Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Typically, meetings of the Lake County, Florida Historical Society consist of a dozen or so folks. Last week Wednesday, more than 250 people crammed into the Lake County historic courthouse for a meeting many hoped would derail the effort to bring a statue of Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith from the U.S. Capitol to Tavares. It was almost certainly the best-attended meeting ever in the society’s 65-year history.

But the clear majority of those who came to the meeting came to advocate for the statue. They overwhelmingly outnumbered the out of town activists bussed in by a black pastor to oppose the statue.

“It’s far from over,” said Pastor Mike Watkins, who intends to appeal again to Lake County commissioners, landlords of the courthouse where a museum is located that is the statue’s intended new home. Watkins is expected to attend an upcoming Commissioner’s meeting to ask that the museum be EVICTED from the county-owned building it currently occupies.

Leading up to the meeting, Watkins had launched a membership drive, paying the $15 each fees to sign up new members, most of whom did NOT even live in the county. And area SCV camps and other heritage groups also organized membership drives of their own. These increasing the membership from 107 members to 421. The army of new members occupied every folding chair, most of the steps of the historic building’s grand staircase and a few spots on the railing of a second-floor balcony.

Dixie Heritage reader Lunelle McCallister attended the meeting wearing a red cap bearing the slogan, ‘Save the beautiful Statues’ to the Lake County Historical Society meeting.

When the votes were tallied, the slate of candidates led by president Bob Grenier easily won re-election. Grenier for president won easily. The former Tavares City Council member did not answer any reporter’s questions afterwards, because the “reporters” were mostly hostile towards him so he retreated into his office. But Grenier is a supporter of the statue.

It’s unclear exactly when the transfer of the statue from the US Capitol will take place as the replacement statue has not been cast. So chances are the County Commissioners will not make a hasty decision regarding evicting or retaining the museum. But this brouhaha is far from over.

SCV FLOAT STIRS BACKLASH IN CORPUS CHRISTI, TEXAS

Saturday’s Buc Parade featured an SCV float complete with Battle Flag. Now certain troublemakers in Corpus Christi are demanding to know why the Commisioners did not simply deny the SCV’s application to enter the float.

According to the commission, saying no to any group, including the SCV, would be discriminatory. “As a non-profit organization,” according to the commission’s statement Monday, “the Buccaneer Commission does not and shall not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion (creed), gender, gender expression, age, national origin (ancestry), political views, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, or military status, in any of its activities or operations.”

ALSO IN TEXAS

Earlier this year, Gov. Greg Abbott, his Lt. Gov (has-been sportscaster Dan Patrick) and other top state Republicans agreed to remove a Capitol plaque honoring the Children of the Confederacy. In response, the state Senate on Tuesday advanced a bill that would take removal powers away from local governments and other public entities requiring a citizen’s vote to effect a removal. Now the bill must go to the other chamber. We’ll monitor this one.

UDC LOOSES ANOTHER ROUND

A North Carolina judge has dismissed a complaint which sought to have the City of Winston-Salem return the Confederate statue to the site from which it was removed on March 12.

The Forsyth County judge on Wednesday dismissed the complaint from the United Daughters of the Confederacy who had asserted Winston-Salem couldn’t legally move the statue because of a state law regarding publicly owned monuments.

NON-HERITAGE NEWS AFFECTING THE SOUTHLAND:

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has submitted his resignation letter to President Trump, effective May 11.

MEDIA COVER-UP FOR MAYOR BUTTPLUGGER

Scores of men are coming forward accusing “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg of sexual assaults and other improprieties. But you probably are NOT hearing about it in the “media.” In fact, The Daily-Beast has even admitted to covering it up.

According to Lachlan Markay at The Daily-Beast media companies are setting up and pulling down fake Linked-in and other social media accounts in order to report the accusations as a “right wing plot” to destroy Peter Buttplugger’s struggling presidential campaign.

CHALLENGING BUTTPLUGGER

Colorado Senator Michael Bennet becomes the latest candidate to join the growing field of Democrats seeking the 2020 presidential nomination.

Mark Morgan as new head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Morgan previously ran the Border Patrol under President Obama.

STATES RIGHTS REASSERTING THEMSELVES

Unborn babies in Ohio just received the best news ever – as soon as their heartbeat is detected it is illegal to abort them.

Being touted as one of the most anti-abortion bills in the country, the Heartbeat Bill bans abortions once a heartbeat is detected which some doctors claim can be shown as early as 5-weeks.

And while many “pro-life” bills include exceptions like babies who were conceived through rape or incest – Ohio’s new Heartbeat Bill prohibits these exceptions and it is causing a firestorm in Ohio.

SHADOW-BANNING
by Al Benson, Jr.

Al Benson, Jr., is the Editor of the Copperhead Chronicle. In addition to writing for Southern Patriot and other publications, he is a member of the Confederate Society of America and the League of the South.

Wikipedia had some interesting commentary on this subject on their site that I thought was worth noting. I won’t go into all of it but just a little so folks that don’t know can see what it is.

The Wikipedia article noted: “Shadow banning…is the act of blocking or partially blocking a user or their content from an online community such that it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned. By making a user’s contributions invisible or less prominent to other members of the service, the hope may be that in the absence of reactions to their comments, the problematic or otherwise out-of-favor user will become bored or frustrated and leave the site.”

In other words, they ban, or almost ban, your material in such a way that you will hardly notice it has been done. They do this by making your material, your articles, comments, or whatever you post “less prominent” to those who have been used to seeing it out there on a regular basis.

I have several friends that follow the material I post on my blog spots. Awhile back, (and I may have mentioned this once) one sent me an email telling me I had been shadow banned. At the time, I had not even thought of such a thing. Naïve of me, I know, given the nature of those people that I usually write about. I occasionally used to get hate mail from some who disagreed with my perspectives, but hadn’t seen any of that in quite awhile and so did not have this kind of thing in my mind.

Anyway, my friend did some of the research I had not even thought about and explained to me how he figured it out. He put the names of my blogs up on a search engine (maybe more than one) and explained to me that, in most cases, all he could find in relation to my blog articles on most of them was one direct entry into my sites and every other entry was from an article of mine posted on someone else’s sites, so that if you were looking for one of my articles you could only find it on somebody else’s site, not directly on mine. This cuts traffic to my site down considerably. Though most of the people that use my articles do list my blogs as their source, if you read the entire article on their site then you have no need to click onto my site.

Please understand, I am not complaining about the good folks that post my articles on their sites. The vast majority of them do that to help me get the word out and, for that, I am grateful to them

There was a time when my articles were listed, both from my own sites and others combined, on as many as a dozen pages on search engines. Those days are gone. Now you are fortunate if you can find listings on three pages, so something has happened.

The other night I typed out the blog address for one of my blogs on a search engine and there was not even one direct listing for my site. Everything was via someone else’s site. The same day I got a notice from a friend of mine in New England telling me that when he tried to click onto my site for the latest article I had sent him, he got a notice telling him my site was “not safe” and so he was hesitant to forward my article, as he usually does, to others.

I have received that same type of warning about a handful of sites I usually check out over the past few years. I went into those sites anyway and kept going back into them and eventually those warnings ceased. There was nothing “wrong” with any of those sites except that they tended to comment in areas that were politically incorrect and so someone was attempting to warn people away from those sites lest they get to read and digest information the Establishment would rather they not see.

“Big Brother” is always watching. All the blather about internet security and “privacy” for all is a joke! We are all watched, checked on, monitored, and if we continue to post stuff someone doesn’t approve of, well, they work to do something about that. I have now talked to a dozen other people that have had this or similar problems with what they send out and receive.

I have a friend in the Southern Heritage Movement who used to include a little picture of a Confederate Battle Flag on each email he sent out. All of a sudden, one day, his emails started bouncing back to him as “undeliverable.” He couldn’t figure out what the problem was-until he started to connect the dots and realized what it was. So he took the little Confederate Flag off the emails he was sending out and, guess what-all of a sudden his emails started getting through again. What a coincidence! So please don’t insult me by telling me no one is watching what we do. They watch everything we do. Everything we send out or receive is watched by somebody.

I have had similar experiences, where I have used the word Secession in the title of an article and when I would go to send it out the email would not work and the article would go nowhere. However when I changed the word secession to something a little less obvious the articles would, somehow, manage to get mailed. You can’t make this stuff up-you learn by experiencing it.

What has escaped me for awhile is why anyone would want to bother trying to blunt what little influence I might have. I can see them going after InfoWars or Drudge or Zero Hedge or some of those other sites that reach millions most every day. Those kinds of sites reach more people in one day than I will in the next ten years! Why are they worried about me or others like me that will never have huge audiences?

The conclusion I have come to is that the Deep State, the Establishment, Big Brother, or whatever you want to call this Leviathan, is afraid of people finding out the truth. The real truth scares them because if it ever got to enough people who could really grasp it, their positions of power and control would be in severe jeopardy and so they have to attempt to shut down any and all attempts to tell people what really goes on. Even really small efforts like those of myself and others that I know personally!

The Wikipedia article noted their attempts to drive “problematic” and “out-of-favor” users toward boredom and frustration so they would just hang it up and quit. That may work for some, but not all. In the final analysis, it is the Lord that directs people to our sites and He will direct to our sites those He wants to see what we have to say, be they many or few. That’s up to Him. Jesus started out with 12 disciples and look what, in His Father’s providence, He accomplished. None of us will ever do what Jesus did but I think the Lord has certain people out there that He wants each of us to reach and if we remain faithful He will see to it that we are able to do that-and Big Brother won’t be able to do anything about it-and I think he realizes that and it frustrates him no end.

GOD BLESS AMERICA
by Dr. Brion McClanahan

Brion McClanahan is the author of six books. He finished his Ph.D. in History at the University of South Carolina in 2006, and had the privilege of being Clyde Wilson’s last doctoral student. He lives in Alabama with his wife and 3 daughters.

Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were only the beginning. For anyone that believed American iconoclasm would stop once Confederate statues were removed or “contextualized,” they were rudely awakened last week after the Philadelphia Flyers decided to remove the Kate Smith statue in front of the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia due to her “racist” recording history.

They first bagged it, then removed it. This action came on the heels of the New York Yankees banning her rendition of “God Bless America” from the seventh inning stretch. The team had been playing her version since 2001 following the September 11 attacks.

Smith, who died in 1986, was clearly another low hanging fruit. After all, she was born in Virginia and was called the “Songbird of the South” at the height of her popularity during World War II. She must be a racist. Smith recorded one “offensive song” in 1931, “That’s Why Darkies Were Born,” and another for the 1933 musical Hello, Everybody, “Pickaninnay Heaven.” She also posed in an advertisement for a “mammy doll” in the 1940s. This was enough to boot her from public spaces and polite conversation, or more importantly, to lose the ability to enjoy her beautiful contralto voice at Yankee or Flyer games.

Not everyone bought the latest social justice crusade with even some traditionally leftist voices saying this went too far, but once the Reign of Terror begins, all vestiges of the ancien regime have to go. It’s almost as if these Dantonists are slandering Robespierre before they lose their heads, too.
One New Jersey town offered to take the statue, but the Flyers refused. Just like Confederate statues bulldozed by city governments, they must be removed from public site, or better yet placed in a junkyard.

We can shake our heads at the destructive tendencies of these social justice morons and their useful idiots in the public sphere, but the lesson is that reconciliation is no longer fashionable. The American education system has succeeded in in its goal of making presentism the dominant “historical” lens. Judge everything by fashionable present standards or off with your head!

It used to be that Northerners of all races and backgrounds would sing and write about the South in glowing terms. They weren’t duped into this position. They experienced it themselves and sought to capitalize on the dominant view of the American South, and black Americans loved the South as much as white Americans. Louis Armstrong’s “music video” for “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” would be panned today for its “overt racism,” but Louis Armstrong and every actor in the video are African-American. They loved their home. Armstrong wasn’t forced to record this tune, and it was, in fact, one of his standards. Does that make him a racist?

Moreover, Smith wasn’t the only person to record “That’s Why Darkies Were Born.” African-American Paul Robeson performed the tune as well, and his version is perhaps better than Smith’s. Does that make him a racist?

Or how about the any other African-American musician that performed antebellum plantation tunes in the early to mid-twentieth century? Does that make them racist?
The point of reconciliation was to heal the wounds of the War and Reconstruction.

Music had that effect, and because all American music is Southern music, Louis Armstrong’s South, not the modern interpretation of the region, is what dominated popular opinion in the mid-twentieth century. The Kate Smith disaster is what should be expected in our modern Orwellian society. American history cannot begin until about 1975. Everyone before that needs to be “contextualized” according to modern standards, if not marginalized or removed.

The point of history is to understand through the context of the time in which the actors lived. That cannot be done in our current political and social climate. But that is the objective. Slogans, chants, and platitudes have replaced real scholarship and understanding, and Kate Smith’s “God Bless America” is the latest victim. It doesn’t matter that Smith helped raise truck loads of cash for the war effort in the 1940s, or that she was instrumental in getting female African-American artists air time, or that African-American artists performed the same “racist” songs as Smith, or that her version of “God Bless America” was used in both the 1940s and early 2000s as a cathartic release, or that she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1982. Kate Smith committed the sin of being a woman of her time and for that she and her legacy must be punished or banished.

Unfortunately, this won’t end any time soon.

Until Next Week,
Deo Vindice!
Chaplain Ed

Dixie Heritage,
P.O. Box 618
Lowell, FL 32663