I live in Madison County, Montana. Long before cable panels debated corruption and accountability, this place learned a hard lesson about what happens when government goes bad.
In the 1860s, Bannack served as the territorial capital of Montana. Henry Plummer was its elected sheriff. He wore the badge, swore the oath ... and built the gallows.
Healthy institutions correct themselves. Unhealthy ones protect themselves. Madison County learned that lesson the hard way. Minnesota is confronting it now.
And according to many who lived here at the time, he also ran the crime.
Plummer and his deputies were accused of leading a gang of road agents who robbed and murdered travelers hauling gold through these mountains. Stagecoaches were ambushed. Men vanished. Fear became routine. Complaints led nowhere. The law appeared to be shielding the very violence it existed to stop.
So the citizens acted.
In 1864, a vigilance committee arrested Plummer and two of his deputies. No formal trial followed. No appeals. The man who built the gallows was hanged on them.
Historians still debate Plummer’s guilt. They do not debate why the vigilantes emerged. People believed government had become part of the threat rather than the safeguard. When authority no longer restrained crime, citizens concluded that authority itself required restraint.
That story unsettles. It should. But it is real, and it matters now.
The distance between frontier Montana and modern Minnesota is not as wide as we might like to think.
Minnesota is now reckoning with one of the largest public-assistance fraud scandals in American history. Billions of taxpayer dollars intended to feed children and support vulnerable families were siphoned through nonprofits that faced minimal oversight and little urgency to address obvious red flags.
Warnings surfaced early. Audits flagged problems. But the payments continued anyway.
It was a prolonged, systemic failure, not a single clever con.
RELATED: Trump has the chance to end the welfare free-for-all Minnesota exposed
Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images
As the scope became clearer, more voices spoke up. Questions multiplied. The alarms grew louder. Yet the machinery kept moving. Oversight failed to halt the flow of money in real time. Accountability arrived only after exposure, not before.
For many watching, the most disturbing fact was not that warnings existed but that raising them changed nothing.
Imagine a medical provider entrusted with managing a patient’s pain. The patient is vulnerable, dependent, unable to advocate fully. Now imagine discovering that the provider has been siphoning the medication, not to heal, but to feed a personal addiction.
The first problem is theft.
The deeper problem is betrayal.
The most dangerous problem involves everyone who noticed and did nothing.
That provider violates something fundamental. So does a government that tolerates corruption while presenting itself as a caretaker.
This summer, America turns 250. There will be speeches, reenactments, and familiar lines from the Declaration of Independence. We will hear again about equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those words deserve their place.
But Americans have developed a habit of quoting the Declaration selectively.
“All men are created equal” fits neatly on a bumper sticker. The context Thomas Jefferson supplied fits less comfortably. He warned about power, corruption, and the responsibility citizens bear when government betrays its charge.
The founders did not merely announce ideals. They warned about consequences.
They wrote that governments exist to secure rights and that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” That sentence is often cited. The one that follows rarely is: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.”
These were not men eager for upheaval. They understood that stability is precious and easily lost.
But they continued, warning that when “a long train of abuses and usurpations” reveals a consistent design toward despotism, resistance becomes not merely permissible but necessary.
The prophet Jeremiah put the problem bluntly: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).
RELATED: ‘Shameful revisionist history’: America250 faces scrutiny after posting ‘progressive propaganda’
Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images
That realism about human nature runs through both scripture and the Declaration. The framers carried it forward into the Constitution. They assumed power would be abused. They assumed ambition would seek advantage. They assumed virtue would require reinforcement.
So they divided authority, erected checks and balances, and made corruption harder rather than trusting leaders to be better.
Vigilance was the price of liberty. When a people become absorbed in the pursuit of happiness and neglect the pursuit of accountability, history intervenes.
In this Montana county, the story of Sheriff Plummer serves as a reminder of what happens when authority receives blind trust and accountability arrives too late.
The lesson does not praise vigilantism. Vigilantism signals collapse, not health. When citizens feel forced outside lawful systems, failure has already occurred upstream.
Unchecked corruption creates pressure that does not dissipate on its own. Healthy institutions correct themselves. Unhealthy ones protect themselves.
Madison County learned that lesson the hard way. Minnesota is confronting it now. America itself may be closer than we care to admit.
Every summer, tourists pass through this county on their way to Yellowstone National Park. In Virginia City, students retell the story of Sheriff Plummer, often dressed in Old West attire, offering visitors a taste of frontier drama.
The story feels safely distant. A relic of a rougher age.
But news from Minnesota sounds less like reporting and more like repetition.
A century from now, what story will students tell about Minnesota?
Then, as now, theft was dismissed. Warnings were minimized. Institutions protected themselves rather than correcting themselves. Trust eroded quietly before it collapsed publicly.
Corruption ignored does not remain contained. Betrayal tolerated becomes precedent. Institutions that refuse correction eventually lose consent.
History shows what follows. When authority protects itself instead of the public, legitimacy erodes quietly, then collapses suddenly. By the time citizens reach for drastic remedies, lawful ones have already failed.
Madison County learned that lesson in blood and with rope. Minnesota is learning it through audits and indictments. The difference is only the stage of decay.
History does not repeat itself as theater forever. When its warnings go unheeded, it returns as judgment.
An autopsy report on the remains of an 11-year-old girl found in a plastic bin behind an abandoned home contains disturbing details about her death.
The report said there was amphetamine as well as an antihistamine present in the body of Jacqueline "Mimi" Torres-Garcia. There was also evidence that she had been starved before dying.
Her body had been 'folded into a tight fetal position' and placed into a laundry bin that was put into a black garbage bag.
The girl's remains were found in October behind the Clark Street home in New Britain, Connecticut.
She only had a single blueberry in her stomach and weighed only 27 pounds despite being 4'8" tall. The report said she had a "near absence of subcutaneous fat."
The medical examiner ruled that her cause of death had been fatal child abuse with starvation. The manner of death was found to be homicide from maltreatment and neglect.
The autopsy report also found no injuries to the girl's head, body, or neck.
Her body had been "folded into a tight fetal position" and placed into a laundry bin that was put into a black garbage bag. That was put into the 40-gallon rubber tote that was found behind the boarded-up home, according to the State of Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
Police arrested the girl's mother, Karla Garcia, and the mother's boyfriend, Jonatan Nanita, for her murder. The girl's aunt, Jackelyn Garcia, has also been charged with other charges related to her murder.
Her mother was charged with murder, tampering with evidence, and intentional cruelty to a child, among other charges. Nanita was charged with murder and intentional cruelty to a child.
RELATED: Mom allegedly left children in filthy apartment with trash, human and animal feces: police
An arrest warrant said that all three had allegedly admitted to "intentional restraint, neglect, and cruelty."
Police said at a press conference in October that Torres-Garcia had likely died in the fall of 2024, about the time of her 12th birthday on Jan. 29.
The mother and boyfriend had previous arrests for violent criminal behavior, while the girl's aunt had been arrested previously for causing risk to a minor.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
West Virginia has banned young men like Becky Pepper-Jackson — a transgender 15-year-old — from competing in girls’ and women’s sports.
While the law has been blocked by lower courts, conservatives and fathers — like BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere — are hoping that the outcome will be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court.
“The 15-year-old Becky Pepper-Jackson is the sole transgender student athlete in the entire state of West Virginia, according to her attorneys and her bid to continue playing competitive sports is in the hands of the Supreme Court,” Stu reads from a Washington Post article on “Stu Does America.”
Jackson’s lawyers argued that the ban discriminates against him for being transgender, which they believe violates his constitutional equal protection rights.
However, the state argued that the ban is necessary in order to preserve fairness in women’s sports, which means that Becky Pepper-Jackson — who the state also argued has an unfair physical advantage like all biological males — is no exception.
“This is something that literally everyone knows. And when I say literally everyone knows it, I mean not just you and me. ... Everyone, including far-left lunatics, understand this. They all know it. They all know it in their hearts, in their minds. They all know it,” Stu says.
“What they admit publicly, what they argue publicly, is something totally different many times. But they all know what the truth is here. Every single one of them. This is not, like, some mysterious information we’ve stumbled upon. I didn’t dig through a government report and find some little notation at the end that indicates, ‘Wow, we discovered new information,’” he continues.
“That’s not what’s going on here. This is just blatantly obvious things that everyone understands,” he adds.
Want more from Stu?To enjoy more of Stu's lethal wit, wisdom, and mockery, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
In “Politics,” Aristotle explains that political rule comes in three basic forms: rule of one, rule of the few, and rule of the many. Each form has a healthy and a degenerate expression. Monarchy and tyranny describe rule by one. Aristocracy and oligarchy describe rule by the few. Polity and democracy describe rule by the many.
What separates the good from the bad in each category is not structure but motive. A king governs for the common good. A tyrant governs for himself.
Despite the millennia that separate us from Aristotle, the philosopher’s portrait of tyranny feels uncomfortably contemporary.
Aristotle does more than classify regimes. He explains, in cold and unsentimental terms, how tyrants preserve power once they seize it. His warnings, written more than 2,000 years ago, read less like ancient theory and more like a field manual.
The tyrant begins by eliminating rivals. He fears competition, especially from men of spirit and competence. Anyone admired for virtue, courage, or leadership poses a danger because excellence inspires imitation. Such men are removed through exile, execution, or disgrace.
Next the tyrant attacks institutions that allow citizens to form bonds. Aristotle lists common meals, clubs, educational gatherings, literary societies, and discussion groups. Any shared practice that fosters trust, loyalty, or independent thought threatens despotic rule. Organization creates solidarity, and solidarity creates resistance.
The tyrant also forces citizens to live publicly. Privacy breeds conspiracy. Public life enables surveillance. Aristotle describes rulers who compel their subjects to remain visible so that dissent never escapes notice. Long before Bentham’s panopticon, Aristotle understood that constant observation disciplines behavior.
Surveillance alone does not suffice. Tyrants cultivate networks of informers to uncover thoughts that cannot be seen. Citizens learn to treat one another as potential threats. Suspicion replaces trust. Speech becomes guarded. Silence becomes safety.
Aristotle could not have imagined digital surveillance, but he would have recognized its function. Technology merely perfects a strategy the ancients already understood.
Social bonds must then be weakened. The tyrant sows discord between neighbors, friends, and families. These relationships form the first line of resistance to centralized power. When trust dissolves at the most intimate level, organized opposition becomes nearly impossible.
Poverty also serves the tyrant. Aristotle observes that despots deliberately exhaust their populations with endless labor. The goal is not productivity but distraction. Citizens too busy to rest or reflect lack the energy to conspire.
He cites the construction of the Egyptian pyramids as an example of forced labor designed less to achieve a purpose than to consume a people’s strength. The task glorifies the ruler while leaving the population depleted.
War further strengthens despotism. Constant external threat convinces citizens that they need a strong ruler to survive. Crisis suspends normal limits. Emergency justifies control. Under perpetual conflict, organization becomes treason.
Aristotle claims that tyranny, the degenerated rule of one, borrows from the worst features of democracy. Despots empower groups unlikely to organize independently against them. He mentions women and slaves not as moral judgments but as political calculations within the ancient world.
The logic remains familiar. Tyrants elevate those dependent on the regime and hostile to existing social hierarchies. Dependence fosters loyalty. Resentment supplies enforcement.
Flattery plays a crucial role. Tyrants surround themselves with sycophants who inflate their ego and confirm their righteousness. Men willing to abase themselves rise quickly. Men of honor refuse to flatter and therefore remain dangerous.
Flattery becomes a sorting mechanism. Those who value dignity exclude themselves. Those who crave favor advance.
Aristotle adds that tyrants prefer foreigners to citizens. Citizens possess memory, tradition, and moral expectation. They know how things once were and how they ought to be. Foreigners lack these attachments, and they are happy to flatter the ruler who elevated them.
This arrangement benefits both sides. The tyrant gains enforcers without local allegiance. The foreigner gains status, wealth, and protection. Without the ruler, he has nothing.
RELATED: Do you want Caesar? Because this is how you get Caesar.
Blaze Media Illustration
Despite the millennia that separate us from Aristotle, his description of tyranny feels uncomfortably contemporary. Surveillance now operates through algorithms and cellphone cameras rather than forcing everyone to live at the city gates, but the purpose remains unchanged. Security replaces liberty. Total observation replaces trust.
Our institutions remove ambitious and virtuous individuals while elevating compliant managerial drones. Debt binds the population to endless labor. Work consumes life without building independence. Citizens remain busy, anxious, poor, and isolated.
Cultural and political authorities weaken family, denigrate religion, and discourage independent association. Community dissolves into administration. Loyalty transfers from neighbors to systems.
Ruling classes increasingly rely on populations with little connection to national history or tradition. These groups have no reason to defend inherited norms and every incentive to please those who grant them status.
Some details differ but the formula for tyranny does not. Aristotle understood tyranny because he understood human nature. His analysis endures because the same impulses govern power in every age.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) urged U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to "round up all" of the criminal illegal aliens.
The post Democrat Sen. Fetterman Urges ICE to ‘Round Up All’ the Criminal Migrants appeared first on Breitbart.