‘The South’ will die again – here’s why
Real estate mogul Donald J. Trump likely knew that the violence of this past weekend was likely to happen.
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in May warned that white supremacist groups had already carried out more attacks than any other domestic extremist group over the past 16 years and were likely to carry out more attacks over the next year, according to an intelligence bulletin obtained by Foreign Policy.
Even as President Donald Trump continues to resist calling out white supremacists for violence, federal law enforcement has made clear that it sees these types of domestic extremists as a severe threat. The report, dated May 10, says the FBI and DHS believe that members of the white supremacist movement “likely will continue to pose a threat of lethal violence over the next year.”
The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which attracted hundreds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other members of the so-called alt-right, sparked violent clashes over the weekend. A woman, Heather Heyer, was killed by a car that drove into a crowd of people protesting the rally.
James Alex Fields Jr., the driver of the vehicle that struck Heyer, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder.
Since the outbreak of violence over the weekend, President Trump has been heavily criticized for not condemning racist groups. “We must remember this truth: No matter our color, creed, religion or political party, we are ALL AMERICANS FIRST,” he tweeted.
Capitol Hill Republicans dished out their harshest rebukes since Trump took the oath of office:
“We must be clear,” Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said on Twitter. “White supremacy is repulsive. This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who had slammed Trump’s initial failure to condemn white supremacist groups by name, said the organizers of the event — initially meant as a protest against taking down a Confederate statue — are the only ones deserving of blame.
Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas), who has a black father and white mother, told a story on CNN about how his dad had experienced racism while growing up in Texas. …
GOP Sen. Jerry Moran (Kan.) said that Trump’s remarks were particularly egregious for a sitting president.
Meanwhile, Dixie apologists are now having to confront the awful truth about the violence inherent in the white supremacist movement. They are going through the five stages of grief, and part of the denial stage involves Trumpian both-siderism.
During an interview with Richmond Times Dispatch, Bowling initially said that he was weighing his options after the incident in Charlottesville.
“I’m not saying we’ll call it off. I kind of have to watch and see what goes on,” he explained. “I don’t want to see David Duke at this rally, I don’t want to see Antifa, I don’t want to see Black Lives Matter. I don’t want them there.”
“The last thing we ever would want would be any of these nuts — right or left — coming to Richmond causing trouble,” Bowling added.
Just hours later, Bowling told the paper that he was calling off the rally “due to the potential for violence after Charlottesville, the rally on Sept 16 will not be held.”
The symbols of confederate insurrection, war, institutionalized slavery, and the residual racism left in it wake will continue to be removed. Here’s a fun fact: most of these monuments were erected during the Jim Crow era!
A striking graphic from the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed that the majority of Confederate monuments weren’t erected until after 1900 — decades after the Civil War ended in 1865. Notably, the construction of Confederate monuments peaked in the 1910s and 1920s, when states were enacting Jim Crow laws, and later in the 1950s and 1960s, amid the Civil Rights Movement.
White supremacists may whine that their “heritage” is being “erased” – but refuse to say word one about the fact that the US was founded with slavery as an instution, built on the backs of black slaves, is not the same nation 228 years after the founding slaveholders wrote the Constitution, and the monuments they fetishize are not to their precious ethnicity but to the military traitors who enforced injustice, racism, and bigotry.
Work crews took down four Confederate monuments in Baltimore overnight into Wednesday, days after white nationalists led a deadly protest over the planned removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Monuments to Robert E. Lee, commander of the pro-slavery Confederate army in the American Civil War, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, a Confederate general, were dismantled from the city’s Wyman Park Dell after the city council on Monday approved the removal of four statues, the Baltimore Sun reported.
The Hollywood Forever Cemetery announced plans Tuesday to take down a monument commemorating Confederate veterans after hundreds of activists requested its removal, with some threatening vandalism.
The move comes days after violence erupted at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., over the city’s ordered removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The events triggered a national debate about similar monuments across the country.
Lest we forget: all the white racist’ claims of victimhood of powerlessness, they do in fact have more power than minorities with respect to one of the nation’s most fundamental rights.
Take Virginia. It’s been in court for years over whether its political districts illegally segregated voters by race, overly packing blacks into fewer blue seats and bleaching more than enough red seats to secure majorities.
What about Ohio? It’s going before the Supreme Court this fall for voter purges that targeted blue inner cities but went light on red surrounding suburbs.
And Florida? Its lifetime ban on ex-felons has disenfranchised 1.6 million people, one in five blacks.
As for Tennessee, its Republicans have imposed extra proof of citizenship for new voters and cut back on early voting and stricter voter ID laws to get ballots. All target Democrats, especially non-whites.
This state-by-state list of racist election laws and actions hardly stops there. Brian Kemp, Georgia’s white Republican secretary of state, purged half a million voters. He’s running for governor against the state assembly’s Democratic leader, Stacey Abrams, a black woman. In Indiana, an Indianapolis newspaper just documented that GOP election officials shut down early voting in 2016 in Marion County, its black epicenter, but expanded it in surrounding white suburban counties.
And yes, there are still enormous social obstacles.
Ronald Reagan famously opened his campaign for the presidency at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia and Barry Goldwater hid behind his States Rights beliefs while voting against Civil Rights bills. Northern and western towns and cities also carried on unremitting warfare against black Americans, practicing residential and school discrimination and disregarding police misconduct. When a northerner criticized southern racial practices a southerner asked him to write as well about Boston’s angry protests against integrating their schools. And while the Deep South has in fact changed since W.J. Cash’s 1941 version, far too many Americans, in the Deep South and elsewhere, still treat African American citizens as lesser beings.
Make no mistake: Americans beat the treasonous Confederacy once. The simple mathematics of demography are making our nation more diverse and better. Those fundamental numbers will swamp the paranoiac “white genocide” whiners, neo-Nazis, and modern day Klansman who fetishize the Old South as if it were a good thing. They are keeping the sputtering, cancer-ridden, failing body of its bastard offspring on life support
Rest assured that they won’t succeed.
‘The South’ will die again!
