Authentic News with Jim Fetzer, February 19, 2026 Hour 1

“Even before he [Lincoln] reaches the Capital, he pretends to discover a plot to destroy him on his way by rail at night from Harrisburgh. That was when he made his grand entrance into Washington like a thief, disguised in a Scotch cap and cloak…. But the trick was so bunglingly played that everybody … laughed at the too palpable fraud; for he sent his wife and children on the doomed train that was to be thrown off the track for the purpose of dashing him to pieces.” (The Old Guard; March 1864, p. 63)

“Mr. Lincoln professes to an admiring clergyman that he ‘will submit to any sacrifice for the good of the country.’ Then let him submit himself to be hanged without delay.” (The Old Guard, Oct. 1864, p. 237)

“A leading organ of public opinion—of Northern, or New England public opinion—says: ‘We have the power to subjugate, or to annihilate, the South, and one or the other we are going to do.’ This programme is plainly announced. No robber ever stated his point more boldly; and we suppose we must take it as a correct declaration of New England morality. The principle, though shocking, has the merit of simplicity. Let us test it in another relation. A man may say, ‘I have the power to whip my father and to beat my mother, and I am going to do it.’ This may suit New England politics, and New England Christianity, but can it pass for an enlightened public morality? The question is not what we have the power to do, but what we have the right to do.” (The Old Guard, Feb. 1865, p. 49)

“‘[W]hen any female shall by word, gesture, or movement insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.’

“This in essence was a ‘right to rape’ order which he [General Butler] issued to his troops…. Palmerston, the British Prime Minister, wrote to Charles Francis Adams, the U.S. Minister in London the following concerning Butler’s order:

“‘I will venture to say that no example can be found in the history of civilized nations till the publication of this order of a general guilty in cold blood of so infamous an act as deliberately to hand over the female inhabitants of a conquered city to the unbridled license of an unrestrained soldiery.‘” (Sam Dickson, “Shattering the Icon of Abraham Lincoln”)

“The despatches found on the body of Col. Dahlgren, who was killed near Richmond, will be quoted in disgrace of the name of the United States as long as our name shall last. They prove that the object of the last ‘raid on Richmond’ was to set fire to the city, full of women and children, without notice, and to murder its inhabitants…. This is not warfare; it is assassination. By the laws of war all who were taken in the act of attempting to execute such a plot were liable to be treated, not as prisoners of war, but as spies and assassins. Their lives were forfeited, if the Confederates had chosen to adhere strictly to the laws of war.” (The Old Guard, April 1864, p. 95)

“Sherman used Southern prisoners of war to clear mine fields by marching them back and forth across land outside Savannah where mines were suspected. Southern prisoners were also herded in front of Northern emplacements under Confederate artillery fire so as to force Southerners to fire on their own men. Thus in the siege of Charleston, 50 Confederate officers were placed in a holding pen in front of Fort Wagner on Morris Island, so as to expose them to the fire of Confederate batteries shelling the Northern positions.” (Sam Dickson, “Shattering the Icon of Abraham Lincoln”)

“They called this bloody strife a ‘war for the Union.’ That was the stupendous fraud. There is, there can be, no war for the Union. War is necessarily and inevitably disunion. It is a cutting away of the fraternal tie, the voluntary bonds, that make union. Thus sundered, the Union is gone, and what remains is a mass of States standing in their original separate sovereignty….

“[They] have at last dropped the hypocritical cry of war for the Union, and have boldly run up their own true black and piratical flag of war for subjugation and extermination….

“‘The South shall be destroyed!’ is the hellish watchword inscribed upon the black banners of the Republican party. ‘The South shall be destroyed!’ is the damnable eloquence of Congress. ‘The South shall be destroyed,‘ is the brutal jargon of the pulpits! ‘The South shall be destroyed,‘ is the cry of slavering ignorance in the streets! These accursed words of barbarism are everywhere belching forth like hot flame out of the bottomless pit.” (The Old Guard, July 1864, pp. 146–147)

“The German writer correctly describes the aggression against the Southern states as ‘one of the most dreadful wars in the history of the world’…. The German author, by the way, perceives the hypocrisy of the pretense that the South was invaded ‘to save the Union.’ That pretext reminds one of the man who had religious scruples against divorce and accordingly saved his marriage by murdering his wife.” (Revilo P. Oliver; Liberty Bell, Feb. 1992; “TO SEE OURSELVES”)

“A Democratic member of Congress said to Mr. Lincoln, ‘I shall vote you all the men and money you want, and then I mean to hold you responsible for the use you make of them.’ ‘Well,’ replied the mountebank wit, ‘you give me all the men and all the money I want, and I will whip the rebels and you too.'” (The Old Guard, Feb. 1868, p. 82)

The satanic tyrant openly promised to use the army against the Democrats in Congress as well as against the sovereign Southern states.

“The Anglo-Saxon population of the whole western tier of counties in Missouri were deported from their homes by General Ewing’s General Order Number 11, which depopulated the region by forcibly evacuating the women and children on the shortest of notice, along with burning their houses and stealing their property.” (Sam Dickson, “Shattering the Icon of Abraham Lincoln”)

“The city of Atlanta, after its surrender, was burned to the ground, and only a handful of churches and a few outlying residences escaped the holocaust…. Captain Daniel Oakey of the Second Massachusetts Volunteers recounted the burning of Atlanta as follows: ‘Sixty thousand of us witnessed the destruction of Atlanta, while our post band and that of the 33rd Massachusetts played martial airs and operatic selections.'” (Sam Dickson, “Shattering the Icon of Abraham Lincoln”)

“Before the torches in the hands of his troops, houses, barns, mills, farming implements, all disappeared in flame. Women and children were seen flying by the light of burning dwellings; corn, wheat, and forage—the only supplies left the inhabitants—were seized or destroyed; the very ploughs and rakes were broken up, and rendered useless. From the women, greybeards, and children, threatened with starvation, went up a cry to God for vengeance on the author of this enormity.

“‘I have destroyed,’ said General Sheridan, in his official report, ‘two thousand barns filled with wheat and hay, and farming implements; over seventy mills filled with flour and wheat; have driven in front of the army over four thousand head of stock; and have killed and issued to the troops not less than three thousand sheep. This destruction embraces the Luray Valley, and the Little Fort Valley, as well as the main valley.'” (The Old Guard; Dec. 1867, p. 893)

“If the northern States have a right to conquer the southern, then the southern States have also a right to conquer the northern, and so there is nowhere a principle of security, safety and rest. If we have a right to steal their spoons, and smash to pieces their pianos, to burn their dwellings and destroy their private property, they have the same right to do the same to us, and there the terrible doctrine hangs like a murderer’s sword over our heads, and the heads of our children, for all generations. The people of South Carolina have as much right to burn Boston, as the people of Massachusetts had to burn Charleston.” (The Old Guard, Nov. 1867, p. 804)

“[T]he Second Massachusetts negro infantry, 700 strong, Col. Draper, a white man, commanding, with one hundred white cavalry, … started for the Northern Neck….

“On the route six negroes violated the person of Mrs. G. eleven times, she being the wife of a soldier of the Ninth Virginia cavalry….

“Where they went they were led by their officers and told, ‘You can go loose and do as you please.’” (The Old Guard, September 1864, p. 200)

“‘Two weeks ago 300 rebels passed 7 miles south of Waynesboro at night. At daybreak, 2 rebel prisoners were brought in. I felt much chagrin that the pickets had brought in the 2 and I reprimanded … [the lieutenant] for not having obeyed my orders and yours which were to bring in no prisoners. Lieutenant Kerr … took the 2 prisoners out of the guard tent and shot them dead.‘” (www.republicbroadcastingarchives.org/the-rebel-and-the-renegade-roundtable-w-mike-gaddy-steven-douglas-whitener-november-23-2025 ; 35:51)

“Since these are the latest recognized rules of civilized warfare, can we wonder that all Europe agree in expressions of surprise and horror at the barbarities we have perpetrated upon the people of the South, from the very commencement of this war? Our army correspondents, who have written for the New York Times, Tribune, and Herald, have spread a knowledge of our brutality and barbarism broadcast over the whole world. A correspondent in Grant’s army, for the New York Tribune, in a letter published June 20th, gives the following between Gen. Butler’s Chief of Staff and a negro sergeant:

“‘Well,’ said Gen. Butler’s Chief of Staff to a tall sergeant, ‘you had a pretty tough fight there on the left.’ ‘Yes, sir; and we lost a good many good officers and men.’ ‘How many prisoners did you take, sergeant?’ ‘Not any alive, sir,’ was the significant response. Gen. Smith says, ‘They don’t give my Provost Marshal the least trouble, and I don’t believe they contribute toward filling any of the hospitals with Rebel wounded.’

“The amount of all this is that Butler’s Chief of Staff and the New York Tribune chuckle over the account the ebony devil gives of murdering wounded soldiers. It is a source of delight to them that these negroes take no prisoners, but assassinate their victims in cold blood. In any other country such acts would be punished with death; here, in this land demonized with the implacable, the hellish spirit of Abolitionism, they are sources of delight to all who keep company with the Republican party.” (The Old Guard, August 1864, pp. 172–173)

“At Palmyra, in Missouri, General McNeil murdered, in cold blood, ten soldiers of the Confederacy [prisoners of war]…. President Davis ordered by telegraph the execution in retaliation, of ten Yankee prisoners…. [T]he telegraphic order was never executed; … and the Palmyra massacre was … unavenged….” (Edward A. Pollard; The Third Year of the War (1864); p. 199)

“Before the eyes of Europe the mask of civilization had been taken from the Yankee war; it degenerated into unbridled butchery and robbery.” (Edward A. Pollard; The Second Year of the War (1864); p. 88)

“At a recent Lincoln campaign meeting in the village of West Hoboken, N.J., the speaker said: ‘We have to complain of Mr. Lincoln that he has not built a bastile in every school district, and erected a gallows at the corner of every street in the North, to punish the opposers of his government.‘ This speech was applauded by the Republican crowd that listened to it.” (The Old Guard, Nov. 1864, p. 264)

“Among things cited by Burke Davis in The Long Surrender was the fact that after the Battle of Sharpsburg in Maryland, the Northerners announced that they would not permit anyone to accord Christian burials to the Southern soldiers of war—they ordered the bodies to be left out to rot and to decompose. Only after the rot had gotten to the point where the public’s health was being endangered were the rotted remains scooped together and buried in unmarked common ground.” (Sam Dickson, “Shattering the Icon of Abraham Lincoln”)

“And when the war that had appalled civilized mankind was over and the bandits who brazenly called themselves a ‘Republican Party’ imposed on the conquered and prostrate South the vengeance for their own crimes that they called ‘Reconstruction,’ there were many Americans who still had a conscience and some sense of human decency, but they were obliged to acquiesce, at least by silence, in the national hypocrisy….” (Revilo P. Oliver; “The Beginning of the End”; Liberty Bell, Aug. 1988)

“The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.” (H.L. Mencken)

“What equitable reason can be assigned for the action of the Federal power in violently overthrowing the government of the late Confederate States, founded, as it was, on the consent of the governed, and fully answering all the purposes for which human governments are instituted? … If we conscientiously believe that the popular consent is a necessary condition of all legitimate government, how shall we justify the compulsory imposition of Federal authority on the southern people … ?” (The Old Guard; Dec. 1867, p. 942)

“Only in a community, demoralized and debased by the vices of war, and the lusts of illegal power, could a monument to such a man as Lincoln long stand to insult the sunlight and blast the vision of decent men!” (The Old Guard, Sep. 1867, p. 650)