August 15, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

ODYSSEY OF A SOUTHERN SON:

Allen Armentrout and His Defense of His Heritage

Friends,

There are several excellent Web sites and blog sites that offer valuable information, and historical articles and essays on Southern (and American) culture and heritage, and detailed responses to those I call “adherents of lunacy” who have cut themselves off from the great continuum of Western and Christian civilization and whose hatred of that civilization knows no bounds.

Over the past few years I have mentioned several of these venues where an educated and reasoned defense of Southern heritage (which, in fact, is American heritage) may be found …and I’ve had the honor to have a number of my columns and essays appear in some of them.

Perhaps the “granddaddy” of them all is The Abbeville Institute which publishes well-written and well-researched items on a daily basis [www.abbevilleinstitute.org ]. Abbeville holds a number of superb conferences and seminars throughout the year—I recommend you take a look at their Web site.

Actually, before Abbeville, the LewRockwell site [ www.lewrockwell.com ] would occasionally publish articles about the mounting attacks on the South, its history, and its rich inheritance. And Chronicles magazine (both print and online, published in Rockford, Illinois) has continuously featured Southern writers [www.chroniclesmagazine.org] and taken positions favorable to the South.

Two of the more recent sites are: www.reckonin.com  and www.dissidentmama.net. Both are excellent…more about them a bit later in this column. And I should also add Ilana Mercer’s fine site: www.ilanamercer.com, which features Old Right and pro-Southern essays.

What has become apparent in recent years is that the “official,” national “conservative movement” wants to have as little to do as possible with what we might call “Southern conservatism,” or the defense of the South, these days.

It was not always that way…as those of you above age fifty may recall. In days gone past—during the 1950s, 1960s, into the 1970s, major national conservative journals and publications, including Bill Buckley’s NATIONAL REVIEW, and the intellectual quarterly, MODERN AGE (founded by Russell Kirk)—Southerners, writers and intellects of the caliber of the late Mel Bradford, Andrew Lytle, James McClellan, Wendell Berry, and others were frequently featured in such journals.

But since the takeover of what passes for the “conservative movement” by the Neoconservatives, by the 1990s most “Southern” conservatives (except for the “approved” ones, like Lindsey Graham) had been purged, unceremoniously expelled from “mainstream” (Neo)conservative mastheads and their submitted essays met with a not-so-polite “No thank you.”

The same things occurred with the traditional “Old Right” conservative writers outside the South who had once been featured and praised contributors to those publications (e.g. Paul Gottfried).

Indeed, when is the last time you saw a true Southern conservative—say Clyde Wilson, Don Livingston, or Brion McClanahan—interviewed on Fox News? Or, for that matter Paul Gottfried, or Patrick Buchanan on Fox? The dominant Neoconservatives, with their belief in the imposition of a globalist egalitarianism and their rejection of the original American Founding and its wise constitutionalism, will have none of it.

What the writers for Web sites like Abbeville, Reckonin’, Dissident Mama, and a few others have understood is that their battle for the inheritance and traditions of the South, for understanding and appreciating our history, is not just a struggle for particular “Southern” beliefs and values. Rather, those traditions, that inheritance, and that legacy are representative and integral parts of Western Christian tradition itself: the battle for our culture below the Mason-Dixon Line is not just a regional battle; it is in microcosm a battle—a war—of civilizations, of the 2,000 year Christian culture and heritage and beliefs we have received as a trust to keep and nurture and, then, are to pass on to our heirs—that civilization, against those forces which would pervert it, demolish it, destroy it, and replace it with something emitted from the bowels of Hell, itself.

Today, just a few days after the one year anniversary of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11-12, 2017, I wish to share with you a three part essay by my friend “Dissident Mama,” and I hope you will read it through. It’s a bit long—in three parts—but truly excellent, and, employing the solitary but noble example of one young Southern man, Allen Armentrout, illustrates in so many ways what our traditions and beliefs are all about, indeed, what we are all about. 

Let me recommend that you go directly to Dissident Mama’s Web site to read her three-part essay. There are numerous photographs there (that don’t show up in what I transcribe here), and she uses an MP3 recording of the classic folksong, “Oh, I am A Good Old Rebel,” sung by Braden Harwood, to accompany a portion of her part three (with three additional verses that I composed to update this post-War Between the States song to modern times…I think you’ll like it).   

Dissident Mama may be accessed at:  www.dissidentmama.net

Allen Armentrout, part 1: Southern son

http://www.dissidentmama.net/allen-armentrout-part-1-southern-son/

By Dissident Mama on Friday, August 10, 2018

Editor’s note: I wasn’t sure what to expect when interviewing Allen Armentrout, who launched to brief fame after the above image went viral late last summer. What I found was an intelligent, articulate, kind, and hopeful young man. A pure Southern gentleman, whose “Yes, ma’ams” delighted this ol’ dissident belle.

Raised right, educated in true history, and nourished in the God of the Bible, Armentrout’s also a fearless resistor to the Southern cultural genocide. To me, he serves as a much-needed light in these dark and dangerous times. I hope you will agree.

“So, my son, when in the conflict of life the cloud and the darkness come, stand unflinchingly by your post;
remain faithful to the discharge of your duty.”
— Robert E. Lee

August 15 marks the one-year anniversary of when Allen Armentrout did his duty: honoring General Lee. Defying his youthful 21 years of age, the North Carolina native and lover of Southern heritage stood his ground resolutely and quietly as a seething flash mob gathered around him, hurling the most hurtful and irrational rhetoric at the lone rebel.

The cloud & the darkness

“Terrorist go home!” the rabid crowd of about 30 shrieked with hysterical flair synonymous with today’s intolerant left. “Racist!” screamed one. “Get the fuck out of here!” screeched another. Obscenities, expletives, juvenile chants, and verbal snares filled the totalitarian-tainted air.

“She actually whispered in my ear,” Armentrout told me in my recent two-hour phone interview with him (click here for full audio). The “she” he’s referring to is the black woman seen in this video and the link above.

“It was kinda eerie. I can still hear it. She was like ‘We’re going to find you, chop your body up into tiny pieces, and people aren’t even going to know.'” That’d be peak social justice, I suppose.

The most well-known image from that Tuesday in Charlottesville, Virginia, is at top, a picture in which Lara Rogers, a middle-aged mother of three shoves double-birds in Armentrout’s face. To cultural Marxists, Rogers is considered a “middle-fingered hero,” who’s just resisting “white supremacy.”

But to we non-leftists, Rogers and others in the nihilistic throng are emblematic of exactly why Armentrout was in what I disrespectfully call “the Berkeley of the Blue Ridge.” It’s a place brimming with unhinged tyrants, who claim to defend their homes and values, while they seek to destroy the roots and history of what once made Charlottesville (and the South at large) so great.

They’re Jacobins who resort to vitriol and bully tactics while claiming the moral high ground against a young man who simply wants to defend his hearth and heritage against a fashionable and utterly dangerous cultural genocide. They claim unity, but seek to conquer. The claim victim status, but revel in schadenfreude.

Stand unflinchingly by your post

“I stood there two hours being mocked and brushed up against,” Armentrout explained in his warm Piedmont drawl. “I don’t think you could’ve gotten more verbally assaulting than those people did to me.”

“Can you imagine what they might have done if I didn’t have a gun, if that was how volatile they were with me having a gun?” continued Armentrout, who came to Charlottesville open-carrying an AR-15 on his left shoulder and a holstered .45 handgun on his right hip, wearing a Confederate kepi and jacket, and holding a large Battle Flag.

Simply exercising his God-given and legal right to self-defense threw some emotive apparatchiks into a tizzy, of course. Leftists simply cannot fathom the concept of self-defense because they childishly equate guns with murder.

It also tweaked some of Armentrout’s supporters, who thought the weaponry sent the wrong message, considering the violence that had unfolded in Charlottesville just three days prior. He admitted he almost left the rifle in the trunk of his car.

But with “all this hating on the ARs,” he opted to prove that the maligned gun can be used in a peaceful way and as a deterrent to harm and criminality. “Every time an AR-15’s been put on the news, it’s ‘Oh, it’s killed somebody.’ This time, it’s not going to be that way.”

“People nowadays do not value life,” he added. “How hard do you think it’d be to kill a kid with a Confederate flag at a controversial monument? It’d be nothin’.”

When in the conflict of life

Like a soldier preparing for battle, Armentrout played bagpipe military music through his Bluetooth headset when setting out for Lee Park, the now contentious site where the Confederate general’s monument has been standing since 1924. He geared up and started the trek from his car, which was positioned about a mile away for security measures.

En route, a man brandished a weapon and made veiled threats, and a few cops approached him. Undeterred, Armentrout steadfastly marched onward, weapons visible and flag flying high. Such are the battle lines in this 4th-generation war and Lee Park was the beachhead.

Back in June, the politically correct Charlottesville City Council had voted unanimously to change the park’s name to Emancipation Park, and in February, voted to remove Lee’s statue. (The statue still remains pending lawsuit, but is sometimes cloaked in a tarp.) But the progressives who’ve colonized this once charming mountain town have deemed the statue contemptuous and demand that it must go.

This kind of puritanical purge of all things Southern is one of the many reasons the Unite the Right (UTR) rally had even taken place in city the previous weekend. The 26-feet-high bronze sculpture simply came to represent resistance to the leftist status quo because the Charlottesville barbarians made it so.

The horrific event, as described by my friend who attended the rally, didn’t occur because the city is a “place fractured by racial history and racial wounds,” assert the social-justice shills. The calamity was caused by these very hand-wringers who now cry foul and proved what dissidents of all stripes have been saying all along: we live under anarcho-tyranny.

And the cultural Marxists’ cleansing of Confederate symbols and subsequent celebration of evildoers only proliferated post-UTR, amplifying that ugly reality. In fact, it was the razing of the Confederate veteran statue in Durham by a legion of lunatics which inspired Armentrout to head to Virginia.

“There does come a point where morally what they believe in is completely wrong and threatens my way of life in some cases,” Armentrout said of the Reconstructed masses. “And that’s when you have to stand up for what you believe in.”

Charlottesville is a case study in peak democracy. It’s the bitter pill that there’s an outright state-enforced, media-pushed, corporate-collaborated war against freedom of conscience, civility, and federalism. And Dixie is its emblematic whipping boy.

“It is history that teaches us to hope.”
— Robert E. Lee

“You know why people hate us?” asked Armentrout, who likened the progressive agitators to the cruel ancient Roman emperor Nero. “Because we’re the last beam of hope. We’re the last group of people in the United States who stand up to tyranny” and the monuments are a reminder of that.

“There once was a group of people who said, ‘Enough’s enough,’ and took up arms against” central authority, he continued. “The federal government doesn’t want people to know about that.” He’s absolutely correct: that’s what this is about.

“They can tear down every monument. They can kill every Southerner. They can burn every history book. They can dig up every Confederate grave. It doesn’t change what happened. The truth cannot be destroyed, ever.”

And just like Nero-era Christians were tortured, unjustly punished, and castigated as scapegoats for every social ill but still somehow prevailed, the prayer is that Southerners too shall triumph. But they can only do so with God.

“With Christ, comes freedom, and with Christianity, comes free will,” affirmed Armentrout when critiquing America’s spiritual and social degradation. “We can fight. We can complain … but until we turn our hearts over to the Lord, it’s not going to change anything.”

Faithful to the discharge of your duty

Armentrout told me that he felt “spirit-led” to Charlottesville. “If the Lord has told you to do something – it doesn’t matter how hard it is or how much you’re going to suffer in doing or what you might have to sacrifice – in the end, the Lord is going to bless you.”

His maturity in faith and unwavering courage in his beliefs are the blessings of God, Armentrout said. How else could one remain so undaunted in the face of such vile chastisement?

This self-control he exhibited is what astounded people. “How could you be so calm? I would’ve knocked her upside the head,”  Armentrout said were some of the most common comments regarding Rogers’ infantile aggression.

“Yeah, well, I wanted to, but that’s not the Christian thing to do … you can turn the other cheek when people are cussing you. Through just that one character trait alone, I showed Christ in me … (but) it does take some restraint from the Holy Spirit.”

“My chief concern is to try to be an honest, earnest Christian.”
— Robert E. Lee

The dichotomy between Armentrout’s stealthy demeanor and the alt-Marxists’ unbalanced behavior was palpable. It’s why he didn’t engage them in conversation. He did, however, have a polite dialog when he first arrived at the park. They agreed to disagree and ended the exchange with a handshake.

But when the maniacal mobsters ambushed him, he “clammed up.” Attempting to have a civil exchange with uncivil and miseducated people is “a lost cause,” he said.

“You want another day like Saturday, don’t you?” cried one of the blood-thirsty gaggle. “This is our town!” called out another, who was probably not even a native of the city, much less of Virginia. “Racist go home!” they chanted.

The South is his home

Armentrout’s German ancestors came to Pennsylvania in the 1740s, but migrated to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley soon thereafter. From the settlement of Keezletown, his forebearers fought in the French and Indian War. One relative was a POW and slave to an adversarial Native American tribe, but escaped.

The Armentrouts constructed churches, grew their families, cultivated community, fostered freedom, and continued defending Virginia during both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Continuing the patriotic lineage, his fourth great-grandfather served in the Confederate Army in the Stonewall Brigade during the War Between the States.

“I’m just very proud … of the sacrifice they gave so that I can live in this country,” he said of his kin. I’m “thankful that even though we were defeated, that my ancestors stood up to the Yankees and the invaders and tried to fight for our independence there, too.”

“A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday does not know where it is today.”
— Robert E. Lee

When Armentrout was a junior in high school, he and his father made a pilgrimage to Keezletown – a link he discovered when doing ancestral research. It was the dirty grave markers in an unnamed cemetery there that started Armentrout on a path which led eventually to Charlottesville.

He decided to clean those neglected veteran gravestones “of men who died for our rights and our freedoms hundreds of miles away from their families.” Many of their “descendants probably don’t even know where they are. For all I know there might be an Armentrout in Missouri or Texas, somewhere far away from me that hopefully a fellow compatriot out there might clean.”

Armentrout’s budding appreciation for genealogy and honoring the dead built upon the lessons instilled in him by his father, Michael, who’s an independent fundamental Baptist preacher. Unlike the atrocious example Rogers set for her children, Armentrout’s dad taught him about virtue and godliness through the lens of history.

“I learned a lot from my dad and those two pictures.”

“Some of my best Christian role models growing up were Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson,” he explained.” As a boy, images of the Confederate generals in his father’s study always caught his eye.

“My dad taught me as a young man to revere those individuals and taught me what they believed, showed me what to stand for and what not to. I was taught that I have rights and freedoms. I was taught the truth and I was taught to care.”

“I think it better to do right, even if we suffer in doing so, than to incur the reproach of our consciences and posterity.”
— Robert E. Lee

His dad educated him about the War and the Southern cause “and made the information pertinent to the way we live and how what they fought for applies to today.” To me, it’s a very Orthodox [Church] perspective.

Just like we Orthodox look to the saints and use their stories to help grow us in faith, Armentrout looks to the enigmatic Lee and Jackson. Just like we Orthodox are called upon to pray for our dead Christian ancestors, Armentrout honors his.

Just like the traditional Orthodox fought against iconoclasm in the Byzantine Empire, Armentrout resists the destruction of his symbols and traditions. This all gives him a sense of purpose. Pride in a people.

“A man’s life is always trying to seek things to fill the void in his heart and respecting those who fought and died for you completes you in some way,” he said. It’s about time and place. Identity and meaning. Ties that bind. And being a grateful Southern son.

Be sure to check out part 2, “Take my stand,” to be posted Sunday afternoon.

----------------------

 

Allen Armentrout, part 2: Take my stand

http://www.dissidentmama.net/allen-armentrout-part-2-take-my-stand/

By Dissident Mama on Sunday, August 12, 2018

“There is scarcely anything that is right that we cannot hope to accomplish by labor and perseverance. But the first must be earnest and the second unremitting.”
— Robert E. Lee

In the final paragraph of part 1, Allen Armentrout told me how honoring the sacrifice of the Confederate dead “completes” him, giving him a sense of identity and peace spiritually. But is also serves a purpose ideologically, resisting the cultural cleansing to which his ancestors and Southern history are subject.

“Just put a foot down. This is your blood.”

Armentrout’s activism is steeped in liberty and in rebuking the poisonous nature of progressive dogma. “Exercising your rights is another thing that makes me feel complete in my life … (and) knowing that I can do something controversial and unpopular, and there’s nothing anyone legally can do to me.”

To the willfully uninformed, Armentrout was some loony kid who wanted to play dress-up on that fateful day Charlottesville last August. Or perhaps a “Nazi” who aimed to stir up trouble. Or maybe just a backwoods yahoo with bad timing.

Charlottesville was “not my first rodeo,” Armentrout said. In fact, ever since he took that life-changing ancestral pilgrimage to Keezletown and witnessed those unkept veterans’ graves, he had become a quiet but confident Dixie activist.

It first began with Armentrout attending city council meetings and tending to a Confederate cemetery in his hometown of High Point, North Carolina, where he’d clean the markers, rake pine needles, and fly his Battle Flag. Then “I would play Dixie on my phone and I would stand there and salute.”

“I didn’t care who was watching,” he explained. “I just knew that what I was doing was right.”

   

By the time he moved to Pensacola, Florida, to attend college, Armentrout had grown bolder. He started flagging overpasses, which he described as a “piece of the puzzle” for him. Just a gray-uniformed man on a highly traveled road, holding a flag and saluting for hours.

“I would do it by myself, unfortunately,” he remarked, adding that there were always people who’d promise him they’d be there next time. But they never showed. “I’m not waiting on any other person.”

“Part of being Southern is being able to lead yourself, being able to govern yourself. Being able to say, ‘This is important to me, and I’m going to make it a point to go out and do something for what I believe and love.'”

Proving grounds of a patriot

When he saw an uptick in the bludgeoning of his heritage by Obama, the corporate press, the corrupt race-baiters, and self-loathing whites in the aftermath of the Charleston shooting in 2015, Armentrout joined a Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) chapter near his university.

The camp’s membership were “older gentlemen, who were not as zealous and, in my opinion, were kinda burned out,” he said. Armentrout was told on several occasions that if he kept flagging, he needed to represent himself as an individual, clearly distinguishing himself from the local SCV.

“Isn’t that what I joined this camp for?” he asked rhetorically. “I broke out my suit and started going to city council meetings as an ‘individual.’ I got super-active.”

His Dixie advocacy was well known in the Florida Panhandle. He was asked to lead the re-dedication ceremony (photo seen at top) of a once-public Confederate statue and flag, which had been returned to a local by the City of Crestview.

The Pensacola SCV “came after me and even attacked me, saying I was capitulating” to the Southern-symbol removers. Armentrout said. “I had had about enough of it.”

“There is no more dangerous experiment than that of undertaking to be one thing before a man’s face and another behind his back.”
— Robert E. Lee

Fortunately, an Alabama SCV division defended him, offering him the organizational support he’d been needing. Armentrout became a member and the camp helped him with the Crestview dedication.

Although an SCV member in good standing, Armentrout understands the struggles of “Southern heritage” organizations trying to exist and do battle in our prickly post-modern world. Many Confederate descendants aren’t even willing to try to take the hill, much less die on it.

The Big Sleezy

It was this compliant attitude among some old-schoolers that ultimately led Armentrout to New Orleans. The Crescent City was ground zero of the Dixie-cide by the spring of 2017.

Monuments to three of the Confederacy’s most notable heroes – Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Louisiana’s own P.G.T. Beauregard – were under threat by quisling extraordinaire, Mayor Mitch Landrieu, a sinister Soros-backed band of carpetbaggers known as Take ‘Em Down NOLA, and all the usual suspects. These statues have all since come down.

]Antifa “want to see the destruction of this country,” Armentrout affirmed. “I saw them disgracing and tagging the monuments … and I said, ‘Where are the good guys?’”

“The only opposition the TV shows is people making fools of themselves … some guy doing something stupid with a Confederate Flag or saying something that makes him sound idiotic.” He wanted to counter that narrative and be a good guy.

Armentrout told me he’d read that New Orleans SCV camps had advised their members to “stand down” and “restricted members from any way defending the monuments.” Needless to say, he was disappointed and thusly motivated.

“The SCV is a very valuable asset … (but) some members are not at good at actively taking up a Battle Flag and marching into a threat.” He was, so he did. And did so solo yet again.

Up to now, Armentrout had received his share of disapproving looks when caring for tombstones in High Point. In Pensacola, the full-time student and employee and part-time activist had been told to “get a job,” called a “dumb ass,” and given pretentious lectures by guilt-obsessed people who claimed to have Confederate lineage.

He had even had a jar of peanut butter thrown at him while on a Florida overpass. So, when a black preacher cursed at him in New Orleans, it wasn’t that shocking – just another step in the social devolution he was experiencing firsthand as a resistor against it.

But seeing the stunning statues doused in red paint and covered with sticky foam did take him aback. And the city’s foot soldiers was even more jarring.

“I saw a fire truck roll by and a fireman got off the truck wearing a mask and a riot helmet, got a crowbar, ripped the plaque off of this monument … and threw it in the back of the truck and sped off.” The “goons” flabbergasted Armentrout.

“So many people are not natural leaders, they’re natural followers.”

So by the time Armentrout opted to go to Charlottesville, he’d seen some stuff, learned some lessons, and knew exactly what he was doing. He planned it precisely as to avoid bodily harm by the crazed hive-mind thugs he knew would challenge his legal and peaceful self-expression.

“In the South today, you have to understand, the Reconstruction and living under 150 years of Yankee occupation is going to have an effect on the inhabitants,” Armentrout said of anti-Confederate groupthink. “150 years of deluded history and eventually rewritten history, the implication of apathy in schools, where kids are taught not to care, is going to take its toll.”

“They’re just a product of the environment that the Yankees created.” It’s a gracious stance that many people, including some fellow Christians, would have a hard time taking: Lord forgive them for they know not what they do.

“I have fought against the people of the North because I believed they were seeking to wrest from the South its dearest rights. But I have never cherished toward them bitter or vindictive feelings, and I have never seen the day when I did not pray for them.”
— Robert E. Lee

As a preemptive measure, Armentrout called the police department three times before driving up to Virginia as to notify them of his intent to salute the Lee statue and open-carry weapons for self-defense. “If you ever want to do something that by the world’s standard is crazy, call your local police department.”

He continued, “It gives the police dispatcher a forewarning and the police officer a prelude to understanding what’s going on before he pulls up to the scene.” It can help to dispel misinformation and fabricated claims of violence, as well.

Armentrout also had close friends of the family act as his advocates, phoning the police third-party, simply communicating that he’s “on point and not crazy.” All necessary precautions when entering as hostile an environment as Charlottesville.

Armentrout talks with Charlottesville police, one of whom asked the mob, “You want another day like Saturday, don’t you?”

At the previous weekend’s Unite the Right (UTR) rally, the Charlottesville Police had stood down, enabling the harsh brutality and consequent wreckage that needlessly befell people and property to unfold, so this measure was huge a gamble for Armentrout. But it paid off.

He told me the cops were utterly professional, both the ones who talked with him en route to Lee Park and once on site. “The police sergeant came up to me and was like, ‘Sir, you have every right to be here. We are here for you public safety because we know what can happen.”

The officer told Armentrout they had other things going on in the city and that his being there was tying up law enforcement resources. He added, “But we don’t expect you to leave.”

“Sir, I definitely respect other people’s public safety,” responded Armentrout. “I just came up here to respect my ancestors and pay my respects to Lee, and I just wanted to see this monument in the event it was taken down.”

Armentrout also noted that he’d driven far to honor Lee and needed a few more minutes, but did request a police escort back to his vehicle. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable walking out of here,” he said. So he whistled “Dixie” in his head, gave a final salute, and then nodded to the police.

“We should live, act, and say nothing to the injury of anyone. It is not only best as a matter of principle, but it is the path to peace and honor.”
— Robert E. Lee

The lying media made it seem as if Armentrout was forced to leave the park and that the righteous social-justice warriors had succeeded in chasing off the big, bad rebel. The fact that he wasn’t disarmed prove the fabricated plotline.

Armentrout’s .45 remained holstered while he rode in the front of the police cruiser, and his AR-15 just laid in the backseat. “‘This guy has a handgun on his side in my patrol car’ was probably the last of [the cop’s] concerns. He was probably like ‘I need to get this guy out of my town before another Saturday happens.”

Media madness

News crews and reporters were still lurking around Charlottesville because of the UTR event, so they arrived on the scene quickly. “They thought, ‘Here is this guy. He’s gotta be nuts,'” Armentrout said.

“He’s by himself with an AR at a Confederate monument that’s been at the seat of controversy. He’s going to do something … and we’re going to get it on camera.”

But “I didn’t, and it blew their minds. That’s what made those people yelling at me even madder,” he added. “I hope that me doing that … maybe they could see what Christ was like in that small moment. I had faith.”

It made no difference that Armentrout wasn’t the ignorant, redneck, belligerent cartoon character the Lincoln cultists have created as their perpetual scapegoat for all of society’s ills. Just as he had drawn the ire of the alt-Marxist hordes in Lee Park, the progressive press went after him with a vengeance.

“It’s the loneliest feeling in the world – to find yourself standing up when everybody else is sitting down. To have everybody look at you and say, ‘What’s the matter with him?’ I know.”
— Robert E. Lee

Armentrout was portrayed as a “white supremacist” and a “racist protester,” who was carrying an emblem of “racial terror” say “historians.” The hyperbolic headlines and bombastic articles fed into the purposeful media manipulation that there are Nazis abounding in AmeriKKKa.

Wanting to set the record straight, Armentrout answered questions from a few newspapers, but the so-called journalists turned out to be hacks who wrote predictable hit pieces. Of course.

He said an English reporter wrote article with “a huge slant, basically saying I was condescending of women because I would pay for their dates or hold doors for them. I said, ‘I’m proud of that. I’m a gentleman.” So he stopped giving interviews.

The aftermath

Despite Armentrout’s self-imposed media-blackout, he still got hate mail. He even received a few death threats.

Unfortunately, Armentrout was also “released” from his upcoming senior year at Pensacola State University, which was supposed to be free. Not a good place for a young college kid to be, especially one who believes that “debt enslaves a person.”

Armentrout used GoFundMe to try to raise money for finishing up his undergraduate degree. But the website shut him down – twice! – due to alleged “hate speech” violations.

“You’ve got to be a man, you gotta take command of your own life, you gotta make choices that are tough,” he tells compatriots who may find themselves in these same dire straights. “You gotta decide what you want for you and your family, you gotta be willing to protect them.”  It takes earnest labor and unremitting perseverance, just like Lee wrote. “One day the Lord might call them to take a stand,” Armentrout said. “It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.”

Allen Armentrout, part 3: Humility and hope

http://www.dissidentmama.net/allen-armentrout-part-3-humility-and-hope/

By Dissident Mama on Wednesday, August 15, 2018

One year ago today, Allen Armentrout took a rebel stand in Charlottesville, Virginia (see part 1). The world deemed his peaceful and principled actions as racist and traitorous. Like cultural-Marxist clockwork, the politically correct ramifications (see part 2) immediately began unfolding for the unReconstructed Southerner.

“Sad thoughts … are necessary and good for us. They cause us to reflect. Do not yield to them, but use them as a medium through which to view life correctly.”
— Robert E. Lee

Armentrout knew he couldn’t overcome these trials and tribulations by himself. So he leaned on the cornerstone of his life: Jesus Christ.  “What got me through it all, honestly, was I knew what I had done was the light of the Lord,” the 22-year-old said during our recent two-hour chat. “If God has a will for our life, we better do it.”

“In the end, God’s got a bigger plan and something way better for us. And if we don’t receive rewards or blessings … in this life, we will in the next.” Wise words from such a young man.

Brothers in arms

God’s favors did begin to manifest for Armentrout in the here and now. He experienced an outpouring of support, monetary and otherwise, from a slew of Southern-without-apology compatriots and even a few Northerners.  One of his favorite correspondence (as well as a generous donation to his college fund) came from a lawyer in New York City. “Good job, young man,” the letter read. “Even though I’m a Yankee, I respect your integrity and your character.”

The tremendous encouragement of like-minded folks who dare to oppose the cultural genocide was a feeling reminiscent to his days flagging overpasses in Pensacola, said Armentrout. Sure, there were always a few loud and belligerent people, who castigated him from their sense of self-appointed moral superiority. “But at the same time, you’ve probably got four or five as many people going under the bridge, giving you salutes and thumbs up and honking their horns,” he recalled of his early activist days. “I’m telling you, it makes you feel free.”

He also got the backing of numerous SCV camps, received an award from the Military Order of the Stars and Bars, and was flown around the country for pro-Southern speaking engagements. The accolades were greatly appreciated and spurred in him hope for the Southern cause.

Armentrout’s act of allegiance to ancestry and real history and defiance to the status quo was even immortalized in a music video and his image made into pop art (as seen above). “I’m very thankful there’s a remnant of people still left that respect the old-time way,” he said humbly.

From Russia with love

Armentrout’s blessings continued when he was contacted on Instagram by a woman from Moscow, Russia. “’You’re a hero,’ she wrote. ‘You’re a celebrity in Russia.'”  At first, he was distrustful and thought the message was some sort of publicity stunt. But as it turned out, she worked for the largest non-government-controlled media in Russia, Armentrout told me, and this free-press news channel wanted to interview him.  “For an American to actively stand up against the liberal movement and to experience what I experienced, to them, I’m a folk hero,” Armentrout commented. “I don’t consider myself a hero … but that’s how they saw me.”

So, he prayed about it and finally agreed to the offer. A Los Angeles correspondent and news team from Moscow flew into North Carolina, and Armentrout met them at a park near his house. He specifically chose a public meeting place. “Last thing I want to do is get abducted, thrown into a van, and wake up in Russia somewhere,” he remarked with a chuckle.

When The Last Patriot of America segment aired, “I had hundreds of people from [former] Eastern Bloc countries and Russia contact me, and telling me, ‘We’re proud of you. Russia backs you up!'”

“The consolidation of the states into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it.”
— Robert E. Lee

”People who lived under communism know how precious freedom is and they see the leftist direction America is going,” Armentrout assessed. “They’re screaming … ‘Don’t give up your rights! Why are you giving in to these liberals? Why are you letting them take over this country? We’ve been there, done that. It doesn’t work!'”

Still today, some in the Russian press and alternative media will refer to Armentrout as “one of the few traditionalists” left in America. Funny that the most honest assessment he got from any TV news network or newspaper came from people who once lived under Bolshevism. “It showed me the condition of America,” he said matter-of-factly. “The truth in American journalism is just dying out. It’s all fake.”

Triumph over tragedy

Another happy point for Armentrout was that he and Pensacola State University came to an amicable agreement, and he eventually got accepted to a new school. All his college credits transferred, and he’ll be graduating in May 2019, just one year late and debt-free.

“Shake off those gloomy feelings. … Look upon things as they are. Take them as you find them. Make the best of them, turn them to your advantage.”
— Robert E. Lee

During the interim, Armentrout got a job with a tree company, which offered him a short-term but adventurous opportunity to work out in California with the sequoias. He also bought a house in North Carolina, which he’s now subleasing, so he could accept a career-advancing position out of state.

“The reason that good things happen in my life is because the Lord’s good to me,” Armentrout affirmed. “I don’t take a bit of credit for any of it. It’s all Him.”  He sees too how God used his seeming misfortune to open other doors. “I was able to witness to some people that the Lord put in my life through this ‘set back.’ I know that ultimately through my suffering … I was able to share the Gospel.”

When asked if he’d do Charlottesville all over again, Armentrout replied with an adamant “yes.” He’s simply not consumed by the rage and the debasement that so defines the leftist mob and their sinister “social justice.”

He holds no animus toward the people who screamed obscenities at him or lied about him. He’s not angry about the disruptions that were needlessly caused in his life. “As Southerners, we invest emotionally in what we do. When we believe, we put our heart and soul into it. When people attack us … it hurts,” Armentrout admitted. Yet this Southern son overcame. He perseveres by holding tight to his faith, praying for his enemies, and clinging to heritage.

“You can’t change history,” he said. “You can rewrite it. You can author it. You can brainwash millions of people, but it doesn’t change what actually happened. And people that stand up for the truth are always and will always be in the right.”

“Duty … is the sublimest word in the our language. Do your duty in all things … You cannot do more, and you should never do less.”
—Robert E. Lee

See, we unReconstructed folk understand that the Confederacy fought to preserve decentralization: a philosophy, a way of life, a civilization-building, liberty-enhancing political, cultural, and societal belief system that took more than 500 years to develop and foster, improve upon and establish. A blessing of the boldest sort, but a delicate one no less.

That is at the heart of Dixie. It’s a heart for the small and local, the familial and the neighborly, the tried and traditional, the minimally governmental and exponentially private. Southerners understand perfectly well that the centralizers, meddlers, expansionists, and progressive enforcers seek the opposite. They always have.

After all, Southern rebels been living under their iron thumb for 150 years; it is our coerced, ugly reality. And we don’t like what we see, nor do we like that we must subsidize our own demise.

So we resist this “progress” in any way that we can. Just like Armentrout did. And just like so many before us have done.

One such person was Maj. James Innes Randolph, who wrote the poem “Oh, I’m a Good Ol’ Rebel” and also happened to be topographical engineer to General J.E.B. Stuart during the War of Northern Aggression. His poem evolved into a folk song and has since become an unReconstructed anthem, expressing poignantly both Southerners’ deadly War experiences and raw emotions post-War.

 Author and historian Dr. Boyd D. Cathey recently penned three new verses “to reflect what has happened over the past 150 years and what we are facing today.” [The updated version as performed by Braden Harwood, Sons of Confederate Veterans member of the James-Younger Camp in Norwood, North Carolina, may be heard at:  http://www.dissidentmama.net/allen-armentrout-part-3-humility-and-hope/  ]

Dr. Cathey concludes with the words “Victory, it is our goal and heaven is our fate.” But he has no illusions and admits that “we go to fight a large and vicious foe. Our chances are not great and that is what we know.”

But this isn’t a conflict of our own making. It is one for survival. It’s the mob who has chosen to ramp up their revolution. They aren’t interested in reconciliation. They want to dominate.

So our monuments and our past are on the chopping block, being sent wholesale to the “social justice” guillotines. “Off with their heads” till not another statue or Confederate remains, dead or alive.

Gotta purge Johnny Reb so the alt-Marxist metamorphosis can really take hold. His downfall is justified in order to obtain new, better America. If only he would shut up or just go away.

Yet, he keeps on fighting. Head held high, faith abounding, and against the tide. It’s in his blood.

“How it will all end, I cannot say but will trust to a kind providence, who will, I believe, order all things for the best.”
— Robert E. Lee

History is filled with ordinary people who sometimes do extraordinary things. Individuals who are called because of time and place, because of circumstances beyond their control, to do fearless acts. To do what is right, no matter what.

Such is the story of Allen Armentrout – a Christian who lives in this world, but not of it. He’s not defined by it, and he’s certainly not going lose sight of Heaven because of it.

Instead, he stays focused and unremitting, and filled with humility and hope, like his hero Lee. Just like Christ called him to be. “Just be proud of God … and He can do the same thing in your life like he’s done in mine.” Indeed, what a way to view life correctly.

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