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Trump gives America a history lesson at Mount Rushmore — 141 Comments

1. It was one of his best delivered speeches also. He can stick to the text when he really wants to and that was a good example last night.

   Wonder who the primary speechwriter(s) was.

2. It was an important, inspiring speech. I rarely say that about any speech.

   Its Independence Day. Feel blessed to live in “the shining city on the hill”.

   Thank you neo for being a voice of sanity during a crazy, troubling time.

   Now barbecue with the block, no masks allowed.

3. The first I heard of the speech was a Facebook comment from a leftist friend (a pretty strained friendship at this point): “The president of the United States has just given a speech encouraging civil war.” Or did he say ” advocating”? One or the other.

4. Mac:

   If you’re feeling brave, you might comment by asking your friend to quote the specific words where Trump encourages civil war. You could also quote unifying words from Trump’s speech. You might also point to the rioters in the cities and ask whether they are advocating civil war and/or actually practicing it, and what Trump is supposed to do about that in your friend’s book.

5. I thought the speech was great. I agree that he won’t win over many leftists, but I think his base will be strengthened, and maybe some middle of the roaders will also like his message. People are getting sick of all the BLM chaos and being called racist constantly. I liked the people he talked about putting into his garden of heroes. Maybe he can peel off some blacks too.

6. “I think his base will be strengthened, and maybe some middle of the roaders will also like his message….
   Maybe he can peel off some blacks too.”

   Blacks are relatively moderate (compared to white SJWs).
   They may end up in a sort of pickle, if Durham can show their hero SparkleFarts to have been an outright criminal.

   Happy 4th to Neo, and most folks here.

7. I have heard several people laud the speech. Mark Levin, who is a tough critic called it the best speech he has ever heard.

   I wish everyone would listen. Unfortunately, as we know, the people who most need to hear it will simply get their impressions from dishonest sources.

   Sorry Neo. I don’t agree that the words to that song prove anything; inspiring though they may sound. The preponderance of the Union soldiers fought simply because the were conscripted into an extremely unpopular war. The penalty for avoidance was severe. It is questionable how much they cared that much about southern slavery.

   In honesty, the same could be said for a large percentage of the Confederate soldiers.

   The Civil War is part of our history; and it was fought for several reasons. Once secession was a forgone conclusion, it was inevitable because the Union had to be preserved. The question is, could it have been avoided? We should note that England paid millions of pounds to the slave holders in their West Indies colonies to induce them to finally and peacefully give up their illegal activity. The U.S. government did little but issue ultimatums that the power brokers in the South would never accept; and eventually invaded. Untold wealth, and awful loss of life was the cost. The ordinary people in the Confederacy, who played no part in slavery, paid a terrible price; while the Union suffered relatively little. A complicated history; but, it is our history. It should not be distorted in any way.

8. Happy 4th…

9. I did a Google search on “trump speech” news. Here is a sample…

   CCN: Trump doubles down on divisive messaging in speech to honor Independence Day

   USA Today: Trump targets ‘Marxists’ in July 4th speech, boasts of coronavirus response despite record case numbers

   Fox News: Trump defends US history, blasts ‘radical left’ in ‘Salute to America’ celebration

   Independent: Trump struggles to say ‘totalitarianism’ in dark Independence Day speech at Mount Rushmore

   Mother Jones: The Five Most Outrageous Things Trump Said at Mt. Rushmore

   NPR: Trump Flouts Virus Rules, Warns Of ‘New Far-Left Fascism’ At Mount Rushmore Event

   Probably, the one adjective most repeated was “divisive”.

   Needless to say, the MSM is working overtime to bamboozle the public. For this election, Trump is going to have to take his message directly to the people… again.

   Another item of note from the speech. Trump is labeling the radical movement leading the current unrest as “Far-Left Fascism”. This is not only true, it is a clever way to disarm the Left’s disingenuous claim that the Right is fascist.

10. I think one mistake that Martin Luther King — and the 1960’s civil rights movement in general — made was not to ponder all the implications of the quote (I don’t know who said it first)

    “Most slaves do not dream of being free but rather of being slave owners.”

    Those discriminated against by race knew well the rules of racial prejudice — and they all dreamed of change. But, as can be seen all too clearly now, for a very large fraction, maybe even a majority, what appeals most is racial discrimination working for them rather than against them.

    That is what they find most attractive because that is most like being the slave owner rather than the slave.

    Equality with no racial prejudice — all too many blacks are cold to the idea. And, when you get right down to it, they would also rather associate with people who look just like them and talk just like them — because it is so unsettling to try to work with and understand people who look weird and talk weird — so black students accepted into integrated universities demand all-black dorms, all-black student unions, the right to hold meetings from which other races are excluded, the right to be taught only by black professors, etc., etc. And they get what they want, instead of being told to go pound sand.

    I never thought to see local police forces and most of the House of Representatives kneel down — literally rather than just figuratively — before looting, arson, vandalism, and racial discrimination. They richly deserve the contempt that history will bestow on them, and it will arrive a lot sooner than they expect.

11. I agree with Oldflyer about the claim that the Civil War was fought to free the slaves. No rationale for war is ever that simplistic. I understand the temptation is there to occupy some sort of moral high ground with that narrative. But, we should not do so by sacrificing the truth. We chastise the Left regularly for doing this. We should not fall into the same vice.

12. wrt slavery and the Civil War. See Manning, “What This Cruel War Was Over”. She looked at soldiers’ letters, north and south, and unit publications. She found considerably more interest in the Peculiar Institution among the troops than we have been led to believe. The Know it Alls make their intellectual bones by scoffing at the “patriots” who think America can act nobly and has done so.
    To insist America is always acting meanly gives them intellectual heft. They think.

13. he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
    – Our unabridged national charter, “The Declaration of Independence”

    America’s “original sin” was actually the “unavoidable compromise”.

    Also …

    he has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, & conditions of existence:

    Different nations, different tribes, different outcomes, with indigenous people changing over time through war, slavery, immigration, migration, and genocide.

14. There were two different kinds of anti-slavery motivations among Union troops and the Union population in general: First, there were a substantial number of people who did have moral and often religious objections to slavery. Second, there were those who had ‘practical’ objections to slavery, under the belief that it would undercut the value of free labor..particularly if it was expanded to additional states…much as an American worker today might oppose slave-labor policies in China because of their effect on his own wages.

15. I don’t think paying the slaveowners to liberate their slaves would have likely worked in the US, because too many of the owners saw themselves as an aristocracy. It was about lifestyle, not just economics.

16. USA Today’s comment: “despite record numbers” [of coronavirus] is a tautology. On the day that the last case is diagnosed as positive, it will be a record number. Every additional case is a record number. Duh.

    As for racism and slavery — my feeling is that they need to be separated in our thinking and our dialogue. To conflate them serves only to confuse the more important issue — racism — as slavery is long past. People who want to conflate them do so because they really don’t want to have an honest dialogue. What they want is to shame white people and push them toward virtue-signalling that will give the disputant an advantage.

    My roommate (the first black to integrate the all-white college I attended) and I talked often about racism. He taught me how constant and all-pervasive it was, something I came to agree with only very slowly, but I now recognize that he was right and I was wrong. He gave me example after example of things I was not aware of and was shocked and saddened to learn. Simple things, more complex things, but a whole lifetime of human interactions that I came to realize were based on his being black and the other person being white. But we never talked about slavery. It was a non-issue to him and to me. He knew no one in his family who had been a slave, and I knew no one in my family who had owned slaves. Past history. Long past.

    Then the second year he was on campus, the college accepted another black student. A woman. He and she didn’t hit it off, and he complained to me about what the college had done. I had to agree with him: it was a ham-handed effort on their part. While I think their heart was in the right place, the admissions staff was boneheaded about what they did.

    BTW, Ron had been an Eagle Scout, was a straight-A student in high school and college, studied far harder than I did, and knew what he wanted to do with his life. He was a great example. I would have done well to pay more attention to how he lived.

17. I’ve read many letters, diaries and journals of Union soldiers. With few exceptions, they wrote that slavery was an evil that must be brought to an end. Again, with few exceptions, the soldiers’ understanding of slavery’s evil had a foundation in their Christian faith.

    These documents aren’t obscure. They’re readily available in library archives at universities I happened to be working at, enrolled in, or just visiting. Many historians don’t like to read these sorts of documents, because they’re not consistent with assumptions about the Civil War that are more academically fashionable.

    Having said all of that, it’s also true that many Union soldiers would have rather stayed at home on their farms, with their families. Riots against the draft were far from a trivial problem. But even among those men, I’d bet that many thought that slavery was evil. I remain unconvinced that indifference was widespread and prevalent.

    My memory may here be failing me, but I can’t recall a single soldier making an economic argument against slavery. Of course, who knows what thoughts they kept to themselves. Still, if there are historians who’ve found documents supporting this claim, they must have looked hard. At the same time, they would have ignored the religiously-motivated arguments hiding in plain sight. If forced to choose between documents I’ve read, and books written by historians with dubious motives, my choice is clear.

18. I think the “fact” that the Union soldiers were all racists themselves that didn’t care a whit about ending slavery and were all only fighting because they were forced at gunpoint to do so is another teaching point instilled in students over the past 3 or 4 decades. It’s calculated–if you can show that the whites who were technically and directly responsible for ending slavery up and to including Lincoln were a bunch of worthless racists, then their history can be more easily erased.

19. Neo: Your suggestion is very sound in the abstract, but if you knew this guy…. Suffice to say that it would be unpleasant and unproductive. Most likely he listened to the speech, or at least part of it, and heard the words. But he’s the sort of person who believes that he *knows* what Trump, and all Trump’s supporters, *really* mean when they speak of our national heritage and so forth: white supremacy. (He of course is as white, i.e. northern European, as can be.)

20. Outstanding speech, given in a glorious setting.

    I have been to Mt. Rushmore a few times. It never fails to impress.

    The fireworks were impressive as well.

    All in all, it was a homerun. If you love America. If not, too bad, so sad.

    Happy Independence Day to all.

21. D. Cohen:

    Martin Luther King did not make that mistake.

    See this:

    During speeches given at the Freedom Rally in Cobo Hall on June 23, 1963, at Oberlin College in June 1965, and at the Southern Methodist University on March 17, 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. called black supremacy “as dangerous as” white supremacy:

    “A doctrine of black supremacy is as dangerous as a doctrine of white supremacy. God is not interested in the freedom of black men or brown men or yellow men. God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race, the creation of a society where every man will respect the dignity and worth of personality.”
    —Martin Luther King, Jr., Speech at the Southern Methodist University, March 17, 1966.

22. D. Cohen (9:08 pm) concludes,

    “I never thought to see local police forces and most of the House of Representatives kneel down — literally rather than just figuratively — before looting, arson, vandalism, and racial discrimination. They richly deserve the contempt that history will bestow on them, and it will arrive a lot sooner than they expect.”

    M J R wishes to point out,

    “History” will be written by the victors in our ongoing culture war. I find it very difficult to be optimistic about what “history” will say about the good guys (our side, for most neo readers here). If the kneelers deserve contempt, it will very probably be for reasons pretty different from why we good guys tend to feel contempt for them.

23. The measure of Trump’s speech can be determined by the wailing of our enemies.

    The South seceded over slavery. The war was fought initially over disunion. The Emancipation was just strategic economic warfare. Lincoln said that if he could preserve the Union by freeing all the slaves, he would do that. If he could preserve the Union by freeing none of the slaves, he would do that. If he could preserve the Union by freeing some slaves but not others, he would do that.

    Actually, the war was fought because the South stupidly started it. Fort Sumter was just the Casus belli. The South’s war objectives were threefold:

    First to was to force the remaining slave states out of the Union. They were only partially successful with four of seven leaving and the other three kept in more or less by military force.

    Second was to reclaim the portion of Texas that had been ceded to the United States, particularly the strip that ran through the Colorado goldfields.

    Last was to get a share of the Mexican cession all the way to the Pacific.

24. Richard Aubrey, sample size? It is documented, for instance, that over 350,000 German and Irish immigrants were allowed to enter to augment the Union Army. There was an Irish Brigade; and the mostly German 11th Corps. I doubt that these were committed Abolitionists. Of the home grown soldiers, I am sure that many people cited moral grounds as they sent them off to die; and that a number actually went on the same basis. (BTW unit cohesion is always a strong motivator in war. How many times have we heard, “I simply fight for my comrades”?) But, it is indisputable fact that without conscription, enforced with dire consequences for evasion, the Union Army would have been a shell, and that it was very unpopular. We also know as fact that Lincoln very nearly lost the population at one point–and that the Emancipation Proclamation was issued to reinvigorate enthusiasm. Conscription enforcement also became ever more draconian as the war went on. The bottom line is that a war was fought; and that at the cost of massive bloodshed, slavery was ended. We also know that for the past 40 or 50 years the country has gone to great lengths to bring the remaining underclass into the main stream. That is commendable.

    David Foster. Consider this. The slave owners were a very small percentage of the population. If the mass of the people knew that the landed gentry had the option of compensation, would they have revolted against war? Maybe not; because no one–North or South–envisioned the brutality that ensued. We will never know, because the option was not available. Practically, the gentry could have pocketed the money, freed the slaves, and paid them a token wage (deducting rent for their cabins, and the cost of supplies from the owner’s store) because the freed workers would have no real options. In fact that scenario played out throughout the post-war South, only the land was now owned by government sanctioned Carpetbaggers.

    It should be obvious, that I am Southerner. I also served the United States for 25 years in uniform. There is no question where my loyalty lies. But, it is not true to history to present the Civil War in simplistic, or self serving, terms.

    With that, there is so much irony if one considers events of today in terms of some of the issues that preceded and post-dated that war. The Confederate States were ultimately invaded because they flaunted federal law, and subsequently tried to secede from the union to avoid the law. (which they thought they had the right to do of course.) Today several states flaunt federal law by declaring themselves as sanctuary states for illegal aliens. There are no consequences.
    Subsequent to the war, and continuing well into the 20th century, overt racial segregation was practiced in many former Confederate states. (Never mind if covert, or de facto segregation was practiced elsewhere.) This was outlawed by federal edict, and federal forces, including active duty military, were used to force compliance. Now, the descendants of some of the discriminated are demanding segregated spaces in public institutions; occasionally using extra legal and disruptive pressure, and there is no reaction.

25. Does anyone think that the US can withstand having another generation taught to despise our history and that the founding was all based on a lie? If we don’t figure out how to reverse the lefts takeover of our institutions and figure it out very quickly I don’t see how we keep them from complete takeover of government and final destruction of the American idea.
    As many have observed freedom is not the natural state of mankind. Most do not realize how unusual the current era is, and how delicate.

26. Dear Neo:

    The quote you give comes from a 1960 speech, I think. However, I have also come across this from later on in his career:

    The next year in his book Why We Can’t Wait, King wrote: “Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic.”

    Stepen Oates, the author of a biography of King called Let The Trumpet Sound, quotes him thus: “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro..”

    King needed the support of as many elements of the black community as he could get, and it seems that in addition to warning against black supremacy in 1960 he was also willing later to temporize with — indeed according to Oates to endorse — those who said that America “must now do something special for the Negro.”

    The government cannot grant more than equality for one race without discriminating against all the others. More than equality means discrimination. That’s just the way the logic works, and how often have we seen politicians of all persuasions ignore logic in favor of a pleasant and soothing spin?

    Unfortunately Martin Luther King’s legacy with regard to this issue looks like it is mixed. That is what I meant by saying:

    I think one mistake that Martin Luther King — and the 1960’s civil rights movement in general — made was not to ponder all the implications of the quote (I don’t know who said it first) “Most slaves do not dream of being free but rather of being slave owners.”

    Just like we can honor George Washington and Thomas Jefferson even though they owned slaves, I think we can honor Martin Luther King for his courage and what he got right without pretending that he was also always wise.

27. Unfortunately, my last post reads like the second and third paragraphs are something other than a quote (turned up by a search engine). The quote was not difficult to find. The rest of it I wrote.

28. The Confederate general Edward Porter Alexander (he was Lee’s artillery commander at Gettysburg), who became a railroad president after the war, offered some retrospective thoughts about the issue of State’s Rights:

    Edward Porter Alexander, who was Lee’s artillery commander at Gettysburg, became a railroad president after the war. His experiences in running a major transportation system probably had something to do with the evolution of his thoughts regarding state’s rights:

    “Well that (state’s rights) was the issue of the war; & as we were defeated that right was surrendered & a limit put on state sovereignty. And the South is now entirely satisfied with that result. And the reason of it is very simple. State sovereignty was doubtless a wise political institution for the condition of this vast country in the last century. But the railroad, and the steamboat & the telegraph began to transform things early in this century & have gradually made what may almost be called a new planet of it… Our political institutions have had to change… Briefly we had the right to fight, but our fight was against what might be called a Darwinian development – or an adaptation to changed & changing conditions – so we need not greatly regret defeat.”

    See my post ‘What Are the Limits of the Alexander Analysis?”

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/54565.html

29. Oldflyer Read Manning.
    Among other things, only heads of households could own slaves in the legal sense. But every white person in the household could order them around; they served every white person therein. And those people were dependent on the economy based on slavery. They’d have opinions, too. Jefferson said slavery allowed the youngest child to be a veritable tyrant. The issue of slavery thus affected a substantial multiple of the ownership numbers. It’s amazing, or maybe not, how many gloss this over. Some people weren’t owners but expected to inherit slaves. There was the “borrowing” of a relative’s slaves to, for example, clear a field. Or having the option, should circumstances require, of renting a gang of slaves.
    I think Manning gets a little bit over her skis in considering the position of slavery with regard to the poor white farmer.
    Nevertheless, there was, as I say, a substantial multiple of the ownership numbers psychologically, economically, morally involved in the question.

    Hypothetically, an attorney in a larger city didn’t need a slave to keep house for him, presuming he was a bachelor, or work the stable or whatever else might be necessary. Hired help would have been more convenient. But his billable hours would have been paid almost exclusively by people involved in the economy based on slavery. At the best, he’d keep his mouth shut about his misgivings although as humans do might have justified and rationalized slavery to ease his moral qualms.
    Elkins, in his book on slavery, examines the effect of abolitionism on the South and its defenses of slavery.

    It is not necessary to have a very high percentage of the troops enlisting to end slavery to make the case. The pretense that “patriots”–understanding the sneer quotes–contend that the US is perfect can be undone by finding an example of imperfection…..”HA! Gotcha now, see…!” is really old.
    As an example, the necessity for a draft in WW II doesn’t mean people didn’t enlist, and in fact lie about their age to do so.
    I had a client with health insurance. I got a letter that, as he hit sixty five the contract would expire but the company would be happy to switch to a Medicare supplement with minimal paperwork. Turns out it wouldn’t work, as he was sixty four. Lied to enlist after Pearl Harbor. I called the company. “We’re seeing a lot of that. Just write a letter.” Presumably every health insurance company in the country had the same issue during a couple of years back then.
    It’s been suggested that, post Civil War, the power structure in the South was aware that the freed blacks and the poor whites had the same issues and the same complaints against the same power structure and racism was exacerbated to keep the two communities from joining.
    The LA decision (see Plessey vs. Ferguson) to segregate passenger railroad cars came thirty years after the end of the war. Presumably, had white passengers had a problem with integrated railroad cars, it would have surfaced sooner after the war than thirty years. Strikes me as a divide and conquer, or at least not lose, tactic.
    I would suggest that could, as well, have been a consideration among the ante bellum power structure as to what to do with slavery.
    All of which is to say that hauling out the number of legal slave owners as dispositive is so far from the actual picture as to be nearly irrelevant And the same would be true of the number of soldiers whose letters home now archived didn’t refer to slavery.
    Forgot to mention, I saw Manning interviewed. She’d had your view of things before her research. Ended up being surprised at how many soldiers had slavery as an issue, one way or another.

30. The MLK quotes with regard to affirmative action can be found at

    https://www.quora.com/Did-Martin-Luther-King-Jr.-support-affirmative-action?share=1

31. I also took special note of Trump’s recitation of the things Americans stand for

    The question is: how many US citizens support those values? what percentage?

    Perhaps, let’s say, 5% of blacks, 10% of latinos, 30% of asian-americans, 60-70% of non-hispanic whites?

    That barely makes half of the country. And the white population is declining, blacks and latinos are the future in US. That means the percentage of US citizens that support traditional American values is gonna decline next decades, heavily.

    The question, again, would be: which is the minimum percentage of US citizens that must support those values to say “that’s what Americans stand for“? There must be a boundary, a limit somewhere… where’s that limit? When it’s gonna be reached? (because it’s not “if’, it’s “when”).

    Self-denial is a dangerous thing. Modern left has its blind spots, but the American side has theirs too. Be careful.

32. Dear MJR:

    You said

    “History” will be written by the victors in our ongoing culture war. I find it very difficult to be optimistic about what “history” will say about the good guys (our side, for most neo readers here). If the kneelers deserve contempt, it will very probably be for reasons pretty different from why we good guys tend to feel contempt for them.
    __________________________
    Even though history is written by the victors, the victors feel respect, and make it clear in their histories that they feel respect, for those who opposed them with courage. Even more respect is granted those who oppose with honor. The kneelers are showing no courage and little honor. They want to divert the BLM movement away from their power and wealth — to be eaten last by the crocodile — by acting submissively. So even if those they kneel to end up winning everything, those winners will view them with contempt and destroy them too when it’s most convenient. A more muddled historical outcome, one without clear-cut winners and losers, will expose them to contempt from all sides because they have acted so cravenly. And of course if the BLM movement loses…

    So, contempt is coming their way, lots of it, no matter what happens.

    Historians have many ways of expressing contempt. Even if they are writing from the viewpoint of the winning side, after the dust has settled they usually end up talking about decadence, using it as an contemptuous all-purpose explanation for why the losing side lost. Today we tend to think of decadence in terms of unorthodox sexual practices (which is Hollywood’s take on the concept), but it is also often invoked as an all-purpose explanation for feeble and inappropriate responses to dangerous crises.

33. The MLK quotes with regard to affirmative action can be found at

    King should not be a reference point for anyone, because he had nothing of note to say in response to any actual social problems we’ve faced in the years since 1971. Neither did anyone in his camarilla, (other than Bayard Rustin). With the exception of the National Urban League (which had a social work mission which antedated and has post-dated its involvement in protest politics) and the partial exception of the Legal Defense and Education Fund, all the notable ‘civil rights’ organizations of that era have either gone belly up or turned into zombie institutions whose common mission is to collect donations and provide zero-marginal-product employment for the people they hire. (And of course, there’s the satyriasis and every other embarrassing thing about him).

    I think you’d have to scrounge to find a black politician or public intellectual who wishes to address actual social problems with the tools available to practitioners of conventional public policy, and the black rank-and-file seem content with that.

    American has the most affluent and extensively educated negroid population of any size, with the possible exception of the West Indians in Canada and those of the French Caribbean territories. Blacks living in the French Caribbean, in Barbados, and in Britain may have a higher quality of life when you add it all up, but they are not more affluent or more extensively educated. For all that sophistication imparted, Black America has a terrible political culture, one not replicated in the Caribbean or in Brazil or on Colombia’s Pacific coast. Expressed public opinion among American blacks was more variegated prior to 1964 than it is now, and a great deal of what is expressed today is humbug (see the career of TN Coates). No clue how they (and we) get out of this trap.

34. I have turned off the media. They lieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

35. People in the Civil War were all over the map about slavery, as we might expect. Many had a mix of views about it. Lots of people found it personally and morally abhorrent. Many were horrified by the political and military ramifications of breaking up the Union. Abraham Lincoln was famously motivated by both of these views–it would be fair to say more about the latter, though also genuinely about the former.

    Obviously some people were worried by the cheap-labor component. Some were worried about what would happen to society if black savages were turned loose. It would have been hard to find many mid- or late-19th-century Americans, North or South, who thought blacks and whites should fully integrate and intermarry; the racial divisions were shockingly deep. Frankly that has remained true practically through today.

    I’ve always thought it was facile and indefensible to charge Southerners with more racial bias than Northerners. Slavery was hardly the only problem in that area. By the same token, we still have anti-Semitism, though not in the astoundingly casual depth you’ll run into if you read anything written before about 1945 (and much after). Ditto for anti-Asian sentiment and practically any imaginable kind of out-group sentiment. Duh. You’ll find that all over the world, in every era, and in every racial and ethnic group. The fact that it’s fashionable now to deny and denounce it doesn’t change a thing, as witness the “white people suck” meme that’s so prevalent lately. It’s how people are: under stress, we team up into ingroups, and many of us aren’t particularly smart or nice about it. That doesn’t change the fact that avoiding ignorant racial antipathy is more of a priority in this time and place than at any other I’m aware of in history. I don’t see the point in tearing down the one social system that’s tried to move in the right direction on this problem.

36. Pingback:Trump at Mount Rushmore revisited – All Sides Now

37. Being a first-timer to Neo, I must say how impressed I am by the quality, both of the blog and the comments that follow. It’s as if everyone here is operating on a higher intellectual plain. I especially enjoyed the commentary on the War of Northern Aggression (aka the Civil War). Well done, people!

38. You missed the ad lib part of the Trump speech not provided in advance by smart speechwriters which truly reflects the “stable genius” of Donnie’s juvenile mind:

    “In the fields and jungles of Vietnam, they delivered a swift and swiffian(sic), It was swift and it was sweeping like nobody’s ever seen happen. A victory in Operation Desert Storm, a lot of you were involved in that. A lot of you were involved. That was a quick one.”

39. A Baltimore County, MD crab house was mobbed because a member of the family, which owns it, put on FB his disagreement with BLM. The damn county police did not respond. They now have to have a private security force to remain open. No freedom of speech is allowed now.

40. A Baltimore County, MD crab house was mobbed because a member of the family, which owns it, put on FB his disagreement with BLM. The damn county police did not respond. They now have to have a private security force to remain open. No freedom of speech is allowed now.

    Soros has likely put too many cut-outs between him and the rabble to be prosecuted for this sort of thing. Nice idea, though.

41. This debate about the causes of the US Civil war can go on for book length essays. But here are some fun facts:

    Both sides had conscription. The Confederates started drafting in 1862. The Union side didn’t start drafting until the summer 1863. So, at least in the first half, you cannot state that the war on the Union side was fought mostly by draftees. (All of the Union troops up to and including Gettysburg were volunteers.) And, that doesn’t even touch on the whole issue of the US Colored Troops. (USCT) None of them were drafted, yet by 1865 they comprised a sizable portion of the Union army. A lot of black people fought for their own freedom, and that deserves recognition.

    There were 4 slave states that never seceded from the Union. (Five if you count West Virginia.) You could, I suppose, claim that they were all held in the Union by military force. So what. That was part of Lincoln’s initial war aim. However, I am from Kentucky, one of those slave states, and I can tell you that my state was NOT held in the Union by military force unless you consider resisting a military invasion by southern troops. (Kentucky declared neutrality at the very beginning, abandoning it and declaring for the Union only when the Confederate forces invaded the state in 1861.) Additionally, all four of those non-seceding slave states supplied troops to the Union army. They also supplied troops to the Confederate side. But it was almost a four to one ratio Union to Confederate. (Two of my GG grandfathers fought in the Civil War. One in the 15th Kentucky infantry, and the other in the 9th Ohio. Both Union. The 9th Ohio were mostly Germans from Kentucky who joined an Ohio regiment consisting of mostly German immigrants. They were ALL volunteers.)

    With the lone exception of South Carolina, every other seceded state supplied at least one regiment of troops to the Union army. Not a single free state supplied troops to the Confederate army. (It should be noted however, that *individuals* did fight for the other side. Union General George Thomas, for example, was from Virginia. Unlike Robert E. Lee, however, he believed his oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States superseded any loyalty to the government of his home state.)

42. Thanks Neo! Can’t say how cheered up I was/am by the speech itself, and your observations on it.

    Or how disgusted I’ve been by our ‘news’ media, which once would print the text of presidential speeches, but now loudly trumpet their disdain for tiny selected fragments of them.

    Congratulations on a superb blog, and please keep them coming.

43. Gadfly … your take has already been debunked, by your media allies:

    https://twitter.com/i/events/1279605407439220738?s=20

    The choice today is this:

    > Respect for/protection of individual life and liberty, with the EXPECTATION that the individual will responsibly exercise their initiative, alone or with their neighbors, to solve the problems in front of them … said respect/protection secured by a government focused on that objective and not distracted by efforts to heroically save us from ourselves.

    OR

    > Submission to a ruling elite in a high-tech serfdom, in accordance with what I call Assumption Six …

    Ordinary people neither have the resources, nor the intellect, nor the virtue, to help themselves – or each other – in the “right” ways. Only “experts” and “leaders” can provide such help, and should be empowered with the resources and monopoly on coercive force held by the government to do so.

    … in TOTAL trust to those notables, as though they are omniscient and infallible.

    The latter choice, is what the Democrats seek to impose on this nation.

    Trump is the roadblock to that … but it is up to US to restore respect for those self-evident truths that make the former choice valuable.

44. “…fun facts…”
    Very interesting post. (Thanks!)
    But I’m not sure W. Va. could be considered a “slave state”.
    (Isn’t that precisely why they split off from Va.?)

45. To assert that the Civil War was not about slavery or just a minor reason is to reject our entire history up to that point

    Fugitive slave act, 3/5ths compromise, free state v slave state, the actual words of the states that left the Union.

46. But a larger part of me – more cerebral, aware, and older – knew that the speech would be excoriated with almost one voice by the press and the Democrats.

    I’m sure you know that this would have been the case regardless of what Trump said, short of “I am dropping out of the presidential race for 2020.” If he had gotten up there and said “2+2=4” and “e=mc^2” he would have been castigated as racist for promoting white male European ideas.

    Establishment Republicans constantly make the mistake that if they just concede enough to the left they will not be attacked. They are always wrong, and Trump must instinctively realize this.

47. Interesting! Trump managed to place one of the few American victories in our many recent wars in the wrong war. Desert Storm happened in the Middle East, not Viet Nam.

    Keep away from facts, Donald. Stick to calling people names.

48. It is NOT the War of Northern Aggression. The South started the war.

    The South wasn’t invaded for ignoring Federal law. It was invaded for starting a war. The South however did secede in part over the NORTH ignoring Federal law, specifically the Fugitive Slave Act.

    Kentucky was neutral (WTF?) until invaded by the South for the purpose of CONQUEST. Which was part of my point. The South went to war for expansionist imperialist reasons.

    Bottom line is Lincoln didn’t have the political nor military strength to suppress the Southern Insurrection by force…. until the South started the war. Northerners flocked to the colors because the South started a war. Had they actually stayed on the path of peaceful separation, they might have made it.

49. Reading your post here and the many worthy (and widely varying) comments puts a smile on my 76-yr old chops, Neo. I came up in an America honoring time like the one you express gratitude for… In 5th grade we were taught American history the whole year. Again, in 8th grade (Then the second & ‘middle’ year of Junior High). Both teachers were gifted and loved US History. Also, my parents loved and stressed it.
    The Civil War has been particular love of mine for much of my life. My Great Grandad on my Mom’s side, Jacob Honeycutt, was a Western North Carolina boy who joined Longstreet’s Corps of Lee’s Army and was in all its campaigns. He was a poor farmer from the Great Smoky region. No slaves. As the great Shelby Foote said, “He went with his people.” Duuuhhh… As did most of those incredible boys in gray. My mother was from the Ozarks of Northern Arkansas, which is where G-Grandad settled after the war. (Pyatt, Ark.) After this lifelong So.Calif guy & his beautiful Sicilian minx wife moved to Central Florida some years back we began going to that part of N.C. twice a year. Looks just like the Ozarks. One of the true joys I get are the many old ‘Johnny Reb’ statues honoring those tens of thousands of Reb Soldiers (overwhelmingly Non-Slave holding) who fought and died for their states and their people. Now, the mere thought
    of the idiot-koolaid consuming thought police/mobs dishonoring and destroying those bronze boys in so many towns and villages makes me crazy with rage. Safe, so far. May kharma visit those F**ks.

    Thanks for your amazing energy, intelligence, critical thinking and generosity, my fellow generation Girl!!

    God Bless Your Mission.

50. Pingback:Trump at Mount Rushmore revisited – Chronicles 247

51. The Fugitive Slave Act was resisted on many levels. See what is probably the best thing Oberlin ever did.
    The Underground Railroad was illegal. Non-participants who looked the other way, or provided the occasional meal or transport were aiding and abetting a federal crime.
    It’s called civil disobedience.

52. “The preponderance of the Union soldiers fought simply because they were conscripted into an extremely unpopular war. The penalty for avoidance was severe. It is questionable how much they cared that much about southern slavery.” Oldflyer

    Since when do conscripted men literally forced (“The penalty for avoidance was severe”) into a brutal, “extremely unpopular” war… then fight passionately enough to defeat a people fighting passionately for their homes? As posited, that meme violates both common sense and human nature.

53. Reading the transcript, Trump placed the right wars in the right place.

    “ These planes once launched off massive aircraft carriers in the fiercest battles of World War II. They raced through the skies of Korea’s MiG alley. They carried American warriors into the dense fields and jungles of Vietnam. They delivered a swift and swip…you know that, sweeping … It was swift and it was sweeping like nobody’s ever seen anything happen. A victory in Operation Desert Storm. A lot of you were involved in that. A lot of you were involved. That was a quick one. ”

    Facts? Who needs them when lies are better Democrat propaganda.

54. When some friends and I hosted a fairly well frequented blog we noticed three topics that always generated gobs of comments:

    1. The Civil War
    2. Military aircraft
    3. Gay marriage

    If you want to get a lot of comments, state an opinion about which nation in WWII had the best airplanes. Or, maybe a post about gay married civil war generals with pilot’s licenses.
    🙂

55. The preponderance of the Union soldiers fought simply because the were conscripted into an extremely unpopular war. The penalty for avoidance was severe. It is questionable how much they cared that much about southern slavery.

    Only a five digit population was successfully conscripted; too much resistance. Some people enlisted, some people paid a large bounty and were excused, and some people paid a smaller bounty and recruited a substitute. NB, everyone who entered the service prior to March of 1863 was a volunteer.

56. Trump’s speech at Mt. Rushmore was a very direct and plain-spoken one, a speech in which he confronted facts that no other major political leaders are willing to state out loud, and to confront, head on.

    Nonetheless, surveying past political and/or supposed “great speeches,” it becomes quite obvious how the overall quality, the level and number of philosophical and literary references and arguments used, and the sophistication of such speeches has declined (as the educational level, vocabulary, and level of comprehension of the audience hearing it has apparently declined, as well).

    Some of Roosevelt’s speeches, for instance–delivered to what one might assume was generally a much less “well-educated” audience–were written on a much higher level than speeches are today, and it appears he (i.e. his speech writers) made no effort to dumb things down, or to avoid “hard” words and concepts.

    The decline in the quality and sophistication of political rhetoric is quite an indicator of the corresponding decline in the level of both the speaker’s–and the general public’s–level of education.

57. oldflyer: “We also know as fact that Lincoln very nearly lost the population at one point–and that the Emancipation Proclamation was issued to reinvigorate enthusiasm.”

    Doesn’t that contradict your contention that opposition to slavery was not a motivating factor for the North?

    TexasDude, 12:36 pm: Yes. There may have been other contributing reasons for the Civil War but American History shows a steady drumbeat of major controversy over slavery from the drafting of the Constitution right up to 1860.

58. Cont’d –Of course, it makes no sense to deliver a speech so erudite and sophisticated that your likely audience can understand neither your arguments, nor what you are trying to communicate.

59. John A. Broussard:

    Is “keep away from facts” your own motto?

    Seriously, it’s telling that you have to lie to make whatever point you think you’re making – and then, to compound the Orwellian nature of your accusations, you accuse others of lying.

    And do they pay you to spread the anti-Trump meme du jour, or do you do it out of sheer animus?

    At any rate, when even left-leaning Snopes doesn’t support your anti-Trump claim, you should know you’ve got a problem.

    You also have a problem in that the alternate candidate, Joe Biden, does indeed make errors as a matter of course almost every time he makes an appearance.

    I wonder, too, whether Trump-haters believe their own fiction that Trump is a bumbling idiot. It is possible to dislike Trump or his policies without considering him to be dumb. Thinking he is dumb is an error that leads to other errors, such as your comment at this blog.

    However, it is also possible that you know full well that you are in error. Perhaps you just think people in general are dumb and can be fooled by what you say. That’s certainly the case for many people – you can indeed fool some of the people some of the time.

60. In the counterfactual where slavery was abolished in 1787 and the southern colonies refused to join the union, how long would slavery have lasted in the south? If they remained British colonies, would the Brits have abolished slavery before 1863? It seems likely, since they abolished it in their other colonies by the 1830s. But there was no way for the Founding Fathers to know that. So they may have figured the best way to end slavery in the south was to compromise to keep them in the union. More likely they just wanted them in the union, and hoped to figure out a way to kill slavery off at some point. And they did, even if it was 30 years later than when the Brits might have ended it.

61. Jimmy:

    Yes, when I was mulling over the speech I started to wonder what Trump might have said that wouldn’t have gotten the review of “dark, divisive, combative” from the MSM. I decided the only thing would have been something on the order of LBJ’s March 31, 1968 announcement that he would not run again. I was watching that in real time on TV, and I remember the shock.

62. Oh come on GB. Do you dispute the unpopularity of the war? Read a little about the anti-war protests in the North. Why did the Union find it necessary to import over 350,000 foreigners to fill its ranks?
    The bulk of the Union Army fought for the same reasons that U.S. conscripts, who had little or no idea what the issues were, fought in South Vietnam for nearly 10 years.

    My initial comment simply suggested that glorifying a song as proof that Union soldiers fought because of their passion to end slavery was an over statement of history.

    I went on to suggest that the Civil War was more complex than a simple issue of slavery. There were alternatives for resolving that issue. I pointed out that in the 1830s, England avoided conflict after the laws were revised to prohibit slave ownership, by paying slave owners to free their slaves. That may be controversial. Some considered it immoral; but, it worked and that fact was apparent by the time of our Civil War. There is nothing more immoral than going to war unnecessarily; and if the option had been offered, it might have saved the hundreds of thousands of lives, the national wealth, and the untold devastation in one area of the country that the war cost. There were elements on both sides that preferred war. I give them a small benefit of doubt, that they had no idea of the monster they were turning loose.

    I am not sure how any of that is disputable.

63. Snow on Pine:

    I remember being told, when I read Shakespeare in school, that back when fewer people could read they were better and in some ways more sophisticated at processing complex oral messages, and that the “groundlings” didn’t have trouble understanding Shakespeare when they heard it, although many of us do.

    So perhaps in the olden days they were able to process complex auditory information better. Or maybe they didn’t get the speeches all that well, but liked to hear things that sounded erudite.

    Nowadays, just about all of us can read and more of us are used to taking in complex information that way instead.

    Then again, it is also very true, I think, that the population is dumbed down. I think that’s because even though more people are educated, the school system is very dumbed down. I’m not sure what that’s all about, but I’ve noticed it.

    Then again, you get a Churchill or a Lincoln very seldom. Those are the two political orators I use as the standard, and no one has met it in my lifetime, IMHO (Churchill was still alive when I was young, but I think you know what I mean).

64. I just have a little problem with the fact that more Blue and Grey were killed in the “War Between the States” in order to preserve the Union than all other American war casualties combined.
    I don’t think the Union was worth that amount of death, sacrifices on the Union altar, if you will.
    Fort Sumpter was a goad, and bulls in bullrings respond to goads with aggression, but humans do not have to. We are said to have a higher nature.

65. Oldflyer:

    I think you are neglecting to take a look at what I actually wrote about the song [emphasis added]: “it proves that one of the main reasons the North fought the Civil War was to free the slaves…”

    So it was one of the main reasons, not even the main reason necessarily. Also, how important it was changed somewhat as the war went on. Not only does that song indicate the importance of anti-slavery as a motive, but so do their letters home.

66. Cicero:

    I believe that the Civil War had such high US casualties for two main reasons. The first is obvious: it was a civil war, and so the casualties on both sides were American. The second is that war technology had advanced more quickly than war strategy or trauma medicine (although there were many innovations in the latter as the war went on). See this. See also this, which has a lot of interesting information. Note also that a lot of Civil War casualties were from disease, although there were plenty from battle as well.

67. Do you dispute the unpopularity of the war?

    The Democratic Party won all of 33 of 193 seats in the House in 1864/65.

68. Rufus T, re your blog comments: by far the largest number of comments I ever had on my not-widely-read blog were in response to two posts about Atlas Shrugged and about Ayn Rand in general. My blog is mostly about books and music and such, from a Catholic point of view, so the posts were mostly negative. I can only surmise that one or more objectivists had set up Google Alerts for anything to do with their founder. They showed up ready to do battle for her and her ideas and the subsequent discussions/arguments went on and on. That was in 2008. The comments were on the old Haloscan service and are now gone, which is too bad, as it would be amusing to revisit them.

69. I have access to a database “Union Soldiers Compiled Service Records, 1861-1865 Results”. About 45% of the soldiers listed entered the service prior to 1863, at a time when there was no conscription practiced. The median year of birth of the soldiers in the database is around 1838 / 39. The median year of birth of a WWii veteran is 1918, so one might wager the Civil War services and the WWii services had a similar age distribution.

70. Rufus T, re your blog comments: by far the largest number of comments I ever had on my not-widely-read blog were in response to two posts about Atlas Shrugged and about Ayn Rand in general.

    IIRC, it was one guy who made scores of comments on Aristotle. I think I sat that one out.

71. Replying to Griffin, who says, “Wonder who the primary speechwriter(s) was.”

    I dare say, President Trump believes, as his predecessor Harry Truman did, that “The buck stops here.” Clearly, that speech was written by one or more people skilled in oratory, who did not speak in DJT’s somewhat unique voice. But there can be little reasonable doubt that it said what DJT wanted to say. More interesting than the writer(s) identity, (to me, at least), would be to see the initial directives, review, feedback, and editing process that produced it. I credit the whole lot of them, including the guy responsible for it.

    That speech, together with the dishonestly disparaging reactions to it, has put into stark contrast the visions that are held by patriots and those who despise the U.S.A. and wish to remake it into yet another socialist hellhole. Far from stoking a modern civil war, it serves to illuminate the sides to one already forming.

72. Cicero,
    Fort Sumter was not a goad. It was property of an entity that the South Carolina and the Confederacy claimed was a foreign nation. Attacking your neighbors is a great way to get conquered.

    The imperialist warmonger Jefferson Davis was elected to start a war. He did.

    It was one of the stupidest acts in American history. The only one that even compares is the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Stupid stupid stupid.

73. How’s the ramen in the boiler room today, John Broussard?

74. “If you want to get a lot of comments, state an opinion about which nation in WWII had the best airplanes.” Rufus T. Firefly

    The P38 fighter/bomber was so hated by the Germans that they named it the “twin forked devil from hell”. A squadron of P38s ambushed and killed Japanese strategic genius Yamamoto. Later in the war, the vastly superior P51 Mustang was introduced, Brit engines + Yank fuselage/aerodynamics. Then there was the B17.
    Case closed 🙂

    Oldflyer,

    I do dispute the assertion that the war was unpopular on either side. Once started, both sides viewed it as necessary.

    In the main, the North did not “import” ‘foreigners’. “The US, especially in the North, had received a large influx of European immigrants in the 1850s because of people leaving Europe to avoid the ongoing wars and rebellions there.”. Immigrant men, already living in the US volunteered in great numbers for the North, viewing retention of the Union as an important cause worth fighting for.

    The two factors over which the civil war was fought were slavery and states rights limiting federal rights.

    Paying southern slave holders to abandon slavery was not a practical solution. First because the US had not nearly the fiscal resources that the British Empire possessed and secondly, the great majority of Southerners were simply not willing to embrace the cultural changes that ending slavery would bring. Thirdly, there was no need for compromise because on both sides the common belief was that the war would be a short, victorious one. To my limited knowledge, only Gen. Sherman foresaw the North’s logistical advantages and the carnage that a civil war would bring.

    I served on a 5,000 man Aircraft Carrier, CV-64 during the Vietnam war (69-73). I never heard anyone ask or even wonder why we were fighting. We all knew it was to stop Communism’s spread.

    And, many of us knew that while Vietnam was a civil war, we also knew that the North were committed communists. In high school of 66, I delivered an in-depth report on the Vietnam war that stated that the average Vietnamese peasant cared less over who ruled over them, just wanting to live their lives in peace. But that was a desire that the Commies would never allow to flourish. I concluded that we should either fight the war to win or get out.

75. Chases Eagles, You and I must read the same original documents as I believe you have it exactly right about Ft. Sumter and the start of the war. I have many times called the attack on Ft. Sumter the “Pearl Harbor of its day”.

    “Goad”, Cicero? Hardly. That’s just more southern revisionism.

    Ft. Sumter was one of a chain of fortifications built along the Atlantic and gulf coasts by the Federal government to protect the harbors and coastal cities. Ft. Sumter, Ft. Moultrie, and Castle Pickney in Charleston were all part of that chain. Ft. Sumter was the newest one, and had been built on an artificial island out in the harbor. The island and its fort were paid for and built by the US Federal government. Ft Moultrie and Castle Pickney had been occupied by Federal troops since the war of 1812.

    Now, from the time of South Carolina’s secession up until the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, southern forces had been methodically seizing Federal property such as arsenals, custom houses, post offices etc. So far without firing a shot or any bloodshed.

    The commander of the US forces in the Charleston area, Major Robert Anderson – a southerner by the way – could see the crisis building. He could also see that his main base of operations had no defenses from the landward side. So he moved all of his forces from Ft. Moultrie and Castle Pickney over to the brand new, still under construction, Ft. Sumter. He had two reasons for this. One was for defensibility. Ft. Sumter is in the middle of the harbor and had no landward approach. But the other, *as stated explicitly in his reports*, was to avoid any incidents or confrontations between his soldiers and the townspeople of Charleston. (…read the primary sources.) Tensions were high and Major Anderson didn’t want some stupid incident involving one of his soldiers to set off a riot or some such, so he moved everyone to Sumter where they would have no contact with the locals. (Ironically, his move to Ft. Sumter surprised, not only the Confederate forces in Charleston, but the government in Washington as well.)

    Remember, Abraham Lincoln was not inaugurated until March 1861 when the Confederacy was already 3 months old. (Fun fact: Jefferson Davis was president of the CSA longer than Lincoln was president of the USA.) Upon taking office, Lincoln immediately initiated negotiations, with the ultimate goal of coaxing the seceded states *peacefully* back into the Union. But the biggest thorn at that point was the disposition of Ft. Sumter. The negotiations drug on – mainly because, even though Lincoln recognized the government of South Carolina – as he did the governments of all of the seceding states – he refused to recognize the Confederate government in Montgomery.

    Here’s where it gets interesting. As supplies in the fort run low, the Lincoln administration, which recognizes the South Carolina government, formally notifies the governor that they are going to resupply Ft. Sumter with VICTUALS ONLY. Note that ammunition was not needed as up until then none had been expended. Note also that at this point there was no naval blockade of any southern harbor. However, the governor of SC refused and state forces actually fired on the unarmed supply vessel “Star of the West”. (These were the actual first shots of the war.) Then, under direct orders from Jefferson Davis, the Confederate government issued an ultimatum that the US must evacuate the fort or they will open fire. That ultimatum expired and for 30 hours, Confederate forces under General Beauregard bombarded the fort until Major Anderson finally surrenders.

    So, southern artillery had finally fired in anger on US troops who were occupying a fort they had every right to occupy. Now here is what is important to remember…

    As “Chases Eagles” stated, the firing on Ft. Sumter was the Pearl Harbor of its day.

    From the secession of South Carolina on Dec. 20 1860 right up until the attack on Ft. Sumter, the following April, the general opinion of the population in the north was essentially, “Good riddance”. “Let the bastards go”. “We’re tired of their shit.”

    Don’t believe me? All you have to do is read primary sources from that time – newspaper articles, letters etc. Not everyone felt that way, of course, but a lot certainly did. And remember, the slavery question had dominated the politics of the US for almost 50 years.

    The decision to fire on US troops galvanized the North. The attack on Ft. Sumter, due to southern hubris, had the effect of quickly turning a country that mostly had the attitude of “good riddance”, into a country that was now crying for blood!

    And it was indeed southern hubris. Another fun fact: The Confederate government initiated war against the USA without a single cannon factory within its borders. If that’s not hubris then I don’t know what is.

    Anyway, it is my contention that ultimately, the south lost the Civil War, not at Gettysburg, but at Ft. Sumter.

76. Actually, I believe the most comments would result from discussing the three volume. “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog’s Favorite Recipes”.

    Saw a Civil War recruiting poster in a little museum in Owosso, MI. THE GOTHS AND VANDALS ARE AT THE GATES OF THE FEDERAL CITY!!
    The target market was adventurous young guys who’d, presumably, graduated from the sixth grade. Read McGuffey’s Reader….and weep. Today, that would be seen by the college set as an ad for a heavy metal concert…wherever the Federal City was.
    “The Devil and Dan’l Webster used to be in high school lit anthologies. Today, in college history….blank stares.
    You learn other things from what authors mention but don’t explain because they expect their readers to know them.
    Kipling had a kid shouting verses from “Lays of Ancient Rome” into the wind, to start a story. Not only did he expect the adult reader to know the Lays, it was for kids, so they’re expected to know them and adult readers wouldn’t find it odd to think a kid knew the verses.
    My father had to memorize some lines when he was in the thirties version of jr. hi. Still had some of them down….
    Had a history teacher say one reason to learn Greek and Roman mythology is the frequent references to such in older political speeches.

    Various readings over the years have led me to the conclusion the upper crust of ante-bellum South thought of themselves as analogs of the Brit “county society”. Slavery kept them there. Switching to some kind of Downton Abbey arrangement–end of a fifteen hundred year old business model–likely didn’t seem possible.

    And then, seventy years after the war cometh “I’ll Take My Stand; The South and The Agrarian Tradition”. It was a series of essays by writers working around Vanderbilt riffing off Jefferson’s idea of the noble husbandman and the nobility of being a smallholder in an agricultural society. They had a cause, to push back against barbarism of science and………..you can fill in the rest.
    That was seventy years after the war, by guys who didn’t intend to work in the fields themselves, and who hadn’t lived in the ante-bellum South. Hate to think how strong that view of the world, if only to justify one’s position in it presuming one were on top of things, might have been prior to the war.
    Because there’s a practical issue here.
    Google earth Cades Cove. It’s a place in East Tennesee which the park service has fixed up like a small farm prior to the war. Looks nice. Then zoom out and look for another cove. Huh.
    Southern farmers were freaking POOR because they had rocks and mountains to farm. The big shooters had the good land.
    Drive through the midwest and cross the MIssissippi at St. Louis heading west. You’ll go from corn to the horizon across flat, fat blacksoil farm country filling whole time zones to the Ozarks. I didn’t see a single agricultural implement bigger than a lawnmower down I70 to Rolla.
    Ditto crossing the Ohio down to Huntsville.
    Cotton monoculture wears out the soil which is why more land is needed. See the filibuster to Nicaragua. Kansas-Nebraska. Cotton would have brought slavery. And desperate poor farmers would have been the muscle.

    Point of all above is the social, cultural, and economic, not to mention geography, was going to give us a civil war. No way around it.

77. GBritain: And, in the Pacific Theater, the great B-29 Superfortress. My Dad was with the 462nd Hellbirds in the CBI and then on Tinian. There Group Motto: With Malice Toward Some.

    Love that motto in our current age of Islamist butchers and idiot lefty mob culture.

78. This is a bit of a prequel to my earlier comment, but here goes…

    Southerners tend to discount the role that slavery played in the Civil War.

    The fact is, the slavery issue had dominated US politics for a great many years prior to 1861. Both sides had grievances but both sides also had real fears.

    Southern politicians tended to dominate Washington in the early years of our republic but they were being slowly subsumed by the growing population and power in the north. Immigration from Europe overwhelmingly settled in the northern half of the country and the industrial revolution was leaving the south behind. Ironically, those immigrants that did settle in the south tended to be anti-slavery. My GG grandfather is one example and the Germans who settled the Texas hill country are another. (Does the name Nimitz mean anything to you?)

    The lid was kept on this powder keg for many years by more and more compromise as the country pushed further and further west. The issue of slavery was mostly related to its expansion into the territories rather than slavery as it was in the existing southern states. (Lincoln himself stated that he had no constitutional power to interfere with slavery in those states.) This compromise usually took the form of a balancing act of adding a free state for every slave state that entered the union – The Missouri compromise of 1820 added Missouri and Maine for example. (It’s a little more complicated but you get the gist.)

    This entire apple-cart of compromise was upended in the 1850’s by the Dredd Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave act. This instilled fear into the northern population that they were being dragooned into supporting slavery by forcing them to do the dirty work of the slave holders. This galvanized northerners into more and more resistance to the institution with the formation of the underground railroad and the increased number of bloody incidents between the two factions. The hot-heads on both sides were gaining more and more influence which inevitably lead to “Bleeding Kansas” and ultimately John Brown’s raid on the Harper’s Ferry arsenal. Why was that raid so important? Well, let’s look at the very real fears of the southern side.

    In 1859 there was still living memory of the Haitian revolution. In the 1820’s the slaves on the French side of the island of Hispaniola revolted against their masters. The slaves won, but after winning they massacred every white person left on the island – men, women, and children. Fast forward a few years and you start to have slave rebellions in the American south such as Nat Turners rebellion in Virginia. In the south, slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike feared that the north was fomenting these rebellions and that there was a very real possibility that they might be murdered in their beds by another Nat Turner. John Brown’s explicit reason for raiding Harper’s Ferry was to seize the arsenal and arm the slaves. So you can see how this would strike fear into the hearts of southerners. It didn’t help matters that, even though the raid was put down by US troops and John Brown was tried and hung, a very vocal minority of abolitionists in the North actually supported John Brown.

    Now comes the 1860 election, and Abraham Lincoln, a known anti-slavery man, nominated by a party that owed its very existence to abolitionism, gets elected without a single electoral vote from the slave holding states.

    That election is why the states of the deep south decided they were better off outside the Union than in it.

    Now, understand this: I personally, believe that the southern states had every *legal* right to secede. The Constitution did not explicitly forbid it and indeed, up until then everyone both north and south considered the union to be a federation of sovereign states. (That’s why we call them states and not provinces.) A lot of prominent southerners such as Robert E. Lee and Sam Houston thought it was a great mistake to leave the union. Most of the non-slave holding southerners didn’t really care one way or the other.

    So the deed was done, and starting with South Carolina, seven of them then seceded.

    Once those seven states seceded, the general opinion of the population in the north was mostly “good riddance”.

    (Don’t believe me? All you have to do is read primary sources from that time. Of course, not everyone felt that way, but a sizable number certainly did.)

    Which brings us to Ft. Sumter and my comment above. Even though I believe any state has the right to seceed, what they did NOT have the right to do, was to initiate violence against US troops in order to seize legally held federal property.

79. Great discussion, folks! I’ve talked to people who know the Civil War and my place is on the sidelines.

    That said, I do recall the section in Ken Burns’ “The Civil War” which argued movingly that slavery was an important motive for the North based on soldiers’ letters.

    OT: How does Burns’ “Civil War” hold up? I was fairly horrified by his doco on jazz.

    Even more OT, last week I saw “Knives Out,” the whodunit extraganza last year. I initially wondered, why is Daniel Craig talking so weird. Then I realized, oh, he’s an Englishman trying to do a mid-Southern accent … badly. Then I wondered, did he practice off Shelby Foote in “The Civil War?”

80. Roy, good summary, but the Haitian revo did not commence in the 1820s, but in 1791- and finished by 1804. 1804 Haiti massacre. Yes,the South did fear a repeat of Haiti.

81. Damnit I a getting a bit tired of this national bickering, slavery was wrong, every part of it from taking folks out of their homes, transporting them overseas (arguments over packing them in tight with more deaths but arriving with more or loose pack which more arrived alive but less transported), slave auctions which were terrible, breaking up families (I was shown an 1850’s law book from Georgia by a friend who grew up there and it gave the specific ages when children could be sold and status of slave families) the change that occurred in the US South with the introduction of the cotton gin when large gangs of field workers became an economic factor instead of small groups of slaves owned, some trained in trades and skills and cared for somewhat paternally before the early 1800’s. The whole thing was a mess and growing up in the South during segregation we knew it was wrong and needed to change. Black and White bathrooms, white only water fountains, going swimming in a municipal pool with black kids standing outside watching us swim and we knew they had their own waterhole on a creek on the other side of the tracks to the East of town, separate was not very equal and we knew it.

    The kicker was when we started tearing that down in the late 1950’s and by the mid 1960’s where I lived it was mostly gone, no in the deep South but in the middle and Western parts of Texas and Oklahoma it might have been paternalistic but we were working on it. The term I remember was boot strap, give them a hand up, give everyone a fair start and most of the folks I knew were eager to do that. I also think we thought that black folk were just wanting to become like white people but with darker skin and it appears that was not the case, I have had some friends who are black who did well, neighbors, one a doctor another an accountant, a man in my prayer group for years who was a Dallas preacher and even the Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk who was a regular along with a lot of black Dallas professionals in my store (Ron was hanging out in my store in his jeans unwinding the day he lost his election to the US senate) and having said that I have no idea what it feels like to be black and face the challenges in the most advanced nation in the history of the world where the news tells us stories of grief and chaos every damn day.

    I might think that General Longstreet, after the war when he returned to Georgia and became a Republican and tried to help put the pieces back together and was scorned and ostracized by a lot of his townspeople wonder the the same thing, how in the hell do we stop bickering and fix this stuff?

82. I am not good at editing and starting on my 3rd Scotch and water so please forgive my errors, I use my wife as and editor when I send letters.

83. Scotch and water!

    “I never drink water because of the disgusting things fish do in it.” – W. C. Fields

84. I heard that quotation too Rufus from WC Fields but it was a bit more terse and profane.

85. huxley,

    I was very disappointed by Burns’, “Jazz.” In an interview he admitted he knew little of the music or its history before the project. In my opinion he relied way too heavily on Wynton Marsalis. Nothing wrong with choosing Wynton as an expert on jazz, but he should have included others. It overemphasized the trumpet and trumpet players and Louis Armstrong. Armstrong is a HUGE part of jazz, but there were piano players and drummers too. Clarinetists, violinists, saxophonists, trombonists. And singers.

    Piano-wise it was mainly Duke and Ellington. Two absolute geniuses, but so many greats were barely referenced, or not referenced at all. I would guess there was less than 5 minutes total on drumming and drummers. On the saxophone side, Parker got some attention, and I think Coletrane also had a fair amount of coverage, but so many were left out. It seemed like Ragtime and Jewish music were given short shrift.

    I felt like it was a missed opportunity.

86. I watched a replay of Trump’s speech. I liked the message but not the delivery. I know he is very busy, but it didn’t seem like he had practiced much. A lot of weird emphasis, pauses and missing emphasis.

    But I liked the text and the program.

87. In my opinion [Ken Burns] relied way too heavily on Wynton Marsalis. Nothing wrong with choosing Wynton as an expert on jazz, but he should have included others.

    Rufus T. Firefly: I daresay you know jazz better than I, but … yeah.

    As I understand it from more senior jazz guys, in the 2000s there was a jazz civil war between the pro-Wynton and anti-Wynton contingents that involved high-flamage.

    My route into jazz was 70s fusion, which I loved, and I noticed that Burns/Wynton simply left that out as though jazz had been frozen in suspended animation until some black players emerged to play the true black jazz again. There really seemed to be a racial element in the Wynton vision of jazz.

88. huxley,

    I agree that fusion was not given much attention. I think Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea and Miles Davis were shown briefly* during their fusion periods, but that was about it. It did seem overly racially tinged also. Paul Whiteman was featured as a sort of joke, but so many greats were overlooked. I also thought it under emphasized great Jewish players.

    *It’s been years since I watched. I was really excited it was made and watched each episode when originally broadcast, but was so disappointed by the end I have never rewatched it.

89. I won’t weigh into the War Between the Commenters, but I did have a small contribution to the topic of the conscription (or the volunteering) of new immigrants in the North.
    At one of my annual Welsh heritage conventions, I wrote a poem about one such soldier, riffing on Glen Campbell’s “Galveston,” and set it to the tune of a hymn called “Calon Lan.”
    (You can hear the hymn at almost any rugby match in the UK where a Welsh team is playing. I put the chorus after every other verse, otherwise it becomes an interminable performance.)

    The song also speaks to one of the facets of Neo’s post about NYC, and how much she misses her hometown, even after being gone many years, and not really wanting to live there again. The Welsh word for that kind of deep, lasting homesickness is “hiraeth,” and it figures prominently in songs and poems of immigrants who know they will never even have a chance to go back and visit.

    (The Welsh phrases mean about what you would think they do, but I will decode them below. Some infelicities of phrasing were the result of working in elements of the language course vocabulary, just to show the tutors I was awake.)

    1.O Carmarthen, how I miss you,
    as I walk the sand alone.
    I am fighting for the Union
    of a land that’s not my own.

    2.Galveston is where I’m stationed
    on a ship that rides the sea,
    keeping safe this island harbor,
    for the cause of liberty.

    O, fy ‘nghariad, how I miss you,
    fighting on this distant shore.
    I can see the seagulls flying,
    and I love you more and more.

    3.As a young and foolish bachgen,
    I had started out to roam,
    trading all I once had treasured
    when I left my love and home.

    4.For I miss the hills and valleys,
    and the mountains crowned with snow;
    and in dreams I walk the green fields
    of the leeks we used to grow.

    O, fy ‘nghariad, how I miss you,
    sleeping on this distant shore.
    I can see the seagulls flying,
    and I love you more and more.

    5. How I miss the Picau ar y Maen
    that fy mam i baked each day,
    full of currants scattered thickly
    like the shells along this bay.

    6.How I miss my darling sweetheart,
    miss her dear hand on my arm,
    when we’d share a hot Caws Pobi
    in the kitchen at our farm.

    O, fy ‘nghariad, how I miss you,
    starving on this distant shore.
    I can see the seagulls flying,
    and I love you more and more.

    * * *
    fy ‘nghariad – my dear one
    bachgen – boy
    Picau ar y Maen – currant-filled griddle cakes, between a scone and a pancake
    fy mam i – my mother
    Caws Pobi – baked cheese

90. Art Deco: I’m pretty sure there was more than one Randian who showed up, but there was one who dominated and persisted. I don’t remember any specifics now except the smug “if you were really thinking you would see that I’m right” attitude.

    huxley & Rufus T: the person I know who is most knowledgeable about jazz had criticisms of the Burns documentary similar to yours, RT, and similarly laid part of the blame on Marsalis. Personally I enjoyed it but I’m a relatively casual fan.

    huxley: as it happens I watched Knives Out last night and was astonished at the awfulness of Craig’s accent. So astonished that I wondered if it was intended to be a joke of some kind. That kind of absurdity used to be the norm for actors, American or British, doing southern accents, but in recent years (the last 20-25 maybe) they’ve gotten much better, and some of the Brits are absolutely astonishingly accurate, not only in southern but all American accents. Case in point: Miranda Richardson in The Apostle (1997). While watching it I didn’t know who the actress was and thought “I can tell she’s really from the South” (which I am). I was almost stunned when I saw the credits. So I don’t accept “oh well, he’s English” as an excuse for Craig.

    For fans of The Wire: did you know that McNulty and Stringer Bell are both played by Brits? Never crossed my mind that they were not (excuse the phrase) native Americans.

91. I watched Knives Out last night and was astonished at the awfulness of Craig’s accent. So astonished that I wondered if it was intended to be a joke of some kind.

    Mac: Maybe he was going for a Belgian-Southern accent after Hercule Poirot? Your guess is as good as mine. It was awful, though.

    You’re quite right that Brits generally do a bang-up job on American accents these days. I think of Hugh Laurie on “House” and Charles Hunnam on “Sons of Anarchy.”

    Here’s a Miranda Richardson “YouTube” discussing her accent work on “The Apostle.” She speaks of Robert Duvall with deep admiration. I’ll have to see that one again.

    “Miranda Richardson on Perfecting Accents”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RcfHpEtub0

    Going in the other direction, my Irish friend tells me he was stunned by Jon Voight’s accent in “The General,” where Voight played a Dublin police inspector on the track of a crime boss. My friend said Voight got the accent right — down to the Dublin neighborhood and class.

    I can’t think of any non-Southern American actors who do good Southern accents, especially a New Orleans accent. (Kevin Costner in “JFK” — brr!) There must be some.

92. huxley: I can think of one right off, though I can’t remember her name. It’s in a tv (or “tv”–it’s on Netflix) series called Ozark. The young woman who plays Ruth. There have been three seasons of it, and she’s gotten better and better. Her accent was a bit shaky at first, but it’s fairly close to perfect now. She’s a New Yorker, I think…let me look her up…Julia Garner. New Yorker and Jewish, about as far away as you can get from the character she plays, a lower-class (to put it politely) girl from a criminal family in the Ozarks.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Garner

    Thanks for the Miranda Richardson link. I’ll have to wait till tomorrow to watch it.

93. “especially a New Orleans accent”
    I’ve met a few people born and raised in New Orleans.
    No accent.
    Not Cajun. Not Southern.

    Have I met outliers?

94. Back to the statues: there is a reason for the seeming irrationality of targeting monuments to abolitionists and black soldiers along with the usual Confederates.

    https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2020/07/03/no-theyre-not-stupid-why-leftists-destroyed-a-statue-of-an-elk-in-portland-n603513

    In the first place, the rioters aren’t really out to bring about a societal repudiation of “racism” or “white supremacy” at all. That’s just a pretext. If they were, they wouldn’t have gone after Grant and Lincoln, and they didn’t go after them because they were too miseducated and propagandized to know better. What the rioters want to do is the very definition of terrorism: to strike fear into the hearts of a population so that its entire existence is consumed by it, and it becomes paralyzed, unable to act even in its own defense.

    Antifa and Black Lives Matter are terrorists not just because they are open Marxists who want to destroy the United States as a free republic and establish an authoritarian socialist state in its place; they’re also terrorists because terror is one of their principal tactics. They want to make you afraid. They want to make you think the ground is unsteady beneath your feet, that the old order is crumbling, and that they represent the new, energized vanguard, or what another terrorist, Osama bin Laden, called “the strong horse.” They also want to make you think that at any moment, you yourself could be targeted and destroyed, even if you’re as innocent of wrongthink and unacceptable political opinions as the Portland elk.

    In that, they emulate every Marxist state that has ever existed.

    No one is safe from the targeting, and there is no statute of limitations, or allowance for different eras, or for reasonable differences of opinion, or (in some cases) for being correct.

    https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2020/07/03/865989/

    Boeing Embraces the Cancel Culture By Firing a Senior Executive For a 33-Year-Old Article

    In 1987, for those of you who majored in gender studies that was 33 years ago, a Navy lieutenant and fighter pilot named Niel (that is not a typo) Golightly wrote an article for Proceedings of the US Naval Institute, the professional journal of the US Navy, called No Right to Fight. The thesis being that women have no right to serve in combat units and the very fact that they are there, regardless of ability, is detrimental.
    …
    Fast forward to today. Niel Golightly is Boeing’s senior vice president of communications. Or was. Some nasty little SJW inside of Boeing complained about the article to Boeing’s Karens and Golightly was kicked to the curb after writing a self-abasing apology that would have done proud any denizen of a Khmer Rough reeducation camp:
    …
    If [Boeing President] Calhoun had any respect for Golightly or Boeing, he would have said “this is bullsh**” and fired the useless twit who made the complaint and anyone else who’d taken it seriously. He would have issued a public statement about how this was not how the game was played in Boeing and served notice that crap like this would be much more likely to result in HR and a couple of security goons visiting your cubicle than it would in anything else.

    But he didn’t. And the damage Calhoun did here will ripple throughout corporate America. Boeing has identified itself as an easy mark for the most ridiculous of complaints and that will be noticed everywhere. Letters to the editor from college newspapers will be dredged up. Sins of wrongthink will be revealed. And the watch word will be that “Boeing fired Golightly for this, if we don’t do what they did have we created a hostile work environment?”

    One thing I have noticed is that in most, if not all, of these cancellings, the accused have apologized and groveled, and been fired anyway.
    So why do they continue to apologize and grovel?
    At least get fired for standing up for yourself and your beliefs!

    I have no idea who Terry Crews is, but he has grit.

    https://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortneyobrien/2020/06/09/terry-crews-tweets-n2570298?utm_campaign=inarticle

    A few days after football star Drew Brees distanced himself from his sincere remarks about the American flag because critics called him a racist, actor Terry Crews finds himself on the receiving end of the same cancel culturalists (not a Merriam-Webster approved term). This weekend, Crews shared a beautiful sentiment on Twitter: That white and black Americans should actually work together to defeat hatred.

    “Defeating White supremacy without White people creates Black supremacy,” Crews wrote. “Equality is the truth. Like it or not, we are all in this together.”
    …
    Unlike Brees, Crews is standing his ground. He has not deleted his original statement. In fact, he’s since reiterated his message several times and shamed those who were trying to put words in his mouth or misinterpreting him. Or calling him foul names.
    …
    “Please know that everything I’ve said comes from a spirit of love and reconciliation, for the Black community first, then the world as a whole, in hopes to see a better future for Black people,” Crews adds. “I believe it is important we not suffer from groupthink, and we keep minds of our own, and be allowed to ask difficult questions to each other. I believe this dialogue is important as we get through this trauma together. I love you.”

    https://www.redstate.com/alexparker/2020/07/05/terry-crews-die-on-this-hill-unite-good-people-no-matter-race/

    …
    Here’s Crews on Independence Day:

    “Are all white people bad? No. Are all black people good? No. Knowing this reality — I stand on my decision to unite with good people, no matter the race, creed or ideology. Given the number of threats against this decision — I also decide to die on this hill.”

95. Several pundits have noted that President Trump’s speech was, for the most part, hitherto standard fare for Independence Day celebrations.
    Another reminder that it’s not what you say, but who you are.
    https://libertyunyielding.com/2020/07/03/media-hammer-trump-for-speaking-at-mt-rushmore-just-one-problem/

    Just one problem with CNN’s censure of Trump for choosing such a “racist” location for his pre-July Fourth speech. His predecessor, Barack Obama, held a campaign event at Mt. Rushmore himself in 2008 and planned to give a Fourth of July speech there during his presidency but had to rethink the event because of forest fire threats in the area. Interesting that the “Facts first” network didn’t think to call him out for the same offenses.

    We are at a point where what he said, needs to be said.
    https://libertyunyielding.com/2020/07/04/july-4-2020-trump-and-the-crisis/

    No matter what rubric they maraud under – religion, ideology, economics, fantasy narratives woven around claims of science – the promise of America was to shield us from parties getting the armed state on their side and breaking windows into our souls.

    In America, the purpose of law is to restrain the state in its dealings with the people. The purpose of government – it says so right there in the Declaration of Independence – is to secure our rights.

    We cannot be America if our rights are not secure and the state is unrestrained. We will have no shelter, and no one on earth will have shelter, from destructive, vindictive conflict that cuts with a two-edged sword through bone and sinew, and divides soul and spirit.

    In that existential conflict, President Trump is the only big gun we’ve got firing. He’s delivering round after round and hitting the target. If he didn’t say what needs to be said, no one would be heard saying it.

    But he does say it. He said it Friday night, 3 July, 2020. Nothing honors the legacy of 1776 like speaking the truth about the conflict we are in: a conflict not with people who express political thoughts through banners and vigils, but with people who seek political power by breaking public order, breaking public institutions, and breaking windows into our souls.

    If Trump’s critics had their way, the America of the 1776 commitment would be seeking compromise with hostile fringe groups that literally want to destroy and negate that commitment. We’d be trying to meet those who want to kill everything we hold dear “halfway.”

    But that’s not our mission. These are the conflicts America is appointed to win. These conflicts are what America is for. America needs to remember that, and navigate accordingly. Trump expressed that on Friday night at Mount Rushmore, by outlining, in effect, his philosophy for prosecuting this conflict.

    We win. They lose.

    Has America always delivered on that promise?
    Of course not.
    But it’s the first country in history, and still nearly the only one, to at least put the promise out as a goal and try to achieve it; in slow and lumbering steps, yes, but moving that direction nonetheless (despite the efforts of Democrats, such as Woodrow Wilson, to take two steps back for each step forward).

    The alternative to Trump as President is Biden and the Democrats, at which point America will become a national experiment in the CHAZ/CHOP variety of “liberty, equality, community” (fraternity is sexist donchaknow).

    And we all know how that turned out.
    https://www.redstate.com/alexparker/2020/06/27/joe-rogan-chaz-chop-hypocrites-became-what-they-hated/

    Personally, I wanted to see the experiment continue, so those who established it could find they’d only invented America: The Prequel.

    Here’s what I mean: Immediately, they had domiciles (tents), borders (barriers), government (overlord Raz Simone), and police (an armed security force).

    Reportedly, they were checking people’s identity before they were allowed in.

    And despite a commune-style approach, these are Americans; they only understand American ways.

    How long before someone says, “Hey, this is my tent. You can’t graffiti it”? Boom — private property rights.

    And if they were left to grow their own food, how long before people wanted to keep that which they grew for themselves?

    Or how about this scenario: It’s determined that some citizens grow food better — or grow better food — than others; those individuals realize their food is in demand, and they trade their offerings for goods or services which they need.

    Before long, you’ve got a currency system.

    Take every component of their newfangled society and let it evolve; in the end, you have America again.

    And you have — perhaps — a group of people who now understand why modern society exists. We got here via progress.

    Of course, CHAZ couldn’t continue, because the property wasn’t theirs — they took it over like imperialists I’ve heard of before.

    Perhaps they can restart somewhere else — I hear the desert’s nice this time of year. Maybe they give real autonomy a try, which never occurred despite their original jazzy acronym.

    On Thursday, the great Joe Rogan had thoughts on the formerly occupied zone.

    According to Joe, the revolutionaries became everything they hated:

    Those who don’t know history (and most of the last two generations do not, because their elders falsified everything they were taught) are not only doomed to repeat it, but they don’t even understand what they are repeating and why.

96. Doc Zero, connecting the dots:
    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1279026100526624769.html

    The Left is only interested in “democracy” when it gets what it wants. Otherwise, it will do everything it can to subvert the democratic process, forcibly re-engineer the electorate until it votes how the Left wants, or use non-government power to achieve its objectives.

    If the Left can’t win a vote to make something it hates illegal, or the Constitution stands firmly in its way, then it will go around the law to make it impossible to exercise a right you still technically possess, while mocking you for worrying about losing what it’s taking.

    The inexorable destruction of America’s free speech rights is the paramount example. Sure, you’re technically “free” to speak – but you’ll be banned, blacklisted, hounded, threatened, and possibly fired from your job if you break the Left’s ever-changing speech codes.
    …
    If the “will of the people” doesn’t agree with what the Left wants, then the people’s will must be changed BY FORCE until resistance has been eroded, or a means of going around the people to impose left-wing ideas against their will must be devised.
    …
    For all its blathering about the evils of capitalism and money, the Left is keenly aware that the best way to get less of something is to make it more expensive. That’s what all of these totalitarian strategies have in common: they raise the cost of doing whatever the Left hates.

    Sure, you can still speak – but if you’re not “woke,” your speech is WAY more expensive. It might cost you your job, your peace of mind, your ability to use the Internet as freely as committed lefties do. Now, are you absolutely certain you want to speak up and pay that price?

    That’s what they’ll do to the police. They’ll raise the cost of police work until no one wants to do it. Look at the crusade against qualified immunity. How many arrests do you think cops will make when every bust could cost them every penny their families have in the bank?

    Too many of us looked at the “Ferguson effect” – reduced policing in crime-riddled minority communities after the riots – and thought it was an unexpected consequence that would teach the Left a lesson. No, it was a SUCCESS for them. It showed them how to abolish the police.

    They looked at those turbulent final Obama years and saw a brilliant strategy to get what they really want: the elimination of police protection for the middle class. This is ALL about class warfare, and the Left wants to eliminate middle-class prosperity and security.
    …
    The hard Left is very, very serious about abolishing the police as we know them today. They can’t persuade the public, so the public will be coerced. You’ll never be given a chance to vote against what’s coming, and you’ll be denounced as paranoid for warning against it. /end

    Addendum: And just as I typed that last Tweet, I saw this from @MrAndyNgo.

    “The stated goal [of Antifa rioters] is to deplete the city of resources so the police are defunded.”

    The strategy I described is well under way.

97. Rufus: Duke AND Ellington????????

98. “…history lesson…”
    A phenomenal, fascinating, comprehensive and timely article on Lincoln predicated as a review of two recent books on the 16th president, but which is much, much more. Extraordinary and invaluable.
    https://newcriterion.com/issues/2014/12/abraham-lincoln-american-prophet
    H/T Powerline blog.

99. We agree with the general spirit but cringe at the MLK ritual:
    https://posttenuretourettes.wordpress.com/2017/11/05/pathetic-spectacle/

100. Mac: I’ve heard good things about “Ozark” and mean to watch it when it becomes available free on Amazon. (Sadly today’s America is divided into the NetFlix and Amazon camps.)
     _________________________________

     JimNorCal: No New Orleans accent? Maybe things have changed since I lived there in the 70s.

     A classic tell is “aks” instead of “ask” as in the New Orleans de facto anthem:

     I went on down to the Audubon Zoo
     An’ dey all aksed for you.

     –The Meters, “They All Aks’d for You”
     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSZzsWRx_IE

     I’ve heard whites say “aks” too. I ran into a theory that since New Orleans is a port some Brooklynese drifted down there.

     Of course another problem is that there is not one New Orleans accent but several. I never worked it all out.

101. FOAF,

     “Duke and Basie!” Yikes, that’s one of the most boneheaded misprints in blog history. Thanks for pointing out my numbskullery.

102. huxley,

     There was a joke in Chicago when Michael Jordan began to dominate the Bulls and the NBA. For several years it was rumored that Jordan did not like Bulls coach, Doug Collins, who was fired at the end of the ’89 season, despite coaching well by most critics’ opinions.

     The joke goes like this:
     After losing to the Detroit Pistons a reporter asks Jordan why the Bulls hadn’t won the Eastern Conference final. Jordan replies, “Go aks Doug Collins!”

103. AesopFan…re Boeing and Niel Golightly: if there is anyone who didn’t have an excuse for giving in to the mob, it is Boeing CEO David Calhoun. He made a lot of money at GE, then made more while running Nielsen. He is 62 years old; old enough to have missed most of the college indoctrination. He doesn’t need this job; Boeing needs him.

     So what was his motivation? Does he actually believe that Golightly committed an unforgivable heresy? Did he fear rampaging mobs of extreme feminists attacking Boeing, or having the company banned from defense contracts should Dems ever regain control of the government?

     I took a look at the Boeing board of directors, and noticed that Carolyn Kennedy is on it, btw.

104. Continuing on Boeing: One thing I found slightly encouraging is that when this news item appeared on the investment site Seeking Alpha, about 90% of the comments were along the lines of ‘this is crazy.’ And the SA commentariat is by no means universally Republican or pro-Trump.

     So maybe, limits are being reached.

105. Trump’s speech was mostly great – but Trump haters are America haters and Republican haters. Democrat Derangement Syndrome.

     What about Obama’s family?

     Obama’s father was rich from Kenya (former royalty?), none of his relatives were US slaves — were his family ancestors slave owners?
     https://zurukenya.com/tag/kenyan-slave-trade/
     (picture at bottom of freed slaves on a British boat in 1868 – 100 years before Dem riots over LBJ’s Vietnam war)

     I’m still alive – but didn’t read ALL the comments yet.

     On the US civil war, here’s a question few ask or answer.

     How many Americans would have had to die before you thought it was too many to be worth fighting?

     On Vietnam, a similar question could be asked – how many American deaths would you be willing to sacrifice in order to avoid commie Killing Fields and the deaths of 2 million SE Asians?

     One reason Dems hate Nixon, and the Reps, is that he ended the draft – not Dems.

     (ending slavery was great. The death price was too high – 1% or less would be my feeling of about where it is “too many”; also for WW II. Both Germany & Russia lost far more than that, tho. And for occupied France, 2%, maybe 3% is worth fighting to save a way of life.)

106. Tom Grey,

     The thing about war is that you never know the price ahead of time. And, it’s nearly always far higher than anticipated.

107. Tom Grey:

     But surely you know that if we can save one (1) life it (whatever “it” is ) is worth it. And the corollary is that no price is too high to reach the land of the new Soviet man, the utopia of social justice and unicorns. To take your life, that is acceptable, to inconvenience mine, not so much.

108. Tom Grey: Your comment reminds me of a 2006 Bill Whittle piece in which he argued that a single platoon of French soldiers opposing Hitler’s 1936 remilitarization of the Rhineland (which nullified the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Locarno) would have stopped World War II:
     ___________________________________________________

     After World War II, the allies captured the records of the German High Command. I was stunned to discover that the Wehrmacht’s generals were so appalled at Hitler’s decision to test the resolve of the Western Powers (by marching into the demilitarized Rhineland) that they were prepared to remove or even assassinate him should there have been any resistance to the move. They were terrified of finding themselves in another war. Hitler, on the other hand, couched the violation in the same reasonable-sounding terms that Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi would have undoubtedly approved of, and in he went.

     Thus began the most horrible and tragic appeasement in the history of the world.

     According to the Germans’ own records, a platoon of French soldiers, stationed on that bridge and unwilling to retreat (there’s your problem right there) would have caused the overthrow of Adolph Hitler, and the abandonment of his expansionist policies. Why? Because it wouldn’t have paid, that’s why. As it happened, intimidating the West paid handsomely: The Sudetenland, Austria, Czechoslovakia…It was only when the West finally realized the fruits of appeasement that Hitler was stopped. If it had happened much sooner it would have been much easier. If it had happened at the beginning it would have been painless.

     –Bill Whittle, “SEEING THE UNSEEN Part 1”
     http://forthegrandchildren.blogspot.com/2006/11/seeing-unseen-part-1-by-bill-whittle.html

109. Not buying.

110. Obama’s father was rich from Kenya

     In a certain context, perhaps.

111. Tom Grey,

     You can always avoid war by the simple act of surrendering.

     In WWII, most of the combatants on the Allied side were attacked and/or invaded. At what cost do you defend your people from barbarians. The Soviet Union up until 1941 thought they were in a non-aggression agreement with Nazi Germany. They were surprise attacked and very nearly lost the war and their country before the year was over. What would you have had them do?

     What about the US? We were attacked ourselves at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island. I guess we could have just rolled over and let the Japanese Empire go on with their “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere”. But where would that have ended? Australia? San Fransisco? Kansas City?

     Another two fun facts:

     Germany declared war on the USA (December 11 1941) not the other way around.

     And, the single largest ethnic demographic within the US in 1941 was… German! (Do the names Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and Adm. Chester Nimitz mean anything to you?)

     While I believe it is true that FDR wanted us to get into the war before we were attacked, he had to tiptoe around this fact and the fact that up until 12/7/41, most of the country was very much isolationist. We had already had one bad experience in a European war and we didn’t care to have another.

     And the War of Southern Hubris? (Oh excuse me, maybe I should have said the War of Northern Aggression to appease my southern friends.) As was pointed out above, only a very few thought it would last as long or cost as much as it did. Northerners thought their numbers and their industry would quickly put an end to the rebellion. Southerners thought… Well, I’m not sure what Southerners were thinking – maybe that one southern soldier was equal to ten Yankees? At any rate, one of the things that the US Civil War and WWII have in common is that at the very beginning, the battles and casualty rates start out relatively small and gradually build to horrendous numbers toward the end. Compare the battles of 1861 and 1862 with the battles such as Gettysburg and Chickamauga in 1863 and Grants overland campaign in 1864. Now compare the battles of 1940 with battles such as Stalingrad and Okinawa.

112. The thing about war is that you never know the price ahead of time. And, it’s nearly always far higher than anticipated.

     Ray Nathanson: Well said. Furthermore, you can’t know the price of not going to war.

     I was a neocon for the Iraq War, not because I thought it was a great idea, but after 9-11 I thought it was important to foreclose a future where Hussein had nuclear weapons and if we must fight Muslims to do it over there, instead of over here — in general to put radical Muslims on notice that 9-11 wasn’t free.

     We can’t know what the Iraq War prevented, because that’s the way time works, but I remain in staunch disagreement with all those — including repentant neocons — who write off the Iraq War as an entirely stupid mistake.

113. A word about appeasement…

     We, today, have the luxury of looking at the events of the late 30’s with 20/20 hindsight. Some perspective is in order.

     To the people of 1936, when Hitler occupied the Rhineland, the end of the most horrific war in Europe – EVER – was only 18 years in the past. Think about that for a moment. That is closer to them then, than 9/11 is to us today. Put yourself in the shoes of someone such as PM Neville Chamberlain. Would you want to avoid a repeat of that disaster? At what cost? Also add the fact that the ultimate evil of Hitler and the Nazi regime was mostly unknown to the people of that time.

     The fact is, the Munich agreement of 1938 was for the most part approved of by the British and French people. (Churchill was a voice crying in the wilderness at that time.)

     Of course, we all know now that appeasement didn’t work. I don’t think it ever works, but they were willing to try nearly anything to avoid another European war within just one generation.

     Unfortunately, I also think we are seeing a repeat of this same appeasement with our own home-grown BLM and Antifa barbarians. Our mostly feckless city and corporate leaders are trying to appease them in order to avoid the costs of putting them down. In the end, just like CW-1 and WWII, it is going to cost a lot more in the long run.

114. I took a look at the Boeing board of directors, and noticed that Carolyn Kennedy is on it, btw.

     A lapsed museum curator whose history of commercial employment is nil. Worst ruling class in history.

115. Huxley, I agree with you. Well said.

     I had my own misgivings about the Iraq war, but, like you, I also thought that after 9/11 it was important for us to put down at least one of those radical terrorist-supporting regimes in the middle east.

116. “…Carolyn Kennedy is on it…”

     Is anyone else but me getting heartily tired of the entire Kennedy clan?

     I was 6 when JFK was elected. My entire family of Irish Catholics celebrated his win. Now, 60 years later, most all of us – including my 90yo mother – are sick of their sh!t and wish they would all just go away.

117. huxley: I watched the Miranda Richardson clip. Fascinating, thank you.

     I wouldn’t unreservedly recommend Ozark. It’s pretty good, if you like crime dramas with a fairly sensational bent (pretty violent, in other words). I suspect it’s meant for the people who liked Breaking Bad (though it’s not as good) in that it involves a guy (and soon his whole family) who gets involved in crime and is drawn deeper and deeper. In this case it’s money laundering, not drug manufacturing.

     Here is a brief sample of Julia Garner as Ruth Langmore (bad language):

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J8A9ZiIeUQ

     I think there’s one misstep there, accent-wise: it should be “cain’t” as in “ain’t” not “can’t” as in “tin can.”

     And here’s Ruth unleashed, four minutes worth of “iconic lines”–expletive-laden meanness and bravado:

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdYDaWesCNE

118. Roy….Rhineland occupation in 1936. France and Britain were then much stronger militarily than was Germany. When the then-prime-minister of France asked for military options, chief of staff Gamelin told him that the only plan was the one for full mobilization: massive call-up, requisitioning of civilian vehicles, etc. Unwilling to disrupt the country and the economy to that extent, the French government just let the incursion happen.

     (My source on this is Andre Beaufre, later a general but then a young captain on the French general staff)

     An interesting example of reliance on experts: another leader, a Churchill or a Georges Mandel, would have dug into the details and quickly established a forceful but less-all-encompassing military response.

119. Kronstadt Take III…

120. Now, 60 years later, most all of us – including my 90yo mother – are sick of their sh!t and wish they would all just go away.

     Most prominent families don’t regenerate their stores of talent sufficiently to keep it up for too many generations. The Rockefellers were head and shoulders above the Kennedys. I’ve read recently that their collective net worth is about $11 bn and none of them have directed any commercial / industrial enterprise of much consequence since David Rockefeller retired a generation ago. I think the number of living descendants of John D. Rockefeller and his brother is now in three digits.

     The Kennedys have been icons to a certain sort of imbecile common only in the Boston media market. Outside of that zone, they do not compete well. That aside, Joseph Kennedy had 28 grandchildren who survived infancy. Two have built professional / business careers for themselves, two run the family real-estate business, and two others landed media jobs for some reason. The rest are NGO functionaries, society wives, and running hobby enterprises. You won’t be hearing from these people for much longer.

121. Incredible to me that so many lessons of 9/11 have vanished from the silly, shallow, self-obsessed little minds of millennials. But, hey, Selfies and mini-stardom rather than critical thinking are the living proof of Dr. Einstein’s prediction of the “Generation of Idiots”.

     History has taught us over and over and over: ‘Weakness is Provocative.”

     The Lefty Doofus who easily threw his white vastly helpful grandmother under the bus with his spiritual advisor Marxist Reverend Jeremiah Wright & many others, paused briefly and then ABANDONDED the hard won Victory that President Bush handed him with a fledgling republic developing and peace and purple fingers emerging. Obama deserted what he’d been handed and chaos on steroids filled the vacuum.

     VTC=
     Vast Testicular Concavity
     = Barack Obama.

122. At bit late to the Civil War discussion but a fitting coda. From the Conclusion of U.S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs

     CONCLUSION

     The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United Status will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that “A state half slave and half free cannot exist.” All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.

     Slavery was an institution that required unusual guarantees for its security wherever it existed; and in a country like ours where the larger portion of it was free territory inhabited by an intelligent and well-to-do population, the people would naturally have but little sympathy with demands upon them for its protection. Hence the people of the South were dependent upon keeping control of the general government to secure the perpetuation of their favorite institution. They were enabled to maintain this control long after the States where slavery existed had ceased to have the controlling power, through the assistance they received from odd men here and there throughout the Northern States. They saw their power waning, and this led them to encroach upon the prerogatives and independence of the Northern States by enacting such laws as the Fugitive Slave Law. By this law every Northern man was obliged, when properly summoned, to turn out and help apprehend the runaway slave of a Southern man. Northern marshals became slave-catchers, and Northern courts had to contribute to the support and protection of the institution.

     This was a degradation which the North would not permit any longer than until they could get the power to expunge such laws from the statute books. Prior to the time of these encroachments the great majority of the people of the North had no particular quarrel with slavery, so long as they were not forced to have it themselves. But they were not willing to play the role of police for the South in the protection of this particular institution.

     In the early days of the country, before we had railroads, telegraphs and steamboats—in a word, rapid transit of any sort—the States were each almost a separate nationality. At that time the subject of slavery caused but little or no disturbance to the public mind. But the country grew, rapid transit was established, and trade and commerce between the States got to be so much greater than before, that the power of the National government became more felt and recognized and, therefore, had to be enlisted in the cause of this institution.

     It is probably well that we had the war when we did. We are better off now than we would have been without it, and have made more rapid progress than we otherwise should have made. The civilized nations of Europe have been stimulated into unusual activity, so that commerce, trade, travel, and thorough acquaintance among people of different nationalities, has become common; whereas, before, it was but the few who had ever had the privilege of going beyond the limits of their own country or who knew anything about other people. Then, too, our republican institutions were regarded as experiments up to the breaking out of the rebellion, and monarchical Europe generally believed that our republic was a rope of sand that would part the moment the slightest strain was brought upon it. Now it has shown itself capable of dealing with one of the greatest wars that was ever made, and our people have proven themselves to be the most formidable in war of any nationality.

     But this war was a fearful lesson, and should teach us the necessity of avoiding wars in the future.

123. paused briefly and then ABANDONDED the hard won Victory that President Bush handed him with a fledgling republic developing and peace and purple fingers emerging. Obama deserted what he’d been handed and chaos on steroids filled the vacuum.

     The monthly civilian death toll in Iraq is now running about half of what it was during the interval between the Surge and the rise of ISIS. Iraq is less chaotic than it has been at any time in the last 17 years.

124. “…trying to appease them…”

     Um, no actually, they’re encouraging them—no, not “trying” to encourage them, but ACTUALLY encouraging them. As in egging them on. As in providing funds to get them out on bail (should they even be arrested). As in looking the other way while insisting that they’re “mostly peaceful”—whatever that means—protesters. As in refusing Federal assistance to defend their cities. As in warning Trump NOT to clamp down on America’s legally protected tradition and right of “Protesting”.

     (Well, until their own be it ever so humble little “home sweet homes” are on the line, that is. No “little minds” there, nossir.)

     Why are they doing this?

     Because in their infinite (well, infinitely depraved) wisdom, they are certain that it’s good politics, that it’s pragmatic, that it will put them in the driver’s seat. And that it will finally make their nemesis—that ogre that has so far been able to defy them, to withstand their impressive tantrums, to ignore their infantile carping, that orangutan in the White House—a genuine endangered species.

     So they believe.

     And so the echo chamber they’ve created, embellished and reinforced, shrieks and howls so that they can’t hear anything else (not that they want to).
     – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
     “…Obama deserted what he’d been handed…”

     That’s not quite it. Such a formulation would deny Obama the agency that he so clearly deserves. And wants. That is, he didn’t “desert” anything: he very carefully and assiduously set about to fundamentally transform it. Transmutate it. Transmogrify it.

     Destroy it.

     (Gotta give credit where credit is due…)

125. Presuming the militarization of the Rhineland had been successfully carried off–whether it was one platoon or a week’s fighting or something in between….
     What would history profs call it today? Sordid struggle for markets? Mean-spirited victor’s vengeance? Military industrial complex? Aggression and conquest? Nobody would, of course, know what we missed.
     Which brings up a question of how many similar “operations” big or small are you willing to accept if you thought one of them, but not which one, would prevent WW III?

126. BarryM & ArtDeco:

     Sorry, amigos. Nope, Barack
     ABANDONED & RETREATED from the growing republic he’d been handed. Elections, millions of purple fingers of men and WOMEN at voting places, Marsh Arabs’ sacred land restored by American engineers, dozens of schools opened, dozens of newspapers blooming, all with American Strength for backup. Ya know, like post-war Germany, Japan and South Korea.

     Oh, and fewer Americans being killed than in VTC’s Chicago.

127. Richard Aubrey…”Presuming the militarization of the Rhineland had been successfully carried off–whether it was one platoon or a week’s fighting or something in between….What would history profs call it today? Sordid struggle for markets? Mean-spirited victor’s vengeance? Military industrial complex? Aggression and conquest? Nobody would, of course, know what we missed.”

     Assuming you mean presuming the militarization of the Rhineland (by Germany) had been *stopped* by French and/or British military action…that quite likely would have been the historical portrayal.

     General Beaufre said that one of the concerns advanced by the French & British politicians was that any military action would be regarded by neutrals, especially the United States, as aggression. And given the political climate in the US at the time, they probably weren’t wrong about that.

128. Sorry, amigos. Nope, Barack

     You mean “I say it’s spinach”?

     Iraq is quieter now than it was at any time during Bush’s tenure and Iraqi electoral institutions are still in place.

129. About Iraq:

     IIRC a certain Highly Esteemed General and poet of Farsi persuasion has been ululating to the moon (singing in the celestial choir) for a while. That may have something to do with the current state of rest and unrest on Iraq. But I don’t have a statistic at hand. BHO did his best to empower the Iranians, another one of his fundamental transformations, or is that disputed as well?

130. “Of course another problem is that there is not one New Orleans accent but several. I never worked it all out.” -huxley

     There is no Professor Higgins in American, alas.

131. “f there is anyone who didn’t have an excuse for giving in to the mob, it is Boeing CEO David Calhoun.” – David Foster

     I honestly don’t know what motivates most of the supposedly accomplished, smart, certainly rich, Leaders of Industry who don’t have any integrity or intestinal fortitude.
     My feeling is that, if they would give the same resistance as Hillsdale College, or Jordan Peterson, they would find that the mobs would go after easier prey.
     Interesting about the investors — maybe they see the same trend as Neo points out in today’s Biden post: Democrats and their allies are not good for the economy.

132. “An interesting example of reliance on experts” – David Foster

     So, experts in the old days are no better than experts today?
     “But it’s the very best model,” cried the Disease Establishment, ignoring any evidence to the contrary.

     A certain amount of silo-age (and not a little silage) seems to be involved, or as it’s sometimes called, the hammer-nail mindset.

     IIRC, WWI was stumbled into in much the say way, by generals and politicians who couldn’t look outside their own narrow interests or fields of expertise.
     “We’ve already started the mobilization, we can’t stop it now!”

133. BTW, since Vox showed up in the diet post, I thought I would see what they thought of Trump’s speech. You will be shocked to learn they didn’t like it.
     What most interested me, aside for the familiar boiler-plate spin, was the actual refinition of “fascist” to make their point that Trump was a meaning going after, um, non-fascist elements of the Left.

     https://www.vox.com/2020/7/5/21313762/trump-mount-rushmore-speech-independence-day

     It should be noted that Trump’s claims of the existence of “far-left fascism” are fundamentally incoherent: Fascism is a right-wing form of ultranationalism calling for a rebirth of a nation or race, and has nothing to do with liberal and left-wing calls for an end to police brutality and racism. But that didn’t stop Trump from making it the central message of his speeches, which aimed to sensationalize the issue of protests and statue-toppling.

     That comes straight out of Wikipedia, also not a surprise these day.
     But notice what Vox clipped at the end of the definition.

     “Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, as well as strong regimentation of society and of the economy which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe.”

134. Democrats can be accurately called “Liberal Fascists”, as J. Goldberg, a Never Trumper. Too bad — it could become a good name for it, a good phrase, but since he seems to hate Trump so much, Trump supporters won’t use it as much as they could.

     I’m wondering if Kanye West will be willing to call the Dems the KKK Party?
     If he really does run, seriously, Trump wins easily. He has to get “on the ballot”, and Libertarians & Greens know how hard that is to do. But he’s rich and famous and black — so it might be a lot easier for him.

     The racist Dems will hate it. He can also call the black Dem politicians “Uncle Toms”, supporting the racist KKK party that burns down Black businesses in KKK dominated cities.

135. ArtDeco:
     Really…? Seriously…?

     Uuuuummmm… What did I say about Iraq NOW…?! Nuttin’.
     But,it sure as hell isn’t due to Obama. The ISIS butchers have been seriously diminished, reduced, bloodied since January 20, 2017. And Iran has been sent a very clear message that there’s no longer a Wimpy Appeasement Fool in the White House. (*Any doubt that the Dems are just drooling to restore wishful thinking and Appeasement to that House?*)

     om: Happily, you ‘Get It’. Thanks for your comment.

136. Uuuuummmm… What did I say about Iraq NOW…?! Nuttin’.

     You’re contending that Iraq in 2009 was in fantastic shape and BO ruined everything. Not true, and not true without qualifications.

     But,it sure as hell isn’t due to Obama.

     I never suggested it was. I pointed out that you’ve misrepresented Iraq’s condition. George W. Bush had great success with the surge program, but it still left Iraq in a state where it was suffering about 4,000 civilian deaths per year (heavily concentrated in provinces with a critical mass of Sunni Arabs). Then everything went south with ISIS, and Iraq experience several years of violence which approached the 2006 peak. After ISIS was defeated in mid-2017, you’ve had a salutary reduction in violence and if Iraqis are smart and fortunate, that social renorming will continue. Currently, the civilian death toll is running at about 1,800 per year and the intensity of the violence in the southern and Kurdish provinces is low enough that the pound-for-pound analogue is Ulster during the period running from 1977-99 (IOW, these areas have a terrorism problem, but not a full-blown insurrection). And, again, Iraq’s electoral institutions are still in place. (Elections in Iraq are much cleaner and more competitive than they were during the period running from 1922 to 1958).

137. ArtDeco: We’re maybe talking across each other. Look for the numbers of American Occupation force deaths in ’06, ’07, ’08 until BHO abandonded what President Bush handed him.

138. Oh, ’09 & ’10…also. Up until BHO’s Retreat and …See’ya!!

139. I have no hesitation in saying that invading Iraq was an absolutely brilliant strategic idea. (As an aside, it must be remembered that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was official U.S. policy, enacted into law in the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998.) A justified invasion and occupation of Iraq with 160,000 “coalition” troops, right at the heart of the Middle East, right next to Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and the Persian Gulf would have solved a great many problems. However, I could tell that the plan started going south when the massacre of the contractors in Fallujah occurred, and we did nothing. What should have happened, of course, was that Fallujah should have been surrounded and the elders told to deliver the murderers or be annihilated — and level the city if they failed to do just that. That would have cost lives then, but saved many later. (That was the COIN strategy of one of the few Westerners ever to successfully control the Middle East — Alexander the Great.) My foreboding was confirmed when I didn’t see “American Military Government” signs going up all over Iraq. We’ve done this before, just dust off the old manuals and follow the instructions.

     Although I remain convinced that it is America’s duty to “pay any price, meet any hardship, bear any burden, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty,” that view is now tempered with the understanding that has been known to military philosophers throughout human history: you should never go to war unless unless you are capable of and unequivocally committed to seeing it through to victory.

140. Yesterday, wandering around Youtube and sampling videos on all sorts of topics, I just happened upon the videos put out by someone who goes by the handle of “Serpentza,” and whose videos are followed by 750,000 people.

     Serpentza is a white native of South Africa who lived in China for something like 15 years, he apparently has native level fluency in Chinese, is married to a Chinese women and has a newborn daughter, and is someone who has been making and uploading videos about China for a dozen years.

     Living in and doing what he admits was deliberately inoffensive, non-political reporting from China, that is, up until a year or so ago, when he and his wife and child had to flee China, because the Chinese Communist Party authorities were waging a campaign of increasing harassment against him and his wife, and he felt that as a foreign videographer—no matter how studiously inoffensive–he was in increasing danger of being arrested, or perhaps even “disappeared.”

     Check out his recent Youtube video with the title, “Is China Our Enemy?”

     This is someone who has real experience of China, and not just the kind of academic knowledge that is, quite often, gathered from afar.

     Given his expertise, his immersion in Chinese society, and his on the ground experience of living in China, his conclusion that the Communist government of China is our mortal enemy should be listened to, and given great weight, as we consider if China—or rather the Chinese Communist Party–is, indeed, our enemy.

     See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj_pcpN9iL4

141. P.S.–Looking at some of the other videos and the subjects covered on Serpentza’s Youtube channel, it seems to me that some of the things he is covering might not be seen by some as being as “inoffensive” as he described them to be, and are, in fact, critical of some aspects of things in China today.

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