Dixie Heritage News – Friday, June 8, 2018
Another Brick in the Wall
A report, released Monday by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), shows that 110 Confederate monuments have been removed nationwide since 2015 when a shooting at a black church in South Carolina. Shortly after the alleged shooting by Dylann Roof, poorly photo-shopped pictures surfaced of Roof posing with the Confederate Battle Flag. The left and the media used these as a catalyst against our flags and memorials.
Still, according to the report, 1728 known memorials remain nationwide. The SPLC has targeted ALL of them for removal efforts. The Culture War continues.
TEXAS LEADS THE WAY
Having removed more than twice as many Confederate symbols as any other state since 2015, according to a SSPLC report.
The obviously not-so-great State of Texas removed 31 of the 110 Confederate symbols removed across the country.
The report, published Monday, identified 1,728 Confederate monuments that remain in public spaces, 209 of which are in Texas – the second-highest among all states.
Additionally, Texas is home to 58 highways and roads and 36 schools named after Confederates. These too have been targeted by the SPLC.
REPUBLICAN SIDES WITH DEMOCRATS AGAINST HERITAGE
For nearly a year, West Dallas state Rep. Eric Johnson has been trying to remove a 1959 plaque emblazoned with the “Children of the Confederacy Creed” that sits in Austin’s Capitol building. This week Texas House Speaker Joe Strauss wrote the Texas Attorney General’s Office adding his name to Johnsons and supporting the removal effort.
CONFEDERATE ICON CONFERENCE
On July 28, the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation will present “Confederate Icons: History, Memory, and the Future of Our Past,” a conference that will focus on the history of Confederate icons such as monuments and the battle flag, and how their use, meaning, and cultural acceptance have changed over the years.
The conference will feature historians Christy S. Coleman, John M. Coski, Caroline E. Janney, James I. “Bud” Robertson, Jr., and Keven M. Walker.
The conference will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Festival Conference & Student Center at James Madison University in Harrisonburg. The cost is $30 per person, $27 for members of the Battlefields Foundation. Registration includes lunch at the JMU Cafeteria.
Pre-registration is required. To register, call the Foundation at 540-740-4545 or visit www.ShenandoahAtWar.org
For more information, call 540-740-4545 or email info@svbf.net
ALASKAN STUDENT REMOVED @ GRADUATION
A Palmer High School student attended her graduation wearing a mortar board decorated with the Confederate Flag, leading the Principal of Palmer High School, Paul Reid, to remove her and to deroster her from a school sports team.
After the incident, Mat-Su Borough School District Superintendent Dr. Monica Goyette met with the student’s parents to “express her concern with the student’s behavior.”
The student was disciplined by the school and district. “Although the student is now a graduate and no longer in school, she was a member of a PHS sports team. PHS administration has removed her from the team,” a statement to the Press read.
The student, who school officials declined to identify, reportedly took a standard graduation cap to wear, but switched it out for the banned cap at the last moment, unbeknownst to administrators.
FOUNDER HAS PASSED
Wayne Secrest, longtime bass player of the Southern-rock group Confederate Railroad, died after a long illness that forced him to retire from touring late last year. He was 68.
Secrest founded the Atlanta-based Confederate Railroad along with with Danny Shirley, Michael Lamb, Gates Nichols, Chris McDaniel and Mark Dufresne in 1987. The band worked as the backing band for both Coe and Paycheck before signing with Atlantic Records in 1992.
From there, they released seven albums (moving to different label homes along the way), with their first two hitting multi-platinum and platinum status respectively. Their latest album, Lucky to be Alive, came out in 2016.
NON-HERITAGE NEWS EFFECTING THE SOUTHLAND:
THE WAR ON CASH
President Trump’s Federal Reserve Board of Governors nominee Marvin Goodfriend reportedly advocated on two different occasions the elimination of cash from circulation in an effort to prevent individuals from hoarding cash in the event that the Federal Reserve were to push a negative interest rate policy during a financial crisis.
OCCASIONALLY THEY GET IT RIGHT
The Supreme Court on last week Tuesday limited the scope of police searches, ruling that officers must have a warrant to go through a vehicle parked at a home or on its surrounding property.
In an 8-1 ruling, the court reversed a Virginia Supreme Court decision that found the Fourth Amendment’s automobile exception allows for warrantless searches of vehicles anytime, anywhere, including at a home or on its surrounding property, which is known as curtilage.
Citing Court precedent in her majority opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment has occurred when a law enforcement officer physically intrudes on the curtilage to gather evidence.
“Such conduct as this is presumptively unreasonable absent a warrant,” she said.
She said the lower Court ruling would grant constitutional rights to people with the financial means to afford residences with garages in which to store their vehicles, but deprive people without such resources any individualized consideration as to whether the areas in which they store their vehicles qualify as curtilage.
Justice Samuel Alito dissented from the Court’s ruling, calling it unreasonable.
AND TWICE IN THE SAME WEEK
The Supreme Court ruled Monday in favor of a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a sodomite couple, in one of the most closely watched cases of the term.
In a 7-2 decision, the justices set aside a Colorado Court ruling against the baker — while stopping short of deciding the broader issue of whether a business can refuse to serve gay and lesbian people. The opinion was penned by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is often the swing justice in tight cases.
The narrow ruling here focused on what the court described as anti-religious bias on the Colorado Civil Rights Commission when it ruled against baker Jack Phillips.
“The Commission’s hostility was inconsistent with the First Amendment’s guarantee that our laws be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion,” Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion.
Attorney Michael Farris, president of the Alliance Defending Freedom which represented the baker, told Fox News that Phillips is “ecstatic” at the decision. “Justice Kennedy has held that tolerance is a two-way street, and Jack Phillips was not tolerated by the Civil Rights Commission of Colorado,” he said.
The court said the broader issue, though, “must await further elaboration.”
The Trump administration backed Phillips, who was represented in court by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian nonprofit. He had lost at every step in the legal appeals process, bringing the case down to the Supreme Court’s decision Monday.
The Trump administration agreed with Phillips’ legal claims to a large extent. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in October issued broad guidance to executive branch agencies, reiterating the government should respect religious freedom, which in the Justice Department’s eyes extends to people, businesses and organizations.
Liberal justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan joined the conservative justices in the outcome. Kagan wrote separately to emphasize the limited ruling.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
DEA Engages in a Wrong-Home SWAT Raid in Tennessee
by Herschel Smith
Herschel Smith writes The Captain’s Journal and hails from Charlotte, North Carolina.
Armed with a federal search warrant, weapons, body armor and flash-bang grenades, DEA agents and members of the Bradley County SWAT team crept up to a house in Cleveland, Tennessee, before dawn Tuesday and then burst inside.
As they swept the entryway, they detonated the grenades and smoke filled the first floor.
Then they opened the basement door and found a man with a gun. They tackled him and told him he was under arrest, wanted for murder.
Except… it was the wrong house and the wrong man.
Spencer Renck says his alarm had just gone off and he was getting up to go to work when he heard the noises upstairs. He grabbed his gun “to protect (his) family from whatever was happening.”
“I thought someone had broke in,” he said in a post on Facebook, recounting the incident. His wife and four children were also in the house.
He went up the basement stairs to see what was going on.
As soon as they open the door I turned around, seen all those guns to pointed at me,” Renck told CNN affiliate WDEF.
That’s when he was tackled, he said, and it took a few minutes before the agents and SWAT team realized they had the wrong address.
“They destroyed my door, door frame, carpet on my stairs blew my ceiling out and burned my living room floor and hallway. All because someone got the wrong house,” Renck wrote on the Facebook post.
He said after they realized their mistake, the agents went to his neighbor’s house.
Renck said that during the raid, one flash-bang grenade went through the open doorway of his young son’s bedroom, and it “blinded and deafened” him.
Now, Renck told WDEF, his son is “worried about how he’s going to sleep at night and he’s wondering if he’s going to have nightmares when he had guns drawn in his room, waking up to a big bang.”
“This operation was a part of a larger ongoing investigation. Unfortunately, this search warrant was initially served on the wrong residence… situations such as these are tragic and DEA takes them very seriously. We intend to look into this matter further.”
Hey, I have an idea that will prevent this from ever happening again. Get rid of your dumb ass SWAT team because it violates the fourth amendment.
BEHIND “THE WALL”
by Wayne Allyn Root
Wayne Allyn Root is a conservative talk radio host and a national politics opinion columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Please ignore the advertising slogan “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” It’s not true. Las Vegas is the crossroads of America. What happens here is happening everywhere. And I’ve uncovered the biggest liberal scam in America going on right here in Vegas.
It revolves around my home community in Henderson. I live in Anthem Country Club. There are about 1500 beautiful homes behind the gates at Anthem. What’s the appeal of Anthem Country Club? It’s got a big beautiful wall around it. And thick iron gates in front, protected by armed guards. There is virtually no crime inside walled, gated, armed Anthem.
I’ve lived here for almost 17 years. My kids grew up here. They played outside everyday from morning till night and I never worried for one moment. Because of the wall, the gates and the armed guards, my kids were as safe as if they lived in ” Mayberry R.F.D.” Life is good behind the gates of Anthem.
In the rest of Las Vegas … not so much, In the rest of Vegas … lots of crime and fear. This proves walls, gates and armed guards are good if you want your family to be safe.
But wait. Anthem recently added a new feature to keep our residents safe. Drivers entering our gates must show a government-issued photo ID. Anyone entering our community – guests, gardeners, maids, nannies, pool cleaners, handymen, plumbers, electricians, delivery personnel – must provide state or federal government issued photo ID or they will be denied entry. Every single one of them.
There are many lessons we can learn from studying Anthem. If you want your family and children to be safe, build a wall.
Preferably a wall that is also surrounded by armed guards. The Vatican understands this lesson. Mexico understands – it has a wall on it’s southern border. Many rich Liberals in America who live in gated communities – or gated private estates or buildings with doormen – understand this lesson, too. They just don’t want you to have a wall. They think their children are more important than yours.
They clearly think you are stupid, as they argue walls and guns are not necessary. Liberal Democrats are hypocrites in this and many other ways !
Guess who lives inside the walls of Anthem Country Club? Harry Reid. You know, former U.S. Senator and majority leader in the Senate.
The former water carrier for President Obama, who spent his entire Senate career fighting viciously against a wall.
Harry argued walls were terrible and unnecessary. Harry could have retired anywhere in Vegas – or anywhere in America, for that matter. But he chose to live behind the walls – and gates – and armed guards of Anthem Country Club.
Harry is my neighbor. Welcome to the neighborhood. But, Harry, don’t Liberals hate walls and gates and armed guards and photo ID? Don’t Liberals call those racist? Yet here sits Harry Reid and the entire Reid clan, interesting! The argument against voter ID is a scam. How do all those gardeners and maids and pool cleaners and handymen drive through the gates of Anthem everyday?
The answer: They already have government-issued photo IDs. So I guess it’s a lie when Liberal politicians claim minorities don’t have photo IDs, or they’re too difficult for them to get or it’s ” racist” to ask them for it.
I guess we just proved the Liberal argument is a scam. Voter ID is an issue because Liberals want election fraud They can’t win without it. They want illegals to be able to vote by the millions for the Democrats.
Folks, we are being scammed. Anthem Country Club is the proof. What happens here is happening everywhere!!!
Little by Little – The Wall is Being Built
by Brent Smith
Brent Smith is a writer, author, and blogger best known for his syndicated column, The Common Constitutionalist. Brent is a writer for many conservative outlets.
Slow but sure, the Southern border wall is being built. If this is how president Trump has to get it done, so be it, and I guess we should be thankful.
We should be thankful that there is finally someone at the top who does give a crap and someone who is determined to keep his campaign pledge – not just drop it because it’s just “too hard,” or he might waste some important “political capital.”
And please stop with the mocking refrains about Mexico paying for the wall. Like that’s of paramount importance. If it eventually happens – great. Otherwise Trump’s exclamation should be taken as it was intended – a purposely hyperbolic negotiating tactic.
We should be thankful that we have a president who has not given up on the project, despite opposition from both sides. He is also fighting the derelict Washington mindset that dictates if something isn’t “comprehensive,” it should not even be considered. If “comprehensive” border legislation can’t be passed, nothing should be. That’s not defeatist at all.
As a real estate guy, Trump knows that sometimes you have to just take what you can get and build one building at a time – or one stretch of wall at a time.
In April, construction of a new wall section started, which will span about 20 miles of the Mexico/New Mexico border, just west of the El Paso Texas area, and will range between 18 and 30 ft high. Yep – it’s only 20 miles, but it’s 20 miles more than we’ve gotten under anyone else.
The new wall section has a few improvements over its old counterparts.
First, it’s an actual wall, not just a dilapidated fence or some posts dug into the ground to prevent vehicles from crossing, but not people. It is constructed of close-fitted vertical posts, allowing border agents to see through, but has a 5 ft high flat and smooth steel plate at the very top to prevent climbing over, and is sunk into several feet of concrete. Old designs were merely driven into the dirt and were easy to tunnel under.
Of course not everyone is thrilled, such as the Mayor of El Paso, Dee Margo. The press couldn’t wait to remind us that he is a Republican.
He’s no Republican I would ever support. The Mayor, who favors Beto O’Rourke over Ted Cruz, says that anti-illegal immigrant and border wall “rhetoric has been more harmful than helpful.” He adds that, “You cannot tell the difference between where El Paso ends and Mexico begins. We’re really one community and have been for over 400 years.” Apparently, this is not a problem.
Well Mr. Mayor, you two-faced fool – that’s been the problem since December 29, 1845, when Texas became a State. You can’t have a nation without clearly defined borders and the wall would also help the Mayor’s obvious topographic deficiency by showing him, “where Mexico ends and El Paso begins.”
Just this past Friday, June 1st, construction of yet another section of border wall began. This time in San Diego. It is of the same design as the New Mexico wall, complete with 5 ft high, steel anti-climbing plate. This section is to be approximately 14 miles in length.
Again – we’ll take what we can get.
“The San Diego Sector wall construction is one of Border Patrol’s top priority projects,” the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statement said. “Not only does it significantly upgrade our existing infrastructure in San Diego, it also marks the third concurrent wall project in the U.S. and reflects CBP’s unwavering commitment to secure our borders and protect our Nation.”
I find myself doing this a lot lately, but once again I’d like to thank president Trump for sticking to his guns and not giving up on this issue.
Is the Pope Catholic? – by Pat Buchanan
Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative.
That joking retort we heard as children, “Is the pope Catholic?” is starting to look like a serious question.
Asked five years ago about a “gay lobby” in the Vatican, Pope Francis responded, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?”
As judgment was thought to be part of the papal job description, traditional Catholics were startled at what the new pope had volunteered.
Now the Holy Father has apparently fleshed out what he meant.
According to a childhood victim of a pedophile priest in Chile, Juan Carlos Cruz, a homosexual to whom the pope apologized, Francis said: “God made you like this and loves you like this and I don’t care. The pope does love you like this. You have to be happy with who you are.”
The Vatican has not denied what Cruz relates.
What makes this remarkable is that the catechism of the Catholic Church, based on the Old and New Testament and tradition, has always taught that homosexuality is a moral disorder, a proclivity toward sexual relations that are unnatural and immoral.
The idea that God is responsible for homosexual orientations, that the pope and the Catholic Church are fine with men being attracted to one another, and that those so oriented should be happy with it, appears, on its face, to be heresy.
It implies that what Catholics regarded for centuries as moral truth was wrong, or that moral truth has evolved and must be made to conform to modernity. This is moral relativism: Truth changes with the times.
And if what Cruz reports is accurate, the pope’s position is close to Hillary Clinton’s.
In 2016, at a New York fundraiser, Clinton recited her infamous litany of sins common to the “basket of deplorables” backing Donald Trump.
Said Hillary, they are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.”
A phobia is “an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something.” Clinton was thus saying that those who have an aversion to homosexuality are morally or mentally sick.
Yet, up until December 1973, homosexuality itself was listed as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association.
The new morality we hear from the pope and Hillary reflects a historic change in the moral thinking of the West. For the belief that homosexuality is normal and natural, and not only acceptable but even praiseworthy, has carried the day.
Legislatures and courts have written this “truth” into law. It has been discovered by the Supreme Court to be lurking in that Constitution whose authors regarded and treated homosexuality as a grave crime.
And, yet, from this historic change, questions naturally arise:
On the issue of homosexuality, have we ascended to a higher moral plateau?
Or has America jettisoned the truths we believed and replaced them with the tenets of an ideology that may be politically and culturally ascendant but is rooted in nothing but baseless assertions and lies?
Consider the views of Cardinal Gerhard Muller, lately removed as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as to what is behind the drive to have “homophobia” regarded as a mental disorder.
“Homophobia (is) an invention and an instrument of the totalitarian dominance over the thoughts of others. The homo-movement is lacking scientific arguments, which is why it created an ideology which wants to dominate by creating its own reality.”
In short, cultural Marxists and their progressive allies have taken an ideological assertion – homosexuality is normal, natural and moral – without any historical, biological or scientific basis, and asserted it as truth, established it as law, and demanded that we accept and act upon this truth, or face the wrath of the regime.
Said Muller: “It is the Marxist pattern according to which reality does not create thinking, but thinking creates its own reality. He who does not accept this created reality is to be considered as being sick.
“It is as if one could influence an illness with the help of the police or with the help of courts. In the Soviet Union, Christians were put into psychiatric clinics. These are the methods of totalitarian regimes, of National Socialism and of Communism.”
As Russell Kirk wrote, ideology is political religion. And the dogmas of the political religion by which we are increasingly ruled have displaced the teachings of Christianity and tradition.
Since the Stonewall Riot of 1969, homosexual relationships have gone from being seen as indecent and immoral, to being tolerated, to being accepted, to being on the same plane as traditional marriage, to being a constitutional right.
And if you do not accept the new morality, you are a deplorable bigot. And if you act on your disbelief in the equality of homosexuality, you will be ostracized and punished.
The truths being jettisoned built the greatest civilization known to man. Will the invented truths of our new egalitarianism survive the arrival of the new barbarians? It’s not looking all that good right now.
Puritans, part 5: Redeeming the Time
Rebecca is a truth warrior, wife, boymom, and apologetics practitioner for Orthodox Christianity, the Southern tradition, homeschooling, and liberty. A recovering feminist-socialist-atheist and retired mainstream journalist turned domesticated belle and rabble-rousing rhetorician. A mama who’s adept at triggering statists, so she’s going to bang as loudly as she can.
Picture it. A book store in Madison, Wisconsin, in the mid-’90s. Quite the unlikely place you’d expect to be exposed to the true history of the Pilgrims being totalitarian religionists, not the freedom-seeking refugees in funny hats, bonnets, and buckled-shoes we hear about in grade school.
This took place at a book signing and lecture, not given by a historian, but rather by LGBT activist Dan Savage, whose syndicated sex-advice column, Savage Love, was a favorite of mine back then. Obviously, I was in the throes of my leftist degeneracy, so I dutifully drank in his half-truths of this seemingly fresh critique.
“Debauchery and Puritanism are two sides of the same coin.”
— Dr. Clyde Wilson
Even though Savage was excoriating the Puritans mostly for their chaste sexual mores, he was also perpetuating the myth that New England history is the whole of American history. You know, “Land of the Pilgrims’ pride” and all that. Savage was simply echoing the increasing mainstream narrative in oh-so puritanical fashion.
Virginia who?!
Take the all-too-common misbelief that the Pilgrims celebrated the first official Thanksgiving. Yet, this occasion really occurred in 1609 as voyage-weary but grateful English settlers – whose mission it was to expand territory in the already-established Virginia colony, not flee religious persecution – stepped ashore dry Southern land for the first time.
This might not seem like a big deal, but it’s emblematic of the whitewashing of Southern history. It’s an attempt to make the South less important than it was and is. It’s an attempt to overshadow Virginia, and by virtue her sons and daughters and their extraordinary contributions to the making of America. Without the South, there would be no America.
“America was to be New England writ large, complete with the Puritan Thanksgiving,” remarked Dr. Donald W. Livingston, president of the Abbeville Institute, when explaining the “Lincolnian nationalism” with which we’re living today. South = bad. North = good. End of story.
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” — George Orwell
If you discount the Cavalier but constantly laud the Puritan, it becomes much easier to make Southerners seem like they were/are traitors. When New England is pushed as the norm, the plumb line of perfection, saying that Dixie was “rebellious” to American principles becomes a palpable narrative.
And when it’s been propagandized for so long that those principles are “equality” and “tolerance,” it’s much easier to further those infinite abstractions without God, natural rights, the guide of history, and the filter of moral tradition. Rednecks and hillbillies are just too racist to be reformed. Those yahoos just gotta be replaced, don’t ya know?
Leftist academics push a “false theory that human life is forever and only a story of oppressors and oppressed,” says historian Clyde Wilson. “As a result, the Czar’s Cossacks, the Taliban, and the great Virginians are best understood as equivalent oppressors. Such historianship constitutes neither a contribution to knowledge nor a useful teaching for society’s young.”
Revisionist, cherry-picked, and “contextualized” history is such the norm that most people don’t even question discrepancies, outright fallacies, or complete erasure. Many well-informed citizens are clueless of some of the facts and chronologies pointed out in parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 of this series.
Homeschoolers aren’t immune
I was at an Orthodox homeschool conference recently and was chatting with a mom who said that Classical Conversations (the homeschool co-op in which both our families participate) has a “Southern bias” and noted the “Lincoln’s War Between the States” verse from the CC timeline song as evidence. At first I thought she was offended by linking Dishonest Abe with the event itself, as if to blame him (rightly) for the war.
But then I realized she was troubled by the name. She was incensed that it wasn’t merely called “the Civil War,” since that’s the only title of which she had apparently ever heard. Really?!
I, in all my Southern politeness, replied, “Well, you can teach your kids to call the bloody conflict whatever you want, but a civil war it was not.” I then gave her a quickie primer on how that type of struggle has a specific meaning, and as classical home-educators, we should strive for precision in wording and honesty in language. How can we learn from the past and gain wisdom if our verbiage is so askew?
“Conviction without experience makes for harshness.” — Flannery O’Connor
This was not the first time that I’ve butted heads with “national” CC mamas. Many beyond the South do not like any historical narrative on the War of Northern Aggression, other than the one that has been spoon-fed to them by Lincolnian educrats for nearly a century.
To me, it seems silly to go to the trouble and expense of homeschooling if you’re going to just parrot the conformist propaganda. Classical home-educators should really know better, especially Christian ones, whose breadth of understanding of the faith and defending it against secular wiles is greatly benefited by meticulous study of Church and (by default) political history.
The Bible story is so often set with statism as the backdrop. Context matters. True history matters. After all, “Repentance is a call to the past,” says Aaron D. Woolf, editor of Chronicles Magazine.
My diplomatic plea to red-pill classical Christian homeschool moms on the “Civil War” in a Facebook thread discussing CC’s alleged “Southern bias” – an insult some historically ignorant people hurl at CC simply because their materials aren’t necessarily status quo.
Unstable compounds
Existing in these disunited states is proof in and of itself that the South was right. We’re supposed to be one, yet we’re balkanized. We’re multi-lingual, yet we can’t even speak our minds. We’re “multi-cultural,” yet our traditions are shunned. We foster public ownership and private profit, yet we claim to hate fascism.
We’re about godless “equality,” yet that fantastical notion applies to everyone but us. I mean, “protected classes” were invented to marginalize the Southern man (you know, the white, straight, Christian, toxically masculine kind). We clamor for transcendentalism, yet live in a fallen world. We abhor the African slave trade, yet tolerate modern slavery and don’t even believe in freedom.
We scream for “social justice,” yet promote true injustice as social goods. We clamor for “civil rights,” yet ignore states’ rights and the peacefulness of subsidiarity. We laud the individual, yet seek socialism and globalism. We have local problems, yet seek national and even global solutions.
These are “unstable compounds,” as Livingston describes. Most normal people know it. Even leftists know it, at least the ones who are being eaten by their supposed allies when they no longer meet the constantly changing PC metrics.
As author Michael Malice tweeted, “Progressivism is domesticated imperialism, the attempted conquest of one culture over another ‘inferior’ one.” This was one of the reasons Hitler praised Lincoln in “Mein Kampf.” Dishonest Abe had no tolerance for the roots, resilience, and “otherness” of the South.
Karl Marx was no fan of Dixie either. He regarded the Confederacy’s secession “as a rebellion against progressive German immigrants who somehow were better Americans than the Southern sons of patriots and founders,” explains Wilson.
Interestingly, Lincoln’s radical Republican Party was greatly influenced by these Germans, who were a natural fit to the Puritan mindset. They had fled the failed communist revolutions of 1848 that had occurred throughout Europe, only to become Northern partisans and social-policy activists before, during, and after the War.
Richard Taylor, writer, Confederate general, and son of U.S. President Zachary Taylor, said a German immigrant once vaingloriously instructed him on how to be a proper American. Just give us your land, money, blood, sweat, ingenuity, and eventually hearts and minds, and we’ll let you be a cog in the shallow wheel of “progress.”
“Tradition usually rests upon something which men did know; history is often the manufacture of the mere liar.” — Jefferson Davis
We’re living with the rotten fruits of Lincoln’s inglorious “union” today. But the sacrifice and bravery of the South’s men and women not only repelled the federal onslaught and its military, political, and spiritual conquest for four years, it beat the tar out of them much of the time – especially before the death of Stonewall Jackson, who together with Robert E. Lee, never lost a battle.
The Confederacy’s valiant efforts were a stopgap to wanton central authoritarianism and the remaking of America that Southerners had been warning about since the 1780s. And its loss became the watershed moment for America.
“The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slave-holders; they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other,” remarked 19th-century Presbyterian James Henley Thornwell.
“The world is the battleground, Christianity and atheism the combatants, and … humanity is at stake.” The bifurcation was a clash of civilizations. And since to the winner go the spoils, the Lincolnian myth became the foundation upon which modern Americanism was built. Lincoln’s a saint. Lee is Satan. Class dismissed.
General will
Tyranny won over self-determination. Democracy over states’ rights. Post-modernism over Scriptural faith. Nihilism over the sacraments. Modernity over familial customs. Materialism over agrarianism. Existentialism over objective truth. And now all must bow down and pledge allegiance to this “indivisible” nation-state.
Lincoln’s “will of the people” ideology is noticeably similar to Jean Jacques Rousseau’s guiding concept for the French Revolution. “Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will,” Rousseau said, “and in a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.”
Interestingly, both despots oversaw a murderous reign of terror. Who da thunk?!
“When Christians today decry the use of Federal power to enforce secular humanist views,” penned the Kennedy Twins, “they should be reminded that it was Patrick Henry who warned Southerners what could and would happen in a democracy if one finds himself in the minority status.” In a word, today’s minority enemy is traditionalism.
“Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
— H.L. Mencken
“We are going to have to change our conversation,” Michelle Obama told a hyper-emotional campaign crowd in May 2008. “We’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.”
This “place” isn’t a reinvention, but rather a recycling of the tired old Puritan ethos. The Union coerced us into believing that there can be no law without a legislator. Just regulate “morality.” Force your ideas upon other citizens through the heavy hand of government. Our fictional destination is a secular-progressive Zion, no matter the cost.
The abolitionists, “many of whom stated frankly that if forced to choose between their private beliefs on the one hand, and the Holy Scriptures on the other, they would be compelled to jettison the Bible,” wrote historian Tom Woods. Northern meddlesomeness doesn’t need the Good Book ’cause Yankees are just that doggone smart.
Today’s temperance and prohibition movements, like the progressive wars on sugary sodas, tobacco, plastic shopping bags, drugs, gambling, words like “retarded” and gender-specific pronouns, and anti-bullying, are demagoguery veiled as altruism. It’s pathological nosiness and always leads to negative “unintended” consequences.
“The American … is beyond all things else, a judge and a policeman,” wrote Mencken in 1917. “He believes firmly that there is a mysterious power in law; he supports and embellishes its operation with a fanatical vigilance.” Just some 50 years after the War, and already the puritanical progressive came to symbolize the U.S. citizen.
Northern women, who had been given roles as teachers and missionaries post-War and into the 20th century, were steeped in the reform movement. Couple their Fundamentalism with female emotionalism, and you’ve now got the makings of feminism.
Pretty soon these Reconstructionists would be comparing the institution of marriage to chattel slavery and challenging familial norms. Change we can believe in, right?
Southern solidarity
“I believe that somewhere, deep in the innermost recesses of their atrophied souls, Yankees know that they truly have botched things, and truly are plagued with guilt,” claims historian Forrest McDonald.
“That, I think, is the bottom line: the Yankee hates himself, and he hates his heritage. And why does he hate us? Because we do not hate ourselves and we treasure ours.”
While the North became increasingly post-Christian, Dixie still clung to her guns, Bibles, and ancestors. While the Puritans traded their Scriptural traditions for the “social gospel” and then eventually for the “social justice” aims of cultural Marxism, Dixie held on to her faith-heritage and historic traditions.
“Disregard public opinion when it interferes with your duty.”
— Stonewall Jackson
Flannery O’Connor once said that true Southern identity is a “mystery known only to God.” We have our quislings, that’s for sure. But Dixie has more than not been a thorn in the side of the encroaching secular humanism.
“Its esteem for its ancestors and its refusal to denounce them and become a clone of the Northeast is infuriating to the Left,” historian Gail Jarvis succinctly says. We have been and must continue to be the bulwark to replacing the brutality of the present with the beauty of the past.
Break free from the carpetbag
Be proud of who you are. Y’all are in good company. Don’t fear being called hateful names. After all, a Southerner’s mere existence is offense enough to trigger some puritanical-progressives into a tailspin. Laugh it off.
Although Southerners have certainly been victims, don’t be victimized. Be jubilant and joyful ambassadors for the Southern-without-apology movement. Be glad to be an outcast in America’s violent, pornographic, and dead culture.
“You have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.”
— Flannery O’Connor
As author Wendell Berry argues, “we are wholly dependent on pattern … and the understanding of connections seems to me an indispensable part of humanity’s self-defense.” So, pass on the stories of a people and a place of our still-rich Southern culture to your children, your neighbors, anyone.
And “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Delight in home and community. Relish history and tradition. Resist the empire. Embrace your dissidence. Pray without ceasing.
As T.S. Eliot presciently wrote in 1931, “The world is trying to experiment with attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail, but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide.” Amen.
Until Next Week,
Deo Vindice!
Chaplain Ed
Dixie Heritage
P.O. Box 618
Lowell, FL 32663
