August 18, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Cancel Culture Comes Home: The Forks Cafeteria in Wake Forest, North Carolina

Friends,

I have written previously about the very real dangers of what is called “cancel culture.” Indeed, what we have—what we see and experience today in the United States is a massive attempt, increasingly successful, to not just inhibit the rights of more conservative and right-leaning citizens from expressing their views, but to “doxx” them, get them fired from their jobs, publicly shame them, instill in them fear to effectively shut them up completely. This is happening not only on our college and university campuses, controlled almost in their entirety by totalitarian leftists who talk excessively about “our democracy” while doing their damnedest to suppress it, but also generally in society. (Again, I ask—demand—to know why our conservative legislators continue to throw millions in taxpayer money at these bloated, overpaid excuses for Marxist indoctrination camps?)

The increasing instances of suppression are to say the least deeply deleterious to whatever future this American republic might have. When you have as many as one third, maybe one half, of the persons in these United States now whipped up fanatically into a vicious ideological frenzy, with a desire to ban and repress and punish their fellow Americans—when you have local and state governments seemingly paralyzed by, if not supportive of the anarchic chaos in dozens of American cities—when you have a news media in its near totality abetting this process and purposely shaping (and suppressing) the news to reflect an extreme revolutionary agenda—when most of the Internet and tech industry monopoly zealously undergird this process and censor opposing voices, then can the real fate of “our democracy” be secure? Are not the extremists, with their unbridled—and learned in school—hatred, actually engaged in a form of projection when they talk about equality, democracy, racism and bigotry: guilty of the very same things they accuse others of?

All this was recently brought home locally in Wake Forest, North Carolina. Wake Forest, once a small college town and still the seat of Southeastern Baptist Seminary, from its tradition as a desirable small town about fifteen miles north of Raleigh to its present condition as a “bedroom” community of nearly 45,000, is host to a large branch of the North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), the 47th Regiment NC Troops, Camp 166. The local SCV has been very active there, civically and publicly-mindedly, for nearly thirty years participating in everything from the local Christmas parade to support for Adopt-a-Highway and Tri-Area Ministries programs.

Then came last week like a bolt of lightning out of the blue, one more insane effect of cancel culture, an example of the lunacy, the real ideological sickness that seems to possess so many of our fellow citizens. For twenty-eight years the 47^th Regiment NC Troops Camp has been meeting at The Forks Cafeteria & Catering in downtown Wake Forest, in one of the Forks’ private conference/dining rooms, without any adverse incidents at all. Indeed, a state divisional SCV meeting was held there a few years ago (again, with no problems at all). But this past week David Greenwell, the owner of The Forks, notified the SCV that it could no longer meet there because the organization represented “hate and racism,” even though he could not cite even one example where such “hate and racism” were on display. Indeed, he admitted: “I have never had any problem with the group at all. They were always nice and friendly.”

This in microcosm is where we are in society today—this is what has happened and is happening to our culture. While too many of our folks, regular citizens who work and raise families, sit by and indifferently watch, our traditions, our heritage, our beliefs and values, the very symbols we honor are uprooted, spat upon, defiled…and we are told to shut up or else, or else face the bitter effects of cancel culture.

But this cannot continue without end. Either we stand up and oppose this destructive and devastating frenzy, or we will simply disappear into the bowels of history, perhaps to be cursed by our grand-children to whom we leave the barren desert of the Gulag.

*****

I pass on today a news article from a local online journal about the decision of The Forks Cafeteria; at the end of the story is contact information if you should wish to make your views known to the owner (please, if you do so, be polite).

THE WHITE STREET JOURNAL

15Aug

Sons of Confederate Veterans kicked out of the Forks Cafeteria

http://wsj30.com/2020/08/15/sons-of-confederate-veterans-kicked-out-of-the-forks-cafeteria/

By wsj30 on Aug 15, 2020

By JAY LAMM | editor@wsj30.com

The local Sons of Confederate Veterans has been kicked out of Forks Cafeteria because of customer complaints about Confederate symbols visible during meetings.

The group has been meeting at the downtown Wake Forest iconic restaurant off Brooks Street for the last 28 years. The group was notified by phone Wednesday night by David Greenwell, owner of the Forks Cafeteria. 

Greenwell said Friday that he understands the position of the group, but he did what is best for his business in a progressive time in history.

Frank Powell, former commander of 47th Regiment NC Troops Camp 166, a chapter of the SCV, received the phone call from Greenwell.

“The call was out of the blue. Unexpected. We were shocked and upset,” Powell said. “We have been meeting there for 28 years. We started when the restaurant was in the old Seminary cafeteria on the Seminary campus. He said he had received complaints and he didn’t want us meeting in his restaurant. His tone sounded as if he was mad at me.” 

Powell said his group met in a private room and disturbed no one. A Confederate battle flag was on display in the room during the meeting. Powell said it couldn’t be seen from outside of the room. 

“We meet the first Thursday of every month. We have about 50 members, but we average about 25 at a meeting — young and old,” said Powell. “The owner doesn’t know what we do at our meetings. He’s hardly ever around when we are there.”

Greenwell said he didn’t make the decision hastily.

“I have never had any problem with the group at all. They were always nice and friendly,” said Greenwell. “People started to complain. There was a placard in an easel the nights of the meeting that displayed Confederate symbolism. It could be seen from the cash register station, and it upset some customers.”

Powell said Greenwell never asked him to remove the flags or signage. 

“Our meetings usually feature a historical program and the speaker will sometimes bring artifacts. This has never been a problem,” said Powell. 

“The Confederate Battle Flag represents hate and racism in this country, at this time. I just couldn’t have a group with that symbolism in my business anymore,” said Greenwell. 

“None of us will ever eat at The Forks again,” said Powell. “We have received much support in such a short time. So far about 100 people have said they will not eat there again”

Greenwell said he has learned a lot about some of his customers and people in the community since he made the decision to not allow the Sons of Confederate Veterans to meet in his business. He said he realizes he might lose customers. 

“I have received calls, messages from people who say they will no longer support my business.  You never know about some people, friends, you thought, but I do now,” he said.

Powell said his group is not a hate group but a group preserving heritage and making a difference in the community. 

“We have a section of US-1 for the Adopt-a-Highway program we keep clean. We participate in the Wake Forest Cemetery Walking Tour every year. We have supported the Wake Forest Purple Heart Banquet for the last five or six years with a financial donation and buying tickets to attend the event. We’re a member of the Wake Forest Community Council for the last few years, and I’m serving as treasurer this year. We support Tri-Area Ministries with donations every month,” Powell said.

The organization also marched in the Wake Forest Christmas Parade for 26 years before it was cancelled in 2019.  The parade was cancelled due to threats of protest and violence because of the same Confederate group’s intended participation.

“We are misunderstood. No one knows what history is anymore. We feel we are a victim of pure discrimination,” Powell said, adding that the group has sought legal advice. “Just about every community group in Wake Forest meets at The Forks, but now, not us. We just want to be treated like everyone else.” 

Now, the group is looking for a new meeting place, but nothing had been decided.

“We have a couple of places we are looking at,” said Powell. 

The next meeting is Sept. 3. 

Greenwell said he was prepared for the fallout of his decision. 

“I know I will lose business because of this decision,” he said, “but I needed to be progressive for the future of my business and its place in the community.”

============================================================================

Here immediately below is contact information for The Forks Cafeteria & Catering, if you should wish to let them know how you think about this application of “cancel culture”:

https://theforkscafeteria.com/contact-us/

Telephone number: 919-556-6544

August 13, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The English Language and Grammar are Racist! Get Rid of them!

Friends,

In these revolutionary times it had to come sooner or later—any brief moment of serious reflection (rare these days, it seems) would reach this point inevitably. And it is not like it’s totally new, but this time it’s with us with a force that we should expect to grow inexorably and be picked up by the advance guard of the cultural fanatics as a magic talisman that will be foisted on our schools and on us.

If “white supremacy” and “racism” are purveyed and maintained by the use of the structures and historic foundations of “white” language and grammar, well then, that language and grammar must be undone, critically deconstructed, and “other” forms of written and verbal communication admitted as equal. Indeed, if our historic means of communication is so infected with traditional “whiteness,” is there not an extreme case for not only reducing its importance and influence, and recognizing, for instance, “black English,” but maybe even eradicating “white language”? After all, by the logic of this argument, language is and has been a “weapon” of historic cultural racism and control by “white oppressors.”

While this agenda has not yet asserted its dominance over the literary canon or the accepted norms and style for serious writing and communication, it has in fact had tremendous success in modes of communication such as Twitter and Instagram, which increasingly control cultural expression. And one can argue that it is just a matter of time before the swirling linguistic revolution, with its already de facto acceptance and everyday normalcy, reaches the college classroom and the publishing houses, as well as the media. Indeed, the entertainment industry no longer resists it to any great extent.

As a sign of the future, just recently I ran across the statement of the chairman of the English Department at Rutgers University (June 19). The open letter of chairman Rebecca Walkowitz will, no doubt, be the precursor of additional actions, some stated, others just implemented, to follow.

Here is how the Reuters News Service characterized Walkowitz’s intentions:

The letter expresses the Department’s plans to respond to the calls of BLM to “create and promote an anti-racist environment in our workplace, our classes, our department, our university, and our communities; and to contribute to the eradication of the violence and systemic inequities facing black, indigenous, and people of color members of our community.”

Within the letter Walkowitz outlines a series of concrete steps to promote departmental changes, including expanding the availability of seminars engaging with discussions of social justice and improving graduate student life.

This same section also includes Walkowitz talk[ing] about incorporating “critical grammar” into the university’s pedagogy. This approach, according to Walkowitz, is meant to “challeng[e] the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, non-standard “academic” English backgrounds at a disadvantage.

“Instead, it encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them w/ regard to micro-level issues in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on ‘written’ accents,” the letter noted.

If you can read through the fashionable pseudo-intellectual framework that surrounds what Ms. Walkowitz is essentially saying, it is this: “we’re going to eliminate standards in grammar and writing, and let students who don’t speak or write ‘traditional English’ express themselves accordingly.”

And more ominously, there is the assertion that traditional modes of communication are inherently biased and oppressive. Is not the next step in this process a radical deconstruction in grammar? Already great works of our literary heritage have undergone this deconstructive process to reflect critically the goalposts of “woke” anti-racism and feminism, standards that now regulate how we read and interpret them.

Grammatical expression is next.

The logic, as I say, is inexorable. For the cultural revolution to succeed it must transform or suppress the language of the oppressors.

My friend Dr. Clyde Wilson’s solution to our academic problems grows more attractive by the day: “Napalm our universities,” he once wrote me. Although written mostly (I suspect) in a jocular vein, there is much truth to what Professor Wilson wrote and observed. Until we get control of higher education—and until our Republican-dominated legislatures stop buying into the dangerous practice of trying to outdo their Democratic cohorts in throwing millions of dollars at those financially-bloated sinecures of lunatic leftist plutocracy and revolution—there is simply no way we can even think about saving our culture, much less restoring it.

August 8, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

John “Oswatomie” Brown and the Present Revolution

Friends,

I pass on just one essay today, an essay I think most readers will not have seen or read. In our present climate where everything is meticulously measured and scrupulously evaluated by hyper-fanatic totalitarian-wannabes for fealty and strict obedience to a new and ever-advancing “anti-racist” narrative, our history is being radically re-written. Everything these days must agree with the ironclad racial narrative—which is more severe and unforgiving than any ukase by a Russian tsar or infallible proclamation by the Roman pontiff.

In this regard, Jim Bovard takes a refreshing look at the historical figure of the terrorist John “Oswatomie” Brown, with fascinating research and information. 

Pass it on to a “woke” friend, if you still have one:

 

Anti-Slavery Zealot John Brown Is No Hero

Yet poets Thoreau and Emerson made him a god and helped spark the Civil War.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/19th-century-radical-chic-the-transcendentalists-love-affair-with-john-brown/

JIM BOVARD  JULY 9, 2020

Many Americans have been aghast at violent mobs toppling statues and the widespread looting and destructive rampages that followed the killing of George Floyd. Media coverage often ignores the damage inflicted by righteous rioters and the businessmen, black and white, whose livelihoods have been destroyed. Instead, activists are portrayed as heroic because of their political rhetoric and demands for radical changes. 

Soaring political animosity is sparking fears of much greater conflicts in the coming months. More than 160 years ago, a similar pattern paved the way for a conflict that ravaged much of the nation. Few people are aware of how one of America’s most respected philosophers helped inflame the divisions that led to the first Civil War in 1861.

In his 1849 essay, “On the Duty Of Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau boldly declared: “That government is best which governs not at all.” After a night spent in jail for refusing to pay taxes, Thoreau “saw that the State was half-witted.” He concluded, “I quietly declare war with the State,” withdrawing his allegiance as long as the government enforced unjust laws. 

But late in his life, Thoreau mutated into an apologist for bloodthirsty political fanaticism. Thoreau, following in the footsteps of his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, believed that “our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.” Thoreau was a Transcendentalist with boundless faith in absolute truth and absolute goodness. And he never doubted that he perceived those absolutes far more clearly than the vast majority of people who “lead lives of quiet desperation,” as he wrote in Walden.

Thoreau was justifiably fiercely opposed to slavery. He had initially been wary of fire-breathing Abolitionists who wanted the nation to pay any price to end slavery until he met and swooned for John Brown in 1857. Thoreau donated to Brown after hearing him make a rabble-rousing speech. Thoreau bragged that he “never read” the political columns in newspapers because “I do not wish to blunt my sense of right.” Maybe that helped explain Thoreau’s obliviousness (or lack of concern) regarding Brown’s notorious murders in Pottawatomie, Kansas, when he and his sons hacked to death five men living in a pro-slavery portion of the state. That 1856 carnage embodied one of Brown’s favorite sayings: “Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin.”

In October 1859, Brown led a band of zealots attacking Harper’s Ferry, Virginia to seize the federal arsenal, part of his plan to end slavery via the mass killing of slave owners across the South. Mount Holyoke University professor Christopher Benfey aptly characterized Brown in the New York Review of Books in 2013 as someone who was “murderous, inept, politically marginal, probably insane.” Most of the nation was horrified by Brown’s attack at Harper’s Ferry, which was speedily put down by federal troops led by Lt. Colonel Robert E. Lee. Even the nation’s foremost abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, condemned Brown’s attack as “a misguided, wild, and apparently insane–effort.” Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Tribune that “the way to universal emancipation lies not through insurrection, civil war, and bloodshed, but through peace, discussion, and quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity and justice.” 

But Thoreau decided that Brown was literally Jesus—or at least that Jesus and John Brown were “two ends of a chain which I rejoice to know is not without its links.” In “A Plea for John Brown,” an oration delivered in Concord, Massachusetts two weeks after Brown’s attack, Thoreau referred to Brown as an “angel of light” and described Brown’s Harper’s Ferry accomplices as his “twelve disciples.” Thoreau hailed “the new saint who would make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”

Thoreau exalted Brown: “No man has appeared in America, as yet, who loved his fellow man so well, and treated him so tenderly.” That was balderdash on par with Stalin’s apologists gushing in the 1930s about the “peace-loving Soviet Union.” When Thoreau and Emerson met Brown in 1857, Brown told them that it would be “better for a whole generation of men, women, and children should pass away by violent death” than for the Golden Rule or Declaration of Independence to ever be violated. Rather than recognizing Brown as a lunatic seeking a pretext to slaughter much of humanity, Thoreau and Emerson hailed him as a moral visionary. But they never explained how to reconcile the Golden Rule with genocide. 

For Thoreau, Brown’s self-evident goodness made his killings irrelevant. Thoreau declared, “The question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it.” As University of Connecticut Professor Michael Meyer noted in 1980, “Thoreau’s Transcendentalism allowed him to disregard any information about Brown which might have tarnished his image as martyr.” Thoreau focused on Brown’s “willingness to be killed—rather than Brown’s willingness to kill indiscriminately for his cause. Thoreau never mentions that the first man killed by Brown’s raiding party at Harper’s Ferry was a free black man who was shot in the back.” Similarly, Thoreau touted Brown’s fight against slavery in Kansas but never mentioned the Pottawattomie massacre. Thoreau also entitled himself to disregard any publications which vigorously criticized Brown: “they are not human enough to affect me at all.”

Thoreau and Emerson rallied northern opinion to view Brown as a martyr; Emerson also explicitly defined Brown as a “new saint” and labeled him “the rarest of heroes, a pure idealist.” David Reynolds, a CUNY professor and author of a book on how John Brown “sparked the Civil War,” wrote in 2013 that Thoreau and Emerson’s “bold, virtually solitary public support of John Brown rescued Brown from infamy.” Thoreau and Emerson swayed northerners to see Brown as a hero; Thoreau’s “plea” concluded with a call for vengeance against the South. As a result, “many Southerners viewed the raid as a larger Northern scheme to directly attack the South, leading to increased sectional distrust and accelerating the approach of secession in 1861,” as the American Battlefield Trust noted.

For Thoreau and Emerson, “trust yourself” was effectively replaced by “kill them all and let God sort them out.” Thanks in part to their efforts, “a passion for the violent solution to slavery was sweeping the abolitionist citizens of the nation,” as historian Thomas Fleming wrote in A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War.

Radical Republican Congressional leaders “unanimously agreed that the integrity of the Union should be preserved, though it cost a million lives,” the New York Times reported on Christmas Day 1860. Massachusetts governor John Albion declared, “We must conquer the South.” Pro-war Bostonians urged the governor to “drive the ruffians into the Gulf of Mexico and give the country to the Negroes.” [….]

Thoreau’s canonization of John Brown helped drive the nation to a Civil War that left more than 700,000 soldiers dead. With each passing year, the conflict became more unhinged from basic decency. Shortly before he launched his famous swath of destruction through Georgia in 1864, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman telegraphed the Secretary of War that  “there is a class of people—men, women, and children—who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.” 

Though the end of slavery was a blessing, the war’s aftermath unleashed new poxes. As a result of illness, poverty, and negligence by federal officials, roughly 25 percent of freed slaves died or became gravely ill in the first years after the war, as Connecticut College Professor Jim Downs noted in his 2012 book, Sick from Freedom. 

Was it worth it? It is open to dispute whether a war was necessary to end slavery in America. Abraham Lincoln said in 1859 that he was “quite sure [slavery] would not outlast the century.” Slavery ended almost every place else in the western hemisphere without a civil war. In early 1862, Lincoln asked Congress “to consider a constitutional amendment that would guarantee compensated emancipation to any state, including those in rebellion, that would agree to abolish slavery gradually by 1900,” Fleming noted. But abolitionists torpedoed the proposal and demanded that the war continue.

John Brown was the living embodiment of the 19th century quip: “A fanatic is someone who does what the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the matter.” Similarly, the mobs in many cities that are currently unleashing violence are convinced they are doing God’s work—or at least obeying the commandments they imbibed in college sociology classes. But the idiocy of the new saviors knows no bounds, as illustrated by their attacks on statues of Frederick Douglass in New York, the monument of the 54th Massachusetts regiment (one of the most famous colored regiments in the Civil War), and their beheading of the statute of Col. Hans Christian Heg, a Union officer who helped rescue escaped slaves before 1861. The Black Student Union and the Student Inclusion Coalition of the University of Wisconsin are also demanding removal of a statute of Abraham Lincoln on their campus.

Thoreau’s deification of John Brown should be a reminder of the perils of glorifying political violence in the name of any ideal. John Brown’s legacy vivified how hatred is far easier to unleash than to control. Reasonable people can usually reach compromises or craft accommodations with happier results than mobs driven berserk by the latest Twitter hashtag.

James Bovard is the author of Lost Rights, Attention Deficit Democracy, and Public Policy Hooligan. He is also a USA Today columnist. Follow him on Twitter @JimBovard.

August 2, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

To Recapture the Culture: The Abbeville

Institute Fall Symposium 2020

Friends, I pass on to you news of an excellent opportunity to strengthen your knowledge of history and our Western Christian—and Southern—heritage. Now, in these dark and revolutionary days when it seems that “the centre cannot hold… [and] the worst are full of passionate intensity” (William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 1919), there are few citadels of sanity and open defiance to the frenzied and angry mob and tsunami of self-inflicted destruction of our civilization. Just yesterday my traditionalist Spanish friends sent me news that two orthodox Catholic priests in Spain face up to three years in prison for “the crime of incitement to hate and racism because they had been critical of Islam in diverse writings.” The Spanish equivalent of the district attorney for the city of Malaga, Maria Teresa Verdugo, is demanding that punishment for Fathers Custodio Ballester and Jesús Calvo, who simply expounded the traditional teaching of orthodox Christianity concerning the Muslim religion. And this in Spain, that scarcely half a century ago was supposedly the most Christian nation in Europe. I know because I finished my doctoral studies there in 1975. This incident in Spain can be multiplied many times over in the rest of Europe and now also increasingly in the United States, especially with the arbitrary and politically-inspired rules accompanying the pandemic. But although these outrages are sometimes noted in the media, it is more insidiously in our culture—in the arts, literature, music—where this zealous, fanatical anti-Western cancer has taken firm root, with penalties meted out to the guilty defenders of the two millennia of inherited Western culture, in many cases resulting in the complete re-casting, re-writing, bowdlerizing, or banning of the great artifacts of our heritage. Such immortal works of genius as Mozart’s comic opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio, which playfully makes fun of Islam, was censored and its lines rewritten by the Canadian Opera Company. For a recent production north of the border the company had some bright “woke” scribbler “rewrite the dialogue for Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio in order to remove racist language.” And after years of patiently waiting to see a presentation of one of the more fascinating operas of the first decade of the 19th century, Gasparo Spontini’s Fernand Cortez, originally produced (1809) to glorify the French invasion and conquest of “backward” Spain (it was later revised to reflect the 1815 triumph of the Bourbons), a decent video emerged this spring from the May Florence Musical Festival in Italy. It’s a fairly traditional, well-sung production—none of those “Eurotrash” touches that ruin so much of current musical and theatrical ventures these days. Yet, because Spontini glorifies (in some wonderfully heroic music) the conquest of Mexico and the conversion of the heathen Aztecs to Christianity, the director felt compelled to add a projected-on-screen message both at the beginning and at the end basically condemning Western and white colonialism and racism. Nevertheless, the original libretto and music emerge, but I expect to see fierce condemnations of its revival despite the cosmetic application of political correctness. As we watch not just the monuments and symbols of our Confederate heritage disappear from public view, but also monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, Father Junipero Serra, and many others…and we observe that many, if not most of our elected representatives in Congress and on the state level either meekly utter a mild demurrer (at best) or, more likely, accede to and go along with the vandalism and destruction of our Western heritage for fear of being called a “racist,” it is we who should and must summon outrage and disgust. But where is that outrage? Where is that disgust and willingness to take to the streets to counter and show that we will not sit idly by when small, well-organized groups of Antifa and Black Lives Matter revolutionaries seek to erase our inheritance, indeed, seek to erase us? Just yesterday (August 1, 2020) in Raleigh, North Carolina, there was a well-attended manifestation of “normal” people in support of our police. But let me ask: we have reached the point where we have to go out in streets to actually support one of the most normal and fundamental functions of a civilized society? We have reached that point? Where, indeed, are the thousands of others who silently oppose the barbarism and the vicious attacks on our history, our culture, and the very foundations of who we are as a people? We sit back in our arm chairs like zombies and watch “America’s Got Talent” or some other insipid program on network television; we complain about the abbreviated football season; we grumble about bars not opening; some have lost jobs and income due to COVID-19. But where is the swelling outrage about what is and has been going on to simply eradicate and wipe off the map and out of history the culture in which we were born, the culture which annealed and made us who we are? Where is the anger about the near-total subversion of our schools and colleges? Where is the revolt against the scandalously fake and false “news coverage” by our media, both national AND local? Sadly, too many of our leaders in the established conservative movement and in the Republican Party have succumbed to the enticements of power, position and reputation. They would, to quote Pope Leo XIII in the 19th century about liberalism, “rather rule in Hell, than serve in Heaven.” They are more concerned for their power and wealth, their positions and not being labeled racists or bigots or white supremacists, than for stoutheartedly defending the legacy we have received from our ancestors (and that is being attacked by the unhinged revolutionaries). Their approach, at best, is what I would call the “Rodney King approach”: can’t we all just get along? Maybe if I give you much of what you want—maybe if we take down just those offending Confederate statues or change the names of those forts—maybe we can all get along? Okay? And this is precisely what far too many GOP members of Congress have decided to do. It won’t work with the revolutionaries: they will take what you give and demand more until there is nothing left to give. It is a bankrupt mentality that results eventually in total surrender and defeat; it emerges out of the philosophical underpinnings of those we call “Neoconservatives,” those former Leftists, in many cases globalist Trotskyites, who drifted into the conservative movement in the 1970s, and who now dominate not only establishment conservatism but also the GOP. My question, so often expressed in my columns, is this: when shall we stand up and fight? Those manifesting their support for the police in Raleigh yesterday did so; but where are those thousands, the so-called “silent majority”? Will it take a Biden victory at the ballot box, and new authoritarian executive orders, new restrictions, and then, finally, when some ragged and bearded “woke” millennial or smelly, obese feminist comes banging on your door, demanding that since you have three bedrooms you must give one up and share it with a destitute illegal immigrant who has already been convicted of a dozen felonies, but let off by our corrupted judicial system? Will that be the moment when you say: “Wait! No!” But won’t THAT moment be too late…? Remember the scene in the epic film Dr. Zhivago, when Yuri and Tanya have settled in their home in Moscow, which has now been forcibly split up and separated into tenements by the Soviet government. Think it can’t happen here? Think again. Think you cannot be banned, have your expression restricted, get fired not only for writing something considered offensive to the powers-that-be, but for the very fact that you think something no longer acceptable—in some ways these conditions are already here. And yet the refrain is still, “I don’t want to miss ‘America’s Got Talent’ or the PGA!” My recommendations? Talk to your friends, organize at first in small local groups for self-preparedness and defense; insofar as you can, meet with others of like mind and have a plan for possible future events; participate in demonstrations like yesterday’s pro-police manifestation in downtown Raleigh; get a gun and gun license if you don’t already have one; and, of course, vote this fall. And this may not be enough, because assuredly the extremists and fanatics intend to steal the election, and we all know that. In the meantime, the Abbeville Institute is offering once again a symposium that should attract a large attendance. It treats of an issue that affects both Southerners, but also all Americans: “Who Owns America?” We have the specter of immense corporate America…Facebook, Twitter, Google, the tech industry, and many of the boardrooms across this benighted nation…now enthralled by Black Lives Matter and cancel culture. Unlike the traditional Leftist attack template, the American corporate plutocracy is now squarely on the side of revolution and “woke” culture, as Tucker Carlson describes in his blockbuster book, Ship of Fools. This year 2020 and this election may well be our last real opportunity to reverse and alter what has been occurring. If the unhinged Left continues its devastation through our institutions, that, with the major demographic changes and the utter corruption in our education system, will condemn us to disappear, and we shall witness the unceremonious and ugly demise of what is left of our civilization. The Abbeville Institute understands that it is through assaults on the South and its heritage that so many of these attacks have first come. Their symposium this October in Charleston, South Carolina, offers an excellent opportunity to better familiarize yourself with our incredibly rich but under severe attack heritage…and to prepare the arduous effort to take it back and restore it. Here is the program and details: ABBEVILLE INSTITUTE Fall Symposium: TOPIC: “WHO OWNS AMERICA?” The classic manifesto I’ll Take My Stand by Twelve Southerners is 90 years old this year, 2020. When the book was published in 1930 the Depression raged, and American discourse was a combat between corporate capitalism and socialism. For the Southern Agrarians, these alternatives were merely two sides of the same coin—both implying inhuman mass working and living, fallacies of endless progress and bigger is better, and the loss of real culture. The Agrarians proposed a different and better way for Americans. Although their message did not triumph, I’ll Take My Stand has never gone out of print and is still cherished by thoughtful people In 1936 the Twelve joined with Northern and British writers to elaborate their message with specifics in Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence. Given the near-authoritarian and conflicted condition of the imperial United States in 2020, and the remoteness of our present prevailing ideas from the vision of earlier Americans, the Abbeville Institute believes that the Agrarian, Jeffersonian message is still extremely relevant. We will explore such prophetic relevance in economics, government, culture, and meaningful life. SPEAKERS AND PANELISTS: Lee Cheek (Political Science, East Georgia College) John Devanny (History, Christendom College) Thomas Fleming (President, Fleming Foundation) Philip Leigh (Author and Historian) Donald Livingston (Philosophy, Emory University, Emeritus) Carey Roberts (History, Liberty University) Joe Stromberg (Author and Historian) Jack Trotter (Literature, Trident State Technical College) Bill Wilson (Literature, University of Virginia, Emeritus) Clyde Wilson (History, University of South Carolina, Distinguished Emeritus) PLACE AND COST: Crowne Plaza Charleston, 4831 Tanger Outlet Blvd, (843) 744-4422. Participants should make their own reservations. Mention Abbeville Institute for rate of $139 per night, including breakfast. Conference fee is $100, includes tuition and dinner Saturday evening. Fee must be paid in advance with registration. Register online by clicking the button below or to pay by mail, make check to: Abbeville Institute, P.O. Box 10, McClellanville, South Carolina 29458. For questions call 843 323 0690. FRIDAY,  Oct. 16       7:30-9:00                     “The Jeffersonian Conservative Tradition,” Panel Discussion:                                       Carey Roberts, Lee Cheek, Clyde Wilson (All events in     Middleton/Magnolia Room) SATURDAY, Oct. 17 8:00-9:00                     Breakfast         9:00-10:00                   “I’ll Take My Stand, Farming, Poetry, and Resistance.” Bill Wilson 10:00-11:00                 “Who Owns America? Populism, Political Economy, and Corporate Personality,” Jack Trotter   11:00-11:30                 BREAK 11:30-12:30                 “Agrarianism, Republicanism, and Laissez Faire,” Joe Stromberg 2:00-3:00                     “The Postbellum South as An Exploited Colony,” Philip Leigh 3:00-4:00                     “Who Owns America Now?” John Devanny 4:00-5:00                     Panel Discussion 5:30-6:30                     Cash Bar 6:30-8:00                     Supper - All of us at Abbeville Institute Register Now!

Abbeville Institute PO Box 10  | McClellanville, South Carolina 29458 843-323-0690 | mcclanahan@abbevilleinstitute.org