By Wayne Allensworth
Texas Governor Greg Abbott may be forced to make a decision very soon on how he wants to be remembered, as I wrote in my previous piece. He can either make a stand and assert our right of self-defense, or he can fold and deserve the ignominy that will be his legacy. The question concerns Abbott’s reaction should Joe Biden order the border patrol to attempt to get through a barrier in Eagle Pass, Texas aimed at preventing them from cutting razor wire intended to turn back illegal aliens; and/or how Abbott — and the troops themselves — would react to Biden federalizing Texas National Guard units at the border.
I’ve been skeptical that Abbott was serious about the border crisis for reasons stated in the article referenced above. But his announcement that he would defy the court order on allowing the feds in at Eagle Pass casts the situation in a new light, the light of a possible Constitutional crisis. Abbott has already stated plainly that the federal government’s failure to protect Texas from invasion — I don’t know what else we can call the flood of illegals, amounting to millions over the past couple of years — indicates that Washington has violated its compact with the states. That’s been plain for anyone with eyes to see for a long time, but circumstances have forced Abbott to perhaps go further than he intended, and they might yet force him down the path of confrontation with a globalist Blob he has not seriously opposed previously.
I’m well aware that the governor has been on a “business trip” in India. And we all know what that business likely concerns: encouraging Indians to come to America and replace American tech workers. The crisis at home wasn’t enough for Abbott to pull himself away from his trip. If Texas — and an American Remnant we would recognize as such — has a chance at survival, any states serious about their future must find a way to deal with the massive influx of legal immigrants. GOP carnival barkers have been willing to screech about illegals, distracting their base from the larger issue of mass immigration in general and its deleterious impact on our people. Political drama is a narcotic to the masses, and we have to be cognizant of Kabuki theater political games.
Nevertheless, events sometimes snowball in such a way that the players are pulled along with them, forcing all concerned to act, and perhaps not in ways neither they nor we would have anticipated. A Constitutional crisis that could force Red State governors to in effect move toward “internal secession” is necessary if we are to have even a chance to carry on long term, regardless of who resides in the White House. Our opponents have never balked at defying laws they don’t like (such as “sanctuary cities” that defy federal immigration law) or using the institutions of state power to impose their agenda on the rest of us. We will have to act with the same confidence in our cause.
A few points to ponder: When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev instituted his reforms in the 1980s, he had no intention of dissolving the USSR, but events rapidly took the question out of his hands as the Soviet republics, including the Russian Federation, asserted their sovereignty. The Soviet Union failed not only because of that assertion, and the forces it unleashed that quickly surpassed the Soviet elite’s ability to control them, but also because at a critical moment, in August 1991, Soviet troops refused to follow orders. They were unwilling to move against their own people, specifically the protestors who had rallied to defend Russian Federation leader, and longtime Soviet apparatchik, Boris Yeltsin, who had defied the Soviet hardliners following their arrest of Gorbachev. The analogy with our present situation is far from perfect, of course, but the questions it raises are critical:
- Will the Border Patrol agents at Eagle Pass at some point rebel against Washington’s orders that have frustrated them for so long?
- Will the National Guardsmen obey the federal authorities should Biden federalize them?
- Will Greg Abbott be able to transcend the political and psychological barriers that have made him just another conventional red state GOP functionary?
- And will our people demand real action, not simply more political drama on the order of a Super Bowl halftime show?
Maybe not, but stranger things have happened.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
