Dishonest Abe’s False Alibi: A Review of NONSENSE ON STILTS By Paul Graham

In trying to set the record straight on a few old-fashioned American myths, Paul Graham has perhaps inadvertently created a firestorm. The first Yankee Bot 1-star review at Amazon will tell us that anyone daring to protest the words or genocidal tyranny of the smallest tall man in history is just mad that the South lost its war to preserve slavery! Don’t take my word or someone else’s hasbara for it; we have the high authority of Jezebel political postmodernity to trust. When asked, for maybe the second or third time, about the causes of the “Civil War” in the 1860s, while priming the glow plug on her broom, Nimarata Haley wisely proclaimed, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery.” Of course! Come on, Paul! Let all this law and truth and history and being correct stuff go, brother. 

But being honest, we can’t let it go, can we? 

Graham, Paul C., Nonsense on Stilts: The Gettysburg Address & Lincoln’s Imaginary Nation, Columbia: Shotwell Publishing, 2024. 

(Shotwell Publishing, Columbia, SC.)

Paul Graham is a longtime champion of the Southern Tradition and Western Civilization. A native son of South Carolina, he has served as an academic, a popular spokesman, an editor, and a writer whose work always aims to clarify the truth, in general, and specifically as it relates to propounding the still-viable cause of the Old Confederacy. He is the author of Confederaphobia and a co-founder of Shotwell Publishing. He, my editor, friend, and brother, has a certain way with words. His legendary guitar skills, strikingly reminiscent of Mark Knopfler’s transitioning period between the 70s and 80s, may be the subject of future review…

He also nails, dead to rights, Evil Abe, along with the language, law, history, and spirit of the ancient American association and the subsequent Global Amerikan Empire.

Much of what Graham presents is known, or rather, was known—and accepted—as common knowledge about American history. Today, much of it will come as a complete and shocking surprise to various members of our, uh, less-educated society. For some, it will serve as a coherent summary and reminder of the way things actually were or are. And I suspect everyone is in for some degree of wholly novel education thanks to Graham’s ardent scholarship. Why? Because in part, some of the material Graham explains was originally kept secret from the public, whether for three decades or for fifteen! This suppression of information is from an allegedly free and open “democracy” based on “rules” or some such. And, yes, the same nefarious machinations are in play right now, literally the week I am typing this review, as the Washington cartel seeks to persecute, torture, and probably kill Julian Assange for the “crime” of exposing more Washingtonian secrets of the extremely bloody and dangerous kind. And again, yes, the railroading of Assange by the terror firm of Obama, Trump, and Brandon is exactly the kind of thing their 1860s predecessor would have done and did, in fact, do.

As with Assange’s pitiful case, where some people will side with Fred Burton, et al, and others will side with human dignity and veracity, regarding America’s many founding fables, I suspect most people’s thoughts and beliefs are at least somewhat solidified. Yet and still, Paul Graham may have found a way, a very entertaining way at that, to open a few minds if not outright change them. Either will be an astounding feat.

In the aptly named first chapter of Nonsense On Stilts, “Our Fathers Did No Such Thing,” Graham exposes one of many of the lies of Lincoln by simply quoting the great liar’s own famous lie: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation…” Words, whether deployed sincerely or maliciously, have meaning. Graham wisely begins his book by defining his use of “nation,” in accordance with and so as to explain and refute Lincoln’s deception. My friend and the great destroyer both refer to a nation-state of the French Revolutionary, Enlightenment, or Westphalian kind. This definition does not necessarily or directly touch upon the ethnosocial or cultural anthropological notions of a related people, bound by blood, language, belief, tradition, and so forth—an extended family.

There was, in some regards, a genuine if scattered American nation, a kind of ethnostate. It was an extension of the British or English nation. It still exists today, though it is now a distinct minority and even its best-expanded proxy claim teeters at the edge of becoming outnumbered in the boiling, pot-melting stew of chefs Emma Lazarus and Emanuel Celler. It is my view that Anglo-America would have been better served by the kind of more overt clarification or understanding that founded the Russian Empire of old and preserves the modern Russian Federation today. (As for Nonsense On Stilts, my view is neither here nor there.) Graham, like Lincoln, refers to the central government of the land, the master state. And that thing did not legally exist and despite various protestations today, can never validly exist. Don’t believe me? Read the book! Graham brings the irrefutable proof, page after page, truth after truth, all set down in an engaging and, as needed, humorous sequence.

In doing so, he masterfully and meticulously exposes the lies and word spells, fictions, contradictions, and fallback enforcing violence that form the basis of American political history and that created the hateful Amerikan Empire. Even in the complete absence of slavery and war among the States, America would have still had myriad problems, owing in no small part to misapplied or misinterpreted rhetoric (whether authored by Lincoln, Jefferson, Madison, or others). Graham corrects the collective course.

Nonsense On Stilts is largely a dissection and refutation of Lincoln’s famed Gettysburg Address, a lofty screed but one of purely rhetorical falsehood. As Graham notes on page 81: “The Gettysburg Address is certainly among the most eloquent alibis in history, but it is a false alibi.” He shines the plain light of truth on page 16: “As much as Lincoln may have wished it to be the case, no new nation was brought forth on the American continent ‘four score and seven years’ before his speech.” He explains exactly why there never was a proper political American nation by exposing the founding diversions that foisted on the American people the central government of the Constitution of 1787 and the fake nation it lied into pseudo-existence (a very messy and dangerous thing, rather poorly done).

Graham also does an excellent job telling an abbreviated version of American political and general history, from the founding of the first permanent English settlement in Virginia to the causes and actions behind the reluctant movement towards independence from the English King to the Declaration of Independence itself to the vastly superior (compared to the beast of ‘87) Articles of Confederation. Along the way, he explores the high treason committed (in secret) at the Philadelphia “constitutional convention”. In short, the representatives were dispatched to perform minor remodeling and ended up building something entirely new and different. And worse. The exact reasons why they were ratified in their treason instead of being hung remains a speculative mystery. I speculate that most Americans know little to nothing about the entire affair. They will know after reading Graham. They’re in for more lessons too. For instance, some will be surprised to learn for the first time that the Bill of Rights was tacked on as an afterthought, and a rather weak one at that. 

The founding tale of America, as mistold in so many high school civics classes, is in truth only a story of Enlightenment necromancy which Graham properly explodes and dismisses. As for Lincoln’s pertinent part, Graham describes his actions, page 60, as “illegal, immoral, and (saddest of all) unnecessary.” In so describing, Graham also explores the paradox of Lincoln’s evil, by showing that the cherished Constitution, a fraud, though accepted as the “holy” founding fraud by many, contains no mechanism for holding the States in perpetual union. There was not and is no permanent national “nation.” As such, from page 63: “Because there was never a nation conceived in the way described by Lincoln, or dedicated to any abstract proposition such as equality, there was no legal or moral justification for Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern States (period, full stop).” Put that on your broom and fly it, Nikki.

Further, from page 68: 

…if the powers to prevent a State from leaving the federation is not delegated to the entity known as the United States by the Second Constitution (and it is not), nor prohibited by the Second Constitution to the States (which it does not), then the right to leave the Union is reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. I don’t know how to make the issue clearer. Secession is not a federal issue and, therefore, the federal authority had no legal right to prevent a State to ‘withdraw their consent’ for the very reason that it is not in the ‘instrument itself.’

Legal arguments against States leaving the “perpetual” union died when the treasonous fraud of the Constitution replaced the Articles.  But Lincoln’s was not a legal argument, it was one of imperial force. Graham understands this, writing on page 22:

This false rendering of plain history and documented facts could only be rendered ‘true’ (politically true, or ‘politically correct’) by bullets, bombs, and bayonets, that is, total war as well as by the skillful silencing of dissenting voices wherever they could be reached so that only one version of American history—the nationalist version —would be left.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. States in rebellion. Gulf of Tonkin. Afghanistan. Ukraine. Assange. Etc.

With a nod to Dr. Donald Livingston, on page 84 Graham notes: “We no longer enjoy self-government and the rule of law at the national level and the only hope for restoring those things is through the States as units of the federal system.” This observation is backed up by observable reality and it was even endorsed by none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin in his February 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson when, based on his experience with so many American leaders, he suggested those leaders are not really in charge of anything. Similarly, the American people are not in charge of their own political affairs. Call it what one will—too many like to yell, “Democracy!” or “Republic!” as if those words mean anything anymore—but the American experiment has, like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, morphed into something terrible and beyond control. It is, as I like to say, not really any form of government. Rather, it is a satanic cult generally masquerading as a terrorist organization. Wounded Knee. Tuskegee. PATRIOT ACT. Gaza. Et cetera.

Before providing a long, relevant, and eye-opening appendix of critical documentation, Graham concludes, on page 102:

If nothing else, it is my hope that it will provide a little healthy scepticism and a willingness to question the legitimacy of the powers exercised over us by the government at Washington, DC, who do not represent our interests which are always specific and local. There are no national issues that need to be addressed because there is no nation.

Again, I think he has a decent shot at fostering such scepticism and realization. 

I will conclude with a few observations about a few related matters. First, the problems that confound America today are descended from those that have vexed this land from its inception. America and Americans have always had a problem with identity. It wasn’t always so evident or pronounced, for so long being buried under prosperity, growth, or turmoil. But the problem was always present, a byproduct of the same issues that even plagued pre-colonial England before the founding of Jamestown in 1607. 

As for that year, somewhat in defiance of certain circles, I urge a little caution and inspection. Let the reader ask himself why America, so often referred to as Christian, has so little official reference to Christianity. There is no such reference in the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the 1787 Constitution, or even the Confederate Constitution to the Trinitarian God, Christianity, or Jesus Christ. The Declaration contains a lone bare mention of “Nature’s God” and the Confederate Constitution does, in its Preamble, invoke, “Almighty God.” But that’s it. America, regardless of how one defines it, was a grand experiment in Enlightenment philosophy brought to life. The main purpose of the Enlightenment was always to weaken and destroy Christianity and to substitute for it an allegiance to worldly power. Further to my dated point, the legacies of 1607 Jamestown and 1620 Plymouth are both really chronicles of the rapacious exploits of conjoined Seventeenth-Century hedge funds. Both were chartered into existence by a neo-Kabbalistic heretic and widely alleged sodomite. They were primarily designed to enrich certain private monied interests while placing constraints and expenses on the English people to say nothing of the treatment of the Native Indian Tribes. 

As such, and as no corrective actions have ever been undertaken in America or England, is it any wonder that our countries are today ruled by outright luciferians? That is a question that all English and European-descended Americans should carefully examine. I suspect that many will not seek an answer, at least, not yet. I also suggest, with a degree of optimism, that other good people in the collapsing United States would also benefit from such introspection. The Empire is at its end and is already rapidly disintegrating. When whatever final processes take place, all people within current U.S. territory—Black African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Native Indians, etc.—would be wise to be ready to rebuild and to be on guard against the kind of malice and misdirection that brought down older America. I had one specific case and poster woman in mind, a rare political mastermind who can cook some mean fiction. For now, I shall keep that example to myself. For her part, she undoubtedly knows what I mean, having lately suffered but a continuation of the long-standing American tradition of lies, deception, and false rule which is now visited upon new demographics. Without caution and intervention, there will be much more of it. 

I go so far as to suggest people outside America and even outside the Combined West will also benefit from a little Nonsense on the brain. Ergo, to begin or reignite the thinking process in defense of genuine freedom, peace, and stability, I highly encourage all concerned and civilization-minded people to consider Paul Graham’s worthy and groundbreaking work. Whoever and wherever you are, do yourself a favor and order Nonsense On Stilts today. Being a staunch proponent of multi-bibliotheca, I also suggest Graham’s book pairs very nicely with a slightly different kind of book, The Stone House, by Dr. Yara Hawari. Both deal with the phenomena of real people afflicted by fake law, the overcoming of which shall be a great cause for celebration. Cheers, and pleasant readings!