The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Why the South Is Rising Again

Posted on | August 21, 2017 | Comments Off on Why the South Is Rising Again

 

“These Democrats will do whatever they have to stop the president.”
“Now they’re making a big deal about statues? Who cares about statues!”

That exchange between two guys in a diner in Long Island, N.Y., was overheard by a former Democratic congressman, Steve Israel, who is no fan of Donald Trump, but who is smart enough to understand why the Charlottesville riot didn’t hurt Trump’s support among his voter base. Rep. Israel said Trump has been “diabolically brilliant” in appealing to the sentiments of working-class whites who elected him.

If two guys eating breakfast in a New York diner get it, and if even a Democrat like Steve Israel gets it, why don’t the media get it?

Ask yourself a few questions: Does the typical “swing” voter who made the difference for Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin consider monuments to Robert E. Lee a major social problem? Whoever you might be, or wherever you live, try imagining yourself as a white working-class resident of suburban Pittsburgh, Detroit or Milwaukee. Is such a person “racist”? Well, if judged by the standards of the elite media, perhaps so, but this doesn’t mean the Trump voter thinks of himself that way; he just doesn’t buy into the liberal elite’s interpretation of the nature and causes of racial problems in America. That white guy in Michigan who lives near the bankrupt crime-plagued disaster of Detroit isn’t likely to believe racism is the universal explanation for every problem facing the black community. No, that white guy in Michigan watches the local TV news out of Detroit, and then he sees the national news about protests over Confederate memorials, and he has the same common-sense reaction as the two old guys in that Long Island diner: “Now they’re making a big deal about statues? Who cares about statues!”

Save your Confederate money, because the South is rising again: “The latest wave of polling shows that the president’s overall job-approval rating has inched upwards since the controversy, that a sizable majority of Americans support maintaining Confederate memorials instead of tearing them down, and that a notable minority agree with the president’s use of ‘both sides’ language during Tuesday’s press conference.”

What we have witnessed since Charlottesville is an “elite Mass Hysteria Bubble,” Professor Glenn Reynolds says. This madness originated in academia, and the news that the University of Texas at Austin has taken down statues of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate figures shows how widespread this elite hysteria has become. My immediate reaction was to wonder if Texas A&M will now remove the statue of Gen. Lawrence Sullivan “Sul” Ross, a much-beloved campus landmark. And what will become of Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas?

The panicky reaction to Charlottesville among certain Republican politicians reflects a deficient understanding of the political landscape. At times of crisis, when the liberal media are trying to gin up a phony controversy to smear Republicans, it would behoove GOP leaders to consult Vox Day’s wise advice in SJWs Always Lie: “Do not try to reason with them” and “Do not apologize.” If you are not a Nazi sympathizer, why panic in response to ludicrous accusations that you are responsible for the actions of a random idiot at a white supremacist rally?

Furthermore, who are you, Mr. Republican Senator, to dismiss the grievances that might cause some misguided people to think that joining a bunch of nutjobs like Vanguard America is a smart thing to do? The liberal media expected Americans to sympathize with Black Lives Matters mobs, while Democrats made excuses for rioters in Ferguson, Baltimore and Charlotte, and yet President Trump was supposed to ignore “antifa” thuggery? Certainly, no Republican politician can endorse Jew-hating or race-baiting, but isn’t it possible that the so-called “alt-right” rally in Charlottesville signified something other than racial hatred?

Pardon me for caring about “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” without regard to whether I believe their grievances are legitimate, or whether I approve of the “redress” they might seek. If the AFL-CIO convention demands an increase in the minimum wage — which they do, year after year — my advice would be to ignore them. While I might sit here at my computer and blog about why raising the minimum wage is a bad idea, I’m certainly not going to assemble a frantic mob of libertarians and try to storm the AFL-CIO convention hall. Likewise, when neo-Nazis gather to blame an international Zionist conspiracy for everything wrong in the world — which they do, year after year — my advice is to ignore them. Maybe I would write a blog post urging the neo-Nazis to go storm the AFL-CIO convention, although I’d only suggest this as a joke. On the other hand, wouldn’t a massive brawl between Nazi thugs and union goons be an amusing spectacle to watch? But I digress . . .

When President Trump said “both sides” engaged in violence at Charlottesville, he was simply stating a fact, and “facts are stubborn things,” as John Adams famously said, as an attorney arguing in defense of British soldiers accused of killing civilians in the Boston Massacre.

Many years ago, I realized that the real action in politics occurs far away from the daily back-and-forth between Republicans and Democrats in Washington, D.C. American politics is ordinarily a football game played between the 40-yard lines, a boring bipartisan stalemate. If you want to find some real action — if you want to get an idea of what forces could be building up toward a movement that might produce change in the status quo — you need to look toward the lunatic fringe of kooks and radicals. Today’s marginalized wacko sometimes become tomorrow’s mainstream leader. Who ever would have imagined in 1969, for example, that radical terrorist Bill Ayers would live to see his young protégé Barack Obama elected president? For decades now, I’ve been paying attention to wackos on both the Left and Right, doing it in the Gonzo way, immersing myself in various fringe ideologies the way I’ve done the past three years with radical feminism. For example, I covered Workers World Party “anti-globalization” protests in D.C. in the late 1990s, before they spun off their anti-war front group A.N.S.W.E.R. during the Bush years. I got video of young Arab-American kids chanting pro-Hezbollah slogans at a D.C. rally in 2007, which was the same year I participated in a panel discussion about the Duke lacrosse rape hoax, where one of my fellow panelists was a Duke student named Richard Spencer. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.

 

Long before we had radical “antifa” mobs engaged in rioting, arson and physical assault in their efforts to shut down free speech on university campuses, and SJWs trying to silence dissent online, some of us were already calling attention to the rising wave of Cultural Marxism.

Consider the case of Jesse Dirkhising, who was raped, tortured and asphyxiated by two homosexuals, but whose “death received only regional media coverage until a Washington Times article ran a story nearly a month after his death, noting the lack of national coverage in contrast to that given to the 1998 death of Matthew Shepard.” Who do you think wrote that article? The liberal media bias that sought to treat Jesse Dirhising’s death as strictly “local news,” whereas the same media engaged in a national crusade celebrating Matthew Shepard as a martyred saint, is a major factor in the rise of the so-called “alt-right.” The same kind of bias helped drive the Duke lacrosse rape hoax, which in turn radicalized Richard Spencer. Grant that Spencer is an extreme example of this phenomenon, but he is the tip of a large iceberg of discontent in this country, of people who know they are being lied to by both the media and the government, and whose distrust of the existing political status quo led to the election of Donald Trump.

The “Democrat operatives with bylines” are guilty of deliberately distorting the news for partisan purposes, and in the process are inciting a firestorm of hatred that results in violence, which the TV networks then exploit for ratings and revenue. Lather, rinse, repeat.

If you want to know the real history of the Confederacy, you won’t get it from the national media, but perhaps you’d learn something from my 2001 article at the American Spectator, “Not Afraid to Fight,” which was published on the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Fort Sumter:

For a boy growing up in Douglas County, Georgia — where the ruins of the New Manchester Mill on Sweetwater Creek still stand as a silent monument to General Sherman’s destructive method of warfare — the historical reality of that war was hard to avoid, and its hyperpolitical 21st-century interpretation not even yet imagined. We were instead taught to think of the War Between the States, as most Southerners then called it, as the result of a tragic misunderstanding. The patriotic legacy of Fort Sumter our teachers imparted to us, as young inheritors of the Confederate past, was that our ancestors had been unafraid to fight, and had fought with remarkable courage long after all hope of victory was gone.
Patriotism and courage have gone long since gone out of fashion. America’s intellectual elite — “The Ruling Class,” as Professor Codevilla calls them — are nowadays the diligent disciples of draft-dodgers who once marched beneath Vietcong flags in anti-war demonstrations. In the “long twilight struggle” against communism, they were on the other side. . . .

You can read the whole thing. Our public schools and universities today are as guilty as the liberal media of promoting political propaganda, and in the process are fomenting needless animosity and division. If things continue in the direction we’ve been going the past few years — “the Crazy Years” indeed, Professor — another civil war could become a real possibility. However, as it is still within our power to avert such a catastrophic conflict, it behooves patriotic Americans to learn a thing or two about military tactics, which are often applicable to politics.

Many times during the Civil War, battles were lost by commanders who failed to adequately assess their enemy’s strength and position, and who let themselves be drawn into an attack that exposed their flank. Such was the lesson Robert E. Lee taught John Pope at Second Manassas, where the Yankee general foolishly imagined he was in pursuit of a beaten and fleeing rebel force led by Stonewall Jackson, only to discover to his eternal regret that (a) Jackson was neither beaten nor fleeing, and (b) an an entire Confederate corps under James Longstreet was in position to destroy Pope’s left flank. If only our Republican politicians today were as shrewd as Lee, but alas, they are as foolish as Pope!

When the left-wing mobs start attacking the legacy of Lee, they have in effect exposed their own flank, because Lee is still widely admired by Americans. If conservatives would simply remain calm and then counter-attack, the Left would be easily routed and driven in panic. But, no, Republican “leaders” are a bunch of selfish cowards, too concerned for their own personal prestige to risk being deemed “offensive” by the media, and retreat at the first volley of hostile fire.

Remain calm when under attack, and look for the attacker’s weakness. The problem for the Left is that bad causes always attract bad people, like the 25-year-old arrested for attempting to bomb a Confederate monument in a Houston park. The bomber’s alleged target was a statue of Richard Dowling, an Irish immigrant and Houston saloon owner who commanded the victorious Confederate forces at the Battle of Sabine Pass. Only by the weird ideology of the Left is such a figure as Dick Dowling a symbol of “hate,” but there is no shortage of weirdos on the Left, and these kooks predictably discredit whatever “social justice” cause they pursue. If Republican “leaders” would stop kowtowing to the media and start trying to help President Trump, rather than sabotaging him for the sake of their own vanity, the conflict over Confederate monuments could be turned against Democrats (and their lackeys in the media) who have incited the Left’s irrational fury.

No one should imagine that whatever “victories” the Left may score in its attacks on Confederate heritage will hurt Trump or benefit the Democrats. You go around insulting people — which is what this cultural jihad against the South is about — and you can expect them to resent it. They will not forget who is responsible for these insults, nor are they likely to forgive them. To quote Professor Reynolds, “If you don’t like the consequences, don’t do the thing that produces the consequences. Anything else is just crazy.” We can expect the craziness to get worse during the next three years, and if conservatives want to win, they will have to learn to stop panicking every time the media stir up some new “controversy.” Remain calm, look for the opponent’s weakness, and then counter-attack — hit ’em with everything you’ve got.

“Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy, if possible; and when you strike and overcome him, never let up in the pursuit so long as your men have strength to follow; for an army routed, if hotly pursued, becomes panic-stricken, and can then be destroyed by half their number. The other rule is, never fight against heavy odds, if by any possible maneuvering you can hurl your own force on only a part, and that the weakest part, of your enemy and crush it. Such tactics will win every time, and a small army may thus destroy a large one in detail, and repeated victory will make it invincible.”

People need to study history, instead of trying to erase it.



 

 

Category: Donald Trump, History, Media Bias, Racism

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