhetoric of people who should know better. It’s the oldest story in the world, retold with new slogans.

Evil wins when good people mirror its rage.

A drone video surfaced this week showing Hamas terrorists staging the “discovery” of a hostage’s body. They pushed a corpse out of a window, dragged it into a hole, buried it, and then called in aid workers to “find” what they themselves had planted. It was theater — evil, disguised as victimhood. And it was caught entirely on camera.

That’s how evil operates. It never comes in through the front door. It sneaks in, often through manipulative pity. The same spirit animates the moral rot spreading through our institutions — from the halls of universities to the chambers of government.

Take Zohran Mamdani, a New York assemblyman who has praised jihadists and defended pro-Hamas agitators. His father, a Columbia University professor, wrote that America and al-Qaeda are morally equivalent — that suicide bombings shouldn’t be viewed as barbaric. Imagine thinking that way after watching 3,000 Americans die on 9/11. That’s not intellectualism. That’s indoctrination.

Often, that indoctrination comes from hostile foreign actors, peddled by complicit pawns on our own soil. The pro-Hamas protests that erupted across campuses last year, for example, were funded by Iran — a regime that murders its own citizens for speaking freely.

Ancient evil, new clothes

But the deeper danger isn’t foreign money. It’s the spiritual blindness that lets good people believe resentment is justice and envy is discernment. Scripture talks about the spirit of Amalek — the eternal enemy of God’s people, who attacks the weak from behind while the strong look away. Amalek never dies; it just changes its vocabulary and form with the times.

Today, Amalek tweets. He speaks through professors who defend terrorism as “anti-colonial resistance.” He preaches from pulpits that call violence “solidarity.” And he recruits through algorithms, whispering that the Jews control everything, that America had it coming, that chaos is freedom. Those are ancient lies wearing new clothes.

When nations embrace those lies, it’s not the Jews who perish first. It’s the nations themselves. The soul dies long before the body. The ovens of Auschwitz didn’t start with smoke; they started with silence and slogans.

Andrew Harnik / Staff | Getty Images

A time for choosing

So what do we do? We speak truth — calmly, firmly, without venom. Because hatred can’t kill hatred; it only feeds it. Truth, compassion, and courage starve it to death.

Evil wins when good people mirror its rage. That’s how Amalek survives — by making you fight him with his own weapons. The only victory that lasts is moral clarity without malice, courage without cruelty.

The war we’re fighting isn’t new. It’s the same battle between remembrance and amnesia, covenant and chaos, humility and pride. The same spirit that whispered to Pharaoh, to Hitler, and to every mob that thought hatred could heal the world is whispering again now — on your screens, in your classrooms, in your churches.

Will you join it, or will you stand against it?

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Bill Gates ends climate fear campaign, declares AI the future ruler

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The Big Tech billionaire once said humanity must change or perish. Now he claims we’ll survive — just as elites prepare total surveillance.

For decades, Americans have been told that climate change is an imminent apocalypse — the existential threat that justifies every intrusion into our lives, from banning gas stoves to rationing energy to tracking personal “carbon scores.”

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates helped lead that charge. He warned repeatedly that the “climate disaster” would be the greatest crisis humanity would ever face. He invested billions in green technology and demanded the world reach net-zero emissions by 2050 “to avoid catastrophe.”

The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch.

Now, suddenly, he wants everyone to relax: Climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” after all.

Gates was making less of a scientific statement and more of a strategic pivot. When elites retire a crisis, it’s never because the threat is gone — it’s because a better one has replaced it. And something else has indeed arrived — something the ruling class finds more useful than fear of the weather.The same day Gates downshifted the doomsday rhetoric, Amazon announced it would pay warehouse workers $30 an hour — while laying off 30,000 people because artificial intelligence will soon do their jobs.

Climate panic was the warm-up. AI control is the main event.

The new currency of power

The world once revolved around oil and gas. Today, it revolves around the electricity demanded by server farms, the chips that power machine learning, and the data that can be used to manipulate or silence entire populations. The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch. Whoever controls energy now controls information. And whoever controls information controls civilization.

Climate alarmism gave elites a pretext to centralize power over energy. Artificial intelligence gives them a mechanism to centralize power over people. The future battles will not be about carbon — they will be about control.

Two futures — both ending in tyranny

Americans are already being pushed into what look like two opposing movements, but both leave the individual powerless.

The first is the technocratic empire being constructed in the name of innovation. In its vision, human work will be replaced by machines, and digital permissions will subsume personal autonomy.

Government and corporations merge into a single authority. Your identity, finances, medical decisions, and speech rights become access points monitored by biometric scanners and enforced by automated gatekeepers. Every step, purchase, and opinion is tracked under the noble banner of “efficiency.”

The second is the green de-growth utopia being marketed as “compassion.” In this vision, prosperity itself becomes immoral. You will own less because “the planet” requires it. Elites will redesign cities so life cannot extend beyond a 15-minute walking radius, restrict movement to save the Earth, and ration resources to curb “excess.” It promises community and simplicity, but ultimately delivers enforced scarcity. Freedom withers when surviving becomes a collective permission rather than an individual right.

Both futures demand that citizens become manageable — either automated out of society or tightly regulated within it. The ruling class will embrace whichever version gives them the most leverage in any given moment.

Climate panic was losing its grip. AI dependency — and the obedience it creates — is far more potent.

The forgotten way

A third path exists, but it is the one today’s elites fear most: the path laid out in our Constitution. The founders built a system that assumes human beings are not subjects to be monitored or managed, but moral agents equipped by God with rights no government — and no algorithm — can override.

Hesham Elsherif / Stringer | Getty Images

That idea remains the most “disruptive technology” in history. It shattered the belief that people need kings or experts or global committees telling them how to live. No wonder elites want it erased.

Soon, you will be told you must choose: Live in a world run by machines or in a world stripped down for planetary salvation. Digital tyranny or rationed equality. Innovation without liberty or simplicity without dignity.

Both are traps.

The only way

The only future worth choosing is the one grounded in ordered liberty — where prosperity and progress exist alongside moral responsibility and personal freedom and human beings are treated as image-bearers of God — not climate liabilities, not data profiles, not replaceable hardware components.

Bill Gates can change his tune. The media can change the script. But the agenda remains the same.

They no longer want to save the planet. They want to run it, and they expect you to obey.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Why the White House restoration sent the left Into panic mode

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Presidents have altered the White House for decades, yet only Donald Trump is treated as a vandal for privately funding the East Wing’s restoration.

Every time a president so much as changes the color of the White House drapes, the press clutches its pearls. Unless the name on the stationery is Barack Obama’s, even routine restoration becomes a national outrage.

President Donald Trump’s decision to privately fund upgrades to the White House — including a new state ballroom — has been met with the usual chorus of gasps and sneers. You’d think he bulldozed Monticello.

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s ‘visionary.’

The irony is that presidents have altered and expanded the White House for more than a century. President Franklin D. Roosevelt added the East and West Wings in the middle of the Great Depression. Newspapers accused him of building a palace while Americans stood in breadlines. History now calls it “vision.”

First lady Nancy Reagan faced the same hysteria. Headlines accused her of spending taxpayer money on new china “while Americans starved.” In truth, she raised private funds after learning that the White House didn’t have enough matching plates for state dinners. She took the ridicule and refused to pass blame.

“I’m a big girl,” she told her staff. “This comes with the job.” That was dignity — something the press no longer recognizes.

A restoration, not a renovation

Trump’s project is different in every way that should matter. It costs taxpayers nothing. Not a cent. The president and a few friends privately fund the work. There’s no private pool or tennis court, no personal perks. The additions won’t even be completed until after he leaves office.

What’s being built is not indulgence — it’s stewardship. A restoration of aging rooms, worn fixtures, and century-old bathrooms that no longer function properly in the people’s house. Trump has paid for cast brass doorknobs engraved with the presidential seal, restored the carpets and moldings, and ensured that the architecture remains faithful to history.

The media’s response was mockery and accusations of vanity. They call it “grotesque excess,” while celebrating billion-dollar “climate art” projects and funneling hundreds of millions into activist causes like the No Kings movement. They lecture America on restraint while living off the largesse of billionaires.

The selective guardians of history

Where was this sudden reverence for history when rioters torched St. John’s Church — the same church where every president since James Madison has worshipped? The press called it an “expression of grief.”

Where was that reverence when mobs toppled statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant? Or when first lady Melania Trump replaced the Rose Garden’s lawn with a patio but otherwise followed Jackie Kennedy’s original 1962 plans in the garden’s restoration? They called that “desecration.”

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s “visionary.”

The real desecration

The people shrieking about “historic preservation” care nothing for history. They hate the idea that something lasting and beautiful might be built by hands they despise. They mock craftsmanship because it exposes their own cultural decay.

The White House ballroom is not a scandal — it’s a mirror. And what it reflects is the media’s own pettiness. The ruling class that ridicules restoration is the same class that cheered as America’s monuments fell. Its members sneer at permanence because permanence condemns them.

Julia Beverly / Contributor | Getty Images

Trump’s improvements are an act of faith — in the nation’s symbols, its endurance, and its worth. The outrage over a privately funded renovation says less about him than it does about the journalists who mistake destruction for progress.

The real desecration isn’t happening in the East Wing. It’s happening in the newsrooms that long ago tore up their own foundation — truth — and never bothered to rebuild it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Trump’s secret war in the Caribbean EXPOSED — It’s not about drugs

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The president’s moves in Venezuela, Guyana, and Colombia aren’t about drugs. They’re about re-establishing America’s sovereignty across the Western Hemisphere.

For decades, we’ve been told America’s wars are about drugs, democracy, or “defending freedom.” But look closer at what’s unfolding off the coast of Venezuela, and you’ll see something far more strategic taking shape. Donald Trump’s so-called drug war isn’t about fentanyl or cocaine. It’s about control — and a rebirth of American sovereignty.

The aim of Trump’s ‘drug war’ is to keep the hemisphere’s oil, minerals, and manufacturing within the Western family and out of Beijing’s hands.

The president understands something the foreign policy class forgot long ago: The world doesn’t respect apologies. It respects strength.

While the global elites in Davos tout the Great Reset, Trump is building something entirely different — a new architecture of power based on regional independence, not global dependence. His quiet campaign in the Western Hemisphere may one day be remembered as the second Monroe Doctrine.

Venezuela sits at the center of it all. It holds the world’s largest crude oil reserves — oil perfectly suited for America’s Gulf refineries. For years, China and Russia have treated Venezuela like a pawn on their chessboard, offering predatory loans in exchange for control of those resources. The result has been a corrupt, communist state sitting in our own back yard. For too long, Washington shrugged. Not any more.The naval exercises in the Caribbean, the sanctions, the patrols — they’re not about drug smugglers. They’re about evicting China from our hemisphere.

Trump is using the old “drug war” playbook to wage a new kind of war — an economic and strategic one — without firing a shot at our actual enemies. The goal is simple: Keep the hemisphere’s oil, minerals, and manufacturing within the Western family and out of Beijing’s hands.

Beyond Venezuela

Just east of Venezuela lies Guyana, a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map a year ago. Then ExxonMobil struck oil, and suddenly Guyana became the newest front in a quiet geopolitical contest. Washington is helping defend those offshore platforms, build radar systems, and secure undersea cables — not for charity, but for strategy. Control energy, data, and shipping lanes, and you control the future.

Moreover, Colombia — a country once defined by cartels — is now positioned as the hinge between two oceans and two continents. It guards the Panama Canal and sits atop rare-earth minerals every modern economy needs. Decades of American presence there weren’t just about cocaine interdiction; they were about maintaining leverage over the arteries of global trade. Trump sees that clearly.

PEDRO MATTEY / Contributor | Getty Images

All of these recent news items — from the military drills in the Caribbean to the trade negotiations — reflect a new vision of American power. Not global policing. Not endless nation-building. It’s about strategic sovereignty.

It’s the same philosophy driving Trump’s approach to NATO, the Middle East, and Asia. We’ll stand with you — but you’ll stand on your own two feet. The days of American taxpayers funding global security while our own borders collapse are over.

Trump’s Monroe Doctrine

Critics will call it “isolationism.” It isn’t. It’s realism. It’s recognizing that America’s strength comes not from fighting other people’s wars but from securing our own energy, our own supply lines, our own hemisphere. The first Monroe Doctrine warned foreign powers to stay out of the Americas. The second one — Trump’s — says we’ll defend them, but we’ll no longer be their bank or their babysitter.

Historians may one day mark this moment as the start of a new era — when America stopped apologizing for its own interests and started rebuilding its sovereignty, one barrel, one chip, and one border at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.