"Illegal Immigration Now, Illegal Immigration Tomorrow, Illegal Immigration Forever!"
In the 1950s and 1960s, Democrats sought to maintain their power with chants of "Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever!" Little has changed.
This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.
by Ron F. Hale
February 18, 2026
Democrat Governors have a long history of defiantly standing “spraddle-legged” against Federal Law. Born in 1953, I saw the relics and remnants of the “Solid South” (1877-1964), a time when the Democrat party enjoyed 100-years of one-party rule in the South. Democrat politicians fought hard to keep supreme authority and control. Southern Republican politicians were as scarce as hen’s teeth.
Southern Democrat leadership used every possible political trick to reassert raw power and domination after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Numerous instances of voter suppression occurred without intervention; literacy tests and poll taxes were employed to exclude both African American and poor white voters. Jim Crow laws were used to uphold Democrat political power while institutionalizing segregation.
After Federal troops left the South, Black congressmen who had gained high office during Reconstruction faced intimidation and violence which drove them out of office. People were expected to know their place and stay in their place—or else, Klan enforcers dressed in white might show up under the cover of darkness. All this was done under total Democrat rule for a century.
When the Solid South began to crumble, the Democrat party projected their guilt and wrongdoings onto all Southern white people (not their precious party). Around twenty percent of white Southerners owned slaves. Today Democrat party guilt is projected onto all white people who reject their D.E.I. strategy. When Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) condemns the current SAVE Act as Jim Crow 2.0., he is using an old tactic of projecting guilt on white America while he stands against voter ID laws that most Americans desire. He expects most Americans to be ignorant of the fact that Jim Crow laws were made and enforced in the Solid South by Democrat politicians.
I remember Democrat Governor George Wallace shaking his fist in the face of Federal Law. Rick Bragg, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, writes from personal experience about Wallace in his best-selling book: All Over But the Shoutin’:
I know I grew up in the time when a young man in a baggy suit and slicked-down hair stood spraddle-legged in the crossroads of history and talked hot and mean about the colored, giving my poor and desperate people a reason to feel superior to somebody, to anybody. I know that even as the words of George Wallace rang through my Alabama, the black family who lived down the dirt road from our house sent fresh-picked corn and other food to the poor white lady and her three sons, because they knew their daddy had run off, because hungry does not have a color.
Martin Capital is a member of the Freedom Chamber. Here’s why you should be too!
Standing all “spraddle-legged” in the schoolhouse door at Forster Auditorium at the University of Alabama in 1963, Governor Wallace proclaimed his inaugural promise of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Standing on the wrong side of history, Governor Wallace blocked the entrance and education of two Black students: Vivian Malone and James Hood.
President Kennedy ordered the National Guard federalized with Executive Order 11111, and Alabama National Guard General, Henry V. Graham, ordered the Governor to step aside. Jawboning to not seem rushed, Wallace at last yielded to Federal Law.
Orval Faubus, another Southern Democrat Governor stood spraddle-legged in front of Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas. He blocked the school door with his Arkansas National Guard preventing Black students an education. Governor Faubus stood in defiant opposition to a ruling by Federal Judge Ronald Davies mandating that integrated classes continue as the court-ordered in the Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision. President Dwight Eisenhower eventually sent in Federal troops to enforce the laws of our land. The Governor reluctantly obeyed Federal law.
Noted historian and professor, Victor Davis Hanson spoke to this very issue on November 22, 2021, in his Blade of Perseus website article titled: The New Blue Confederacy:
In archetypical “states’ rights” fashion, blue-state “sanctuary cities” are as defiant of the federal government as the Old South was when it claimed immunity from federal jurisdiction—all the way from the nullification crisis of 1830-1833 to George Wallace in 1963 blocking the door at the University of Alabama.
In mentioning the “nullification crisis of 1830-1833,” Hanson is dredging up the ghost of Democrat South Carolinian John C. Calhoun. Calhoun served as a congressman, the secretary of war, and the 7th vice president of our nation (1825-32). He was a fire-breathing defender of states’ rights and the institution of slavery.
Calhoun helped his state pass the Ordinance of Nullification declaring the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 to be unconstitutional and unenforceable in South Carolina. Steps were taken to organize a state militia to push back federal troops if sent into his state. Calhoun forcefully argued for the right of his state to nullify federal law and (if necessary) to secede from the Union in securing the sovereignty of South Carolina. This eventually led to the 1861 attack on the federal property called Fort Sumter. This action lit the fuse to the American Civil War.
If John C. Calhoun stood “spraddle-legged” in the Old South defiantly declaring to the United States Federal Government, “Y’all don’t come down here, or else,” then Governor Tim Walz is just as defiant in the New Blue Confederate state of Minnesota declaring, “Yous Guys, come up here and you’ll get hurt, ya darn tootin!”
Professor Hanson warns that we may be slouching toward another Fort Sumter. Is it happening in Minnesota? Comparing 1861 to 2026, we see several shared discords:
President Donald Trump is hated by sanctuary city leftists---as much as slave-owning secessionists hated President Abraham Lincoln.
President Lincoln was assassinated and two attempts to kill President Trump now live in our American collective consciousness.
As the slave-owning Southern Democrats had a strategy of pushing their “peculiar institution of slavery” into the new Western states, the Democrat Party of today have developed a new “peculiar institution.” Their new power-grabbing strategy allows millions of illegal immigrants to cross our sovereign borders, receive Democrat-driven free government monies for rent, food, and living expenses. Fraud and corruption are running amok in sanctuary states and cities. When applying for their new driver’s licenses, they are automatically registered to vote in many blue states.
It seems plausible this new “peculiar institution” will lead to a national one-party rule, by the Democrat Party of course.
This is why, the new mantra for the Blue State Democrat “spraddle-legged” Governors can be, “Illegal Immigration Now, Illegal Immigration Tomorrow, Illegal Immigration Forever.” The younger version of Gov. George Wallace should be beaming with pride!
— Ron F. Hale is a retired Tennessee pastor and former member of the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination. He has written for The Stream, The Christian Post, The Christian Index, American Thinker, The Baptist Message, and other Baptist state newspapers.
Outstanding piece of writing! I also have great respect for Victor Davis Hanson, an thoughtful and accurate historian.
Thank you, Mr. Martin, for this guest post.