On Memorial Day 2026 — a day we pause to honor the men and women who gave everything for this country — House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries stood before the Center for American Progress’s CAP IDEAS Conference and announced that his party’s goal is to “break” us. Not defeat us in debate. Not persuade us. Break us. Break our spirit. That is the language he chose, and it tells you everything you need to know about where the modern Democratic Party actually stands.
Jeffries Drops the Mask
At the CAP IDEAS Conference on May 19, 2026, Representative Hakeem Jeffries — the top Democrat in the House — said this:
“Either MAGA extremists are going to break the country or we’re going to break them. And our goal is to break them. We will defeat them. We have to beat them electorally and then we have to break their spirit because of the extremism that’s being unleashed on the American people.”
I want to be precise about what he means when he says “MAGA extremists.” He means you. He means the tens of millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump. He means, without any doubt, every person in the Second Amendment community. We are the “extremists” in his framing — the people who believe the Constitution means what it says, who own firearms lawfully, who show up at the ballot box, and who push back when courts and agencies try to nullify our rights.
He is not talking about some fringe group. He is talking about us.
The Harvard Playbook — Written in 2016
What Jeffries said out loud at CAP IDEAS is not new. It has a pedigree. In May 2016, Mark V. Tushnet — William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School — published a post at Balkinization titled “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism.” At that moment, a Hillary Clinton presidency looked inevitable, and Tushnet was ready to declare total victory. Here is what he wrote, and I quoted it at length in my book First They Came for the Gun Owners:
“The culture wars are over. They lost, we won… For liberals the question now is how to deal with the losers in the cultural wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (‘You lost, live with it’) is better than trying to accommodate the losers… Trying to be nice to the losers did not work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown v. Board of Education, and taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.”
Read that again. A Harvard Law professor compared American conservatives — American gun owners — to Germany and Japan after unconditional surrender. He was not speaking metaphorically. He was describing a strategy: impose our values on the losers and do not bother being nice about it.
Trump’s 2016 victory threw cold water on that triumphalism. But the mindset never went away. Jeffries just said it at a conference podium in plain English.
What Extremism Actually Means
My answer to this “extremist” label is simple: I agree with Barry Goldwater, who said at the 1964 Republican National Convention — “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
If standing for the plain text of the Second Amendment makes me an extremist to Hakeem Jeffries and Mark Tushnet, I will wear that label. The same people who throw the “extremist” tag at gun owners circulate op-eds — like the one from a University of Baltimore professor quoted in my book — arguing that if you want to exercise your Second Amendment rights, you should first agree to be shot. That is the intellectual company they keep.
They get to call us extremists because they control enough of the narrative infrastructure to make the charge stick. The answer is not to cower. It is to keep fighting.
The Militia Men We Forget
On this Memorial Day I keep coming back to one group of Americans who rarely get their due: the militia men of the Revolutionary War. The men at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. The men at the Battle of Kings Mountain in October 1780. The New Hampshire and Massachusetts militia who stood with General John Stark at the Battle of Bennington in August 1777 and turned the northern campaign.
Stark could not attend the 1809 anniversary celebration of Bennington — he was too old. So he wrote a letter. Part of it reads:
“My friends and fellow soldiers, I can never forget that I commanded American troops on that day at Bennington. They were men who had not learned the art of submission… undisciplined freemen are superior to veteran slaves.”
And then his warning, written more than two centuries ago and sounding like it was written last week:
“These are my orders now, and will be my last orders to all my volunteers — to look to their sentinels. For there is a dangerous British party in the country, lurking in all their hiding places, more dangerous than all foreign enemies.”
Look to your sentinels. The threat is internal. Stark knew it in 1809. We know it in 2026.
Closing
Jeffries wants to break our spirit. Tushnet wrote the theoretical justification for doing it a decade ago. An anonymous professor in Baltimore argued we should have to bleed before we can exercise a constitutional right. This is the world we are operating in.
My read is that the Second Amendment community is not losing this fight — not legally, not electorally, not culturally. But complacency is the enemy. The men who died at Bennington and Lexington and Kings Mountain did not have the luxury of tuning out. Neither do we. This Memorial Day, the best way to honor their sacrifice is to keep being the sentinels Stark asked us to be.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.