All right, folks, we were jumping into that, wanted Ben Shapiro Show Mailbag.

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Colby says, I was wondering if you would agree that conservatives somewhat feed into the push to cancel and destroy American history by over-glifying and mythologizing some figures in our history. In particular, I think of Abraham Lincoln, who's often praised high and low by Republicans and conservatives as a hero of the Republic, who won the Civil War and ended slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation.

I personally have nothing against Lincoln and think he is deserving of praise and admiration for much of what he did accomplish, but having researched the Civil War in greater detail, I've come to believe that his myth has equally played the part of misinforming Americans about our nation's history and allowed progressives to better influence the populace to believe in modern lies. It just seems like it would be better for us to start talking about the civil war as what it is, the greatest failure of American history in which a good nature but imperfect man tried to save the union as the very demographics of our nation divided us to the breaking point in ways that still affect us to this day. I'm not sure what you mean by that last line. there's a very open debate over Lincoln's interpretation of the Constitution.

It's a very open debate over Lincoln's interpretation of the

Constitution. There's a very open debate in his time. Basically, the case that was made by Abraham

Lincoln is that the Constitution embodied the values of the Declaration of Independence.

He called the Constitution a frame of silver around an apple of gold, right?

That was his basic description. The idea being that it was the values of the declaration

that all men are created equal with life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, that was guaranteed

by the Constitution. And so what that meant is that the United States, as a country,

had no obligation to allow states to secede for perceived

misuse of the Constitution in, for example, ending slavery. So his case was that, for example,

there was no right of state nullification, as was proposed by John C. Calhoun, former vice

president of the United States under Andrew Jackson. Calhoun, former vice president of the United

States under Andrew Jackson. Calhoun had made the case very early that states had the right to

nullify. He had actually done that over trade tariffs. And that had been rejected forcibly by

Andrew Jackson, but it became the basis of a broader theory of secession among members of

the southern states who suggested that there was no power under the Constitution of the United

States for the federal government to speak out on the issue of slavery in the South.

It's a state, it's a state's rights issue.

And as a state's rights issue, the federal government can't speak on it.

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