Monday, June 29, 2020

June 29, 2020
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
White Guilt and Our Schools: The Monster Must be Beheaded NOW
Friends,
As I carefully scanned the images emerging from my 42” Sony boob-tube, it all become clear. In fact, although it shouldn’t have surprised me, in a way, it did.
A goodly portion of those mostly Millennial demonstrators (AKA, rioters and looters) in nearby Raleigh and, as well, all across America who were participating in the Black Lives Matter uprising, were and are white. That’s right: take a moment to closely examine what you are seeing on your TV screens.
White faces, mostly 20- and 30-somethings, bearded and tattooed, pajama-guy white dudes and unwashed and smelly obese feminists—with a sprinkling of aged-out former Hippie types who never grew up or out of their youthful craziness. Mostly college educated—which means they spent several years in an indoctrination facility/hot house where they were pumped full of revolutionary post-Marxist slogans and tidbits, fed to them by professors themselves who absorbed the “first wave” of socialist nihilism from the 1960s. And not to mention their primary and secondary schooling which served to prepare them like sausages for what is euphemistically called “higher education.”
A lot of them, although very adept at Twitter, Instagram and the latest computer technology, can’t (or won’t) find a real job. Their education, such as it was, badly prepares them for that. Essentially they are ignoramuses. Indeed, one rioter out in San Francisco—an archetypal feminist “womyn”—stated that although she didn’t know who Winston Churchill is or was, she was happy to see his monument toppled because, after all, “he is a white man” and “part of the oppressive white patriarchy.”
Got that? It makes admirable sense given our defecated and rotten tendentiously ideological educational establishment. If it’s a white man (or even a white woman), it’s got to go. That’s what is propagated in our colleges and in our primary and secondary schools.
And so, ironically, it is those white social justice warriors, those “enragees”—those youngish and ignorant, heavily indoctrinated creatures, severely seared with “white guilt” which will never go away who have very often taken the lead in what is called the “Black Lives Matter” movement. They simply believe, they feel, they must somehow expiate that guilt, and how better than to burn down some small white-owned business (causing the owner to go bankrupt, and the loss of jobs for his employees, many of whom may be black).
Here is a very short video which brings this home, plus some of the ridicule of some black folk who look askance at the ostentatious self-flagellation and penance-pushing of those white “bruthas and sistas.”
Let’s go back and look at causes.
My first question—one I’ve asked before repeatedly—is when are we going to have true and radical educational reform? Not just papering over the problem, for it IS a problem on which the future of our civilization depends. Not just throwing more money at “education” and at the schools, as most Republicans and conservatives in state legislatures do, so as not be savaged by Democrats or, more especially, by the Leftist media, as “anti-schools” or “anti-student,” or, increasingly, as “racists.”
Of course, charter schools are one way to go. Also, encouraging and supporting private school education and, yes, home schooling where possible (perhaps with small groups of parents taking the lead). But importantly and necessarily is tackling the critical and systemic ideological problems in our public colleges. And by that I mean restructuring, re-imagining (a word now the Leftists like to use) radically what college education is meant to be, and that includes demanding and insuring course changes and severe but equitable (and non-ideological) faculty vetting (at the end of each school term). And if the Boards of Trustees or Boards of Governors will not do it, then the legislatures must step in and perform the actions needed.
Preeminent historian Clyde Wilson of the University of South Carolina declares that our colleges must be napalmed. While I don’t go quite that far, I do think he’s on to something. Millions and millions of dollars are spent annually on retaining a “national reputation”—as it is called—for places like the University of North Carolina, the University of Virginia, and Old Miss. Millions of dollars go to grossly overpaid academics who are little more than Leftist shills, apparatchiks intent on the cookie-cutting reproduction of more Leftist apparatchiks, filled with the kind of frenzied and hysterical passion we’ve witnessed in past weeks.
Of course, there will be perfervid screams of “violations of academic freedom” or of “academic integrity.” Overpaid faculty and administrators will protest and threaten to leave; let them go. Others can be found…and they will be a vast improvement. And those reformed universities WILL find students.
The real object here among these later day revolutionaries surpasses the fondest dreams of the old Soviet Communists, who at least partook of some of the forms of creaky old Western civilization…the Commies never would tolerate transgenderism and gender fluidity or same sex marriage: a sure fire means to land yourself in a Gulag.
The present contagion is in this sense “post-Marxist,” incorporating various ideas that come from Marxist theory and the Frankfort School theoreticians, but polished and perfected, if you will, by such fundamental texts as Frantz Fanon’s influential anti-colonialist and anti-white tract, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), and more recently by radical organizer Saul Alinsky’s critical primer, Rules for Radicals.
Here, summarized, are thirteen rules Alinsky offers.  Much else follows from them:
1.     "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. Power is derived from two main sources – money and people. 'Have-Nots' must build power from flesh and blood."
2.     "Never go outside the expertise of your people."
3.     "Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy."
4.     "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."
5.     "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions."
6.     "A good tactic is one your people enjoy."
7.     "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag."
8.     "Keep the pressure on."
9.     "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist."
10. "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition."
11. "If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside. Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog."
12. "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative."
13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions."

Alinsky’s minions in Antifa and Black Lives Matter have perfected these operative rules in praxis, with an infusion of energy and globalist funding. And they have correctly counted on the widespread and shameless cowardice of the so-called “white oppressors,” too often themselves subject to the same ambience emanating out of those ideological outhouses - AKA colleges. And fearfully confirmed by establishment elites in the Republican Party and in the “conservative movement” (see in particular Rules 13, 11, 10, and 1).
What we observe before us is a contagion, another kind of pandemic, an infection of the mind and intellect far more dangerous than COVID-19. It must be eradicated through counter action in whatever form that may take. The Monster’s head must be sliced off, its wellsprings dried up, its street partisans arrested and imprisoned. And that is just the beginning.
If not, then time to close the book of what remains of Western Christian civilization.

That is our choice.

Monday, June 22, 2020

June 22, 2020
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Governor Cooper to North Carolina: “Let the Rioters do their Worst; I won’t Stand in Their way!”
Friends,
Governor Roy Cooper comes across as a nice man, well-mannered, calm, the kind of man you would want as a neighbor and, yes, as a friend. He seems unthreatening in how he speaks, always with a very slight but perceptible eastern North Carolina accent.  In short, he radiates a down home “you can trust me” charm.
Except for one thing: it’s all a façade, false, a mask hiding a far darker side of his character. His likable demeanor disguises an individual—North Carolina’s chief executive officer—who has been largely responsible for giving the green light to looting, mob violence, and the blatant destruction of symbols and artifacts of our history.
His praxis is not one of openly or vocally inciting the riots and violence; no, that would be too obvious and likely to produce a backlash. Rather, through his actions—and failure to act—he has purposefully enabled those riots and that violence. He has used the initially ostensibly peaceful demonstrations as means to achieve his purposes, purposes which he has had all along.
Whether he acts (or fails to act) out of conviction, or through the advice of his small extremist “woke” social justice warrior constituency, the result is the same. North Carolina’s elected chief defender and protector of our laws and Constitution has become its chief violator, if only in a remote sense and without his guilty fingerprints.
Over the past week or so a mob of rioters and looters rampaged through Raleigh, North Carolina’s capital city. Stores were looted, graffiti were sprayed on monuments, and lawlessness reigned. But you see Raleigh has a “woke” leftist mayor Mary Ann Baldwin, and like so many other mayors in leftist-controlled cities across the nation, her response was to let the mob do its business under the theory: “let them destroy property, that’s acceptable, but we don’t want to ‘hurt’ the rioters physically.” In other words, the capital police stood down as the rioters rampaged through the city…and millions of dollars of private property were destroyed, an outrage against the very raison d’etre of our law enforcement, the reason they exist, which is not only to protect individuals but also private and public property. And is it not legitimate to say, like other leftist mayors, that Baldwin has a certain real sympathy for the goals and objectives of the rioters?
But even worse came over the long weekend from Friday, June 19 to Sunday, June 21, 2020. The mob had taken aim at the historical monuments on Capitol Square. They had already defaced them, but now their object—clearly stated on Twitter and Instagram for anyone to read, including our elected leaders and law enforcement, both state and municipal—was to topple them and to begin with the three iconic Confederate monuments on the Capitol grounds: the statue of Pvt. Henry Wyatt—the first Confederate soldier killed in the War Between the States, the monument honoring the women and children of the Confederacy, and lastly, the giant and artistically distinctive Confederate obelisk facing Hillsborough Street.
At first on Friday night they managed to bring down two lesser statues perched aside the tall Confederate monument. The police did nothing, in fact, stood down with the complicity of Mayor Baldwin and the governor. Then came the Wyatt and Women of the Confederacy monuments. At first state capital police resisted…but then, they too were told to stand down.
And at that point Governor Cooper, in one of those moments that assuredly required some pre-planning on his part, intervened and issued an order: all Confederate monuments, he decreed, would be taken down because they were “dangers to public safety.”  It was a logical succession, something that could be presented to the public as the culmination of a rational process, to “protect” the raging rioters who might somehow “hurt” themselves if they continued to attempt to destroy state property! (After all when the mob felled a monument recently in Portsmouth, Virginia, it actually landed on one of the rioters. We can’t have that happening!)
But in so doing, in enabling the rioters to ultimately succeed in their rampaging fury, Cooper flagrantly violated the laws of the state of North Carolina. He invited the mob to destroy public property without the slightest hindrance, he encouraged them. And thus he fulfilled their deepest desires.
And he did so in spite of—in open violation of—the Heritage Protection Act [Monuments Protection Act] of 2015 [G.S. § 100-2.1] which specifically enjoined and forbade the removal of North Carolina’s historic monuments by any level of government authority. Indeed, Cooper through his Department of Administration had attempted previously, in the summer of 2018, to have those three Confederate monuments at the State Capitol removed, under the very narrow exceptions allowed by the Monuments Law. As required by that statute, he had gone before the North Carolina Historical Commission (empowered in law to rule on such cases) using the very same reasoning that he was to use about “public safety” on June 19-21, 2020.
But back on August 22, 2018, the Historical Commission, composed of noted attorneys and historians, several named by Cooper himself, had denied his appeal by a vote of 9 to 2, in effect declaring that the law’s use of the term “public safety” as an exception had nothing to do at all with supposed danger to demonstrators (as Cooper claimed), but meant internal and structural weaknesses or decay within the monuments themselves. External threats to the monuments and whatever harm that might come from those threats were not included as a reason or exception for removing a monument. Those threats to public safety must be dealt with by law enforcement—by the required protection of public property by our constituted constabulary.
Thus, what Cooper did was not only a violation of the Monuments Protection Law, but also a violation of the specific and exact legal ruling of his own North Carolina Historical Commission. Denied his request in August 2018, he manipulated and used the current riots on the State Capitol Square—telling the police to stand down so that violence could occur—to achieve his ultimate goal: removal of the monuments in the most underhanded manner, while indicating to everyone (in particular, to his most fanatical and “woke” followers) that he was taking this action for the sake of “public safety” and “against racism” that those monuments to once-living and breathing men, women and children—citizens of North Carolina—supposedly represent.
Confirmation of this underhanded praxis comes from various high-placed sources, both in law enforcement and in government. And not only that, for Cooper has essentially informed smaller municipalities around the state that should riots occur in their communities, should the mob visit them, he will not allow the North Carolina National Guard to assist them to protect their communities or their history…if a noisy bunch of Antifa/Black Lives Matter thugs try to take down YOUR monuments, basically the governor is telling the citizens of the Tar Heel State: “You are on your own. My tiny radical extremist constituency rules, and I will allow—permit—even encourage—them to destroy artifacts of our history and culture.” Public opinion, which in every poll is two-thirds against removing those monuments, be damned.
Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest, who will oppose Cooper in this fall's election, has spoken out in condemnation of what is happening and what Cooper is enabling (June 20, 2020):
"North Carolinians should be shocked by the utter lawlessness that occurred in downtown Raleigh once again last night, this time on the State Capitol grounds. While Gov. Cooper shifted blame when our cities were looted and buildings were damaged, he has no excuses this time. Last night’s destruction occurred on state property, right next to his office. It is clear that Gov. Cooper is either incapable of upholding law and order, or worse, encouraging this behavior. The essence of a free society is the rule of law. When our elected leaders turn a blind eye to chaos, destruction, and disorder, society begins to unravel."
It is important that Forest get this message out, via his campaign appearances and via media (TV ads). It is a winning message if he will use it, and he must be strongly encouraged to do so.
All the while the revolution advances—in Oregon and California it is George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Francis Scott Key, their monuments toppled. Columbus is now down in various cities. Even the slightest verbal demurrer online is banned as “racist.” You cannot dissent from the new narrative and agenda. And too many of those on our side run for the tall grass, fearful of being called racist.
When the mob comes for the statues of George Washington on North Carolina’s State Capitol grounds—when the effort is to topple monuments to Charles B. Aycock and Zebulon Vance, or to displace North Carolina’s monument to its three presidents (Jackson, Polk, and Johnson), what will Cooper do? By his own irrepressible logic he must give in; there is no other course now that he has implicitly (if not explicitly) thrown his lot in with the new Taliban fanatical destroyers. They desire the total and complete erasing of our heritage and culture. Cooper has invited them in, encouraged them, and thinks he used them. But in fact they have used him, and they will bring him down into the very feculent sewer of anarchic devastation that they create and zealously push.

He deserves nothing better.

Sunday, June 21, 2020

June 21, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Two Perpetrated Frauds: George Floyd and the Race to Compromise
NEW Essays Published by Reckonin.com and Chronicles Magazine
Friends,
I pass on two columns I have just had published, on the Reckonin.com site (founded by Dr. Clyde Wilson) and on the Chronicles Magazine Web site. Both are based largely on original pieces I authored in this series of little essays, but with some updating changes and editing.
The first is a strong dissent from ongoing canonization of George Floyd who died up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, back on May 25, and whose death has become a cause celebre for rioting, looting, and open revolution…and the near complete collapse of any reasonable questioning or opposition to the succeeding madness (by so-called “conservatives” and Republicans). The case for Floyd as martyr is built on a tissue of lies and ideological assumptions which, if followed through, would almost totally destroy what is left of the nation.
Whether about George Floyd and his voluminous criminal and drug record, or about the mythical “war on blacks by the police” (utterly disproven by statistics), or about the inherent “genetic racism” of white people which cannot be erased except through our own racial suicide, or about a template presented now as undebatable that America is and has been since its very inception mired deep in a suffocating “systemic racism” and “white privilege,” it all amounts to the same: elements of an agenda that will radically dismantle this country, violently erase its history and distort its past, and essentially usher in a brutish totalitarian state, an authority empowered to control our every action, our every word, our thinking, and who we are. It will make the Soviet Gulag seem like a summer resort….
In short, the agenda is one of an ultimate assault by those who would overthrow and ground to dust what remains of our Western Christian civilization. Yes, in an indirect way it is also aimed at President Trump and more particularly at those unwashed “deplorables” (you and me) who have not been corralled onto the politically-correct reservation and brainwashed yet (unlike our children who by the very fact of attending public schools and universities invite such calculated indoctrination). But is more far reaching and comprehensive than even that. It is indeed a massive attempt to undo Creation as we have received it, overturn the laws of nature and of God (e.g., same sex marriage, transgenderism, and the destruction of the sexes), and enthrone a power and template which implicitly denies and rejects twenty centuries of belief and  continuity of our civilization.
The second item was published by Chronicles Magazine, and it is shorter, using a scene from the classic film, “Waterloo,” to make a serious point about compromisers who in fact surrender our culture and belief to the Enemy in hopes of not being called “racists” and not being attacked by the frenzied media. In the end they do nothing but legitimize and enable the revolutionary zealots while sacrificing our heritage and civilization. They are, in short, despicable in their cowardice. And while we can at least give a certain grudging respect to the lunatics who follow through with their convictions, the compromisers are beneath contempt. (I sincerely hope the mob will pay them a “visit” in their gated communities and walled mansions!)
Most recently in this parade of pusillanimous compromisers are Brit Steve Hilton on his program “The Next Revolution” (on Fox News) and another Brit, nerdy young Cameron Hilditch, a William F. Buckley Fellow (!) at the formerly-conservative National Review (which has become increasingly a mouthpiece for vicious and violent anti-Confederate rhetoric).
My short essay has gotten some good comment, and I offer it as I think it may cause—induce—some thought about the response of far too many of our supposed defenders against the massive revolution which is going on.
RECKONIN’
“Damn Lies” about George Floyd, Police Violence, and Racism
By Boyd D. Cathey
“Lies! And damn Lies!” That’s what we have been drenched with for the past week or two: lie after lie, bald-faced lies, insane and patently false assertions put forth by almost the entirety of the media, assented to and propounded by nearly all our politicians (including most deer-in-the headlight “I-don’t-want-to-be-called-racist” Republicans and establishment conservatives), and now taken as dogmatic, undeniable truth that makes the claims of Infallibility by the Supreme Pontiff look like idle speculation.
“Never let a crisis go to waste,” once famously said former mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel. And certainly not this one which can be trotted out to accomplish a whole host of things—advance the radical left/social justice revolution (that increasingly dominates the Democratic Party) while furthering the template of the ineradicable “first sin” of America: “systemic racism.”  And, more, that can be employed to maybe, just maybe, bring down President Trump, and more importantly, bring down what he supposedly represents.
Now everyone from most of the talking heads over on Fox News, the Martha MacCallums, the Brian Kilmeades, the Marc Thiessens (who recently said that the riots in DC were preventing his daughter from demonstrating peacefully against racism!), to the more exalted types on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and in The New York Time and Washington Post, has been herded onto the reservation and you can’t get off of it without being labelled and formally damned ex cathedra as a racist or defending “white privilege.” And the list of “racist” offenses—even the most innocent and rational comments which would have never drawn the slightest demurrer two weeks ago—has grown and continues to grow exponentially, day by day, it seems.
Following the Dylann Roof episode in 2105, recall it was those offending Confederate monuments: symbols of slavery and racism, squawked the social justice warriors that had to come down in the name of “equality and justice.” And their cry was echoed by the “conservative establishment” in the pages of the once-conservative National Review (e.g., Rich Lowry) and on Fox News (e.g., Victor Davis Hanson and Brian Kilmeade). Just get rid of those “monuments to slavery” and everything would be okay, we were told.
We warned that destroying the symbols of our heritage was only one more step in a concerted program to disavow and dismantle our Western civilization. Removing the symbols had far more profound meaning.
We were right. Now it’s the fierce frontal attacks on police and law enforcement, one more step in the ongoing revolution.
Oppose defunding or abolishing police forces? Why, you’re obviously a bigot and a racist. Just consider the president of the Minneapolis, Minnesota, city council, Lisa Bender. When asked what would happen if there were no police force and someone called 9-1-1 to report an emergency and violence, she responded that asking such a question most likely implied white privilege. After all, she reiterated, fumbling with her answer, “…community trust in this existing [police] department is so low that there is an urgent need for change now…we need to dismantle this department.”
Or consider what happened in upscale Cary, North Carolina, filled with rich transplanted Yankees who’ve come South to escape the high taxes and mess they made up North. They brought that mess and mentality with them. Facing fierce demonstrations in that city of 80,000, the police knelt down in obeisance bowing to the mob and proceeded in ritual fashion to wash the feet of twelve of them, a Holy Thursday mockery if there ever was one.
But, then, with no backing from authority, with utter cowardice from the city fathers—who fear in their bones being called “racist”—is it any wonder that law enforcement reflects that same pusillanimous behavior?
While what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis was a tragic occurrence, what has ensued has been a virtual canonization of a man who, by all accounts, was an habitual criminal, something of a drug addict, with a long record of criminal charges. 
But in the frenzy to proclaim Floyd’s sainthood—the untouchable “new martyr” of a radical civil rights movement mired and based in falsehood and lies about equality—just about everyone has signed on to a fake narrative: a simple case of perhaps an excessive police action (although there has been no trial and the evidence and motivations are in dispute), but no one is allowed to dissent or raise questions, even very reasonable ones. Thus Texas Governor Greg Abbott—a “conservative” Republican—who joined the disgraceful huckster Reverend Al Sharpton in Floyd’s funeral exequies,  spent time with Floyd’s family declaring that they would hopefully be a “centerpiece of helping America bridge our racial divide & ensure equality, justice & fairness in America….”
But, if you read the response to Abbott’s Twitter message you will also see a response from someone who knows George Floyd’s criminal record: “[Governor Abbott] did you spend any time with the family of the pregnant woman he [Floyd] held a gun to for drugs and money?”
And it took a black woman, Candace Owens, on June 4, 2020, to blow the whistle on Floyd and his dark and seamy criminal past, and to do it fearlessly while almost all white conservatives and Republicans shivered in fear in the tall grass or hoped to somehow convince the farther Left social justice mob that they, too, were fighting even more strenuously against racism in memory of the sainted George Floyd. Owen’s eighteen minute podcast was still up on Youtube the last I looked, including the account of how Floyd pointed a gun at a woman’s unborn fetus and threatened to kill them both. Here is the access link. It’s a riveting commentary. But who knows if the zealous and fanatical “woke” censors won’t take it down and ban it? (It had over six million views as of June 13, 2020.)
Notice, also, in particular her precise and correct use of statistics, official government stats which even appeared in The Washington Post, which give the lie—another big one—to the rampant view that somehow the police have engaged in a “war” against blacks, in particular black males. That charge, propagated in every news outlet, from CNN to my local leftwing garbage dispenser, WRAL-TV, is now established truth: you cannot question it, you can only accept it and accede to the new religious cult that makes the frenzied Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre seem like child’s play. But there is very little evidence to support the assertion of never-ending racist attacks by police on innocent blacks—just ten cases documented for 2019.
On June 5, Dr. Heather MacDonald, author of the book The War on Cops, appeared on Fox to discuss the narrative that there is a huge wave of police murdering unarmed black people, stating“The irony is it is The Washington Post's own database [which] collects the statistics…[that documents] a police officer is 18 and a half times more likely to be murdered by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be murdered by a cop, or killed by a cop.”
All of this, of course, is not really important to pro-demonstrators Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, Colin Powell, and General “Mad Dog” Mattis…or to ambitious anti-Southern Nikki Haley (AKA, Nimrata Randhawa), who would just love to replace Donald Trump at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue supported by a “delivered” GOP, saved from all those uncouth “deplorables” and once more back in the manicured, secure hands of the Republican/conservatives elites. So, they harshly condemn “systemic racism” or march like Romney with the “peaceful rioters” in Washington DC.
Like all compromisers and cowards historically, the Romneys and others of his ilk think they can temporize and “engage” with the radicals. But the radicals have sheer and unbounded conviction on their side, while Romney is little more than a cipher for intellectual and moral decrepitude and cowardice, an embarrassing example of those who will—as all others of such praxis in history—perish just the same at the hands of the revolutionaries, despite their craven surrender.
The words of Irish poet William Butler Yeats (in his poem, “The Second Coming”) come once more to mind, words written shortly after the end of the Great War, the horribly destructive conflagration of 1914-1918:
        Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
        Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
        The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
        The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
        The best lack all conviction, while the worst
        Are full of passionate intensity.
I am not at all sanguine about our prospects, about the future of the American republic. There can be NO compromise with pure evil, with the  forces which openly deny Natural and Divine Positive Law, which destroy our civilization and now parade fiercely in the streets in opposition to everything held dear in Christian and Western tradition.
Our prospects look grim. Yet, we hold fast to our God-given and inherited convictions. As President Jefferson Davis said eight years after the end of the War for Southern Independence: “Truth crushed to earth is truth still and like a seed will rise again.”
=============================================

"Please Only Eat Half of Me!"


By Boyd Cathey    June 18, 2020

The American news media with hardly any exceptions is propagating a falsehood, a lie which is fatal to what remains of the old American republic. Practically all our political leaders, including most Republicans and establishment conservatives, have bought into it.
America at its core, goes the narrative, is a racist society, drenched in historic systemic racism, and the white man is eternally stained with the onus of that guilt. And, in fact, there is really nothing he can do except renounce his whiteness and the entirety of Western civilization, and maybe disappear into the dark recesses of history, itself. His imputed supremacy is at an end.
The real object of this ongoing effort is ultimately power and control of society.
The response of those supposed conservative defenders of American traditions to the fanatical tsunami of violent revolutionary lunacy reminds me of the scene in the film Waterloo (1970), when the illiterate private in the Welsh Guards who has engaged in plunder and stolen a young pig, cautions the pig not to squeal, not to alert those around him of his plunder (a capital offense under military law). “Be quiet,” he tells the pig, “and I’ll only eat half of you!” 
Confronted by shrill and seemingly overpowering demands of a noisy nucleus of woke leftists, the authorized conservatives and Republicans respond to the revolutionaries in the same way: “Only kill us halfway, but please, oh please, don’t call us racists!”
In other words, let’s compromise: you basically get what you want, and you’ll not call us that nasty name—that is, until the next phase of the ongoing revolution against Western civilization, when the process of slow surrender will begin all over again.
Soon there won’t be anything left to compromise.
Has this not been the way with those establishment, opposition forces for Heaven knows how long? Surrender—get killed—just a bit, and continue the desultory and disastrous retreat: voting rights, gun rights, affirmative action, same-sex marriage, transgenderism and gender fluidity, banning free speech, and so on.
The template is built on fabrications and falsification of statistics. Indeed, is this not an example of the “big lie” technique? Tell an untruth long enough, inculcate it into the curricula of school children and via the boob tube over decades, and soon most people will believe it. 
Perhaps the most useful lie has been about the death of unarmed black folks at the hands of police. But that lie is exploded, and we know the precise number of those killings thanks to a detailed Washington Post database.  According to the Post’s own reporting in 2019 police actually killed 25 unarmed whites and just 15 unarmed blacks. Indeed, the chances of being unarmed, arrested, and then killed by the police are extremely rare: Just one out of 292,000 arrests for blacks and one out of 283,000 arrests for whites. This is hardly a “wave of racist police killings,” as the media incessantly claims.
Never mind, say the social justice warriors. Whitey is still guilty with the ineradicable stain of racism, and not just those Confederate symbols, but all symbols of so-called whiteness and essentially of Western, Christian civilization must be erased, torn down, and smashed to smithereens. The past…indeed, history itself…must be abolished. And so too inherited historical memory, the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of the past is to be totally inverted or effaced.

And all the while the establishment conservative voices promoted to us on Fox News, the Brian Kilmeades, the Jonah Goldbergs, and the Chris Wallaces—all whine “please, only eat half of me!”

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

June 16, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

“Do Away with White People?” Pat Buchanan Writes

Friends,
The American news media with hardly any exceptions is propagating an immense falsehood, a tremendous lie which is fatal to what remains of the old American republic. Practically all our political leaders, including most Republicans and establishment conservatives, have bought into it.

America at its core, goes the narrative, is a racist society, drenched in historic systemic racism, and the White Man is eternally stained with the onus of that guilt. And, in fact, there is really nothing he can do except renounce his whiteness and the entirety of Western civilization, and maybe disappear from history, itself. Isn’t that the implication of what we see surrounding us?

The response of those supposed “conservative” defenders of American traditions to the fanatical tsunami of violent revolutionary lunacy reminds me of the scene in the film “Waterloo” (1970), when the illiterate private in the Welsh Guards who has engaged in plunder and stolen a young pig, cautions the pig not to squeal, not to alert those around him of his plunder (a capital offense under military rules). “Be quiet,” he tells the pig, “and I’ll only eat half of you!” 

Confronted by shrill and seemingly overwhelming demands by a noisy nucleus of woke leftists, the authorized conservatives and Republicans respond to the revolutionaries in the same way: “Only kill us half-way, but please, oh please, don’t call us racists!”

In other words, let’s compromise: you basically get what you want, and you’ll not call us that nasty name—that is, until the next phase of the ongoing revolution against Western civilization, when the compromise (read=surrender) process will occur all over again. Soon there won’t be anything left to compromise for….

Has this not been the way with those establishment “opposition” forces for Heaven knows how long? Surrender—get killed—just a bit, and continue the desultory and disastrous retreat: voting “rights,” gun rights, affirmative action and set-asides, same sex marriage, transgenderism and gender fluidity, banning free speech, and so on.

The template is built on lies and fabrications, and falsification of statistics. Indeed, is this not an example of the “big lie” technique? Tell an untruth long enough, inculcate it into school children and via the boob tube over decades, and soon most people will believe it. Is this not what is happening?

Perhaps the most useful lie has been about the death of unarmed black folks at the hands of police. Yet, we know the precise number of those killings thanks to a detailed Washington Post database.

Here is a summary of the Post’s reporting: “Last year, [2019] police killed 19 unarmed whites, in addition to 9 unarmed blacks….The chances of being unarmed, arrested, and then killed by the police  [are] very rare: One out of 292,000 arrests for blacks and out of 283,000 arrests for whites. This is hardly what we would expect from the way the media report these deaths.” 

Never mind, say the social justice warriors. Whitey is still guilty with the ineradicable stain of racism, and not just those Confederate symbols, but all symbols to “whiteness” and essentially to Western Christian civilization must be erased, torn down, and smashed to smithereens. The past…indeed, history itself…must be abolished. And so too inherited historical memory, the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of the past is to  be totally inverted or effaced.

And all the while the Tim Scott’s, the Brian Kilmeade’s, the Jonah Goldberg’s, and the Chris Wallace’s—all on Fox—whine “please, only eat half of me!”

*****
Pat Buchanan has written a column that cries out to be read and pondered, a column that cuts to the heart of what is occurring: the real revolutionary passion and objective, and the abject failure of establishment conservatism to oppose in any meaningful way the anti-white venom.

No, it’s time for citizens to organize on the grass roots level, to re-activate gun clubs and self-defense groups, both neighborhood and community-wide. To home school or privately educate our children. To organize when possible our own lawful and peaceful demonstrations. And to vote out the false conservatives come November.

This inflamed revolutionary contagion will only grow and get worse—if we let it.

Here is Pat’s column:

Cancel the White Men -- And What's Left?
By Patrick J. Buchanan    Tuesday - June 16, 2020

"Can we all just get along?"  That was the plea of Rodney King after a Simi Valley jury failed to convict any of the four cops who beat him into submission after a 100-mile-an-hour chase on an LA freeway.  King's plea came after the 1992 LA riots, the worst since the New York City draft riots in 1863 when Lincoln had to send in federal troops.

In the aftermath of today's protests and riots after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, we hear similar calls. President Donald Trump must "reach out" and "unify the nation."

But how?

Many of these calls for unity come from the same elites who are all-in on tearing us apart by pulling down statues of the famous men of American history whom they most detest.

A second war on the Confederacy is underway, to disgrace and dishonor all who fought for Southern independence in the war of 1861-65. A second Reconstruction is being readied.
 
The St. Andrew's Cross, the battle flag of the Confederate army, though seen as a banner of heroism and honor to millions, is henceforth to be treated like the Nazi swastika. It has been already been banned at Nascar races, where it has been widely popular. Liberals will fight for the right of Marxist radicals to burn the American flag to show their hatred of it but cannot tolerate working folks flying the battle flag of the Confederacy to show their love of it.

A second front in the campaign to cancel history is the renaming of U.S. army bases in Southern states that bear the names of Confederate generals, such as Forts Benning and Bragg. Trump has pledged to veto any defense appropriation bill that contains such a provision.

Third is the drive led by Nancy Pelosi and her allies to remove statues in the Capitol of any of those men of "violent bigotry" who were connected to the Confederacy.

First among them is General Robert E. Lee. Gen. David Petraeus has put succinctly the crime of which Lee is guilty. Though "West Point honors Robert E. Lee with a gate, a road, an entire housing area, and a barracks," writes Petraeus, "Lee... committed treason."

The goal here is to impose the one-sided view of American history that is now ascendant, as official truth — that the cause of Southern secession was unlike the cause of American secession from Britain. It was an act of treason rooted in the ideology of white supremacy.  To have that sole acceptable view predominate, our elites believe they must remove from public display the statues of any associated with the cause of Southern independence and stigmatize them all as traitors.
 
They have, however, a problem: Where do the elites stop when the radicals demand more?

If support of slavery disqualifies one from the company of decent men, does it disqualify George Washington, who owned slaves his entire life? What Washington fought for, independence, was what Lee fought for.

Lee did not challenge Lincoln's election. He did not seek to overthrow the government Lincoln headed. He resigned from the U.S. army to go home and defend the people among whom he had been raised from an invasion to force-march them back into a Union the state's chosen rulers had voted to leave.

Not only does our national capital, Washington, bear the name of a lifelong slave owner, so does the capital of Missouri, Jefferson City. So does the capital of Mississippi, Jackson. So does the capital of Wisconsin, Madison. The capital of Ohio is Columbus. The capital of South Carolina is Columbia. Both are named for now-vilified Christopher Columbus whose statue still stands outside D.C.'s Union Station.

None of these men appears, from how they lived their lives, to have shared modernity's belief in democracy, diversity or social equality. Yet, it was they who cobbled together the United States of America.

Washington led us to independence and ownership of all the land from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the U.S. Andrew Jackson added Florida. James K. Polk added the Southwest and California. Slave owner Sam Houston won Texas' War of independence and brought his Republic of Texas into the Union in 1845.

Two of the three greatest Senate statesmen of the 19th century, Henry Clay of Kentucky and John Calhoun of South Carolina, were slave owners. Both have statues in the Capitol. Do they go, too?

The newest bridge over the Potomac, like the premier dam in the TVA, is named for Woodrow Wilson, who resegregated the government.

These were among the decisive figures of American history. If all are dishonored, with their statues pulled down and their names taken off cities, counties, towns, rivers, canals, bridges, buildings, highways, roads, streets and dams, then what is left?

Detest all those white men if you will, but they were the ones who created the nation we inherited.

Sunday, June 14, 2020

June 14, 2020


MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Defend those Historic Forts Named for Confederate Generals!
And Give the Lie to those “Conservatives” Who Defame Lee and the South!

Friends,
In recent days there has been loud chatter about changing the names of ten American military forts which bear the names of famous Confederate generals. You see, those men were obviously racists and represent historic and systemic white oppression. They were, in short, “traitors” and “racists” who took up arms to defend a slave society and destroy the noble American “experiment” based on equality, and we can’t have any of that: purge it now! Interestingly it was the far leftist New York Times that first urged this policy back on May 23. Breitbart ran a story about it on May 24, and now it’s become the standard template of Democrats and most Republicans.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi goes further advocating the removal the statues of prominent Americans in the national Capitol who represented states where once slavery existed: "Monuments to men who advocated cruelty and barbarism to achieve such a plainly racist end are a grotesque affront to these ideals. Their statues pay homage to hate, not heritage. They must be removed."
Such a position may be expected from the speaker.
Over in the US Senate the Armed Services Committee, which the Republicans control, those esteemed gentlemen by a 25 to 2 tally voted to include a stipulation in the National Defense Authorization Act to strip the iconic names of such military installations as Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, and Fort Benning, named for famous Confederate generals. All but two Republicans supported the measure, setting up, as Reuters news service states, a clash with President Donald Trump, who opposes that change and promises a veto.
Among GOP members of that committee are Southerners Tom Tillis of North Carolina, Roger Wicker of Mississippi, Tom Cotton and Dan Sullivan of Arkansas, David Perdue of Georgia, Rick Scott of Florida, and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, all of whom are reputed “conservatives.” But we know that one of two nay voting Republicans was Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, which means almost all the GOP solons, including those from Southern states turned tail and ran, preferring like cowards to hide in the tall grass (rather than undergo most likely charges of “racism”).
So-called “conservative” pundits on Fox were no better. Victor Davis Hanson, who literally foams at the mouth with hatred at the very mention of the Confederacy, and General Jack Keane, both weighed in. Keane attempted to straddle both sides, saying the he understood the storied history of Fort Bragg (where he had once been commander), but eventually coming round to denounce Generals Bragg, Lee, A. P. Hill, and others as “traitors” who “took up arms against their country,” and thus “we should have a national discussion about name changing.” Even the mostly clear-sighted Tucker Carlson took a swipe at the Confederacy and its leaders as “treasonable” and “on the wrong side of history.” (One wonders if Carlson felt impelled to declare such views, given the intense pressure he’s been under this past week for his hardline views on the racial riots?)
What we have witnessed from our (Neo) conservative elites, those self-appointed leaders in the conservative media and those elected Republicans was nothing less than a display of gross ignorance—at best, and craven surrender to the progressivist Marxist left—at worse.  Given the history and ideology of the present dominant conservative establishment, such a course was perhaps to be expected, even if it shocks and upsets those habitual viewers of Fox News and Republican groupies who think that national salvation will be discovered listening to Brian Kilmeade or voting for Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina as he trashes the Confederacy and its leaders as racists.
There is a grassroots effort to contact the White House and President Trump to let them know you do not want our military bases’ names changed (and support the president’s opposition to proposed changes). Here is the access link to make your voice known to the president on this question:


And to counter the manifested ignorance and ideological falsehoods, I reproduce portions of two essays which I authored over the past few years answering the charges against Lee and other Confederate leaders, and against the formation of the Confederacy itself. Both of these essays appear in full in my book, The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage (Scuppernong Press, 2018).  Those same accusations were answered more fully by Albert Bledsoe 154 years ago in his study Is Davis a traitor; or, Was secession a constitutional right previous to the war of 1861?

First, here are excerpts from “Was Lee a Traitor?”  (June 18, 2018):

“Were Robert E. Lee and the Confederates “traitors” who violated their oaths to the Constitution and attempted to destroy the American nation? Or, were they defenders of that Constitution and of Western Christian civilization?
“Over the past 158 years those questions have been posed and answers offered countless times. For over a century since Appomattox the majority opinion among writers and historians was that Lee and the Confederate leadership were noble figures of a “lost cause,” but sincerely mistaken about what they were fighting for. They were admirable and valorous, even to be emulated, if in the end the “righteous cause” of “national unity” was destined to triumph.
“In the “the road to re-union” that followed the conclusion of the War for Southern Independence, Southerners were permitted their heroes and, up to a point, their history. Southern historians wrote and published accounts of “the repressible conflict” (Avery Craven), of a war that might have been avoided if reason and a spirit of compromise had triumphed (as opposed to belief in what William Seward had called “the irrepressible conflict”).
“We were “all Americans now,” united around one flag. Former Confederate generals like “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, Fitzhugh Lee, Thomas L. Rosser, and Matthew Butler served as US Army generals during the Spanish-American War. Virginian Woodrow Wilson was elected president in 1912. Southerners in Congress exercised a significant role in the direction of the nation, even if the options open to them were always subsumed under the rubric of national unity and limited by the invisible parameters of that unity. Hollywood collaborated throughout the silent period, and up through the 1950s the South and the Confederacy were treated generally with cinematic respect, if not sympathy.
“That post-war truce, that modus vivendi that recognized the nobility, sincerity, and admirability of those Confederates, even if their “cause” and secession were best interred with the past, began to break down by the sixth decade of the 20th century. Actually, a kind of Neo-Reconstructionist perspective had never completely been absent from the scene.  Historians like Black Communist, W. E. B. de Bois (Black Reconstruction in America, 1935), kept alive a narrative that insisted that the War was uniquely about slavery and racism…and the oppression of black folk by a dominant white political and economic power structure.
“With the full-fledged emergence of a “New Left” school of historians in the 1960s and the incredible success of what became cultural Marxism, the tacit post-War settlement all but disappeared.
“I remember my grad school time at the University of Virginia in the 1970s: the old liberal narrative of reunion and unity, an appreciation for the Confederacy and its leaders, was already under attack. Slavery—and the increasing significance of racism, almost to the exclusion of all other considerations—was becoming the prism by which to judge all history, not just the Confederate odyssey and the brutal war of 1861-1865 and subsequent Reconstruction. The texts in my “Civil War and Reconstruction” seminar included works by Kenneth Stampp, Stanley Elkins, as well as C. Vann Woodward (The Strange History of Jim Crow), all pointing to the direction in which we were headed. Even signs of contradiction—historical demurrers like Time on the Cross (1974) by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman—were eventually either dismissed, or, more generally, ignored.
“The “race and slavery” template has become enshrined in our contemporary historiography about “the tragic years” (to use Claude Bowers’ words). Marxist historian Eric Foner [the favorite historian of Republican consultant Karl Rove and other establishment Republicans!] with his multiple works on the epoch (e.g., Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 [1988], A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln [1990], and The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery [2010]) is now counted the major chronicler and interpreter of the period. His works are standard in nearly every college history classroom. And his minions and ideological allies now dominant academia and the historical profession, to the practical exclusion of opposing views.
“But in fascinating ways, even Foner’s perspective is too mild for many current writers and pundits. (Foner even argued, after the August 2017 incident in Charlottesville, that Confederate monuments should not be removed, but instead more statues should be installed to offer a “corrective” viewpoint.)  Strikingly, the most hysterical and unbridled attacks on the Confederacy and, in particular, on Robert E. Lee and Confederate monuments, seem to come from those who consciously proclaim themselves to be “conservatives,” that is, those who are known as “neoconservatives.”
“Basically, these “conservative” critics [see Fox News almost any time of day] of the Confederacy and Lee declare:  “Robert E. Lee and other Confederate military leaders who were in the US Army committed treason by violating their oaths to defend the Constitution, and Confederate leaders led a rebellion against the legitimately elected government of the United States.”  
“This accusation has become an ultimate weapon of choice—the “ultima ratio”—for many of today’s fierce opponents of the various monuments [and military installations] that honor Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, P. G. T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, and other Confederate military and political leaders, and for the belief that those monuments should be taken down. And most especially, it is spewed forth as unassailable gospel by many neoconservative writers, publicists, pundits, and their less distinguished camp followers in the elites of the Republican Party.
“Somehow these critics forget to mention that Lee and the other Confederate leaders resigned their commissions in the United States Army and from Congress prior to enlisting in the defense of their home states and in the ranks of the Confederate Army, or assuming political positions in the new Confederate government. They did not violate their oaths; their states had formally left the union [Virginia when it joined the American nation on June 25, 1788, specifically retained the right to leave that union for cause, which is precisely what it did on April 17, 1861], and, thus, the claims of the Federal government in Washington had ceased to have authority over them [and over Lee].
“Recently, we have witnessed the spectacle of Rich Lowry, editor of the neoconservative National Review, apparently “channeling” Robert E. Lee and declaring that if Marse Robert were alive today he would happily join in the chorus to bring down those monuments honoring Confederate soldiers and leaders. Thus, according to Lowry, the great general would be there demonstrating right beside the “Antifa” Marxists and Black Lives Matter vandals.
“Even more obtuse views come from Mona Charen, a long time Neocon publicist and Never Trumper, who fears that the GOP is “being taken over by Trumpists and Neo-Confederates”!
“But it is from the mouths of such “conservatives” as Andrew Bacevitch, Max Boot, and Victor Davis Hanson that the worst venom emits.  And, fascinatingly, it could just as well have come from a member of the communist Workers’ World Party as from Bacevitch (who writes for The American Conservative, but voted for Obama twice), or from Boot (who was John McCain’s foreign policy advisor during McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign), or from Hanson (who is considered a respected conservative icon).
“Just a few quotes from Bacevitch:
“My complaint about Lee—I admit this to my everlasting shame—was not that he was a slaveholder who in joining the Confederacy fought to preserve slavery. It was that he had thereby engineered the killing of many thousands of American patriots who (whatever their views on slavery and race) wished simply to preserve the Union. At the beginning of the Civil War, Lee famously remarked that he could not bring himself to take up arms against his home state of Virginia. This obliged him to take up arms against the very nation that as a serving officer he had sworn to defend? No less than Benedict Arnold, Robert E. Lee was a traitor. This became, and remains, my firm conviction.”

“And then this from Boot:
“…what is it that we are supposed to be grateful to the Confederates for? For seceding from the Union? For, in the case of former U.S. Army officers such as Lee and Jackson, violating their oaths to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic’? For triggering the most bloody conflict in American history? For fighting to keep their fellow citizens in bondage?”

“But it is from the rabidly anti-Confederate, Victor Davis Hanson, in his fanatical defense of William Tecumseh Sherman’s infamous “March to the Sea,” that these passions are summarized:
“…the attack on [Southern] property and infrastructure [by the North] was permissible, [as] the war was an ideological one against treason and slavery…. Terror, as a weapon to be employed in war by a democratic army, must be proportional, ideological, and rational: proportional–Southerners, who fought to preserve men as mere property, would have their property destroyed; ideological–-those who would destroy property would do so as part of a larger effort of abolition that was not merely strategic but ethical as well; and rational–-burning and looting would not be random, nor killing gratuitous, but rather ruin was to have a certain logic, as railways, public buildings, big plantations, all the visible and often official infrastructure of a slave society, would be torched….”

“Now, these individuals are well-educated, with valuable university degrees, writers of some repute. But their hatred-laced and furious animus for Lee and the Confederacy is flagrantly ideological, an inheritance of their own undeniable genealogy and origins on the zealously Trotskyite Marxist Left…a legacy that continues to characterize and color their thinking and world view.
“It was Lee, Jackson, Davis, and others like them and with them who stood foursquare for the original Constitution, for the vision of the Framers, and, in effect, for the continuance of the inheritance of Western and Christian civilization. Their defeat was an incalculable blow to that inheritance.
“The latter-day neoconservative historical narrative implicitly, if not explicitly, furthers the goals of an historical Marxism that threatens to overwhelm and displace the culture and traditions of the West with a vision that owes far more to Leon Trotsky than to George Washington. In essence, the neocons collaborate in that dissolution.”
Secondly, here are selections from my essay, “A New Reconstruction: The Renewed Assault on Southern Heritage,”  (November 19, 2015) published originally in Confederate Veteran magazine, included also in The Land We Love:
“…the charge has been made that Confederate symbols must be banned [and names of forts changed] because they represent “treason against the Federal government.” That is, those Southerners who took up arms in 1861 to defend their states, their homes, and their families, were engaged in “rebellion” and were “traitors” under Federal law.
“Again, such arguments fail on all counts. Some writers have suggested that Robert E. Lee, in particular, was a “traitor” because he violated his solemn military oath to uphold and defend the Constitution by taking up arms against the Union. But what those writers fail to note is that Lee had formally resigned from the US Army and had relinquished his commission before undertaking his new assignment to defend his home state of Virginia, which by then had seceded and re-vindicated its original independence [which it retained the right to do per its original act of joining the American nation].
“[And what of] the right of secession and whether the actions of the Southern states, December 1860-May 1861, could be justified under the US Constitution.
“One of the better summaries of the prevalent Constitutional theory at that time has been made by black scholar, professor, and prolific author Dr. Walter Williams. Here is what he writes in one his columns:
“During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, a proposal was made that would allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state. James Madison rejected it, saying, ‘A union of the states containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a state would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound.’
In fact, the ratification documents of Virginia, New York and Rhode Island explicitly said they held the right to resume powers delegated should the federal government become abusive of those powers. The Constitution never would have been ratified if states thought they could not regain their sovereignty — in a word, secede.
On March 2, 1861, after seven states seceded and two days before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, Sen. James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin proposed a constitutional amendment that read, “No state or any part thereof, heretofore admitted or hereafter admitted into the union, shall have the power to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the United States.”
Several months earlier, Reps. Daniel E. Sickles of New York, Thomas B. Florence of Pennsylvania and Otis S. Ferry of Connecticut proposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit secession. Here’s a question for the reader: Would there have been any point to offering these amendments if secession were already unconstitutional?” [emphasis added]

“An examination of the ratification processes for Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina in the late 1780s, reveal very similar discussions: it was the independent states themselves that had created a Federal government (and not the reverse, as Abe Lincoln erroneously suggested), and it was the various states that granted the Federal government certain very limited and specifically enumerated powers, reserving the vast remainder for themselves (see Professor Mel Bradford, Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution. University of Georgia Press, 1993). As any number of the Founders indicated, there simply would not have been any United States if the states, both north and south, had believed that they could not leave it for just cause.
“During the Antebellum period there was little political support for denying the right of secession or for the Constitutional right to suppress it.  Of the pre-war presidents, it is true, Andrew Jackson threatened South Carolina in 1833 over Nullification of the “Tariff of Abominations,” but that crisis was resolved through compromise. Even staunch anti-slavery unionist President John Quincy Adams advocated secession over the annexation of Texas, and in his April 30, 1839, speech “The Jubilee of the Constitution,” commemorating the 50th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration as the first American president, he affirmed:
“…if the day should ever come, (may Heaven avert it) when the affections of the people of these states shall be alienated from each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give away to cold indifference, or collisions of interest shall fester into hatred, the bands of political association will not long hold together the parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies; and far better will it be for the people of the disunited states, to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint.”
“In his address to Congress in January of 1861, lame duck President James Buchanan, while deploring secession, stated frankly that he had no right to prevent it: “I certainly had no right to make aggressive war upon any State, and I am perfectly satisfied that the Constitution has wisely withheld that power even from Congress.” Former President John Tyler served in the Confederate Congress, and former President Franklin Pierce, in his famous Concord, New Hampshire, address, July 4, 1863, joined Buchanan in decrying the efforts to suppress the secession of the Southern states:
“Do we not all know that the cause of our casualties is the vicious intermeddling of too many of the citizens of the Northern States with the constitutional rights of the Southern States, cooperating with the discontents of the people of those states? Do we not know that the disregard of the Constitution, and of the security that it affords to the rights of States and of individuals, has been the cause of the calamity which our country is called to undergo?”

“More, during the antebellum period William Rawle’s pro-secession text on Constitutional law, A View of the Constitution of the United States (1825,) was used at West Point as the standard text on the US Constitution.  And on several occasions the Supreme Court, itself, affirmed this view. In The Bank of Augusta v. Earl (1839), the Court wrote in an 8-1 decision:
“The States…are distinct separate sovereignties, except so far as they have parted with some of the attributes of sovereignty by the Constitution. They continue to be nations, with all their rights, and under all their national obligations, and with all the rights of nations in every particular; except in the surrender by each to the common purposes and object of the Union, under the Constitution. The rights of each State, when not so yielded up, remain absolute.”

“A review of the Northern press at the time of the Secession conventions finds, perhaps surprisingly to those who wish to read back into the past their own statist ideas, a similar view. As historian William Marvel explains in his volume, Mr. Lincoln Goes to War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishers, 2006, pp. 19-20), very few Northern newspapers took the position that the Federal government had the constitutional right to invade and suppress states that had decided to secede. Many favored peaceful separation. Indeed, were it not the New England states in 1814-1815 who made the first serious effort at secession during the War of 1812, to the point that they gathered in Hartford to discuss actively pursuing it? And during the pre-war period various states asserted in one form or another similar rights.
“One last comment regarding the accusation of “treason”: after the conclusion of the War, the Southern states were put under military authority, their civil governments dissolved, and each state had to be re-admitted to the Union.  But, logically, a state could not be “re-admitted” to the Union unless it had been out of it. And if it were out of it, legally and constitutionally, as the Southern states maintained (and some Northern writers acknowledged), then it could not be in any way guilty of “treason.” [….]
                                                                  *************

Please sign the petition…and help spread the truth. We shall, apparently, get little or no help from the establishment Yankee Republicans from north of the Mason-Dixon Line, nor from our cowardly southern Republican solons who fear, it seems, being called a “racist” more than the extinction of our heritage and culture. It’s up to us, then. Let the president hear our voices…and come November let’s remember the Scalawags in our midst who plead for our votes but in Washington don’t give a damn about our history and traditions.

                                    February 11, 2024     MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey Descent into Madness: Dostoevsky and the End of...