CONFEDERACY/ SOUTH

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also polarization 2 americas SEE RED STATES

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#1 cause kid death

https://www.alternet.org/tennessee-gun-laws/

7 26 AN

A new list ranking the 10 worst states to live in has just been released, and MAGA is not happy that the whole ranking is deep red.

The list was compiled by CNBC, and according to the Daily Beast, it “factored in several ‘Quality of Life’ issues, such as healthcare and reproductive rights, crime rates, air quality, civil rights laws, and inclusivity.” Using this methodology, CNBC determined that Tennessee delivers the worst quality of life, followed by Texas, Indiana, Louisiana, Georgia, Utah, Missouri, Alabama, Oklahoma and Arkansas. There is a clear red trend to the list, as each state is led by a Republican governor and voted for President Donald Trump in 2024.

CNBC published the list on Saturday, and by Tuesday, MAGA had fomented into a full-blown freakout as Trump loyalists attempted to deflect from failing living conditions in conservative states.

“CNBC says the ability to kill unborn babies and engage in woke racism makes states better to live in,” top Trump ally Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, posted on X. Pete Mundo, a conservative Kansas City radio host, echoed these sentiments, fuming, “These are some of the highest in-bound migration states in the country, but because you can’t abort babies til month 9, and trans your kids at will, it ranks low on the CNBC rankings.”

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measles texas dilley uve camp fla SC

postandcourier.com

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SC measles outbreak takes different trajectory as cases spread in community

12 days agoThe number of measles cases is slowing in the Upstate, but people are becoming infected in other areas of SC and North Carolina.

WMBF News

wmbfnews.com

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Officials confirm 13 new measles cases in Upstate outbreak, exposures at two schools

15 days agoOfficials said the new cases brought the total number of cases in South Carolina related to the Upstate outbreak to 933.

Global News

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AN 10 25

On Tuesday, here in Chicago, America caught a glimpse of its possible future, and it was terrifying. Federal agents, dressed like soldiers and armed with the weapons of war, rammed a civilian vehicle on 105th Street, using a maneuver outlawed by Chicago police, and then fired tear gas into a crowd of bystanders and local officers.

The air filled with smoke and screams as parents fled with babies in their arms, teenagers were slammed to the pavement, and a young girl was struck in the head by a gas canister. One boy was detained for hours, denied his rights, his family left in the dark.

This was not a foreign regime or some distant “law-and-order” fantasy. It was an American city, in broad daylight, and it looked more like a militarized crackdown in a third-world dictatorship than traditional American law enforcement.

The question we have to ask is simple and chilling: *Is this America that we are becoming, one where democracy dies behind clouds of tear gas?

Trump’s secret police are trying to provoke riots in the streets to justify a harsh crackdown on dissent and the Democratic Party. They’re kicking in doors and dragging screaming American citizen children into the cold night. They’re shooting priests in the head with pepperballs.

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And they say it’s all to “make America great again.” Again?!? Like in 1861?

Trump and today’s Republican Party aren’t offering something new. They’re simply resurrecting the old Confederacy, dressing it up in the trappings of modern politics and media. Strip away the slogans and the tweets and you can see the same architecture: oligarchy instead of democracy, hierarchy instead of pluralism, the rule of the white wealthy few over the many.

This isn’t nostalgia for Dixie so much as a deliberate effort to bring back the very systems that tore our nation apart the last time the morbidly rich tried to end our democratic republic and replace it with an early fascist form of neo-feudalism.

At the heart of the old Confederacy was oligarchy, as I laid out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. A tiny elite of plantation owners controlled politics, law, and the economy across the entire region; by the mid-1850s democracy in the Old South was entirely dead.

That same racist, fascist goal appears to animate today’s GOP, which fights tooth and nail to defend the interests of white people, billionaires, and giant corporations while undermining any effort to preserve genuine democracy.

Taxes on the morbidly rich are cut to the bone, while working people and the professional middle class carry the burden. Government subsidies flow to “friends of the administration,” while towns, industries, and communities that cross political leaders are punished with the withdrawal of federal support and attacks by ICE.

Racism, too, is baked into the GOP’s contemporary model. The Confederacy was built on human enslavement and white supremacy. Today’s Republican project echoes that same spirit by targeting immigrants, demonizing Black people (even in the military, per “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth), restricting voting rights in communities of color, and maintaining a system of informal but organized apartheid. Housing segregation, school funding disparities, and the over-policing of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods today accomplish the same results as the old Jim Crow laws, just through different mechanisms.

Male supremacy is also apparently central to the new GOP Confederate order. Back in the day, women were property under the law, and patriarchy was woven into both religion and politics. The modern right’s war on reproductive freedom and equal rights for women is an almost perfect parallel. A woman’s autonomy and economic power, in their worldview, must always be subordinate to the demands of men and to a rigid religious orthodoxy.

The old Confederacy depended on cheap labor, and when it couldn’t enslave outright it invented systems like debt peonage and sharecropping. Today’s Republicans defend the use of prison slave labor, which is still constitutionally permitted under the 13th Amendment and most heavily deployed in Red states. They attack unions, push gig work without benefits, and refuse to raise minimum wages, ensuring that working people remain trapped in low-wage jobs without bargaining power.

The plantation economy itself was a form of monopoly: vast estates swallowed up smaller farms and drove independent competitors under to the point where a few hundred families controlled most of the region’s economy by the 1860s. Today the GOP defends monopolistic corporate power in much the same way, blocking antitrust efforts and encouraging consolidation across agriculture, media, energy, retail, insurance, medicine, and technology. Small business is starved out by giants, just as yeoman farmers in the South were once pushed off their land by the spread of the slave plantations.

The Confederacy was also defined by its propaganda. By the mid-1850s, virtually every anti-slavery or pro-democracy newspaper in the South had been shut down. Writers and publishers were imprisoned, hanged, or fled north to survive. What passed for “news” was propaganda controlled by morbidly rich elites.

Today, billionaire-owned Fox “News” and a constellation of billionaire-funded right-wing outlets play the same role, drowning out dissent and feeding a steady diet of disinformation to keep people angry and loyal. The very idea of objective truth has disintegrated in Republican-adjacent spaces as propaganda replaces journalism.

Another parallel is the fascist ideal of a mythic past. The Confederacy glorified a “golden age” of white rule and slave labor. When defeat came, the Lost Cause mythology grew up to claim victimhood and sanctify the old order. Trumpism and today’s GOP use the same trick. They conjure visions of an imagined past when “real Americans” controlled everything, erasing the ugly realities while promising “a return to greatness” if only people will give them absolute power.

The Confederacy’s legal system was never neutral. It protected the rich and powerful, treating enslaved people and poor whites as expendable, and punishing any who resisted. Today’s Republican project is similarly defined by a two-tier justice system. Elites like Tom Homan who back the movement are shielded, while dissenters and critics like James Comey are punished.

Judges and even military lawyers are now carefully chosen for loyalty, not fairness, ensuring the law remains a weapon for the GOP to use rather than an instrument of justice. Authoritarian capture of the military and judiciary today mirrors the way slave states stacked courts to defend slavery and property rights over liberty.

The Confederacy was also sustained by religious fundamentalism. Pastors preached that slavery was God’s will, and dissenters were driven out of the churches. In our time, white Christian nationalism functions the same way, sanctifying hierarchy and obedience while insisting — based on lies about the Founders — that religion must dictate law. The goal is not faith but control, and theology is being twisted into a tool for political power.

The Confederacy used culture war censorship to keep people ignorant. Teaching enslaved people to read was outlawed, abolitionist literature was banned, and abolitionist or pro-democracy speakers risked their lives if they crossed into the South. Today’s book bans and restrictions on curriculum are the modern equivalent. History is rewritten, ideas are suppressed, and young people are denied a full education to make sure they grow up docile and misinformed.

Violence has always been the enforcer of these systems. The Confederacy depended on slave patrols, irregular militias, and paramilitary terror to keep people in line. Reconstruction was undone by Klan terror and mob violence. Today’s GOP movement relies on heavily armed militias including ICE, groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and vigilante intimidation at polls and protests. The parallels are unmistakable: raw political power backed by the threat of force.

There is also the matter of dynastic families. The old South’s leadership was concentrated among interrelated planter aristocrats who controlled politics for generations. In modern America, political dynasties and billionaire networks serve the same role. Power is concentrated within circles of interlocking families and interests who use money, media, and influence to entrench their rule.

Regional economic hostage-taking was another weapon of the Confederacy. By controlling cotton exports and key resources, Southern elites tried to force concessions from the North and from Britain. Today, Republican leaders use their grip on energy, agriculture, and shipping industries in much the same way, holding national policy hostage to their own demands. Blue parts of the nation are told to bend or else face disruption in fuel, food, or logistics, and other nations’ leaders must publicly kiss Trump’s ass and give his children billions to avoid punishing tariffs.

The Confederacy also merged state power with its ruling economic class. Planters not only owned the land and the labor but controlled local courts, militias, and legislatures. Today, corporate monopolies and billionaire oligarchs have similarly captured our federal government and legislatures in the former Confederate states. The state becomes an extension of private wealth, fusing corporate and political power into a single apparatus of control.

Even in foreign policy, the parallels hold. The Confederacy was isolationist abroad, seeking recognition only to preserve its oligarchic order, but inwardly it was aggressive, unleashing violence on its own people. Trumpism follows the same pattern. International alliances are abandoned, democratic norms abroad are derided, while at home the state turns its power inward against dissenters and marginalized groups.

All of these threads tie together into a single tapestry. As Barry Goldwater or John McCain would have been the first to tell you, what Trump and the GOP are selling today is not new and not even remotely conservative in any meaningful sense.

It’s the Confederate model updated for the 21st century: a system of oligarchy, racism, patriarchy, cheap labor, monopoly, propaganda, religious control, violence, censorship, judicial capture, and economic extortion. Trump, Vance, Miller, Johnson, and their GOP cronies aren’t looking forward to a better and freer future but backward to a mythic past where a narrow wealthy white male elite could rule unchecked.

The danger is not simply that Trump may win an election, or that Republicans may pass bad laws. The danger is that this model of governance, rooted in the Confederacy and refined by generations of oligarchs, is becoming normalized across the Red states and increasingly in the federal government.

Under Trump, today’s Republican Party has become feudalistic, pseudo-royalist, and anti-democratic, and proclaims that they always will be. America fought both a Civil War and a World War to defeat this system of government, and now we’re confronting it — again — here at home as the GOP slides deeper and deeper into autocratic capture.

The question today is whether we still have the clarity and courage to defeat it again, not with cannons and bayonets, but with ballots, organizing, and a renewed commitment to the democratic ideals that Confederates then and now have always hated and feared the most.

See you on No Kings Day!

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2x?

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Trump's MAGA America revives a Confederate nightmare

Ku Klux Klan initiation at Stone Mountain near Atlanta, Georgia. June 1949. KKK men in full white masks and gowns lead new members wearing small face masks. Shutterstock/ Everett Collection

Thom Hartmann January 22, 2025

Welcome to your first full day in the new Confederate States of America.

Much like the old CSA, the new CSA (also known as MAGA America) is devoted to:

— Making American as white as possible,

— Stripping women and minorities of political and economic power,

— Gutting workers’ rights,

— Rigging election outcomes,

— Leaders nakedly taking bribes,

— Using a phony veneer of Christianity to justify brutal policies,

— Making queer people invisible,

— Reconfiguring schools for indoctrination,

— Having militias terrorize minorities and their opponents, and,

— Maintaining a government of, by, and for rich white men.

Never in American history has a group of morbidly rich white men this large or with anything close to this net worth sat to watch a president get sworn into office, and never before have so many billionaires been in a president’s cabinet.

Trump has been openly selling legislation; for example, he recently told a group of fossil fuel CEOs that, if they’d give him a billion dollars, he’d gut the nation’s environmental laws that they don’t like.

Seeing the opportunity, the nation’s richest people have flocked to Trump’s side, each presumably hoping for their own desired federal subsidies or an end to regulations, government lawsuits, or anti-trust actions.

And, of course, they all want more tax cuts.

The Immigration Act of 1924 limited people coming into the country based on race; each year’s immigrants must be selected in a way that maintained the racial ratios that existed in 1890 (before the big wave of swarthy southern European immigrants, most Italian and Greek, that came here during the three decades between 1890 and 1924).

In 1965, Congress passed a new immigration law that ended the racial/country quotas, leading to a rapid increase in Black and Brown immigrants entering the country legally. Combined with illegal immigration, Reagan’s amnesty, and birthright citizenship for their children, the browning of American picked up speed to the point where 2014 was the first year when nonwhite children outnumbered white kids in the nation’s public schools.

To end this trend and make America white again, Trump has, at various times, proposed that America no longer allow immigrants from majority Black “shithole countries,” banned immigration from majority-Muslim countries, will harden the southern border, and last night signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship.

The 14th Amendment defines birthright citizenship, saying:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Trump’s lawyers are arguing that people here without documentation are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of American law because they’re not here legally. Therefore, they say, their children born here are also not “born subject to the jurisdiction” of American law and thus not citizens.

They plan to take their argument to the Supreme Court, where it may receive a favorable hearing. If successful, they might even have a case for stripping citizenship from and then deporting tens of millions of mostly Hispanic American citizens whose parents were undocumented.

Our MAGA Supreme Court majority has already succeeded in several steps toward this goal, by ending abortion rights and gutting both civil rights and voting rights laws.

Four GOP-controlled states are considering charging women who get abortions with murder, and Republicans on the Supreme Court have already functionally outlawed affirmative action and given states the power to make voting harder for Black, Hispanic, and Native American people.

Vice President Vance has written to the Justice Department demanding that they begin to enforce the moribund Comstock Act, which would outlaw the mailing of abortion and birth control medications, among other things (including porn).

Meanwhile, DEI programs in both government and the corporate world are being ended to once again allow companies with white leadership to give preference to white men up for jobs or promotions. Looking at the composition of Trump’s incoming administration and cabinet, it’s reasonable to assume that nonwhite people must be willing to play the role Samuel L. Jackson did in Django Unchained if they want a position.

In his last administration, Trump put the virulently anti-union lawyer Eugene Scalia (son of former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia) in charge of the Labor Department. His current nominee, former Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer, has a more mixed record, but she won’t be setting the administration’s labor policy: Trump will.

The same Trump who told Elon Musk on a live X event:

“You’re the greatest cutter. I look at what you do. You walk in and say, ‘You want to quit?’ I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ’That’s OK. You’re all gone.'”

Musk laughed and said, “Yeah.” Bezos is also virulently opposed to unionization of his Amazon workplace, and Trump has a long history of avoiding hiring companies with unions to do work on his properties.

When the plantation oligarchs ended democracy in the Old South during the 1840-1860 era, they continued to allow elections. But white men who voted (they were the only ones allowed to vote) for anybody other than the oligarch’s men often lost work, were beaten, and even sometimes lynched.

Republicans today are a bit more sophisticated, but their ability to rig elections has endured.

In the years immediately following the Republicans on the Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, over 1600 polling places were closed by Republican-controlled states, most in Black neighborhoods. GOP-run state after state passed laws making it harder to register to vote, allowing challenges to voters and purges of voting rolls, and making it easier to refuse to count mail-in votes from cities with Democratic majorities by claiming signature mismatches.

Reporter Greg Palast estimates that if this had not happened and every eligible voter was allowed to vote and every vote cast was counted, Kamala Harris would today be president.

Republicans also work hard to select their voters, rather than allowing voters to select their representatives. While Democratic states have largely abandoned gerrymandering — which could have given Democrats a majority in the House today — Republican states have doubled down on the practice year after year.

Donald Trump has rolled out a new meme cybercurrency that will allow any billionaire, company, or foreign country to shovel as much money as they want into his own personal pockets, presumably in exchange for whatever government contract, subsidy, or help they can negotiate with the new president.

The Confederacy, organized and run by a small handful of plantation oligarchs, was also notoriously corrupt, and state governments in the Old South often ran on a naked bribe system.

Slaveholders in the Old South used Christianity to justify their inexecrable practice. Today’s MAGA Confederates are no less hypocritical.

Jesus never once mentioned homosexuality or abortion, although he was explicit that preachers shouldn’t pray in public and that the only way to join Him in heaven was to feed the hungry, heal the sick, welcome the stranger, house the homeless, and visit those in prison.

None of that matters, though, to the sanctimonious hustlers running megachurches and appearing on TV and radio; their only goal is to increase their own wealth and power. And Trump, who didn’t even bother to put his hand on the Bible when he was sworn in, promises to gift them with money and prestige so long as they keep delivering their parishioners to the voting booths for Republicans.

Republicans across the nation have succeeded in banning thousands of books that feature or even contain queer characters or discuss homosexuality or transsexuality from schools and libraries. They’re also launching legal efforts — with the explicit support of Clarence Thomas — to outlaw gay marriage and adoption, with the ultimate goal of sending queer people back into the closet as they were prior to the 1980s.

Trump, meanwhile, promises to only recognize two sexes, essentially outlawing trans people.

Republicans are proposing in their platform to micromanage school curriculum nationwide by “defunding schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination.”

This appears to include removing references to our nation’s history of slavery, patriarchy, and white supremacy; rewriting economic and social studies textbooks to make them more billionaire-friendly; and attacking socialism and communism in ways that may cause students to think that Social Security and similar programs are wrong.

In the Old South it was the Ku Klux Klan and the slave patrols.

Today there are dozens of white supremacist groups and independent militias, all devoted to white supremacy and Christian nationalism. Trump’s pardons of the criminals involved in January 6th tells us he’s committed to having the militias that support him rebuild their ranks and get back out onto the streets, but this time on his behalf.

And his continued opposition to gun control signals that, like dictators throughout history and most recently in Hungary and Russia, he wants them armed and dangerous.

The bottom line is that the oligarchy of the old Confederacy never really went away and arguably has just taken over the United States 164 years after they first fired on Fort Sumpter, this time with “Tech Bros” replacing plantation owners.

The big question now is whether they’ll be able to hang onto the wealth and power they’ve managed to seize with this election. Oligarchy, after all, is usually a transitional form of government because people get so angry about the government doing everything for the rich and powerful and little to nothing for them that they demand change.

Popular discontent rises until the oligarchs either slam down an iron fist to crush it with violence and thus flip the country into the type of tyranny you see today in Russia, or citizens overcome the oligarchy and restore democracy, as happened in Ukraine when Paul Manifort’s guy (and Putin’s friend) was deposed by the people in 2019, replacing him with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Which way will it go in America? Unless Trump gets really violent really fast (a possibility), we’ll probably know with the results of next year’s midterm elections…

NOW READ: Trump kept his promise — and made some Democrats look like fools

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Home | Republicans have been lying to their voters for years — and now those same voters are dying

Thom Hartmann June 14, 2024

This is a climate change story that fossil fuel billionaires and their GOP lackeys would rather you didn’t know.

As more and more people are killed by extraordinarily severe weather in places where it used to be unusual it’s going to get harder and harder to keep Red State citizens from finding out how badly they’ve been screwed by the unholy alliance between Republicans and oil barons.

Severe weather in the United States is not only getting worse, it’s moving.

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?

There’s a reason L. Frank Baum placed his 1901 novel The Wizard of Oz in Kansas: the worst and most frequent tornado activity in the world at that time was in the American Great Plains states — particularly Kansas.

Now that’s changing, as weather extremes are moving to the Midwest and the South. Recently, deadly tornadoes — some with wind velocities in excess of 200 mph — have ravaged Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, Georgia, Ohio and Indiana.

This new burst of unusually extreme weather is driven by global warming and its impact on the Arctic, our oceans, and the Gulf of Mexico.

And it’s going to be America’s new normal, although in all probability this is just the beginning and over time it will get a lot worse.

America has always had the most extreme weather of anyplace else on Earth, according to Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute at the University of South Carolina.

China has more people and a larger landmass than we do, but, Cutter told ABC News, “they don't have the same kind of clash of air masses as much as you do in the U.S. that is producing a lot of the severe weather.”

The severity of America’s Great Plains states’ historically extreme weather was the result of geography.

While there’s a massive amount of land on either side of the European/Asian land mass, the United States is bracketed by two giant bodies of water, the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. We also have a huge mountain range — the Rockies — that helps determine where turbulent air from the west ends up, particularly as it encounters colder air from the north and warmer air from over the Gulf of Mexico.

As North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello told ABC News, it’s because of “where we are on the globe,” adding, “It’s truly a little bit ... unlucky.”

But now, as the Gulf of Mexico is heating up faster than the oceans on either side of us, combined with “bomb cyclone” cold weather coming down from Canada because melting ice in the Arctic is making the Jet Stream less stable, that severe weather is moving to the Midwest and South.

This appears to be one of the most consequential outcomes of climate change, severe weather-wise, for the United States.

As Victor Gensini, associate professor in the Earth, Atmosphere and Environment Department at Northern Illinois University, told The Chicago Tribune, the Midwest and South are replacing the Plains states as the epicenter of severe weather.

“That’s a really, really big deal for human exposure and vulnerability,” Gensini told Ezra Maille. “A tornado that goes through a wheat field in Kansas is not a big deal, but a tornado that goes through southern Cook County is a huge deal.”

He added that the Great Plains will probably continue to experience more and more severe drought while tornado activity is shifting toward the East and South.

The fossil fuel industry has known with a high level of certainty how severe weather was a probable outcome of America’s dependence on their products ever since the 1970s.

Yet for the fifty years since then — and continuing to this day — they fund phony “science” and shills to deny climate change or try to spin it as a positive, all while pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the campaign coffers and personal bank accounts of mostly Republican politicians.

We’re at least 40 years behind where we should be in dealing with the fossil fuel/global warming crisis because giant oil companies have run massive disinformation campaigns while funding the political careers of hacks in Congress willing to lie to the public for them.

President Jimmy Carter declared a national crisis in 1979 and proposed legislation to create “this nation’s first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.”

FDR had sold bonds to the public to fund a government corporation that would develop synthetic rubber for fighter plane tires back in the day, and Carter wanted to do the same to end our dependence on fossil fuels:

“Just as a similar synthetic rubber corporation helped us win World War II,” Carter said, “so will we mobilize American determination and ability to win the energy war.”

In that same July 15, 1979 speech, he proposed the government issue bonds that would fund:

“[T]he creation of an energy security corporation to lead this effort to replace 2-1/2 million barrels of imported oil per day by 1990. The corporation will issue up to $5 billion in energy bonds, and I especially want them to be in small denominations so that average Americans can invest directly in America’s energy security.”

But it all came crashing down 43 years ago when the fossil fuel industry’s candidate, Ronald Reagan, replaced Carter, killed the solar bank and the bond program, and even took Carter’s solar panels off the roof of the White House.

The big question now is how long the GOP will be able to keep up their climate change denial in the Red states currently being hammered by extreme weather before their citizens catch on to what’s happening and demand action to reduce our carbon emissions.

As Dr. Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media (PCSSM), told me yesterday:

“It is rather ironic that many of the states that are seeing the worst climate change impacts—Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—are red states, with governors and legislatures that are far more interested in doing the bidding of polluters than representing the people they’re supposed to be representing.

“Unsurprisingly, these states are all among the lowest when it comes to per capita spending on public education. The alliance of rightwing politicians and polluters prefers a poorly educated electorate, ignorant of the environmental health damage being done to them.”

So, what can be done other than offering subsidies for electric cars?

Number one on the list is to put a price on carbon, which will bend market incentives toward green and renewable energy as a replacement for fossil fuels.

According to the World Bank, there are currently 70 carbon pricing programs in place around the world, covering a bit over 23 percent of all emissions. Some are outright carbon taxes, typically with a rebate program to low- and average-income consumers, and some are cap-and-trade type programs (like President George HW Bush put into place to deal with sulfur dioxide emissions).

Canada’s carbon tax, which they put into place in 2019, is working so well that they actually sped up the process of implementation this year.

The original plan called for the initial $10/ton carbon tax to go up $10 every year until it hit $170/ton. The money collected is then recycled back to low- and average-income consumers to compensate them for the extra costs they’ll incur driving and heating their homes. But the program has been such a success that Canada’s government announced this week they’re raising the carbon tax by a full $15 this year.

They can pull this off because the rebates represent, for most Canadians, far more money in their pockets than the cost of the carbon tax. The brunt of the tax is instead borne by Canadian businesses, which is the group that's been designed to push toward green -- and tax-free or even green-subsidized -- energy sources.

An average taxpayer in Alberta province, for example, now gets a $386 check or bank deposit from their government every three months. It’s $340 quarterly in Saskatchewan, $328 in Newfoundland, $248 in Nova Scotia, and $264 in Manitoba.

This is a system that could work very well here in the US, if only there was the political will to make it happen. And, as we cut emissions and figure out new and better ways to pull existing carbon out of the air and oceans, we may be able to dial back on the increasing severity of storms that are ravaging Red states.

The obstacle to pricing carbon in the US is widespread ignorance of how severe our problem is and its origins in fossil fuel emissions. Fully 58% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters say climate change is “not an important concern” and a mere 17% believe human activities like burning fossil fuels “contribute a great deal to climate change.”

Hopefully the deadly disasters sweeping Red states now will wake up Republican voters and motivate them to demand their Republican politicians stop taking money from fossil fuel billionaires and do something now to stop climate change from getting any worse.

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AN 11 23

For a brief moment in the summer of 2023, the surprise No. 1 song “Rich Men North of Richmond” focused the country’s attention on a region that often gets overlooked in discussions of the U.S. economy. Although the U.S. media sometimes pays attention to the rural South — often concentrating on guns, religion and opioid overdoses — it has too often neglected the broad scope and root causes of the region’s current problems.

As economic historians based in North Carolina and Tennessee, we want a fuller version of the story to be told. Various parts of the rural South are struggling, but here we want to focus on the forlorn areas that the U.S. Department of Agriculture refers to as “rural manufacturing counties” — places where manufacturing is, or traditionally was, the main economic activity.

You can find such counties in every Southern state, although they were historically clustered in Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee. And they are suffering terribly.

Yes, the South is actually in crisis

First, let’s back up. One might be tempted to ask: Are things really that bad? Hasn’t the Sun Belt been booming? But in fact, by a range of economic indicators — personal income per capita and the proportion of the population living in poverty, for starters – large parts of the South, and particularly the rural South, are struggling.

Gross domestic product per capita in the region has been stuck at about 90% of the national average for decades, with average income even lower in rural areas. About 1 in 5 counties in the South is marked by “persistent poverty” — a poverty rate that has stayed above 20% for three decades running. Indeed, fully 80% of all persistently poor counties in the U.S. are in the South.

Persistent poverty is, of course, linked to a host of other problems. The South’s rural counties are marked by low levels of educational attainment, measured both by high school and college graduation rates. Meanwhile, labor-force participation rates in the South are far lower than in the nation as a whole.

Unsurprisingly, these issues stifle economic growth.

Meanwhile, financial institutions have fled the region: The South as a whole lost 62% of its banks between 1980 and 2020, with the decline sharpest in rural areas. At the same time, local hospitals and medical facilities have been shuttering, while funding for everything from emergency services to wellness programs has been cut.

Less wealth, less health

Relatedly, the rural South is ground zero for poor health in the U.S., with life expectancy far lower than the national average. So-called “deaths of despair” such as suicides and accidental overdoses are common, and rates of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and stroke are high – much higher than in rural areas in other parts of the U.S. and in the U.S. as a whole.

Manufacturing counties in the rural South are particularly unhealthy. Residents there die about two and a half years younger than the average American, which to demographers is a staggeringly high differential.

These things, of course, didn’t happen in a vacuum. The Obama-era Affordable Care Act encouraged states to expand Medicaid coverage, but Southern states largely refused to do so. That left large portions of the low- and lower-middle-income population in the rural South uninsured. This has pushed many medical facilities in the region into a death spiral, as their business models — predicated on governmental insurance of one kind or another — became untenable.

Given all this, is it any wonder that rates of upward mobility in the rural South are among the lowest in the country? Alas, probably not — certainly not to residents of rural North Carolina, a state where more than half of its counties lost population between 2010 and 2020.

It wasn’t always this way

Although some people think that these areas have forever been in crisis, this isn’t the case. While the South’s agricultural sector had fallen into long-term decline in the decades following the Civil War — essentially collapsing by the Great Depression — the onset of World War II led to an impressive economic growth spurt.

War-related jobs opening up in urban areas pulled labor out of rural areas, leading to a long-delayed push to mechanize agriculture. Workers rendered redundant by such technology came to constitute a large pool of cheap labor that industrialists seized upon to deploy in low-wage processing and assembly operations, generally in rural areas and small towns.

Such operations surged between 1945 and the early 1980s, playing a huge role in the region’s economic rise. However humble they may have been, in the South — as in China since the late 1970s — the shift out of a backward agricultural sector into low-wage, low-skill manufacturing was an opportunity for significant productivity and efficiency gains.

This helped the South steadily catch up to national norms in terms of per-capita income: to 75% by 1950, 80% by the mid-1960s, over 85% by 1970, and to almost 90% by the early 1980s.

Although today the rise of the Sun Belt is often associated with, if not attributed to, climate, low housing costs and the growth of the South’s booming metropolitan areas, all those rural sweatshops and humble-looking processing sheds opening up in the early postwar era mattered a lot. They elevated the living standards of countless once-desperate and impoverished farmers.

The origins of the rural crisis

By the early 1980s, however, the gains made possible by the shift out of agriculture began to play themselves out. The growth of the rural manufacturing sector slowed, and the South’s convergence upon national per capita income norms stopped, remaining stuck at about 90% from then on.

Two factors were largely responsible: new technologies, which reduced the number of workers needed in manufacturing, and globalization, which greatly increased competition. This latter point became increasingly important, since the South, a low-cost manufacturing region in the U.S., is a high-cost manufacturing region when compared to, say, Mexico.

Like Mike Campbell’s bankruptcy in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” the rural South’s collapse came gradually, then suddenly: gradually during the 1980s and 1990s, and suddenly after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001.

Between 2000 and 2010, for example, manufacturing employment in North Carolina, one of the South’s leading manufacturing states, fell by about 44%. Starting a bit earlier — in 1998, when the Asian currency crisis squeezed Southern manufacturers — we find that the Tar Heel State lost 70% of its manufacturing jobs in textiles and 60% in furniture between then and 2010.

Other states in the South’s “manufacturing belt,” such as South Carolina and Tennessee, lost about 40% of their manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. Although they have recouped some jobs since then, not one Southern state has as many manufacturing jobs as it did a generation ago. And most of the job growth in the southern manufacturing sector in recent decades has taken place in or near big cities.

The proportion of craftsmen and factory workers in the rural Southern labor force fell from 38% in 1980 to a little over 25% by 2020 — a trend that was particularly striking in rural manufacturing counties.

Factory jobs there increasingly gave way to low-level service-sector gigs, which generally paid less. As a result, median income per capita in rural manufacturing counties in the South has stagnated and is much lower than in rural manufacturing counties elsewhere in the U.S.

The first step is recognizing there’s a problem

Those parts of the rural and small-town South that were once heavily involved in manufacturing are in economic crisis today.

One might argue that the current mess is a legacy effect of the South’s historical dependence on a low-skill, low-cost growth “strategy” — beginning with slavery — that privileged short-term economic gains over patient investment in human capital and long-term development. That’s a big claim about a larger, more complex story.

For now, our aim is simply to call attention to the problem. One must first acknowledge it before there can be any hope of a remedy. Until then, the inhabitants of such areas will remain feeling, as the Southern writer Linda Flowers vividly put it, “throwed away.”

Peter A. Coclanis, Professor of History; Director of the Global Research Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Louis M. Kyriakoudes, Director, Albert Gore Research Center and Professor of History, Middle Tennessee State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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cdv an 2 23

... But DeSantis never really wanted to stop the virtually nonexistent crime of voter impersonation or fraud. His goal, and that of the GOP nationally, has been to strike fear into the hearts of potential non-Republican voters to ensure election victories for his party.

In states like Alabama, Mississippi, and 20 others where the GOP controls both chambers of the state legislature and the governor’s mansion, intimidating voter-tracking police squads could be the next play in an ongoing effort to undemocratically control elections. Such policing efforts would without question disproportionately target communities of color.

While the expected midterm “red wave” of Republican victories didn’t occur nationally in 2022, the same can’t be said for the South. As documented by the Institute for Southern Studies’Facing South,the GOP actually outperformed expectations, expanding its hold on multiple state legislatures in the region. Prior to the election, analysts had predicted that the Republicans might gain 40 seats across the South; in fact, they gained at least 55. Not only did they take control of at least 25 state legislative chambers — the lone exception, Virginia’s state senate where Democrats retained a two-seat majority — but they also built or maintained supermajorities in legislative chambers in Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia. This means that even if a Democratic governor is in office, Republican legislators can pass extremist bills into law despite a gubernatorial veto.

None of this is spontaneous, nor is it random. Tens of millions of dollars or more from super-rich conservative donors and right-wing foundations have poured into voter-suppression and election-manipulation efforts. Heritage Action for America, a conservative legislative-writing group linked to the Heritage Foundation, spent upwards of $24 million in 2021 and 2022 in key swing states to help Republicans write bills that would restrict voting, targeting Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, and Texas. Consider it anything but a coincidence that the language in voter-suppression bills in those states and elsewhere sounded eerily familiar. As the Guardian reported, at least 11 voter suppression bills in at least eight states were due, in part or whole, to advocacy and organizing by Heritage Action. A *New York Times* investigation found thatin Georgia, “Of the 68 bills pertaining to voting, at least 23 had similar language or were firmly rooted in the principles laid out in the Heritage group’s letter” that offered outlines and details for how to limit voting access.

Contemporary voter suppression efforts, however, go significantly beyond just trying to prevent people from voting or making it harder for them to do so. Credit that, at least in part, to the determination of so many Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans to vote despite restrictions imposed by the states. Consequently, Republican legislators now seek to control — that is, manipulate — election administration, too.Their tactics include the harassment of election workers, far-right activists seeking positions as election officials, and various other potentially far-reaching legal maneuvers.

In fact, in recent voting, attacks on election workers, officials, and volunteers have become so prevalent that a new national organization, the Election Officials Legal Defense Network (EOLDN), was formed to protect them. EOLDN provides attorneys and other kinds of assistance to such officials when they find themselves under attack....

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omg 10% up for DoD, many x more $

Joe Biden and the Democrats are desperately trying to salvage the Child Tax Credit expansion, which pulled millions of children out of poverty.

Reducing child poverty is especially beneficial to families in red states, where poverty is most entrenched. Yet opposition to the expansion has come from Republicans and from red-state Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

Pundits and Republicans often claim that Democrats are out of touch with the working class and need to cater more to rural red-state voters. Yet it is red state politicians who are working tirelessly to impoverish children in their own states. In this, as in many things, the GOP is not the party fighting for red states. It’s the party fighting to immiserate them.

A most hopeful policy

As I’ve said before in the Editorial Board, the Child Tax Credit — or Social Security for children — was one of Biden’s most successful and hopeful policies.

The Child Tax Credit (CTC) was instituted in 1997 in limited form. But the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 turned the program into what was essentially a sweeping basic-income provision for poor families with children.

Annual payments increased from $2,000 to $3,600 per child under 6 and $3,000 per child ages 6-17. A loophole excluding parents with the lowest incomes was closed. And checks were sent monthly, rather than at the end of the year in a lump sum.

The program only lasted for six months. But in that brief time, child poverty cratered. Food insufficiency went down by a quarter. Three million children were kept out of poverty for each month the program continued.

Then the CTC ran out and could not be renewed because of opposition from Manchin and the GOP. Quickly, 3.7 million children fell back into poverty.

Manchin’s opposition is especially painful because West Virginia has the fourth-highest child poverty rate in the nation; 23.1 percent of children live below the poverty line.

Mississippi has the worst poverty rate for children at 27.6 percent. Louisiana is second with 26.3 percent. Others in the top 10 are Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, South Carolina and Tennessee. The only blue state on the list is New Mexico, in third place at 25.6 percent.

Reducing child poverty is obviously good in itself. But there is reason to believe that the policy had strong additional benefits, especially in red states where child poverty is most entrenched.

The libertarian Niskanen Center projected that the expanded credit could increase consumer spending by $27 billion since families who received the money were not in a position to save it, but would quickly spend it on necessities. They estimated state and local tax revenues would rise by $1.9 billion.

The consumer spending boost would be greatest overall in large states like Texas, Florida and California. But the states that would benefit most proportionally were those with the lowest average incomes like Mississippi, Arkansas, and Idaho.

More like excuses

Despite the fact that red states would likely see disproportionate benefits, Republicans are still opposing the CTC while Democrats are attempting to find some way to renew it.

House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, said that Democrats were trying to include the CTC in a bill intended to make it easier for businesses to get a tax write-off for research and development expenses.

Meanwhile, Biden has indicated a willingness to negotiate with Manchin, who has insisted he would block the CTC program unless it has work and income requirements.

Manchin says he’s worried the CTC will lead people to stop working and will encourage laziness. But it’s not clear why we should punish children because of the behavior of their parents. And in any case, there’s no evidence that the CTC reduced employment among those who received it.

On the contrary, employment declined after the CTC was withdrawn, possibly because parents could no longer afford to pay for childcare or lost access to transportation.

Manchin and Republicans have also expressed concerns about the possible inflationary effects of CTC. This is a case, though, where we know that the neediest people — children in poverty — are substantially helped by the policy. An increase in inflation seems like a small price to pay for pulling children out of poverty.

And if spending is a concern, we could couple the CTC with a tax on the wealthy in order to ensure revenue neutrality.

Republican objections sound less like reasons backed by evidence or strong moral principle, and more like excuses.

The politics of cruelty

We have a program that is proven to quickly lift millions of children out of poverty with virtually no downside. Why are people from states with the worst child poverty problems determined to kill that program?

The question answers itself.

Republican politicians have long devoted themselves to entrenching poverty and crushing those in need in their own states.

They oppose the CTC for the same reason that they have fought to prevent Medicaid expansion under the ACA, contributing to rural hospital closures and exacerbating the covid health crisis.

They oppose it for the same reason that they have repealed abortion rights, even though denying women abortion access impoverishes them and their children.

Manchin’s determination to keep children of West Virginia in poverty is in line with the longstanding and successful Republican effort to keep the people of Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia and other red states poor, ill and desperate.

Republicans claim to speak for authentic rural America. But the policies they promote very deliberately keep rural people and their children in desperate circumstances.

The people in power in red states keep hold of it by enforcing a brutal hierarchy. Poor people, women and Black people must be constantly crushed and humiliated to keep Manchin and his GOP cronies in office.

The politics of cruelty have a stronghold, and Republicans are not likely to lose power in Mississippi anytime soon.

But we should be clear that their politics are not based on some sort of true understanding of the needs of working people. They’re built on refusing to help those who need help in their state, and on forcing children into poverty.

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The US isn’t one country. The more we believe it is, the less sense our politics makes. By insisting on “the truth” when the truth is diametric from “the truth,” we end up doing a helluva lot more work. We end up doing all kinds of mental acrobatics to make sure “the truth” is true.

Once we drop the idea of America being one country, things make more sense. We do less work, too, because on seeing the US isn’t one country, the source of our problems – our national problems – becomes clearer. That source is the politics of the American south.

Quarantine self isolation. Pandemic anxiety. Social distancing. Textured art portrait of bored unhappy annoyed trapped woman in black touching plastic bubble wrap wall in darkness.

There we find the reason the US isn’t one country. The states making up that region don’t want it to be. They have instead committed themselves to a wholly imagined confederacy of the mind and spirit, a fictional subnation inside a factual nation in which “real Americans” fight to restore God’s country to its rightful “constitutional” origins.

While the rest of America is animated by the principles of democracy and union, the south (and its interested and ideological allies spread around 50 states) is animated by the goals of division and control. If the south can’t control the machinery of the federal government, as it has since the beginning, the south declares itself a victim of tyranny.

I think the central tension of our history has been between Americans willing to sacrifice for the greater good and Americans eager to kill themselves to prevent sacrificing anything to anyone who’s “against them.” Democracy isn’t what we think it is. It’s not a tool of a sovereign people to effectuate self-rule. It’s a tool of the few to rule the many.

The south is the source of national division for another reason. Its loyalty to the United States as a union of states is conditional. It depends on the south maintaining its grip on the machinery of the federal government. If and when challenged, the south reserves the right to mutiny. Its social contract includes a “treason option.”

Secession before the Civil War is an obvious example. Less well known are negotiations between the Confederate States of America and foreign leaders who dithered long enough for the choice to be clear. Less understood, too, is the relationship, direct and indirect, between Russia and the Republican Party, the American south’s dominant party.

That relationship ranges in degree from passively allowing Russian operatives to sabotage a Democratic candidate for president to coordinating to spread the Big Lie (thus seeding the ground for a failed coup d’etat) to cheering in unison its invasion of democratic Ukraine.

There does exist a Trump-Putin axis in the Republican Party, as Jamie Raskin said. But obscuring that reality for most Americans, I think, is their belief in America being one country. Treason can’t be optional for some Americans. It just can’t be. That would mean “the truth” isn’t true.

The last reason the American south is why we can’t have nice things is this: the states in that region are acting like they are sovereign nations, as if reifying a wholly imagined confederacy of the mind and spirit, as if finally putting into practice the dream of restoring America’s origins.

Tennessee, Missouri and others have nullified federal gun laws. Mississippi, Florida and others have nearly totally outlawed access to abortion. Texas is now doing its own border security and immigration enforcement. Next is regulating the free movement of citizens.

Missouri and Texas are debating bills to restrict out-of-state travel of pregnant people seeking abortions in states where access is legal.

Stopping nonwhite people from crossing the border and taking up residence, terrorizing nonwhite people already here at gunpoint, forcing white women to repopulate their states and preventing white women from traveling “abroad” – altogether these are the things nations do as they’re slouching toward a totalitarian future.

Only we’re not talking about nations.

We’re talking about states within a region within a nation that are acting like nations, thus belying the belief in America as one.

That states are now attempting to put limits on the right to free movement is only the latest in a series of violations of individual liberty. The trend will no doubt continue, as a GOP supermajority of the US Supreme Court decides increasingly that the rights of states to behave like sovereign nations overrules the rights of their people.

To learn more, I talked to professor of political science and contributor to the Editorial Board Elizabeth F. Cohen. She’s the author ofIllegal: How America's Lawless Immigration Regime Threatens Us All. “If you can keep women you suspect are seeking abortions from crossing state lines,” she told me, “you can probably keep them from doing other things in public and interfere with their rights as citizens.”

Is freedom of movement as fundamental as freedom of speech?

Yes.

First, look at freedom of movement within a country. Seen that way, we find a lot of attention paid to the protection of freedom of movement. We also find that exceptions to the right to move freely are associated with other forms of political oppression.

For example, restrictions on the free movement of Black Americans was integral to Jim Crow. Sundown towns were towns in which Black people risked their lives being in public after sundown. Sharecroppers were not permitted to leave their land until debts were paid off.

In the former Soviet Union, internal restrictions on free movement were associated with attempts to centrally control the ethnic makeup of different republics making up the USSR. Needing permission to move around is a sign one has limited liberties of other sorts as well.

Also ask: Why do people move?

We’d find reasons to call the right fundamental.

They move to escape repression, to reunite with families, to exercise other rights and to sustain their and their loved one’s well-being.

It’s hard to say freedom of movement is not fundamental, even though that right is often overridden by claims of national sovereignty.

A legislator in Missouri has proposed a law forbidding pregnant people from leaving the state to get abortions. Can a state override a fundamental individual right in the interest of enforcing its laws?

At any other point in the previous, oh, say, 50 years or so, I would have said that attempts by a state government to restrict the freedom of movement rights of women who seek to engage in activities that are perfectly legal in another state would be instantly shot down.

After all, no one was blocking flights to Las Vegas to keep people from going there to gamble when gambling was largely illegal elsewhere.

We know teenagers under the legal drinking age in the US go abroad and drink alcohol. No one prevents them from leaving on this basis.

But I’m making no prediction of what any court will do in 2022.

Some say the proposed law in Missouri would encroach on the sovereignty of other states. But as you said, it's hard to predict.

...

jim justice warns vaxxers

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/jim-justice/

Your way’s not working': CNN's Jake Tapper corners Mississippi GOP governor over state's COVID crisis

Elizabeth Preza

A combative Gov. Tate Reeves (R-MS) battled with "State of the Union " host Jake Tapper on Sunday morning after the CNN host pointed out the massive death toll in his state...

no lnx

the real reason unvaccinated Americans are dying in hospital beds and claiming they love 'freedom'

John Stoehr August 25, 2021

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a new report showing the dominant delta variant of the coronavirus is now making vaccines against catching it less effective. Before delta, they were 91 percent effective. After delta, they are 66 percent effective. The United Kingdom and Israel have reported similar findings. Vaccines are still preventative, the CDC said, and booster shots were already in the works. The Food and Drug Administration is preparing to sign off on a booster campaign set to begin Sept. 20, according to Bloomberg.

The spread of the delta variant is why the nation's top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, went on CNN to say getting the covid pandemic under control might not happen until spring of next year. "As we get into the spring, we could start getting back to a degree of normality, namely resuming the things that we were hoping we could do — restaurants, theaters, that kind of thing," he said. This news, according to CNN's Stephen Collinson, came as a "severe jolt to a weary nation" that elected Joe Biden to take care of this problem.

Collinson's argument is that the delta variant poses a great danger to the president's domestic agenda, but especially his party's majorities in the United States Congress. "The pandemic that he was elected to end could drag on deep into a midterm election year, with all the political and economic destruction that could bring." Collinson added that Fauci's statement "meant that Biden's best-laid plans of triumphing over the pandemic and riding an economic wave into the campaign for congressional election results in November next year now look at risk."

I'll get back to Collinson's piece and the delta variant in a moment. But first I want to bring in a theme I've been writing about this week: bad faith. In a nutshell, the Washington press corps is not biased in the ways that the Republicans Party says it is. It is not liberal. It does not have an agenda (other than the normal ones, like informing the citizenry or turning a profit). But the Republicans are right in one very important way. It is biased to the extent that it tolerates endless bad faith. Moreover, it tolerates bullshit knowing it's bullshit. On the infrequent occasion when reporters do demonstrate "liberal bias," it's when they demonstrate unwillingness to tolerate Republican bad faith.

What does this have to do with the delta variant? First, it's the reason the pandemic isn't over yet. And the reason for delta's dominance is pretty clear. As Collinson himself says: "The latest surge of the virus, powered by the more infectious Delta variant, was able to take hold because Americans in more conservative, southern states — deeply skeptical of government advice and science — declined in larger numbers than their more liberal compatriots to get vaccinated. If such skepticism, fanned by conservative political leaders and conspiracy fueled right-wing media, were to ultimately boost Republicans in next year's congressional polls it would be a bitter irony for the President."

So when it comes to the question of why the president hasn't done what he said he was going to do, we have to take into account, if we're being honest with ourselves and others, that Biden isn't alone here. There are 50 states in the union, each with their own leaders who make choices they think are best for their constituents. Moreover, you could say, again in all honesty, that the president's plan to get the country back on its feet depended on "more conservative, southern states" doing their part in what is and must be a united effort to overcome a disease that will kill a million Americans before it's over.

Again, honestly, they failed to do their part. Those of us who did are going to suffer. Delta's spread means vaccines are now less effective. As I said last week, this minority is stealing the majority's freedom.

Even this might not be so bad if not for the suggestion, illustrated by Collinson's piece, that voters might punish Biden for failing to control the pandemic while at the same time saying in plain English that the reason it's not under control is because "conservative, southern states — deeply skeptical of government advice and science" have put that objective even farther out of reach. A moral press would make it clear to the citizenry who's to blame. An anti-moral press, one that's hostile toward the obligations of the truth, will make-believe it's hard to say.

I said the press corps often tolerates bullshit knowing it's bullshit, but it often does not. Collinson isn't alone in this. He said southern states are "deeply skeptical of government advice and science." Another variation of this that's echoed by the press corps is that residents of southern states fear losing their freedoms. Residents fear it so much they're willing to put their lives on the line. They'll refuse to get vaccinated. They'll refuse to wear masks. They'll defy "government tyranny." This is the conclusion drawn by the Times' Alexander Stockton and Lucy King in a searing new video op-ed. They went to the Ozarks to better understand anti-vaxers. Over and over, they were told they don't want to be told what to do. Living in America means living free! What Stockton and King don't know is it's all bad faith.

The people Stockton and King interview, including the white men literally dying in hospital beds, do not fear losing their freedoms. That it is a put-on. They're hiding what they truly fear, which is humiliation. Authoritarian-minded people — which is to say, those who determine politics in southern states — live in daily fear of being humiliated. By what? You name it. Living in a diverse, democratic and capitalist republic offers opportunities aplenty to be humiliated for those who identify strongly with top-down social control. Anything threatening that threatens them. Since the pandemic started as "a hoax," it is a hoax. Buh Gawd, they'll die before being wrong. And they do.

Stockton and King don't have the insight necessary for seeing what they truly fear, but they do something I haven't seen from other members of the pundit corps. They take "fearing the loss of their freedoms" and superimpose the claims over images of imminent death, as if to suggest that freedom to die from the covid is no freedom at all. At one point the narrator says: "This is what freedom looks like in America today." I have never seen a simpler and more powerful way of rejecting GOP bad faith. It's something we all of us need to see more.

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America's polarized health care politics

The differences we discovered between red and blue states in our analysis did not surprise our team. After all, a partisan divide over health care in the U.S. existed before COVID-19. During President Bill Clinton's administration in the 1990s, there was a clear and growing partisan divide over health care reform. During President Barack Obama's administration, Democrats supported the Affordable Care Act and the federal government's response to the H1N1 virus, while nearly all Republicans opposed both measures.

We already know that partisan divisions over health care in the U.S. can worsen public health. For example, despite the evidence that the ACA has had a positive effect on individual health care outcomes, Republicans have consistently fought against it. Republican-led states that chose not to adopt Medicaid expansion have not experienced all the positive benefits of the Affordable Care Act.

For example, states such as Texas, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi that have not expanded Medicaid have the largest relative percentage of uninsured residents in the country. In some Republican-led states that did opt for Medicaid expansion, it was adopted with new restrictions. This has ultimately led to worse outcomes.

These long-established partisan divisions have also influenced Americans' polarized views of the government's proper role in addressing the pandemic. This divide grew so wide during 2020 that at some points it was as if people were living in alternate realities based on their partisan leanings. At times an American's political affiliation indicated whether or not they would acknowledge even that a pandemic was really happening....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-u-s-is-a-mess-and-trumps-core-supporters-could-make-it-much-worse/

the United States is in a mess.

COVID-19 is raging out of control in many areas of the country. Black Lives Matter protests are disrupting cities, in some cases themselves disrupted by counter-protesters. Debates over gun control continue across the country, tornadoes, hurricanes and wildfires seem to increase in numbers and size each year.

Could matters get worse? Yes, they could, in large measure due to Donald Trump’s core supporters. who are these people and why is it possible, indeed likely, that they will make the situation worse?

The 20 per cent or soof Americans who follow Trump no matter what, as opposed to the other 20 plus per cent who vote for him as a Republican or because they believe he’ll cut their taxes, are largely the forgotten, the ignored, the disrespected.

In the early 20th century, those in the southern and western United States resented the federal government, largely controlled by politicians from the northeastern reaches of the country.

The West was underpopulated and felt ignored; the South was angry over the loss of the Civil War, the harsh terms of Reconstruction and the end of slavery, which had fuelled the southern economy.

The West, especially California and Texas, is now an economic powerhouse, and no longer feels ignored. In the South, however, there is still a degree of resentment that southern views are not reflected in national policies. Trump has been trying to amplify this resentment with his defence of statues of Confederate heroes and of keeping the names of Confederate officers on military bases.

Evangelical Christians

Trump’s followers are a diverse alliance. Southerners who feel ignored are just one faction within a broad alliance of citizens who feel that the national government does not serve them. One other easily identifiable group are evangelical Christians.

Non-Americans tend not to realize the scope of evangelical Christianity in the United States and are often puzzled by the many references to God in speeches by politicians, especially federal politicians.

These are references to the idea that Americans are God’s chosen people. This is, however, not a homogeneous group, despite media generalizations. Not all are anti-abortion and anti-gay, but many have a sense that America is sliding backwards morally.

That explains why a segment of the movement supports a president who is almost certainly a serial adulterer — his speeches and his actions correspond with their concerns.

Trump was the first president to attend the annual March for Life this past January, and supporters also welcomed his appointment of social conservatives to the Supreme Court, bringing it closer, they believe, to overturning Roe vs. Wade, which legalized abortion.

Xenophobes, the economically disadvantaged

Another segment of hard-core supporters feel strongly that America is under attack by foreigners, including Central Americans crossing the southern border. They also falsely believe the Chinese sent COVID-19 to kill Americans.

Sixty years ago, these supporters would have been in the “my country right or wrong” camp supporting American involvement in the Vietnam War. They believe they are supporting traditional American values, free enterprise, hard work and white society against destructive change.

For these supporters, Trump promised the wall along the southern border to keep out “rapists,” talks often about “the Chinese virus” and says kind things about counter-protesters, even excusing the actions of the young man, Kyle Rittenhouse, accused of killing two people at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Wisconsin.

A sizeable segment of Trump supporters, and the ones who often get the most attention, are the economically abandoned. When Trump was elected, some in the media were quick to dismiss his supporters as lacking education, and therefore unable to grasp that Trump lied, embellished the truth and stoked bigotry.

That’s unfair on several levels.

For one, as corporations move their manufacturing offshore and the U.S. economy relies more on high-tech jobs, the less educated have lost their jobs, whether in the coal mines of West Virginia or the industrial areas of the Midwest.

Understandably, they’re attracted to a president who slapped tariffs on foreign countries, including China and Canada, in the hopes manufacturing jobs will return to America.

Not surprisingly, people who believe they’ve watched the American dream of “work hard and you will succeed” vanish have lost patience with politicians on Capitol Hill who seem only to care about power. And so they’ve turned to a populist, someone who seems to understand. A lot of them don’t care about Trump’s lies; they only care that he talks about their problems.

And not all of those suffering economically are manufacturing or industrial workers service with poor education. There are middle-income earners who have been hurt by the flight of industry, which resulted in regional downturns in the economy.

The news industry

Fifty years ago, a sizeable portion of the American population would tune in every evening to the nightly news on one of three networks and listen to a trusted anchor deliver the news. Now many choose either CNN or Fox, throwbacks in many ways to newspapers of the 19th century that supported one political party and framed the news to favour that party.

Not surprisingly, this approach reinforces existing views of what is going on in the United States. The traditional networks have lost the large audiences of earlier years andlocal news in most markets has become infotainment.

Many people, even those who didn’t bother watching news in past, now get a quick fix from the internet, the source of much of the “fake news” that Trump claims the mainstream media circulate, but really originates in the minds of internet fraudsters.

How many times, for example, have we heard that COVID-19 is a Chinese biological weapon, sent to destroy the American population?

Can we blame lack of education for Trump support when even well-educated individuals have their views of the world reinforced by what they see on the internet or on a cable news channel?

Throw in a number of militant supporters of small government and lower taxes, and you have the hard-core Trump supporters.

Violence a real possibility

Many who identify with these different groups may fall into more than one category; for instance, evangelical Christians who are angry about the de-industrialization of America.

Why are Trump supporters likely to make the situation worse this election?

The answer should be obvious. When a group feels that something critical has been denied them for a long time, its members will protest. If the protest still does not bring about change, some or all will resort to violence to try to force change.

Among the staunch Trump supporters are those who will merely vote for him, those who will demonstrate for him — something Trump encourages — and those who willuse violence in order to ensure the re-election of the man they see as their only potential saviour. Violence is a real possibility as the campaign progresses.

Should Trump lose to Joe Biden, the new president must quickly show sympathy towards the economic issues embodied in the pro-Trump movement and empathy towards the more contentious goals of Trump’s supporters, or it is almost certain the violence will escalate.

Ron Stagg, Professor of History, Ryerson University

aha North Caro Kty big in ~ Stay at home armed protests

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/historian-details-how-anti-science-views-of-white-evangelicals-in-the-south-helped-fuel-the-2nd-wave-of-19/

alex h

when the coronavirus pandemic was killing thousands of New York City residents in the spring, many far-right Republicans in Texas and the Deep South argued that they shouldn’t be forced to practice social distancing or wear protective face masks because of a Northeastern Corridor problem. They failed to realize that pandemics, from the Black Death in Medieval times to the Spanish flu in 1918/1919, can rapidly spread from one place to another.Historian Laura Ellyn Smith, in a blistering op-ed for the Washington Post, discusses the fact that COVID-19 has been hitting the South so hard recently — and argues that the “anti-science” views of far-right white Christian fundamentalists are partly to blame.

“After initially striking the Northeast and Pacific Northwest,” Smith explains, “COVID-19 has spread throughout the country. And now, the states with the highest new cases per capita are those across the South and Southwest. The Bible Belt — which stretches from South Carolina through the Deep South, west across Texas and Arizona — has seen high numbers of cases. And although the United States has seen cases everywhere, these states’ early reopening plans and hands-off measures — most recently, a ban by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) on local mask requirements — reflect a cultural emphasis on prioritizing freedom from government dictate and an anti-science bias rooted in the history of the region.”

Smith, who graduated from the University of Mississippi and now teaches politics at Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent, England, notes how far-right southerners and supporters of President Donald Trump who “have resisted even simple measures, including social distancing and the now highly politicized wearing of masks.” And she points out that in Palm Beach County, Florida, extremists claimed that proponents of mandatory mask-wearing in public places “want to throw God’s wonderful breathing system out.”

To understand the origins of the “anti-science bias” in the Bible Belt, Smith notes, one needs to examine history.

"Where did this anti-science bias come from?” Smith writes. “It became rooted in southern culture and politics with the Scopes trial, popularly known as the Monkey Trial, in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. The trial stemmed from the modernism rising in the post-World War I era. Southern whites felt that these changes challenged their way of life, including seeing the teaching of evolution as an attack on traditional values. They moved aggressively to retain socio-cultural control in a time of transformative change by limiting modern influences.”

After the Scopes trial, Smith notes, “anti-intellectualism” in the South “drew strength from the gathering of religious fundamentalists whose mission to spread their beliefs became more public as southern whites responded to changes that occurred as the result of the civil rights movement.” During the 1960s, Smith recalls, “White southern evangelicals saw their longstanding regional dominance threatened by civil rights activism and federal legislation expanding black civil rights…. During the same period, Congress and the High Court shattered Jim Crow segregation and banned prayer in public schools.”

Smith adds that in the 1980s and 1990s, “southern white evangelicals, who increasingly became the base of the Republican Party, came to associate intellectualism and science with coastal elites who looked down upon them and scorned their values…. This political culture fueled ever-increasing anti-intellectualism that traced its origins back to the Scopes trial.”

Smith wraps up her op-ed by arguing that the type of “anti-intellectual” forces that raged in the Bible Belt in past are still alive and well — only now, their target is anti-coronavirus measures.

“COVID-19 is proving that an unwillingness to listen to doctors and scientists can do great harm,” Smith warns. “Religious freedom and public health aren’t actually incompatible, but countering the anti-science bias that has become a stalking horse for the culture wars is crucial to creating better policies and allowing citizens to make the best possible choices for themselves and for society.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/bill-moyers-explains-how-the-south-won-the-civil-war/

no lnx

Written by Bill Moyers July 31, 2020

Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. If you want to understand this moment in American politics, here’s a suggestion for you: It’s the must-read book of the year — HOW THE SOUTH WON THE CIVIL WAR, by the historian Heather Cox Richardson. Yes, the Civil War brought an end to the slave order of the South and the rule of the plantation oligarchs who embodied white supremacy. But the Northern victory was short-lived. Slave states soon stripped Black people of their hard-won rights, white supremacy not only rose again to rule the South but spread West across the Mississippi to create new hierarchies of inequality. That’s the story Heather Cox Richardson tells in HOW THE SOUTH WON THE CIVIL WAR, with echoes resounding every day in the current wild and fierce campaign for the presidency. Here to talk with her about America’s ongoing battle between oligarchy and democracy is Bill Moyers.

BILL MOYERS: Will you take us on that long but vivid arc of how we got from Abraham Lincoln, describing the end of the Civil War as “a new birth of freedom,” to Donald Trump describing America as “a land of carnage, a nightmare.” From Lincoln to Donald Trump in 2016, what happened?

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: If you think about the Civil War as a war between two different ideologies, two different concepts of what America is supposed to be, is it supposed to be a place where a few wealthy men direct the labor and the lives of the people below them, the women and people of color below them, the way the Confederacy argued? Is that America? Or is America what Lincoln and his ilk in the Republican Party in the North defined the democracy as during the Civil War? Is it a place where all men are equal before the law and should have equal access to resources? And of course, I use the word man there, but that’s because that’s the language that Lincoln used. But the principle is expandable of course. It looked by 1865 as if that latter ideology, that of the Republicans and that of the idea of equality had triumphed. And certainly, the Republicans and Northerners who had fought for the United States government in that war believed that they had redefined America to mean equality before the law. They really believed that was the case. And that they had defeated what they called the “slave power,” the oligarchs who had gone ahead and taken over the system in the 1850s. After the Civil War, Easterners moved West across the Mississippi in really large numbers after 1865.

BILL MOYERS: White Southerners went too, of course, and you argue they saw the West as the final frontier ruled by elites, just as elites, with violence and intimidation, had ruled in the old South.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: And in that West, they discover a land that is already susceptible to the idea of racial and gendered hierarchies, because it has its own history of them. And it’s a place out there where the new American system happens to be a really fertile ground for the Confederate ideology to rise again. And that’s exactly what happens with the extractive industries in the West that encouraged the heavily capitalized cattle markets, for example, or mining industries, or later oil, or even agribusiness. You have in the West a development of an economy and, later on, a society that looks very much like the pre-Civil War South.

And over the course of the late 19th century, that becomes part of the American mythology, with the idea that you have the cowboy in the West who really stands against what Southerners and Northern Democrats believe is happening in Eastern society, that a newly active government is using its powers to protect African Americans and this is a redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to populations that are simply looking for a government handout. That’s language that rises in 1871, and that is still obviously important in our political discourse.

But in contrast to that, in the West, you get the rise of the image of the American cowboy, which is really our image of Reconstruction. In a weird way, people think of Reconstruction, obviously, they think of formerly enslaved people. But the image that has obtained in our textbooks and in our popular culture is the American cowboy, who is beginning to dominate American popular culture by 1866. And that cowboy — a single man, because women are in the cowboy image only as wives and mothers, or as women above the saloons in their striped stockings serving liquor and other things — is amale image of single white men. Although, again, historically a third of cowboys were people of color. It’s a single white man working hard on their own, who don’t want anything from the government. Again, historically inaccurate. The government puts more energy into the American plains than it does any other region of the country. But–

BILL MOYERS: And also on land that had been taken from Mexico after the Mexican-American War, and on land that had been stolen from the Native Americans after genocide. I mean, it’s this whole notion of, “I’m free to roam the land and become a self-made hero,” which was the cowboys’ image to those of us growing up in the ’30s and ’40s, was really a bastard idea.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: And part of that bastard idea, though, was so interesting. Because it is, in part, the Indian Wars of the Civil War and immediate post-war years that helped to both create the image of the cowboy, but also reinforce the idea that a few white men belong above subordinate groups like the Indigenous people, like Mexicans or Mexican Americans. Like Chinese Americans, like Fiji islanders, about whom they care very much in the late 19th century. And that racial hierarchy and gendered hierarchy really gets tied into the image of the American cowboy. And popularized with this backlash against activism in the East, trying to help African Americans adjust to the new free labor economy.

But that image becomes enormously important after 1880. Because in 1880, the South goes solidly Democratic. And, of course, in retrospect, we now know it’s going to stay Democratic for a very, very long time, indeed. But they don’t know that at the time. But what Republicans do note is that they must pick up Western votes if they’re going to continue to dominate the White House and the Senate. After 1888, when we get the installment of Benjamin Harrison in the White House, he loses the popular vote by about 100,000 votes. But he’s installed thanks to the Electoral College. The Republicans under Harrison between 1889 and 1890, they let in six new states in 12 months. That was the largest acquisition of new states in American history since the original 13 and it’s never been matched again. They let in North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, and then Idaho and Wyoming to go ahead and make sure that they would continue to control the Senate, and the Electoral College.

And they’re not hiding this. They actually go onto their media which is their equivalent of the Fox News channel at the time and say, by letting in these states, we’re going to hold onto the Senate for all time and we’re going to make sure we hold onto the White House for all time. But what that does is it begins to shift the idea of that human freedom. All of a sudden, the Republican Party, which has tried to continue to argue that it is standing in favor of equality, although that’s negotiable. After 1888 and the admission of those new states, the Republican Party’s got to start adopting that racially charged language in order to get the West on board. And that begins the change in American history that leads to a later union between the West and the South around this idea that really white men ought to be in charge. It’s not just a Southern thing. It’s a Western thing as well. And they make up a voting bloc in Congress that manages to change a lot of the legislation of the 20th century.

BILL MOYERS: You write about how the massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in 1890, in South Dakota, was an atrocity brought on by politics. And that it played into the use of politics to reimpose inequality, and the use of force for malicious purposes.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: It did. What happens is that with the admission of these new states in 1889 and 1890, the Republicans believe that they are going to do very well in the midterm election of 1890. And the big thing on the table in America in 1890 is the tariff – high walls around the American economy that protect businesses inside America, they protect them to the degree that because they face no foreign competition, different groups can collude with each other to raise prices. So in 1860, the Republicans insist that an economic downturn that’s been happening is only because those tariffs aren’t high enough. What happens in the election of 1890 is the Republicans think they’re going to win and they lose dramatically. It turns out when these ballots are counted, a Republican Senate or a Democratic Senate hangs on the seat of South Dakota, on one Senate seat. And that Senate seat has pretty clearly been corrupted. There’s a huge fight, then, in the legislature of who actually won. So there the situation sits.

BILL MOYERS: Sits there, for sure, with President Benjamin Harris needing to shore up his support in the Dakotas. So, he sends corrupt cronies out to replace experienced Indian agents and dispatches one-third of the federal Army as well.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: And with that movement of the Army into South Dakota in the largest mobilization of the US Army since the Civil War, Lakota are trying to negotiate with the Army that increasingly wants to bring them into the reservation, to the agencies to make sure that they’re under control. And over the course of the next few months, that situation escalates until a Lakota leader, Sitting Bull, is killed in December of 1890. And then in terror after that, a group of Miniconjou Lakota move across the state. They actually find the Army, the Army doesn’t find them. And in the process of corralling them and disarming them later on that month, the soldiers start to fire. And about 250 Lakota are massacred. So, it was a massacre that was really directly attributable to whether or not the Republican Party could control the US Senate in order to protect its tariffs that promoted big business, and protected a few oligarchs.

BILL MOYERS: When Americans moved to the wide-open spaces of the West after the Civil War, they kept alive the same vision of the world that had inspired Confederates. What was their argument?

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: They certainly were not arguing at the time for a renewal of hostilities. But they did believe that America was one in which a few good hard-working white men should dominate women and people of color. And I think that’s written all over the West, although we don’t like to see that because we love our cowboys. But inherent in Western society, Western politics, Western economy and the Western society after the Civil War was the idea that a few wealthy men should control the industries. Or at least, did control the extractive industries of mining and cattle, and agribusiness and oil. And they should also control politics. And that the legal system should defend their interests while the workers should work for the people in charge. You know, these wealthy cattlemen, for example, were somehow the salt of the earth, hardworking little guys. That image was really in contrast to what was going on, which was the creation of a society that looked, in many ways, like the society of the pre-Civil War South. And by the late 19th and early 20th century, the rise of industrialists in the North who took a lot of their power and their ideological power from the cowboy imagery and from the support that they received in the American West. And to some degree, from Southern leaders as well.

BILL MOYERS: So, the pre-Civil War South was an oligarchy.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: Yes. I was very careful with that word. Because there are obviously a lot of words we could use for a system in which a few people take over. But the way that I was using it was with the idea that an oligarchy was a small group, usually of men in that case, who controlled the money in society and therefore came to control the political system, and also the social system.

BILL MOYERS: In order to use government policies to shore up white supremacy and prevent racial equality, right?

HEATHER RICHARDSON: And I think the echoes from that to the present are pretty clear, when you have again a small group of Americans now who define themselves that way, I think. One of the things that I found interesting is with the rise of this small elite group of large planters in the 1850s, the ways in which they came to monopolize popular culture and popular literature so that they simply didn’t say, “Well, we’re hard workers and we’ve been lucky.”But they came to believe that they deserved what they had gotten. And that they were somehow better than everybody else. And you can see that through the pulpits, ministers starting to talk about how blessed they were to have these men in their congregations. You can see it through literature, the rise of novels that talk about people who own large numbers of other people as somehow paternalistic patriarchs. And you can see it through the construction of the other, the people who are enslaved, as being somehow almost sub-human. And that’s a very deliberate construction in the 1850s. And I would argue, you can see something very similar in America in the 2000 aughts.

BILL MOYERS: In what sense?

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: The emphasis in popular culture on how the people who were at the top really belong there. That they somehow are the best people. That they know more than the rest of us. That if you have a billion dollars, you must somehow be really much more special than those of us who don’t have a billion dollars. And I think that really shows in the way that President Trump talks about the people around him. He would appoint only the best people, who by definition, knew more than the experts did. And you look at the position that Jared Kushner has in this administration. I mean, he’s a young man with really very little training in anything and he’s supposed to be solving the Middle East crisis and handling coronavirus?And I don’t even know what his portfolio looks like at this point. But I think that’s a reflection that looks very much like that of elite Southerners in the 1850s when they simply thought by virtue of who they were, they could make things work better than anybody else could.

BILL MOYERS: And you write that as this Old South ideology moved West it influenced popular culture, especially in upholding white supremacy. There were Western movies like the classic STAGECOACH, remember? A Confederate soldier joins with the US Cavalry to defeat the “savage” Apache. And novels such as LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE and GONE WITH THE WIND celebrating the union of Western and Confederate ideology.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: Yes. And isn’t it fascinating—if you think about, again, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s a great example. People tend to dismiss her because they see it as a children’s book. And yet, it’s been enormously influential, enormously influential. And she writes about a world in which Pa takes care of the women folk and dominates the native populations around him. And certainly there are passages in that book that are extraordinarily racist, not only toward Indigenous people, but toward African Americans as well. It’s gotten her in trouble lately. But the theme throughout that book is of individualism. Pa is doing it on his own. Pa is not doing it on his own. The reality of her life was that Pa was managing to keep the family together based on the fact his daughters and his wife worked because Pa could never manage to make ends meet. And they’re living in places that are habitable for white settlers like themselves only because of the protection of the US government. And, you know, even scenes like when– when Mary goes to college.

And remember, they scrimp and save for years for Mary to go to college. And the implication in that book is that they are sending Mary to college. No. They’re raising money for her train fare and her clothing. Her room and board is being paid for by the state of South Dakota. South Dakota actually, weirdly enough, had the highest rate of literacy in the country in that era. But you don’t see that in those books. Because again, you have this wedding, if you will, of individualism to racism and this concept of women being taken care of by their men. It’s a very popular trope in American history. But it doesn’t reflect reality.

BILL MOYERS: So, when a group of slave holders embraced the idea that they and they alone should control America’s economic and political system, the Americans fought back, won the Civil War, and rededicated the country to equality. But when it happened a second time, when very rich men of property mobilized to take over America again, they largely succeeded by convincing voters that equality for people of color and women and minorities destroyed the liberty of white men. That’s almost the drum beat in the background of American politics today.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: One of the things about that ideology that a few wealthy men should rule, it’s not new to America. It’s been around for a very long time. And what’s really radical is the idea that in fact, all of us should have the right to self-government. And the fact that we’re still fighting about it in America today suggests to me that those two fundamentally different concepts of the role of the American government at least are still absolutely the question of what America really is about. For all the frightening things that are happening in America right now, it’s also exciting to get to redefend the concept of human self-determination, which is really what we’ve been doing all along on this continent.

BILL MOYERS: But as you write, the ideology of the Old South and its new Western allies found a powerful reactionary force to reimagine it. Let’s go to the very opening scene of your book. It’s July, 1964. The Cow Palace outside San Francisco, packed with cheering Republicans who’ve just nominated Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona as their candidate for the presidency. They came roaring to their feet when he declares, quote–

BARRY GOLDWATER: I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice in no virtue.

BILL MOYERS: 56 years later, that scene still plays out in my head. Explain why you chose that moment to begin a story that spans America from the Civil War to now.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: Barry Goldwater at that point was known sort of as a cowboy character. And that moment when the state of South Carolina, the state that was responsible for taking the Confederacy out of the Union. When those delegates stand up, they were the ones to put Barry Goldwater over the top, as their delegate yelled when he announced the delegation’s votes, it’s that moment when you recognize that there is a new force in American politics. And it’s the force of reaction against the liberal consensus that was widely shared by Democrats and Republicans both, that in fact, the government should be of the people, by the people and for the people. And that’s the moment when you had that reactionary voice saying, “No, that’s not what America should look like.” And it’s that theory that in fact a few people should run the system and make decisions for the rest of us that has taken over America since ’64.It came across as a racial argument. But of course, his skin was in the game for the end of business regulation.

BILL MOYERS: Regulation, right.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: That’s what he really cared about. It’s interesting the degree to which they harnessed the tradition of American racism and sexism as well, to their project of destroying business regulation.

BILL MOYERS: Goldwater’s big bone was government, but that was all mixed up with opposing Civil Rights and keeping segregation, discrimination. This fear of government that Goldwater was stoking at that moment was the same fear that Southern demagogues had stoked to keep Blacks in their place, it was government that was at stake here. It was what you can do with government.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: Well, and I think you just hit the nail on the head there with the idea that all of this is about the proper use of government. Is the idea of the United States government to protect property, so that people can accumulate more and more of it, and thereby get the power and the education and the connections to go ahead and direct society in a way that’s good for all us, which is their theory. Or is the role of government, in fact, to protect equality before the law, and to make sure that all men, in fact, and all, you know, all people are created equal and have equal access to resources and to opportunity? And those two questions are really the central questions of America.

BILL MOYERS: Ronald Reagan gave the conservative movement its present-day mantr

RONALD REAGAN: The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

BILL MOYERS: Now just imagine using that mantra today when the pandemic is rampant. And somebody knocks on your door and says, “My name is Fauci, and I’m here to help you.” And they say, “But you’re from the government. We don’t want you.”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: I love the way you put it earlier when you said, “This is all a question of what the government should do.” Coming out of World War II, we had a real resurgence of the idea that the government really had a responsibility to promote equality before the law, and to guarantee equal access to resources. And that was a principle that was shared across America, I think, from Republicans and Democrats both. I mean, obviously you saw it with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the New Deal. But you also saw it with Truman, of course. And then you also saw it Eisenhower and Eisenhower’s Middle Way. And the idea was that this American democracy stood against the fascism that had drawn us into World War II. And that FDR was so articulate about fighting back against.

You know, when he talks about Italy again and again, FDR talks about how, you know, American democracy’s messy, for sure, but look, Mussolini was supposed to make the trains run on time and instead, his people are dying and they’re starving to death. And we, us messy members of a democracy, are the ones feeding them. And he says this again and again. And coming out of that war, I think Americans really stood for that. But even before that, there’s certainly a group of reactionaries who look at the New Deal and at the Middle Way and they say, “We don’t believe that the government should interfere in our businesses. We should have the liberty, the freedom to run our businesses as we see fit.” And they, in fact, really believe that the New Deal is going to be erased. They really thought it was a temporary measure, and that Americans would turn against that. But, of course, Americans loved the New Deal. It had gotten us out of out of the Depression and it had won World War II. So they didn’t have any intention of walking away from that.

BILL MOYERS: But Goldwater and Reagan were riding away from it. And both, as you know, loved casting themselves as cowboys, white hats and all. They wrapped themselves in the mythology of the cowboy as hero; a lone white man carving a new world for white people from a hostile environment. So how did we get from Barry Goldwater in 1964, Richard Nixon, a Californian in 1968, invoking the Southern strategy of stirring up the resentments and fears and hatreds of white Southerners. And Ronald Reagan who opened his campaign in 1980 in Neshoba County, Mississippi, just a few miles from where three Civil Rights volunteers had been murdered. And then George W. Bush buying a Stetson and a Texas ranch to prove he was a Westerner. Finally, to Donald Trump, the rich guy from Queens, not a part of the Southern culture or complex, who used the same racial fears, the same threats and promises that had been used in ’64, ’68, and ’80.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: Well, finally by 1951, you have that famous book by William F. Buckley Jr. called GOD AND MAN AT YALE in which he says, “Listen, we got a problem. If we keep on trying to argue against the New Deal on the merits, we keep losing. So, we should stop trying to argue it on the merits. Because when we talked about what was best for most people, people voted for the New Deal.” So, he suggests that we needed to start from a baseline, saying that the government should only protect what he calls “free enterprise.” That is, there shouldn’t be regulation. And it should protect Christianity. You could wiggle around the edges. But you needed to have those two things. Well, that doesn’t really get much traction. And, of course, William F. Buckley Jr. is the son of an oil man. And he is bankrolled by some pretty serious money there. It’s a vision of a very few wealthy men. And it really doesn’t get traction until after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954, when a unanimous Supreme Court, where this chief justice is a Republican and a former governor of California–

BILL MOYERS: You’re talking about Earl Warren.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: Yes. He says the government needs to stand behind the desegregation of public schools. And with that, a door is open to resurrect the idea of the Reconstruction years. That any kind of government action in trying to level the playing field for African Americans in American society is a redistribution of wealth. And in 1955, we get the formation of NATIONAL REVIEW, of course, with the hiring of James Kirkpatrick, who’s a Southern editor. Who hammers again and again and again on the idea that in fact, if you let government be an active government, to go ahead and intervene in things like regulating the economy, or in this case, promoting desegregation, what you are going to get is an attack on liberty, by which they mean tax dollars, your, in coded words, “White tax dollars” are going to go to African Americans. Who, in their eyes, had not earned that sort of entree into public schools. Which is gonna cost tax dollars among other things there were– needed to be troops to have that happen.

Well, that idea, that somehow an activist government, a New Deal government, an Eisenhower government was a redistribution of wealth from hard working white people to first African Americans, and then that group of other is going to be expanded to eventually include, in the 1970s, feminist women. But that argument is really established in the 1950s. And the people who adhere to it initially are not traditional Republicans. And they’re certainly not Democrats. They self-identify as a group called movement conservatives. And they are not true conservatives. They are radical extremists. And they know it. They, a few group of capital C conservatives, are going to stand against capital L liberals. By which they mean virtually everybody else in America, Republicans and Democrats both. Because they make no distinction between the liberal consensus of FDR and Eisenhower and Chinese communism. To them, those are the same kind of redistributions of wealth. So that movement conservative argument that gets its roots in the 1950s and then is picked up by Nixon– I think he gets backed into a full-hearted embrace of movement conservatism because of the problems he’s facing in 1970, with the Vietnam War and Kent State.

But by Reagan, you have Reagan fully defending that vision.And you remember, Reagan’s initial ideas of cutting taxes were not popular. And it was not clear that that was actually going to happen. He has to put George H. W. Bush into his administration as vice president. And he had called that system “voodoo economics.” But it’s really after he’s shot that he manages to get the popular momentum in Congress to pass his first tax cut. And then he tries to cement the ability to hold those tax cuts through including Evangelicals into the political system on the Republican side, beginning really dramatically in 1986. But, also, by packing the court. So, you can see from there on, this vision snowballing.

And then in the 1990s, of course, you get Newt Gingrich becoming the Speaker of the House, and really deliberately purging the Republican Party of traditional Republicans, those he calls, RINOs, or Republicans in Name Only. By the time you get toTrump, that language is there. That whole set up is there. But Trump himself is an interesting character. Because if you remember, he was the most moderate of the Republican candidates when he was running. So he had the racism and the sexism down. But a lot of people who might have liked or might even have not liked the racism and the sexism loved the idea he was gonna make taxes fairer. He was gonna create a better health care system. He was gonna make wealthier people pay more. He was gonna promote infrastructure. All those things that went by the board. He’s put movement conservatism on steroids. And his platform in 2016 was stunning. It was William F. Buckley Jr.’s wish list, or Goldwater’s wish list. And a narrative that, by the way, has taken off, and been extraordinarily strong since the rise of Reagan.

He was elected in 1980. And you have that cowboy individualism gone wild with the STAR WARS series, which is the movie of 1977. That imagery, that one guy is going to do it on his own without the help of the government is a lovely image. It’s a mythological image. It’s one that Americans love, but it’s not reality. In fact, that image has enabled oligarchs like those really taking the reins of power under Ronald Reagan, to skew our laws in such a way that wealth has moved upward, opportunity has been taken away from the vast majority of us. The lives of most Americans, a majority of Americans, has gotten significantly worse, not better. And now under Donald Trump with the coronavirus, but also with the extraordinary dis-junction in the economy.

Now, of course, we’re looking at the recession because of the coronavirus. But even before that, with the booming stock market, and the reality that most Americans didn’t have $400 in the bank to meet an emergency. I think people are really coming to realize there is this extraordinary gap between that image and reality. And beginning more to want to root their politics in reality, both to fight the coronavirus and to fight the economic recession. But also to give credit to the essential workers of color, and to the women who are keeping this country running. I thought it was really interesting that one of the tropes from American individualism is, of course, that moms are home, right? Taking care of the kids. Over the weekend in Portland, moms went out and made a wall, a wall of moms to stand between the protesters and the federal troops.

BILL MOYERS: You say that the movement of women into politics rejects the construction of a society in which a few elite white men control the destinies of the rest of the country. And you find hope in that. But I wrote after your last sentence, “Yes, but white oligarchs and their mercenaries still have the power.”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: Yes, they do. And I often don’t sleep at night. But people ask me what gets me up every morning, and why do I continue to be optimistic. And I am because I believe in American democracy. I believe in the concept of human self-determination with almost a religious faith. And if I lose that faith, I feel like I will have broken that faith not only with the people around me today, but with all those people who came before us, and fought in wars, and who gave up their time and their money and their energy and did everything that they could to make sure that American democracy would survive. So, we’re in a very frightening time. But there are a lot of us, I think, who believe in this great American experiment, and will give it our all to make sure it doesn’t end on our watch....

ANNOUNCER: Thanks for listening to Moyers on Democracy. Read an excerpt from HOW THE SOUTH WON THE CIVIL WAR, a must-read book for understanding how we got to this moment. And, be sure to check out Bill’s podcast with Heather Cox Richardson, exploring how her daily LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN found a large and loyal following on Facebook and our website. You’ll find all this and more at Billmoyers.com.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/fear-and-aggression-dogmatism-and-intolerance-these-psychological-motives-have-shaped-right-wing-conservatism-in-america-ever-since-the-civil-war/

Many people who see little rational basis for supporting Donald Trump ask themselves: Why is he so popular? Relatedly, why did so many people support Richard Nixon, Adolf Hitler, and other avatars of popular right-wing conservatism? There are, of course, many different reasons for each situation. But there also key commonalities that have been identified in meta-analyses of the topic written by the psychologist John T. Jost and colleagues. In relation to Jost’s work, I have examined aspects of the antebellum South in order to better understand its political culture, especially aspects of that culture that prompted many Southerners to become more emotionally receptive to the appeals of “fire-eater” secessionist conservatives. More broadly, this historical lens can help illuminate the mass appeal of conservatism in general, focusing particularly on the psychological factors that tend to underlie this appeal.

Among the various scholars writing on the topic since World War II, Jost found agreement that an inclination to respect tradition in resisting change and to respect hierarchy in sustaining inequality are two key interrelated core conservative ideological characteristics. He found that several psychological motives increase the likelihood that people will manifest these ideological characteristics. These psychological motives include tendencies toward “fear and aggression . . ., dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity . . ., uncertainty avoidance [including less openness to new experiences] . . ., need for cognitive closure . . ., need for structure . . ., and [support for] group-based dominance.” The desire to keep under tight reins any conditions that evoke uncertainty or fear is the most prominent and overarching of these motives, which often translates into ideologically-based preferences to hold tight to elements of society and political culture identified with traditional authority.

For decades, antebellum Southern whites were exposed to a regular drumbeat of fearful rumors that bloody slave insurrections would result if slaves were emancipated, which rabidly pro-secessionist political leaders (the fire-eaters) contended would happen if Abraham Lincoln were elected president in 1860. This fear, along with racist attitudes toward African-Americans, reinforced the Southern white craving for order, the inclination to value the certainties that they felt they knew, and wariness about the possibilities of change.

Fear boosted the strength of leaders in politics, press, and pulpit whose cries about the dangers of slave revolt made people more inclined to emotion-based political decision-making rather than reason-based thought. In his role as one of the secession commissioners sent by the early-seceding states to coax other Southern states to join their cause, Stephen F. Hale of Alabama expressed many Southerners’ fears in portraying Lincoln’s election as “[inaugurating] all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection [referring to the bloody slave liberation struggle during the era of the French Revolution in the country later known as Haiti], consigning her citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to pollutions and violation to gratify the lust of half civilized Africans.” Slave emancipation and equal rights for African-Americans would result in the obsessively-feared “amalgamation” of the races through interracial sex, or “an eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting and destroying all the resources of the country.” “With us [Southerners],” Hale observed, “it is a question of self-preservation. Our lives, our property, the safety of our homes and our hearthstones, all that men hold dear on earth, is involved in the issue."

contention over slavery was also part of a broader web of controversy arising from what many Southerners thought of as a decades-old culture war over the differing social arrangements and values of the North and South. Pointing to the fact that abolitionists were usually active in other reform movements in the North (that were virtually non-existent in the South), Southern leaders saw these movements as being of one piece with abolitionism, in dangerously seeking to extend the concept of human rights and opportunity to out-groups—often singling out the feminist movement in this regard—and in seeking to lure people away from traditional social relations and socioeconomic structures.

Southern leaders sought to stereotype reform activism as more radical and pervasive in the North than was actually the case.The historian Manisha Sinha observes that the North was portrayed as an atheistic land “in which property, marriage, female subordination, religious fidelity, and other pillars of social order were constantly challenged.” The fire-eater James D.B. De Bow on the eve of secession spoke of Southerners as “adhering to the simple truths of the Gospel and the faith of their fathers, they have not run hither and thither in search of all the absurd and degrading isms which have sprung up in the rank [Northern] soil of infidelity. They are not Mormons or Spiritualist [sic], they are not Owenites, Fourierites, Agrarians, Socialists, Free-lovers or Millerites.”

The South’s dominant approach to the Christian religion produced an atmosphere conducive to the fearful imaginings of a culture war, and reinforced the sorts of personality characteristics that Jost believes are conducive to the formation of right-wing conservative political beliefs. The tendency to demonize the North and its reform movements grew, in part, from a more general Manichean outlook emphasized within Southern churches, which divided the world into harshly drawn categories of good and evil. In this perspective, the only alternative to a slave-based traditional way of life in the South was considered apocalyptic ruin. Thus, the influential Rev. James H. Thornwell of South Carolina thundered that “the parties in this [cultural] conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders—they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins, on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle ground—Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity the stake.”

Rather than pressing their congregants to realistically face the moral challenge of slavery, clergymen were crucial in helping Southerners circle their attitudinal wagons in defense of the peculiar institution, using a narrow literal interpretation of the Bible to defend it while insisting that the South had a God-given stable order far superior to that of the urbanizing “ism”-plagued North. Seeking to contain the moral ferment of the North and its potentially destabilizing effects, clergymen focused their congregants on personal salvation, shunning the direction of many Northern churches that sought to reform society in order to remove impediments to godliness.

Rather than seeking to treat certain passages of the Bible as allegory or historical custom in order to reconcile Scripture with more conscientious attitudes toward slavery (and to reconcile with scientific discoveries such as the geological findings proving a much older earth than that found in the Bible’s accounts), clergymen sought instead to squeeze reality into arigid literal interpretation of the Bible. Thus, they offered their adherents a way of escape from the use of reason and dialogue in performing moral calculus, and demonstrated how to ground their beliefs and behaviors in what made them feel emotionally secure in the present. This helped hide the immorality of slavery from Southern eyes, and it hid the falsity of Southerners’ belief that their security depended on the continuation of slavery.

This religious approach reinforced the closed nature of a society in which dissenting viewpoints and the give and take of civil dialogue were only tolerated when concerning issues that did not challenge the structures of society. This was most particularly the case from the early 1830s onward, as the rise of abolitionism and other reforms prompted the highly defensive approach to issues that would mark the final decades of the antebellum era. Using the “isms” of the North as a foil, Southern right-wing leaders began to frame slavery as a “positive good,” in contrast to the previous view of slavery as a morally troublesome institution that was nevertheless too difficult to abandon due to economic and security concerns. Leaders thus placed the South on a fateful path, rejecting what had been a relatively open political culture in which civil discussion about weaning the South off slavery had been tolerated.

Believing themselves to be sitting atop a social volcano, Southern leaders sought order by isolating the region’s people from the culture of what they considered to be a decadent North and indeed from a decadent Western civilization in general. Psychological, economic, and physical bullying upheld the closed nature of the South, as did the forceful exclusion of antislavery newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets—backed by the federal government’s acquiescence in banning the distribution of supposedly incendiary works through the mail in Southern states. Those who voiced heterodox views could readily find their businesses shunned and their standing in society ruined. “Vigilance committees” filled with men itching to prove their masculinity sprang into action at rumors about whites advocating abolition and rumors that slaves may be planning to revolt. Many were forcefully exiled from the region, beaten up, or hanged as a result.

The suppression of thought in the antebellum South helped ensure that the individual dispositions of many whites would gravitate toward Jost’s categories of fear, dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity, uncertainty avoidance, need for cognitive closure, and support for group-based dominance, all of which left many Southerners ill-equipped—in their lack of knowledge and in their fearful, conformist attitudes—to stand up to the fire-eaters during the secession crisis of 1860-1861. Seeking order above all, the South disallowed the possibility of evolutionary change from the 1830s onward, obtaining as a result bloody revolutionary change in the 1860s.

Ideally, more history and political science professors will recognize the value of using historical case studies as a lens for better understanding the psychology of right-wing conservatism, particularly in understanding its mass appeal. Given the propensity of right-wing conservatism toward authoritarianism, such a curricular element could help sensitize citizens to the potential danger that the emotion-driven inclinations characteristic of conservatism pose to the maintenance of a civil democratic polity. I would recommend the study of the social psychology of past right-wing political movements as a normative element in college-level U.S. history courses and other humanities and social sciences courses geared toward teaching the foundations of civic knowledge. Ideally, an awareness of the social psychological basis of right-wing conservatism might even suffuse down into the quotidian teaching of history and civics on a secondary school level. The ascendancy of Donald Trump illustrates how important it is to increase our citizens’ ability to take such historical issues into account in examining current events.

Daniel Eli Burnstein is Professor Emeritus of History at Seattle University. He is the author of Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City (University of Illinois Press, 2006).

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/the-american-south-has-resisted-social-distancing-measures-and-we-ll-pay-the-price

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The American South has resisted social distancing measures — and we’ll all pay the price

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, image via Wikimedia Commons.

Written by Martin Longman / Washington Monthly April 2, 2020

As you can see from the New York Times’ examination of travel patterns in the United States, there has been a wide and largely regional disparity across the country in terms of who was quick to self-isolate and who wasn’t. Most of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Upper Midwest, and the West Coast had issued stay-at-home orders by March 27. Other states that were proactive include New Mexico, Colorado, Idaho, and Louisiana. The urban areas in Texas tried to be proactive even as their state government opposed them. The South, as a whole, did not instruct people to stay at home and the result is that their travel patterns remained normal, or close to normal.

This is going to matter later.

The inconsistencies in policies—and in when they are imposed—may create new problems, even for places that set limits weeks ago.

“Let’s assume that we flatten the curve, that we push transmission down in the Bay Area and we walk away with 1 percent immunity,” said Dr. George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco. “Then, people visit from regions that have not sheltered in place, and we have another run of cases. This is going to happen.”

There’s a tradeoff to self-quarantining. People don’t get infected with COVID-19, so people don’t survive the infection and get immunity. The isolated communities are nearly as vulnerable to a new outbreak as they were before all this began. It’s worth doing anyway for a variety of reasons, including that it limits how many people are flooding our unprepared and undersupplied hospitals, and that it buys time for researchers to find effective treatments and develop a vaccine. Hopefully, getting COVID-19 in the fall or winter will be more survivable than getting it now.

But areas that were slow or still refuse to isolate and limit travel have spiked their own infection rates and spread the virus far and wide. They’ll have a higher level of immunity but that’s not going to be helpful to the rest of the country.

Looking at the charts, there seems to be more going on than just whether or not a given state government asked people to shelter in place. Outside of the South, people seem to have complied with this even in the absence of official guidance. Meanwhile, with the exception of parts of Louisiana and South Florida, the states of the former Confederacy all look the same regardless of what their governors set as policy. Something cultural explains why Southerners didn’t heed the advice they were hearing in the media, and it’s not just support for Trump. He has plenty of support in the prairies states and Mountain West, and they did significantly reduce their travel. The pattern is visible even in a blue state like Virginia and a purple one like North Carolina, both of which have Democratic governors.

Whether religiosity explains it, or a probably related skepticism toward scientific expert advice, or maybe something to do with their car culture, I don’t know. But their slowness to respond to this outbreak has undermined the effectiveness of the efforts of the areas that did respond. And, because of the nature of this disease, we’re all going to be paying for that for the foreseeable future.

Two real winners were arrested for vandalizing a memorial dedicated to African Americans last month at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Fifty-year-old Nancy Rushton McCorkle and 31-year-old Ryan Francis Barnett have been accused of defacing the Unsung Founders Memorial with racist graffiti as well as other acts of vandalism around the campus. The Unsung Founders Memorial was created in honor of “enslaved and free African American workers that helped build the University.”

According to the Winston-Salem Journal, McCorkle is a member in a group called Heirs to the Confederacy. Sort of like being called the Proud Losers of Dumb Terrorist Losers. TheWinston-Salem Journalsays McCorkle was seen at a rally in support of a Confederate statue in Downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina, this January.

When the alleged vandals struck, at the end of March, UNC’s Interim Chancellor Guskiewicz wrote that besides the memorial, other racist language was graffitied outside of the school’s Hanes Art Center.

According to CNN, the inscription on the memorial, dedicated in 2002, reads: “The Class of 2002 honors the University’s unsung founders—the people of color bond and free—who helped build the Carolina that we cherish today.”

Their memory will last, but these two clowns will vanish into the night.

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Trump Cabinet official hid ties to Confederate groups from the Senate in sworn disclosures: report

On Friday, CNN’s KFile reported that Robert Wilkie, President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs, failed to disclose his ties to Sons of Confederate Veterans in a questionnaire to the…

https://www.alternet.org/here-are-7-things-united-daughters-confederacy-do-not-want-you-know-about-them

kal h

it's helpful, in the midst of any conversation about this country’s Confederate monuments, to understand who put these things up, which also offers a clue as to why. In large part, the answer to the first question is theUnited Daughters of the Confederacy, a white Southern women’s “heritage” group founded in 1894. Starting 30 years after the Civil War, as historian Karen Cox notes in her 2003 book “Dixie’s Daughters,” “UDC members aspired to transform military defeat into a political and cultural victory, where states’ rights and white supremacy remained intact.” In other words, when the Civil War gave them lemons, the UDC made lemonade. Horribly bitter, super racist lemonade.

This article was produced by Make It Right, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Though the UDC didn’t invent the Lost Cause ideology, they were deeply involved in spreading the myth, which simultaneously contends the Confederacy wasn’t fighting to keep black people enslaved while also suggesting slavery was pretty good for everyone involved. Lost Causers — plenty of whom exist today, their sheer numbers a reflection of the UDC’s effectiveness — argue that Confederate monuments are just innocent statues; that taking them down erases history; that we cannot retroactively apply today’s ideas about the morality of slavery to the past. The response to those ridiculous cop-outs is that Confederate monuments honor and glorify people who fought to maintain black chattel slavery; that they were erected for the explicit purpose of obfuscating history; and that the immorality of slavery was always understood by the enslaved. Excuses, excuses: get better at them.

“In their earliest days, the United Daughters of the Confederacy definitely did some good work on behalf of veterans and in their communities,” says Heidi Christensen, former president of the Seattle, Washington, chapter of the UDC, who left the organization in 2012. “But it’s also true that since the UDC was founded in 1894, it has maintained a covert connection with the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, in many ways, the group was the de facto women’s auxiliary of the KKK at the turn of the century. It’s a connection the group downplays now, but evidence of it is easily discoverable — you don’t even have to look very hard to find it.”

In 2017, after the white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, UDC President Patricia M. Bryson posted an open letter claiming the UDC’s members “have spent 123 years honoring [Confederate soldiers] by various activities in the fields of education, history and charity, promoting patriotism and good citizenship,” and that members, “like our statues, have stayed quietly in the background, never engaging in public controversy.” But that isn’t true, not by a stretch. The UDC’s monuments, books, education and political agenda have always spoken loudly—in absolutely deafening shouts — on issues from anti-black racism to the historical memory of the Civil War across the South. Today, a shameful number of Americans don’t think slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War—even though the seceding states literally spelled this out in document form — in part because of the UDC’s campaign of misinformation. The most minor of gains made by blacks during the Reconstruction were obliterated nearly as soon as they were obtained, and the UDC backed that disenfranchisement full stop. Even the current UDC has mostly steadfastly refused — with rare exceptions — to take down Confederate monuments. They know the power of those symbols, both politically and socially, and they aren’t giving an inch, if they can help it.

The UDC have had a huge impact on this country, and to pretend they’ve stood “quietly in the background” would be laughable if it weren’t so insulting. The UDC both trained and became the white women of 1950s massive resistance, who author Elizabeth Gillespie McRae writes did “the daily work on multiple levels . . . needed to sustain racial segregation and to shape resistance to racial equality.” They set a precedent for a huge swath of today’s white women voters whose main political agenda is white supremacy — women who in a 2017 Alabama Senate race backed the alleged pedophilewho wistfully longed for slavery and supported the presidency of a man who brags about grabbing women’s genitals when he’s not shouting his racism from the rafters. They have contributed to the construction of a “white womanhood” that has historically been and currently remains incredibly problematic, rendering “white feminism” eternally suspect. With their impact considered, and signs of their handiwork all over society — even carved indelibly into mountain sides — it seems worth understanding a few things about the UDC both then and now. Here are seven things you should know about the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

1. They published a very pro-KKK book. For children.

In 1914, the in-house historian of the UDC Mississippi chapter, Laura Martin Rose, published “The Ku Klux Klan, or Invisible Empire.”It’s essentially a love letter to the original Klan for its handiwork in the field of domestic terror in the years following the Civil War, when blacks achieved a modicum of political power.

“[D]uring the Reconstruction period, sturdy white men of the South, against all odds, maintained white supremacy and secured Caucasian civilization, when its very foundations were threatened within and without,” Rose writes.

She goes on to provide a look at the roots of racist anti-black stereotypes and language in this country, a lot of which is still recognizable in modern right-wing rhetoric. For example, she accuses black people of laziness — and wanting a handout — for refusing to keep working for free for white enslavers, and instead trying to find fortune where the jobs were: “Many negroes conceived the idea that freedom meant cessation from labor, so they left the fields, crowding into the cities and towns, expecting to be fed by the United States Government.”

In one section, with pretty overt delight, Rose highlights the methods the KKK used to terrify black people, including posting notes around towns with the “picture of a figure dangling from the limb of a tree,” and exalts the KKK’s lawless, murderous violence:

“In the courts of this invisible, silent, and mighty government, there were no hung juries, no laws delayed, no reversals, on senseless technicalities by any Supreme Court, because from its Court there was no appeal, and punishment was sure and swift, because there was no executive to pardon. After the negro had surrendered to the Ku Klux Klan, which he did by obeying their orders to the very letter, — for they feared that organization more than the devil and the dark regions, — the Invisible Empire vanished in a night, and has been seen no more by mortal man on this earth.

To be clear, Rose is here gushing about vast extrajudicial violence committed by the KKK against black people. In 1870, a federal grand jury labeled the KKK a “terrorist organization.” In 1871, a congressional committee was convened specifically to address the issue of Klan violence, and the report based on testimony from those hearings estimated “20,000 to as many as 50,000 people, mostly black, died in violence between 1866 and 1872.”

“This book was unanimously endorsed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy” at its general convention in November 1913, Rose notes, and the group “pledged to endeavor to secure its adoption as a supplementary reader in the schools and to place it in the libraries of our land.”

2. Actually, they published at leasttwo very pro-KKK books...

...and probably many more. Another UDC ode to the KKK was written by Annie Cooper Burton, then-president of the Los Angeles chapter of the UDC, and published in 1916. Titled “The Ku Klux Klan,” much like Rose’s aforementioned book, it argues that the Klan has gotten a bad rap just because they terrorized and intimidated black people, not infrequently assaulting and raping black women, murdering black citizens, and burning down black townships. For these reasons, she suggests, the UDC should do even more to show reverence to the Klan:

“Every clubhouse of the United Daughters of the Confederacy should have a memorial tablet dedicated to the Ku Klux Klan; that would be a monument not to one man, but to five hundred and fifty thousand men, to whom all Southerners owe a debt of gratitude.”

By “all Southerners,” Burton clearly means “only white people,” which is also what she means whenever she uses the word “people.”

3. They built a monument to the KKK.

The UDC was busiest during the 1910s and 1920s, two decades during which the group erected hundreds of Confederate monuments that made tangible the racial terror of Jim Crow. This, apparently, the group still considered insufficient to convey their message of white power and to reassert the threat of white violence. So in 1926, the UDC put up a monument to the KKK. In a piece for Facing South, writer Greg Huffman describes a record of the memorial in the UDC’s own 1941 book “North Carolina’s Confederate Monuments and Memorials:”

“IN COMMEMORATION OF THE ‘KU KLUX KLAN’ DURING THE RECONSTRUCTION PERIOD FOLLOWING THE ‘WAR BETWEEN THE STATES’ THIS MARKER IS PLACED ON THEIR ASSEMBLY GROUND. THE ORIGINAL BANNER (AS ABOVE) WAS MADE IN CABARRUS COUNTY.

“ERECTED BY THE DODSON-RAMSEUR CHAPTER OF THE UNITED DAUGHTERS OF THE CONFEDERACY. 1926”

4. Their most intense efforts focused on the “education” of white children.

Historian Karen Cox, author of 2003’s “Dixie’s Daughters,” has written that the UDC’s biggest goal was to indoctrinate white Southern children in the Lost Cause, thus creating “living monuments.

“They had a multi-pronged approach to doing that,” Cox told me. “It involved going into schools and putting up battle flags and portraits of generals. It meant getting schools renamed for famous Confederates. It was creating the Children of the Confederacy, which was their formal youth auxiliary, so that the UDC could draw membership from the group when they became adults…Children were always involved in the unveiling of monuments. They would select one child to pull the cord, and then there’d be cheers when the monument was unveiled. Children in the stands would form what they called a ‘living battle flag.’ Then they sang Southern patriotic songs.

Cox has also written about the Confederate catechism, a call-and-response style drill written by a UDC “historian” that posed as a history lesson:

“‘What causes led to the War Between the States, between 1861 and 1865?’ was a typical question. ‘The disregard, on the part of the states of the North, for the rights of the Southern or slaveholding states’ was the answer. ‘What were these rights?’ The answer . . . was ‘the right to regulate their own affairs and to hold slaves as property.’”

AP reporter Allen Breed has noted that the wording of the catechism has been “tweaked over the years,” but the version displayed on the UDC website as recently as August 2018 included this line: “Slaves, for the most part, were faithful and devoted. Most slaves were usually ready and willing to serve their masters.”

5. They’re big fans of black chattel slavery from way back.

The UDC were perhaps the most efficient agents making the ahistorical Lost Cause myth go viral. They did this through a number of methods, the most visually apparent being the 700 monuments exalting people who fought for black chattel slavery that still stand. But also, in the rare cases the UDC has “honored” black people with statuary and monuments, it has been in the form of “loyal slave” markers — an actual subgenre of Confederate monuments — which perpetuate the image of content enslaved blacks and benevolent white enslavers.

In 1923, the UDC tried to erect a monument in Washington, D.C., “in memory of the faithful slave mammies of the South.” The Senate signed off on it, but the idea never came to fruition.

More successful was the UDC’s effort at placing a monument in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, that plays fast and loose with the biography of Haywood “Heyward” Shepherd (the UDC didn’t even bother to get his first name right), a free black man whom an inscription depicts as a “faithful negro” who choseslavery over freedom, as all “the best” blacks did.

The UDC was even given a place in Arlington National Cemetery for a Confederate monument that includes a weeping black “mammy” figure holding a white child and an enslaved black man marching alongside his enslaver into battle. The 1914 marker intentionally included the enslaved figure to propagate the idea that black people were willing, eager soldiers for the Confederacy — a suggestion that would mean the war couldn’t have been about slavery, which wasn’t so bad anyway. As historian Kevin Levin has documented at length, that lie has become a neo-Confederate talking pointin a long list of other neo-Confederate lies.

6. They get tax breaks that help keep their workings financially solvent.

The UDC is a nonprofit. That means it’s a tax-exempt organization. That recent article about the UDC by AP reporter Allen Breed notes that the annual budget of Virginia, where the UDC is headquartered, “awards the state [division of the] UDC tens of thousands of dollars for the maintenance of Confederate graves — more than $1.6 million since 1996.”

7. They continue to exert political and social influence.

For the most part, the UDC has publicly kept pretty mum on the subject of Confederate monument removal, which has led some to conclude that the group is largely inactive, and even obsolete. Their numbers have dwindled since their heyday, but they remain tenacious about keeping Confederate monuments standing, thus continuing their cultural and political influence.

The UDC does this mostly through lawsuits. (The number of Confederate markers on courthouses has always shown the group’s keen interest in the power of the legal system.) When the San Antonio City Council voted in the weeks after the racist violence in Charlottesville to remove a Confederate monument from public property, the UDC filed suit against city officials. The Shreveport, Louisiana, chapter of the UDC has announced it will appeal a federal judge’s 2017 dismissal of the group’s lawsuit to keep up a Confederate monument at a local courthouse. The UDC threatened legal action against officials in Franklin, Tennessee, when city officials announced plans — not to take down a UDC monument to the Confederacy, but to add markers recognizing African-American historical figures to the park, which the UDC claims it owns. The city of Franklin, with pretty much no other option, responded by filing a lawsuit against the UDC.

And then there’s the case of the UDC vs. Vanderbilt University, in which the group’s Tennessee division filed suit after school administrators announced plans to remove the word “Confederate” from one of its dorms. A state appeals court ruled Vanderbilt could only implement the plan if it repaid $50,000 the UDC had contributed to the building’s construction in 1933 — adjusted to 2016 dollars. Vanderbilt opted to pay $1.2 million to the UDC rather than keep “Confederate” in the dorm name, which it raised from anonymous donors who contributed to a fund explicitly dedicated to the cause.

https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/confederate-monuments-ahistorical-memory-and-gops-domination-south

Among the historical ironies of our current era is the defense of Confederate monuments and southern white “heritage” by Republicans. The curious path that the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln has followed to its present stance is an example of expediency and ideology subverting principle.

For more than a century after the Civil War, the defense of white southern “heritage” was the preoccupation of white Democrats. Until the 1970s, Republicans in the South were a long suffering minority who had to battle against all manner of Democratic machinations to enfeeble their opponents. The party recruited African Americans—who remained loyal to the party of Lincoln and hostile to the white segregationists who still presided over the Democratic Party in the region—and whites who favored Republican policies and were less enchanted by white supremacy than their Democratic rivals. Southern Republicans were often vocal opponents of the poll tax and other Democratic schemes that suppressed voter turnout and impeded equal representation in state houses. Nationally, Republican ranks included moderates and liberals whose commitment to racial equality was crucial for the expansion of civil rights from the Civil War until the election of Ronald Reagan.

The Republican embrace of the white southern heritage began in 1972 as part of President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign. Nixon believed he had to fend off arch-segregationist George Wallace while retaining the support of a “silent majority” alienated by the Democratic Party’s liberalism. Republican strategists sought to peel off white voters in the South who recoiled from the Democrats’ commitment to affirmative action, school desegregation, and opposition to the Vietnam War. This so-called “Southern Strategy,” which appealed to white suburban southerners who were anxious to preserve de facto segregation in the suburbs, allowed the Republican Party to exploit the anxieties of whites in the South and beyond without having to categorically oppose racial integration. By fulminating against urban crime, court-ordered school busing, and excessively generous welfare programs, Nixon portrayed the Democrats as pressing too fast and too far to force integration. Even while Nixon avoided the fire-breathing racism of George Wallace, white voters had little difficulty discerning the Republicans’ message. After the 1972 election, Nixon’s special counsel John Ehrlichman acknowledged that “the subliminal appeal to the anti-black voter was always present in Nixon’s statements and speeches.”

Despite the success of the Republicans’ strategy in 1972, the Democratic Party retained the allegiance of many white southerners through the 1970s. From Virginia to Mississippi, Democratic officeholders included old-line segregationists who only grudgingly acceded to the new reality of growing black political empowerment. Ensconced in positions of power by seniority, these Democratic politicos showered federal and state largesse on their districts while playing up their regional loyalties in thick southern accents.

Only in hindsight is it evident that 1972 marked the emergence of the new face of Republicanism in the South: Jesse Helms. The significance of Helms’ successful Senate campaign that year was obscured by the contemporaneous election of moderate white politicians elsewhere in the region, and especially by the triumph of Jimmy Carter in his 1976 campaign for the White House. Observers were too quick to assume that any lingering legacies of Jim Crow would soon be swept away in the “new New South.”

Helms had previously been a minor figure in national affairs even while he pioneered the politics of white resentment in North Carolina.Taking advantage of his position as an executive at a Raleigh, North Carolina, television station during the 1960s, he had begun delivering nightly broadcast editorials.He honed a stridently conservative message that he presented as down home, common sense traditional values. Americans, Helms growled, were besieged by nihilists, communists, and other radicals intent on undermining Christian and American values. He did not need to literally wave the Confederate flag to reassure whites that he would protect their interests and defend southern “heritage.” His accent, his invocations of traditional values, and his visceral contempt for civil rights activism made such appeals superfluous.

Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign and subsequent presidency was the death knell of the party of Lincoln. Reagan himself evidenced little sympathy for Confederate heritage, but he courted anyone who was receptive or sympathetic to his caricature of “tax and spend” liberalism. During his presidential campaign, he made it clear that he wasn’t embarrassed to glad-hand race-mongers like George Wallace and voters who had previously championed segregation. Notably, he delivered a major campaign speech endorsing “states’ rights” at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Lee Atwater, a Republican consultant who had an outsized role in the Republican presidential campaigns during the 1980s, revealed the logic behind the invocation of “states’ rights” by Reagan (and other Republicans): “By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.” Observers dwelled on the symbolism of his invocation of states’ rights within a few miles of the site where the Ku Klux Klan had murdered three civil rights activists in 1964. But many overlooked the cultural symbolism of the specific site of his speech, the Neshoba County Fair. In 1980 (and virtually to the present), the fair is a festival of white Mississippi culture during which black musicians perform, black chefs cook, and black service workers tend to the needs of white fairgoers who reside in elaborate “cabins” on the fairgrounds. The fair is as close to a whites-only utopia as Mississippi has to offer. No location was more fitting for Reagan’s implicit renunciation of a century of Republican commitment to equality.

Reagan’s handiwork prepared the way for the surprisingly rapid consolidation of Republican strength in the South. Reagan’s version of Republicanism purged most of the liberals and moderates lingering in the party’s ranks. Free-market ideologues and Christian conservatives who shared a contempt for liberal “social engineering” and a hatred of communism assumed their places. Meanwhile, retirements thinned the ranks of old-time Democrats who still commanded loyalty in the hinterlands of the white South.

Jesse Helms’ tenacious opposition to the establishment of a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. was a sign of how far the party of Lincoln had traveled in only a few years. Helms, with the aid of John Porter East (another North Carolina Republican), mocked King’s historical importance, criticized his opposition to the Vietnam War, and tarred him as a communist. Reagan gave credence to Helms’ slanders until finally caving in and signing the legislation creating the holiday in 1983. Helms, Reagan, and the naysayers had made their point even in defeat; any observer understood that Republican support for the holiday was half-hearted at best and that, in the eyes of many conservatives, it was a tawdry concession to illegitimate “special interests.”

Yoking the Republican Party to the Defense of Confederate Heritage

Confederate symbols to the cause of fanning the resentments of white southerners was by no means the exclusive work of Republican politicians. The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), neo-Confederates, and avowed white supremacists in the region played a crucial role during the 1980s and 1990s. Founded in 1896, the SCV failed for nearly a century to muster a large membership or to exercise much cultural authority. But during the 1970s and 1980s, its ranks were invigorated by new recruits, including Civil War reenactors and men vigilant against any insults to southern white “heritage.” Included in the membership of the SCV were white supremacists who looked to the Confederacy as inspiration for the creation of a white Euro-American homeland. TheLeague of the South, a neo-Confederate and white supremacist organizationfounded in 1994, added a patina of intellectual rigor to the Confederate revival. Together, the SCV, the League of the South, and their allies warned white southerners that cosmopolitan academics, liberal and irreligious politicians, foreign organizations, and other sinister forces were intent on the destruction of the white South’s values and heritage. Attacks on the symbols of the Confederacy were one manifestation of this nihilism run amok. While liberals applauded the tentative first steps in the creation of a pluralist South that incorporated everyone into civic life, neo-Confederates angrily countered that the South historically had been and should remain an Anglo-Celtic homeland. Equally important, when the white South launched the Confederacy, it purportedly had come closer than any previous or subsequent society to creating the ideal Christian republic. The defense of white southern “heritage” was, literally, the defense of everything that was sacred.

With gathering energy during the 1990s, the SCV picketed, lobbied, campaigned, and litigated to prevent “heritage violations,” which included “any attack upon our Confederate Heritage, or the flags, monuments, and symbols which represent it.” Particular energy was devoted to bringing suit against countless school districts and municipalities that sought to restrict the public display of the Confederate Battle Flag. Although the SCV usually failed in these efforts, it stoked the fears and resentments of members and allies who were steeped in a white regional memory that dwelled on white southerners’ victimhood at the hands of Union generals, liberal judges, northern legislators, and outside agitators.

This defense of Confederate heritage increasingly contaminated the region’s public life during the 1990s. At the same time that activists within the SCV gained control of the organization, Republicans grasped that Confederate symbols could be used as a wedge issue to loosen the weakening grip of Democratic politicians on the rural South. Georgia provided a vivid illustration of the dangers for Democrats of tangling with Confederate heritage. Throughout the 1990s, state politics were roiled by demands to change the state flag, which segregationist politicians had redesigned to include the Confederate Battle Flag in response to the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark Brown V. Board of Education decision. When the 1996 Olympics brought international scrutiny to Atlanta and the state, Democrats and some business leaders advocated the removal of the divisive Confederate symbol from the state flag.

But other politicians, especially Republicans, exploited the issue to depict Democrats as captives of black activists and outsider business elites hostile to white southern heritage. During the 2002 gubernatorial campaign, Republicans pummeled Democratic Governor Roy Barnes for his role in the adoption of a new state flag, rallying the support of rural white males who harbored grievances against what they perceived to be metropolitan, liberal, and elitist policies. In the hands of Republican candidate Sonny Perdue’s campaign, the new state flag became a symbol of “political correctness,” affirmative action, multiculturalism, moral laxity, and other perceived modern ills. Similar battle lines emerged elsewhere, including Alabama and Mississippi, whose state flags also incorporated the Confederate battle flag. In South Carolina, controversy arose over the display of the Confederate flag above the statehouse.

With the alliance between neo-Confederates and the Republican Party cemented by the end of the 1990s, it became commonplace for Republican politicos to boast of their devotion to southern “heritage.” Texas congressman Ron Paul, for example, was a steadfast defender of the Confederacyand an even more ardent champion of the Confederate constitution. When asked whether he favored secession, Paul readily answered yes, “the states should be able to secede.” But, he lamented, “that principle was destroyed with the Civil War.” The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity has been outspoken in defending the display of the Confederate Battle Flag. When Rick Perry, a member of the SCV, was governor of Texas, he repeatedly expressed enthusiasm for secession and pondered whether Texas should secede.

The Contemporary Politics of White “Heritage”

White “heritage” organizations circulated “voters’ guides” that almost exclusively endorsed arch-conservative Republican politicians like Congressman Paul and Haley Barbour of Mississippi. In several southern states, especially Mississippi and South Carolina, leading Republican politicians welcomed the support of reactionary white nationalist organizations. Governor Kirk Fordice of Mississippi andSenator Trent Lott, for instance, displayed no embarrassment about meeting repeatedly with the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization that continued to oppose integration and racial equality into the 21st century. The rare Republican who strayed from the party’s new Confederate orthodoxy risked a furious backlash, as Governor Jim Gilmore of Virginia learned in 1998. He used his Confederate History Month proclamation (the month had been a state tradition for decades) to denounce slavery, prompting R. Wayne Byrd, the state president of the Heritage Preservation Association, to warn that he would suffer for his “shameful attempt...to pander to racist hate groups like the NAACP.” Subsequent Republican politicians during the 2000s were loath to cross defenders of Confederate heritage.

Indeed, only extraordinary circumstances persuaded southern Republicans to reevaluate their now steadfast defense of all things Confederate. Not until after the 2015 massacre of nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, did Republican leaders of the state grudgingly furl the Confederate battle flag that had graced the state capitol grounds for decades. Before his murderous attack, Roof had immersed himself in the websites of the Council of Conservative Citizens and other white nationalist organizations that fomented racist stereotypes and myths about black criminality. Roof also had educated himself in his race hatred by touring slavery-related historical sites in North and South Carolina and visiting shrines to the Confederacy. When photographs of Roof posing with the Confederate battle flag circulated after the massacre, even some die-hard Confederate apologists conceded that the time-worn defense of the flag as a symbol of “heritage, not hate” rang hollow. The continuing display of the battle flag on the state capitol grounds became a particular flashpoint. The flag had first been raised over the state capitol in 1962 by order of the state’s governor, Democrat Ernest Hollings, as a protest against desegregation. In 2000, after sustained demonstrations and a boycott by the NAACP, the flag was moved from atop the building to a flagpole incorporated into a Confederate memorial located in front of the capitol. There it remained until three weeks after Roof’s violent spree, when it was finally taken down.

The removal of the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds was widely applauded as evidence of statesmanship and a new commitment to reconciliation within Republican ranks in the state and the South. Yet arguably the most important response by Republicans to the banishing of the Confederate battle flag from public space has been the proliferation of “heritage protection” laws. While Republicans retreated from defending the Confederate flag, they nevertheless were steadfast in their devotion to the preservation of Confederate monuments in the public spaces of the South. Alarmed first by the outcry after Roof’s rampage, and then subsequently by the desecration of Confederate monuments by activists energized by the Black Lives Matter movement, Republican legislators in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia took the lead in passing laws that imposed onerous requirements, typically including legislative approval, to alter names on buildings or to move or remove monuments. Riddled with legal ambiguities and resting on untested claims of legislative authority, these laws pose hardships on any communities intent on revising their civic landscapes. Communities graced with teams of lawyers may test the laws or try to navigate the legislatures, but their attempts almost certainly will end up in state or federal court. In the meantime, the contemporary landscape of the South, which is cluttered with thousands of memorials to the Confederacy, will remain frozen for the foreseeable future.

After white nationalists, neo-Confederates, and others staged a violent protest to oppose the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a municipal park in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, white conservatives sought to divorce themselves from racist extremists even while defending those in Charlottesville who had rallied to celebrate Confederate heritage. President Trump’s public comments three days after the tragic death of Heather D. Heyer, a counter-protester in Charlottesville, included a mash-up of arguments that had long circulated among Confederate apologists for two decades. He warned against the erasure of history and suggested that “good people” had been present among the crowds of white nationalists. In subsequent comments, the conservative commentators drew comparisons between the campaign to remove Confederate symbols and the destruction of ancient monuments by ISIS in Syria and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Jewish art in Nazi Germany, implying a moral equivalency between American anti-Confederate activists and the most reviled extremist enemies of the United States. Such remarks were consistent with the long-familiar tactic of attacking the NAACP, which advocated boycotts against states that prominently honored the Confederacy, as a racist hate group. Remarkably, since 2017 Trump and other Republicans have implied that opposition to the preservation of Confederate heritage is un-American. And thus, the party that was responsible for preserving the Union is now offering a full-throated defense of naked symbols of treason associated with a war that claimed more American lives that all other conflicts combined.

If the curious history of the Republican Party’s embrace of Confederate heritage did not have such corrosive consequences, we might dismiss it as farcical. But in the current environment, this history is tragic. At present, white conservatives apparently are unwilling to consider even token concessions to opponents of Confederate symbols except in the wake of horrific acts of violence like Roof’s massacre. And with laws in at six southern states that are intended to impede the removal of Confederate and other divisive memorials, the only path forward is to either elect new legislators or challenge the laws in the courts. Neither course of action is likely to defuse the issue in the near future or to bring to an end the Republican Party’s romance with the Confederacy.

This article was produced by Make It Right, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

privatized probation

http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/outsourcing-probation-a-lucrative-and-growing-industry-140129?news=852293

Privatization of the criminal justice system has extended beyond prisons that are run for profit and now includes probation operators making a buck off Americans who have violated the law.

Quietly over the past four decades, private probation companies have gone into business in 40% of U.S. states, most of them in the South. Georgiaalone has 34 businesses providing probation services.

These entrepreneurs have replaced county offices that used to oversee individuals given probation instead of jail time for their offenses.

But the switch from public to private probation has resulted in excessive financial costs levied on probationers, some of whom have been threatened with incarceration for not paying these companies on time.

Circuit Judge Hub Harrington called the private probation system in Harpersville, Alabama, a “judicially sanctioned extortion racket.”

Take for example Sentinel Offender Services, a $30 million enterprise operating in four states. An investigation by NBC News found that Sentinel demanded payments for fees from low-income probationers and resorted to arrest warrants to force the issue, regardless of the individuals’ financial status.

All of this despite a 1983 federal ruling that said that people on probation cannot be imprisoned for being indigent.

In Florida, private firms can add as much as 40% in surcharges on top of the debt owed by probationers. In Illinois, the add-on fees can amount to 30% of the standing debt.

TheBrennan Center for Justice says that at least nine states allow companies to charge probationers excessive fees.

Former law enforcement officials control this industry—at least in Georgia—having leveraged their connections into profitable contracts. “This is completely dominated by retired state probation people and wardens of state prisons,” Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “They created this industry for themselves.”

Theydid so after Georgia passed a law in 2000 that transferred state probation services to the counties, thereby allowing local courts to outsource those services to private companies. They are allowed to handle all probation cases other than those involving felons.

Bobby Whitworth, the former head of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, accepted payoffs in return for helping to pass that law. He was eventually imprisoned on public corruption charges for having done so.

“My problem [with private probation services] is with…the fact that people are getting rich off the poorest people in society,” Steve Bright, senior counsel for the Southern Center for Human Rights, told the Journal-Constitution. “Many private probation companies don't do anything but collect checks from people. Perhaps someone who has run a loan company would be better qualified.” by -Noel Brinkerhoff, Danny Biederman

To Learn More:

How Private Probation Companies Make Money From the Those They Trap in the Justice System (by Aaron Cantú, AlterNet)

Connections Matter in Ga. Private Probation Industry (by Rhonda Cook, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

'Cash Register Justice': Private Probation Services Face Legal Counterattack (by Hannah Rappleye and Lisa Riordan-Seville, NBC

compiled a bit of info in my petition to End For Profit Probation: http://www.change.org/petitions/end-for-profit-private-probation-of-misdemeanor-cases-in-the-united-states

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11062018/cities-pollution-carbon-footprint-climate-action-renewable-energy-investment-sustainability-report

hope atlanta so fla

http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/map-shows-huge-differences-in-educational-attainment-across-us

District of Columbia is the best-educated part of the country: 56.8% of its residents have at least a Bachelor's degree.
Second is Massachusetts, with 42.7%. While a lot of dark blue clusters on the East Coast, the third-highest score is for Colorado, way out west: 39.9%.
Worst-scoring state isWest Virginia,where just 20.8% of the residents 25 and older have at least a Bachelor's degree. That's just over a third of the share of Bachelor's degree holders in DC.
The Mountain State is marginally outperformed by Mississippi, where 21.8% have completed a college or university education.

Educational attainment is linked to income. In 2016, the average median income as divided per highest attained degree was as follows:

$27,800 – didn't finish high school
$36,700 – high school or equivalent
$67,300 – Bachelor's degree
$95,200 – advanced degree

Map found here at Overflow Data, via Simon Kuestenmacher. Additional information here at Marketing Charts.

https://www.alternet.org/why-racist-america-cant-stop-fighting-civil-war?src=newsletter1091067

April 9, 1865, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. That moment marked the United States of America's military defeat of the Confederate States of America, a treasonous breakaway republic that, in the infamous words of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, was dedicated to keeping black Americans in bondage as human property for all time.

While the Confederacy was conclusively beaten on the battlefield, at a cost of 750,000 lives, the long shadow of slavery and white supremacy still hovers over American society more than 150 years later.

On average, white Americans have at least 13 times the wealth of black Americans. That astonishing wealth gap jumps to 69 times if car ownership is not included in the calculations.

Fifty years after the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, America's schools remain racially segregated. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act of the 1960s are being undermined by Republican efforts to keep black Americans and other nonwhite groups from exercising their right to vote. The country's neighborhoods are also racially segregated at levels akin to that of 50 years ago.

Roughly 2.3 million black people are in prison in America. Police continue to target black Americans for harassment, violence and other abuse. In many ways these outcomes are the American legal system working as designed. Modern policing has its origins in the slave patrols of the antebellum South; debt peonage, chain gangs, the "black codes" and Jim Crow laws morphed into today's prison-industrial complex.

The Republican Party, as I have contended on many previous occasions, is America's largest white identity organization. From the racist backlash against the civil rights movement to the election of Donald Trump, the Republican Party has betrayed the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and is now fully the torchbearer for Jefferson Davis and the heirs of the Southern slaveocracy.

According to recent opinion polls and other research, many white Americans --especially Donald Trump's voters -- believe that slavery was a benevolent system and that the Confederacy was on the right side of history.

How can we reconcile the rise of Donald Trump with to the long view of American history? Why do so many Americans still fight about the real causes of the Civil War? What explains the Confederacy's enduring allure for many white Americans? Should the statues and other monuments honoring the Confederacy be removed from public spaces? If so, what should be done with them?

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. A longer version of this conversation can also be heard on my podcast.In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with historian Ed Ayers. He is a professor at the University of Richmond and the author of numerous books including the Bancroft Prize winner "In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1864." His book "The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction" was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Ayers' new book is "The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America." Ayers is also a co-host of the popular podcast series "BackStory."

What is history, and why do we study it?

It’s all the information we have about everything that happened before today. It has no intrinsic shape or form. It’s not just a bunch of stories that we’re told. It can be anything. In the same way, I don’t know about you but I’m nothing other than my memories and my experiences. If you took those away, I would just be a blank slate. A large part of my work has been to try to gather together a way to see all those stories, those memories, those experiences and those interactions.

How do you reconcile the rise of Donald Trump with a longer view of American history?

One thing about history is that the thing that people expect to happen never does. If there was a poll in the United States during 1860 which asked, “Who thinks that the largest and most powerful system of slavery in the modern world is going to be gone in five years?”, nobody would have said yes. Nobody thought it was possible to destroy something that big that quickly.My instinct is that we are at the beginning of a new Progressive Era in American history. I think what we are also seeing is a great mobilization of people who had been complacent under the Obama years, when it seemed like progress was just going to continue to unfold naturally. Now people realize that progress will only continue when you fight for it.

I think you’ll see, however, that as the Trump administration ends, the amount of energy that’s been spun up among young people, people of color, the gay community and other groups now has a focus in a way it did not before.

In response to social progress there is an inevitable backlash. We saw this in the racist and authoritarian response by white America to Obama's presidency. I appreciate your insights about a new progressive era but I’m deeply worried by how the vast majority of Americans appear to be stuck in a state of learned helplessness.

The barometer will be the 2018 midterm elections. There we will see if people are so full of despair that they have given up on the nation. I’m hopeful that people are going to recognize that voting matters, that politics matters, that governance matters.

Nobody understands what’s happening right now. In my new book, I talked about how nobody saw Gettysburg. Nobody saw the election of 1864. Living through something offers a really poor indicator of what actually happened. You see a part of it, and there’s an authenticity to that. We simply lack the capacity to assemble the flow of events into a coherent story.

Certainly under the Trump administration we’re living through something unprecedented. But that might also mean that we’re living through the beginning of an unprecedentedly comprehensive and inclusive progressive era.

The first progressive era was basically white people. Now, we have the chance for one composed of people from lots of different identities coming together for the greater good. So since we can’t know whether that’s true or not, I choose to believe it in the meantime.

That's a wonderful and hopeful vision. As a counterpoint, there is a great deal of rhetoric in the editorial pages of many major newspapers, as well on right-wing conspiracy websites, that America is in the midst -- or soon will be -- of a new Civil War. As a Civil War historian, when you hear such language do you just dismiss it out of hand?

I try to think very thoughtfully about what it is that they’re saying. In a new Civil War, if it happened today, the equivalent of eight million Americans would be killed. Are we really looking at something like that? I don’t think so.

On the other hand, in my books I show that there was a Civil War because people didn’t believe there could be one. They just kept calling each other's bluff and drawing new lines in the sand. They ended up basically talking and voting themselves into a war that nobody wanted. It is always good to be alert to the danger, but it’s also important to have some sense of historical perspective about what true war looks like. America is not there yet.

Yes, things that are much worse than we can imagine can happen. You have to be alert. But that same vigilance can also allow you to see the possibilities for hopeful change that surround us as well.

The Republican Party is in many ways the Confederacy and the Jim Crow South updated for the 21st century. There has long been a neo-Confederate element in the post-civil rights era Republican Party. With Trump's election they have fully empowered. And in the aftermath of the Charlottesville violence we actually saw the president of the United States, suggesting that there are "some very fine people" among neo-Nazis and white supremacists. How do you make sense of this?

I was in Charlottesville that day. I was going to teach a class that afternoon at the University of Virginia. I would start by explaining how there are people who turn to the symbols of the Confederacy as a native, indigenous rebellion against the power of the federal government. That appeals to a lot of people. But when you see that Confederate flag being mingled with Nazi flags, suddenly that claim upon an indigenous, pure and non-racialized argument about politics and "traditions" is gone. It has been forever entangled with white supremacy.

You might be surprised by the number of people who will come up to me after I give a lecture and tell me, "Slavery was wrong, I would never defend it. But the fact is that Robert E. Lee was a fine man and he was fighting for his home, right? He was fighting for what he thought was right." You hear that a lot. It makes you realize all the evasions that are built into this defense of the Confederacy.

We have all these formulas that people use to say that they are proud of their ancestors. For example, he was a "good" slaveholder. Two, he didn’t really believe in slavery. Three, he wanted to get rid of slavery. Four, most white Southerners weren’t slaveholders so they could not have been fighting for slavery, and so forth. I listen to these folks and I then say, yes, let’s think about this. Let’s forget about whatever you might think about the character or identity of Robert E. Lee. What if the Confederacy had won? What if those men on horseback had actually accomplished what they set out to do? They would have created a nation explicitly based on perpetual bondage that would have been the fourth-richest economy in the world with a monopoly over the single most valuable commodity in the world. How would world history have been different? Other parts of the world would have looked to the South and said, “Ah, the path to the future leads through slavery."

If you try to argue with them on the same ground that they form the question on, you will have a hard time persuading them. But it’s also the case that white Northerners and Westerners have a smug belief in the inevitable end of American slavery that is not warranted either.

Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He hosts a weekly podcast,

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-i-learned-about-cult-lost-cause-180968426

The Republican Party has enacted a range of policies to prevent African-Americans from voting. The Republican Party's voters support those initiatives. In addition, according to a 2016 poll by YouGov, at least 20 percent of Trump supporters believe that African-Americans should still be slaves. More than three-quarters of Republicans :{also express sympathy for the Confederacy:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{,:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}: a white supremacist breakaway republic that waged a bloody and treasonous war in defense of the "right" to keep black people in chains.

ref

https://www.salon.com/2015/07/08/a_staggering_number_of_republicans_support_the_confederate_flag_new_poll_finds/

Backstory podcast: e.g., history of US farmers, American myths: Davy Crockett, Robert E Lee and the "Lost Cause," Drake's plate.

james lowen (lies my tcher told me) after charlottesville on history of confed monuments

most 70 yrs after the war; "god will vindicvat us" latin, as far as helena montana

chic, oakland, LA suburbs had sundown laws (before for Chinese)

neo confed won war 1890 rebrand "war between th states" vs rebellion or cw

1890 definitive date b/c 3: before 1890 monuments in cemetary and mourn; after vindichi

high, states rights BS; south explicitly rejected states rights ; fug slave law was fedral:

standersby req to grab (cops must track) go to fed ct, judge gets 750 now; slave can not testify

Penn ruled state decides how cop$ spent;

NE let blacks vote; justice tawney dred scot

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-august-16-2017/

tag So

http://www.southernstudies.org/2014/12/4-maps-that-show-why-democrats-shouldnt-dump-the-s.html

proxy poverty?

IMR

http://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/2015-annual-report/measure/IMR/state/ALL

animated map stuning

indina, ohio, illin and SO

http://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/2015-annual-report/measure/Obesity/state/ALL

There are 892 Hate Groups currently operating in the US according to a new study by the Southern Poverty Law Center released earlier this week - over 100 more than in 2014. The hate groups were divided into 14 groups, all which believe that equality should be denied based on race, religion, sexual identity and/or naturalization

http://www.alternet.org/belief/america-really-getting-more-tolerant-100-new-hate-groups-appeared-last-year

===

Charles Koch gave $90 million to influence higher ed in the South

Last month, the provost of Western Carolina University in North Carolina asked the public school's chancellor to approve an academic center funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, a private nonprofit run by the billionaire chairman, CEO, and co-owner of the Koch Industries oil and chemical corporation. The foundation funds academic programs, professorships, scholarships, conferences, lecture series and economics centers, all for the purpose of promoting the free-market agenda embraced by Koch and his brother David.

The chancellor has come out in support, and on Dec. 4 the school's trustees will vote on the fate of the Center for the Study of Free Enterprise, which would launch with $2 million from the Charles Koch Foundation over five years and $1.4 million from the university.

The proposed agreement has come under fire from the school's faculty senate, which voted 21-3 to oppose the center's creation. The group raised concerns about academic freedom, cost, reputation, and the lack of peer review.

"The Charles Koch Foundation has previously set forth explicit expectations in line with their political views in exchange for monetary gifts to universities," the faculty senate said in a statement, "thereby constraining academic freedom by influencing and interfering with the development of new knowledge."

The proposed center at WCU is part of a long campaign by Koch to influence higher education. The Charles Koch Foundation along with three other groups led by Koch gave nearly $108 million to 366 colleges and universities from 2005 to 2014, finds an Institute for Southern Studies investigation, building on research by Greenpeace. The other groups are the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation, the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute. (For more about these groups, see "The Koch-led charities funding higher education" at the end of this story.)

Eighty-five percent of the donations — or $91 million — went to 147 Southern colleges and universities.

The bulk of the money given by the four nonprofits — $77.7 million — went to George Mason University, a public school in Fairfax, Virginia. Much of that went to the school's Mercatus Center and Institute for Humane Studies, nonprofits housed at the university that focus on teaching and promoting free-market economics. But even when the GMU donations are excluded from the total giving, Southern schools received 45 percent of the remaining contributions.

Besides GMU, the other schools that received the most money from the Koch foundations are all in the South:Florida State University at $2.3 million, West Virginia University at $1.3 million, Clemson University of South Carolina at $1.3 million, and Troy University of Alabama at $1.1 million...

http://www.alternet.org/economy/what-went-wrong-south-what-went-wrong-america

confed flag rallies map

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/07/16/mapping-hate-pro-confederate-battle-flag-rallies-across-america

2 americas? red/blue?

as goes texas? confederacy won? southern strategy? (sun belt AC s johnson)

6/15 alternet

e environmental movement is making a real difference in the U.S., according to a new research that shows states with strong green voices have significantly lower emissions of the gases that drive global warming.

The study is one of the first to quantify the real impact of green politics on the environment. It reveals that more environmentally-friendly states, such as New York and Vermont, have cut their greenhouse gas emissions despite rising population and affluence. But other states like Texas and Wyoming, where skepticism about climate change is much stronger, have seen emissions rise.

http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/5-most-dangerous-states-live-and-5-safest

According to the study, the five safest states to live in are Massachusetts, Vermont, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Hawaii.The least safe states to live in are New Mexico, Tennessee, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Mississippi. Massachusetts is the state with the lowest share of residents who lack health insurance, the second fewest number of fatal occupational injuries, and the second lowest rate of fatal automobile accidents.

Other notable findings include the fact that Maine has the lowest rate of assault, Oklahoma has the highest estimated property losses from climate disasters, and the highest share of residents without health insurance belongs to Texas. North Dakota, which has experienced a massive fracking boom in recent years, has the highest rate of fatal workplace injuries.

The District of Columbia has the highest number of law enforcement employees, but the highest number of assaults. The number of murders and non-negligent manslaughters per 100,000 residents is 12 times higher in DC than in Iowa and the number of thefts per 100,000 residents is three times higher than Idaho.

You can read the report here.

CDC Map Reveals ‘Most Distinctive’ Cause Of Death State by State:Florida has higher rate of HIV-caused deaths than other states with 15,000 deaths in the studied period. Although only 22 deaths were caused by syphilis in Louisiana, the disease is the most distinctive cause of death in that state. The map also may suggest cultural differences and various public health challenges across the states. For instance, the most distinctive cause of death in Oregon, Nevada and New Mexico is legal intervention. In Tennessee and Alabama, it is accidental discharge of firearms, and in Arizona and Arkansas, discharge of firearms with undetermined intent. In New York and Connecticut, the most distinctive cause of death is inflammatory diseases of female pelvic organs, which may suggest challenges in women’s healthcare in these states. 5/15.

maps http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/06/maps-of-the-south-bad-place_n_4855191.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

highest poverty, teen preg, state pays for rx of poor etc etc

alternet; ...Kacprowicz isn’t presently a leading player, but as this passage shows, he straddles two rising, radical state-level tendencies that the national media have woefully underreported so far: one an explosion of clearly unconstitutional “nullification” legislation, and the other a growing movement to call a constitutional convention (Kacprowicz prefers “amendment convention”) to pass a set of conservative dream amendments. Because he provides a uniquely crafted bridge between these two efforts, his ideas could prove significant in the near future....

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/libertarianism-covers-racism rand paul and TP

AlterNet [1] / By Eric Zuesse [2]

Economic Opportunity Is Lowest In the Republican Bible Belt, Major Study Finds

December 19, 2013 |

The website Equality-Of-Opportunity.org [3] was established this year by four leading economists from Harvard and Berkeley, and it now headlines their major findings, “Mobility in the 100 Largest Commuting Zones.” It ranks all 100 largest U.S. cities for the chances of a person born poor to rise from the bottom 20% to the top 20%.

Whereas all of the top 21 cities (NYC being ranked #21) are shown clustered there closely around 10% for the given place’s odds that a resident born in the bottom 20% will rise into the top 20%, all except just three of the bottom 21 cities are in Old Dixie. Here, the probabilities of rising from the bottom 20% to the top 20% range widely, between just 6.7% (one-third less than in the best locales) down to merely 2.6% (around one-quarter of the probability in the best locales), among these 21 bottom-ranked cities.

In other words: virtually all of this nation’s class-rigidity still remains in the U.S. South, even after the Civil War. New Dixie has replaced the aristocracy’s black slaves of Old Dixie, by the local (white) aristocracy’s institutionalized bigotry against poor people, now of all ethnic groups. What used to be their purely racist bigotry has, it seems, devolved into a crushing, pervasive, classist, bigotry in the South.

Explaining this would produce controversy, and unfortunately the researchers don’t even try. However, it is a striking finding, which demands an explanation.

For a century after Abraham Lincoln was shot in 1865, the North’s Protestant aristocracy increasingly supported the Republican Party, which gradually became, in a sense, the new version of the old aristocratic Southern Democratic Party, but now spread nationwide: oriented more toward concerns about the “free market” than about democracy. Government became subordinated to economics—not just any economics, but “free market” economics, whereas economics had virtually nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution, which was instead concerned with political matters: government.

With the advent of Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and his “New Deal” reforms and regulations during the Great Depression, and his starting of the Social Security system, this aristocratic hostility toward the Democratic Party intensified even more.

In FDR’s re-nomination acceptance speech in 1936, he said, “Economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution.” This was a speech that could be given today.

Then, as if to add insult to Protestant aristocratic outrage, the Catholic Democratic President John F. Kennedy finally committed the Democratic Party against the unquestionably bigoted South; and next, the remarkably progressive Democratic Texan President Lyndon Baines Johnson fatefully sealed this FDR-type Democratic Party, with the Civil Rights Acts, and also Medicare and Medicaid —all done to serve mainly the very same people, the middle-class and the poor, whom aristocrats traditionally have wanted instead to be suppressed, if not again enslaved (such as was the case in the Old South). For example, labor unions are routinely suppressed by aristocrats, because such unions challenge the "free market”— they challenge aristocrats’ hired managers, who no longer possess unrestrained control when a labor union is present.

Aristocrats call this "free market" of theirs simply “freedom,” meaning their own freedom, but also meaning (though never mentioning) the “freedom” of millions of have-nots to suffer unto their graves (via such class-rigidity as prevails especially in the South, and in underdeveloped countries around the world). These financial elite also sometimes call this free-market economics “tough love.” But no matter what the rationalization, the result for its victims is basically like a kiss of death; this is more that type of “love,” even when the proponents themselves actually sincerely believe it to be some sort of “love,” for the people who are actually suffering from this one-sided “freedom” of the aristocracy.

Republicans are proud of this “freedom,” or “discipline,” or “tough love”: they even sometimes call it the "opportunity society." That’s what pervades the South, the very same region of this country where economic opportunity is actually the lowest.

However, apparently enough Americans support this Orwellian operation, so that Republicans constitute a major party, which includes some of the very same people who suffer from it. This is the only way to explain the continued existence of the Republican Party as being a major political party in the U.S.

Nonetheless, this does not mean that today's Democratic Party is actually in favor of the poor—the Democratic Party of today just doesn't hate them as Republicans do. The clearest evidence of this came in a different study.

Princeton’s Larry M. Bartels posted to the Internet in 2002, updated in August 2005, his article, “Economic Inequality and Political Representation,” [4] which examined the votes of U.S. senators on eight bills. He found that, “Republicans were about twice as responsive as Democrats to the views of high-income constituents,” but that, “There is no evidence of any responsiveness [of Senators] to the views of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution, even from Democrats.”

Furthermore, “For Republican senators there is no evidence of responsiveness to middle-income constituents,” but only to the views of high-income constituents, and, “Democrats seem to have responded at least as strongly to the views of middle-income constituents as to the views of high-income constituents—though, once again, there is no evidence of any responsiveness to the views of low-income constituents.”

The popular myth has always been promulgated by Republicans that Democratic politicians engage in class-warfare against the middle-class, on behalf of the poor; but that’s just a blatant lie, whose purpose is to hide the very real class-war, by Republicans, against the middle-class, which is being waged successfully on behalf of the rich—the exact opposite of Republican claims.

Furthermore, “Senators seem to have been a good deal more responsive to upper-income constituents when a Republican was in the White House ... than they were with a Democrat in the White House.”

Perhaps this is the reason why even with a conservative Democratic president such as Obama, today’s far-rightwing Republican Party cannot get much of its wish-list filled. Bartels found “surprisingly strong and consistent evidence that the biases I have identified in senators’ responsiveness to rich and poor constituents are not due to differences between rich and poor constituents in [electoral] turnout, political knowledge, or contacting.”

In common parlance: Bartels found that ideology alone accounts for this difference.

He also considered the possibility posed by a 1995 study, which had shown that, “citizens in the top quarter of the income distribution ... provided almost three quarters of the total campaign contributions.” Could that be the answer —senators were simply voting for their contributors? Bartels found that only “two of the eight salient roll call votes [concerning the minimum wage, and abortion]” in his study could reasonably be explained on the basis mainly of campaign contributions; the other six could not.

A pronounced ideological component seems to have been involved in most senate votes. Republican senators voted overwhelmingly in favor of the rich, and Democratic senators voted equally often in favor of the rich and of the middle-class. Only in about one-quarter of the instances could political donations reasonably account for that.

It might also be worth noting that, even today, the purely racist tendency of the aristocracy is so great that it often is strong enough to outweigh their greed—discrimination is practiced even when it's unprofitable [5]. So: the traditional leftist "explanation" for conservatism (that it's purely based on greed) is false. The understanding that leftists have of rightists is basically the mirror-image of the way Fox News characterizes leftists.

The scientific studies that are being reported here constitute solid scientific findings, not opinions, and reporting them might come as interesting news to many readers, because our news-media unfortunately tend to be reluctant to report as news even the best scientific findings about ideology. But there is a difference between reporting on ideology, versus applying ideology (which an op-ed is supposed to do). This is therefore a news story, which brings together many studies that concern people’s ideology. If it happens to surprise anyone, then that would be simply because the major mainstream news media’s “neutrality” and “nonpartisanship” have required that they avoid reporting such facts as have been reported here. A lot of important facts are unreported for that reason. However, their being unreported has nothing to do with there being anything dubious about them.

See more stories tagged with:

economic opportunity [6]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/economic-opportunity-lowest-former-slave-states

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/eric-zuesse

[3] http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/index.php/city-rankings/city-rankings-100

[4] http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/economic.pdf

[5] http://www.epi.org/publication/bp335-boa-countrywide-discriminatory-lending/

[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/economic-opportunity

[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Salon.com / By Michael Lind [1]

Forget Red vs. Blue -- It's Slave States vs. Free States in 2012

October 10, 2012 |

Every now and then someone highlights the overlap between today’s Republican states and the slave states of the former Confederacy. As clichéd as the point may be, it remains indispensable to understanding what is happening in American politics today:

Confederate (red) and Union (blue) states

Republican (red) and Democratic (blue) states, 2008 election

The core of today’s Democratic party consists of the states of New England and the Great Lakes/Midatlantic region that were the heart of the Union effort during the Civil War. The core of today’s Republican party consists of the states that seceded from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America.Don’t be misled by the contemporary red state-blue state map which makes the mostly-red Prairie/Mountain states look as important in the Republican coalition as the South. A cartogram which shows states by population is far more accurate:

Red and blue states, 2008, with states proportional to their number of electoral votes

As the cartogram shows, in terms of population and votes the South vastly outweighs the thinly-populated Prairie/Mountain states, even though the latter get disproportionate representation in the U.S. Senate and the electoral college. The cartogram provides a pretty good reflection of the situation perceived by conservative white Southerners, by depicting a besieged South encircled and on the verge of being crushed by multiracial, polyglot, immigrant-friendly, secular humanist, progressive Blue America.

Now that they dominate the Republican party, Southern conservatives are using it to carry out the same strategies that they promoted during the generations when they controlled the Democratic Party, from the days of Andrew Jackson and Martin van Buren to the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. From the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, the oligarchs of the American South have sought to defend the Southern system, what used to be known as the Southern Way of Life.

Notwithstanding slavery, segregation and today’s covert racism, the Southern system has always been based on economics, not race. Its rulers have always seen the comparative advantage of the South as arising from the South’s character as a low-wage, low-tax, low-regulation site in the U.S. and world economy. The Southern strategy of attracting foreign investment from New York, London and other centers of capital depends on having a local Southern work force that is forced to work at low wages by the absence of bargaining power.

Anything that increases the bargaining power of Southern workers vs. Southern employers must be opposed, in the interest of the South’s regional economic development model. Unions, federal wage and workplace regulations, and a generous, national welfare state all increase the bargaining power of Southern workers, by reducing their economic desperation. Anti-union right-to-work laws, state control of wages and workplace regulations, and an inadequate welfare state all make Southern workers more helpless, pliant and dependent on the mercy of their employers. A weak welfare state also maximizes the dependence of ordinary Southerrners on the tax-favored clerical allies of the local Southern ruling class, the Protestant megachurches, whose own lucrative business model is to perform welfare functions that are performed by public agencies elsewhere, like child care.

The Southern system is essentially about class and only incidentally about race. That is why, following the abolition of slavery, the Southern landlord elite exploited black and white tenant farmers and child workers indifferently. Immigrant workers without rights to vote or organize unions have always appealed to the Southern employer elite. After the Civil War some Southern landlords experimented with bringing in indentured servants or “coolies” from Asia, until that form of unfree labor was banned by Congress in the 1880s. Today many business-class conservatives from Texas and other Southern states such as former Texas Senator Phil Gramm champion “guest-worker programs” which would bring in Mexican nationals and others to work as indentured servants in the South, while forbidding them to become U.S. citizens with legal and voting rights.

White supremacy was never an end in itself, but a tactic used by the Southern oligarchs to divide white workers from nonwhite workers. But the Southern elite can dispense with racism, because it has never cared what color its serfs are. Indeed, in the seventeenth century Southern planters initially experimented with white British and European indentured servants as farm workers, before trying black slaves, who were easier to identify if they ran away. In theory, in a truly post-racist South, a multiracial Southern oligarchy could lord it over an underpaid, vulnerable and equally multiracial Southern regional majority.

The traditional Southern regional economic strategy, then, depends on the control by Southern employers of a huge pool of low-wage workers with little or no bargaining power in their dealings with their local bosses or the foreign (that is, extra-Southern) investors and corporations who are invited in to exploit their labor. This regional economic strategy can succeed only if the power of the Southern employer class over Southern urban and rural workers is protected from political and legal interference from outside the South and within.

Protecting the prerogatives of the Southern economic elite and the politicians it owns from external interference is the rationale for the defense of states’ rights, in the twenty-first century as in the nineteenth and twentieth. While they demonize “the federal government” as though it were some external force, Southern conservatives are actually afraid of democracy—national democracy. They are afraid of their fellow Americans outside of the region they control. They are afraid that national majorities will impose unwelcome reform on the South, at the expense of their profits and privileges, as national majorities did during Reconstruction, the New Deal and the Civil Rights revolution.

The Southern system is also threatened by internal democracy. The Populist movement of the late 1800s, which in some cases united white and black Southerners in the cause of reform, terrified the white Southern establishment. By World War I many Southern states had adopted variants of the “Mississippi system” of disfranchising all of the black and up to half of the white population, by means of poll taxes, means tests, and other devices, ensuring that elections in the South would be dominated by upper-income voters. The purpose of the “voter ID” laws pushed by today’s Dixified Republican party is similarly to prevent lower-income citizens from voting.

Southern conservatives are sometimes accused of being hypocritical in denouncing the federal government even as their states take a disproportionate amount of federal military and civilian subsidies. But that isn’t hypocrisy; it’s cunning. As long as the local Southern oligarchs control how the federal money is spent in their region, they have no objection to massive restribution from Yankeeland to Dixie. Plans like Romney’s and Ryan’s for block-granting federal subsidies support the self-serving strategy of the Southern elite: federal funding but regional control.

Note that throughout this essay I have used the phrases “Southern establishment,” “Southern oligarchy,” and “Southern elite.” All too often outsiders treat the victims of the Southern oligarchy—the majority of white and black and Latino Southerners—as though they are to be blamed for their misfortune. Unfortunately, many northern progressives are snobs who would rather sneer at the manners and lifestyle of the Southern white working class than mobilize to defeat the Southern elite, which tends to be well-educated, well-spoken and well-traveled.

What about the future? Theorists of a “new majority” at the national level may be vindicated, if this year the Democrats win the popular vote for the five times in six consecutive elections. If Texas, the powerhouse of Southern electoral votes, shifts from red to blue in the next generation or two because of demographic change, that would further ghettoize Dixie conservatives. Gerrymandering can delay the inevitable decline of influence of white Southern conservatives in the House of Representatives, but cannot stop it. As before the Civil War, the Senate may be the last redoubt of the Southern right, but only as long as it can find enough allies among the low-population states of the prairie and mountain regions.

But the former slave states could triumph even as they went down, if the demise of the traditional South were to be accompanied by the Southernization of the American economy and political system. It is all too easy to imagine a United States which combines anti-racist, feminist and pro-gay attitudes with an economic strategy based on luring foreign investment with the help of low voter turn-out, low wages, weak unions, and foreign guest-worker programs, together with an inadequate welfare state dominated by state governments, private vouchers and tax-favored religious charities. A nationalized Confederacy with progressive trappings would be all too reminiscent of today’s America.

See more stories tagged with:

civil war [2],

democrats [3],

race [4],

religious right [5],

republicans [6],

confederacy [7]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/forget-red-vs-blue-its-slave-states-vs-free-states-2012

Links:

[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/michael-lind

[2] http://www.alternet.org/tags/civil-war

[3] http://www.alternet.org/tags/democrats-0

[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/race

[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/religious-right

[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/republicans-0

[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/confederacy-0

[8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

makes sure no confus between john mccain and WT guy

As Michael Lind has noted, http://www.salon.com/2011/08/02/lind_tea_party/ today's Tea Party is less an ideological movement than the latest incarnation of an angry white minority -- predominantly Southern, and mainly rural -- that has repeatedly attacked American democracy in order to get its way.

It's no mere coincidence that the states responsible for putting the most Tea Party representatives in the House are all former members of the Confederacy. Of the Tea Party caucus, twelve hail from Texas, seven from Florida, five from Louisiana, and five from Georgia, and three each from South Carolina, Tennessee, and border-state Missouri.

Others are from border states with significant Southern populations and Southern ties. The four Californians in the caucus are from the inland part of the state or Orange County, whose political culture has was shaped by Oklahomans and Southerners who migrated there during the Great Depression. robt r

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/republican-party-newt-gingrich-_b_1162539.html?ref=daily-brief?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=122111&utm_medium=email&utm_content=BlogEntry&utm_term=Daily%20Brief

Lind salon

The four states with the most Tea Party representatives in Congress are all former members of the Confederate States of America. The states with the greatest number of members of the House Tea Party caucus are Texas (12), Florida (7), Louisiana (5) and Georgia (5). While California is in fifth place with four House Tea Party members, the sixth, seventh and eighth places on the list are taken by two former Southern slave states, South Carolina and Tennessee, and a border state, Missouri, each with three members of the congressional Tea Party caucus.

If states with significant white Southern diasporas were included, the Southern proportion of the House Tea Party caucus would be even bigger. Many of the other states with Tea Party representatives are border states with significant Southern populations and Southern ties. One is Maryland, a state with Confederate sympathies during the Civil War, which, because the Census Bureau defines it as “Northeastern,” is responsible for the only Northeastern member of the Tea Party caucus, Roscoe Bartlett. The four Californian representatives come from the Orange County area or inland California, both regions whose political culture was shaped by Southern political culture, in the form of the “Okie” diaspora that settled there during the Depression.

In the entire House Tea Party Caucus, there is not a single representative from New England.

...

In light of this recent history, it is clear that the origins of the debt ceiling crisis are to be sought, not in generic American conservatism, but in idiosyncratic Southern conservatism. The goal, the methods and the passion of the Tea Party in the House are all characteristic of the radical Southern right.

From the earliest years of the American republic, white Southern conservatives when they have lost elections and found themselves in the political minority have sought to extort concession from national majorities by paralyzing or threatening to destroy the United States.

The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 asserted the alleged right of states to “nullify” any federal law that state lawmakers considered unconstitutional. This obstructionist mentality led to the Nullification Crisis of 1832, when South Carolina refused to enforce federal tariffs. Civil War was averted only when President Andrew Jackson, a Southerner himself, forced the nullifiers to back down.

In 1820 and 1850 the South used the threat of secession to force the rest of the United States to appease it on the slavery issue. In 1861, the South tried to destroy the United States, rather than accept a legitimately elected president, Abraham Lincoln, whom it did not control.

Following defeat in the Civil War, the former Confederate states regrouped as “the Solid South,” a one-party region, first Democratic and now Republican, that has tended to vote as a bloc in national affairs. The South sought to block the federal civil rights revolution by a policy of “massive resistance” to court orders ordering racial integration. Some Southern states went so far as to try to abolish their public school systems rather than integrate them. It is hard to avoid seeing a link between this racist rationale for privatization and modern conservative plans to scale back Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, relied on disproportionately by black and brown Americans and low-income whites, while increasing taxpayer subsidies to private retirement and healthcare accounts enjoyed mostly by affluent whites.

As white Southerners, upset with the Democratic Party’s racial and social liberalism, migrated into the post-Goldwater GOP, they brought their Dixiecrat attitudes into the party of Lincoln. The Kemp-Roth tax bill of 1981, which inaugurated the policy of creating permanent deficits by slashing taxes without cutting spending, had its strongest support among Southern and Western members of Congress and the least support in the fiscally conservative Northeast.

The Republican Party’s attempted government shutdown of 1995 marked the new domination of the Republican Party by Southerners like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay. The impeachment of their fellow Southerner Bill Clinton was an attempted coup d’état by the Southern white minority in the United States, which, as in 1860, was frustrated because its candidate lost the presidential election.

The debt ceiling crisis is the latest case in which the radical right in the South has held America hostage until its demands are met. Presidents Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln refused to appease the Southern fanatics. Unfortunately, President Obama and the Democrats in Congress chose not to follow their example and instead gave in. In doing so, they have encouraged the neo-Confederate minority in Congress to find yet another opportunity in the near future to extort concessions from America’s majority by sabotaging America’s government.

Loeb

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

STOPPING THE CONFEDERATE CHARGE

By Paul Rogat Loeb

Could Maine once again help save the United States from the Confederates, just as it did at Gettysburg? On the battle’s pivotal second day, Confederate troops from Alabama charged up Little Round Top. They would have captured its heights and dominated the field with artillery, were it not for the 20^th Maine regiment, 350 men commanded by Colonel Joshua Chamberlain. Outnumbered 10 to one and running low on ammunition, Chamberlain’s troops stood firm. Five times the Alabamians drove them from their positions. Each time the men from Maine fought their way back; then, when it appeared they were surrounded, they charged down the hill, sent the Confederates fleeing in retreat, and in the process won the battle and possibly the war. Now the time has come for citizens to urge moderate Republican Senators, like Maine’s Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, to take their own courageous stand, and break the charge of the new Confederates—the current Republican party.

Trent Lott is gone as majority leader, but his past support and present nostalgia for segregation and Big House politics is no aberration, either in his life or in the “party of Lincoln” he’s helped lead. It’s a core Republican theme, and has been for 30 years, ever since Nixon’s “southern strategy.” As we know, Lott fought against desegregating his fraternity, opposed a Martin Luther King holiday while proclaiming, in a speech to the Biloxi, MS, Sons of Confederate Veterans 'The spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican platform,' and spoke as a repeated honored guest to the heirs of the White Citizen’s Council, the Council of Conservative Citizens. But that’s hardly worse than John Ashcroft telling the avowedly pro-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan,“Traditionalists must do more. I’ve got to do more. We’ve all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we’ll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda.” Twice Ashcroft vetoed bills that sought to give residents of the heavily black city of St. Louis the same access to voter registration as the mostly white suburban voters. Dick Cheney voted against civil rights laws and opposed Nelson Mandela release from his South African prison. Think of the Willie Horton ads that helped elect Bush Senior, the “black hands, white hands” ad that helped Jesse Helms keep his North Carolina Senate seat, Ronald Reagan kicking off his 1980 campaign in Neshoba, Mississippi, (where civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner and James Cheney were murdered), or George W. Bush making it a point to speak at the segregated Bob Jones University. Think of the recent defeat of Georgia governor Roy Barnes (and in a ripple effect Senator Max Cleland) and South Carolina’s Jim Hodges in part because they opposed prominently flying the Confederate Battle Flag over their respective state capitols. Look at the electoral map, and ask where the Republicans would be without white southern backlash.

Republicans didn’t always carry the Confederate banner. As late as 1932, Franklin Roosevelt got just 23 percent of the African American vote, and for many years after that, the Dixiecrats who Lott so praised held the Democratic party hostage on race matters. This began to change as the Great Migration brought several million blacks to northern and western cities. Under pressure from African American labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the military. And his fellow Democrat Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights bill. Although Johnson acknowledged that pushing the bill might lose the Democrats the south for a generation, the bill would never have passed without strong support from moderate Midwestern and New England Republicans, like Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen.

But after Alabama Governor George Wallace won five states in 1968, Richard Nixon developed his “southern strategy,” targeting the Wallace base through what he called “positive polarization.” Nixon highlighted his opposition to racially charged issues like busing and affirmative action, made a symbol of lazy and undeserving black welfare mothers, challenged the permissiveness of the Warren Court (while nominating ex-segregationist Harold Carswell to an open seat), and made “law and order” a code word for resistance to black demands. Republicans have been running racially loaded campaigns ever since. The ascension to power of men like Lott, Ashcroft, and Cheney marked a major advance for regressive racial policies. Although this administration talks of compassion and highlights a handful of individual African Americans, they’ve continued to promote policies that damage the poorest and most desperate minority communities, like cutting resources for low-income housing, health care, child care, literacy programs, energy assistance, and the Boys and Girls Clubs programs in public housing projects. They’ve passed election-reform rules that will make it harder for poor and minority voters to vote, like requiring additional identification. This, together with the corresponding tax cuts they’ve given to their wealthy cronies, suggest that plantation politics is alive and well in the White House today.

The current Republicans have one more Confederate tie--one that handed them the White House. A century ago, in the process of restricting black voting and establishing racial segregation, the Confederate states barred ex-felons from voting. These laws remain in force throughout the Deep South, and in Florida alone prohibited 650,000 people from registering, including one in three African-American men. Tens of thousands more got letters purging them from the rolls for convictions that never applied under Florida law—or never existed to begin with. The letters were sent by a data-collection firm with strong Republican ties, a firm whose staffers acknowledged that their efforts would disproportionately target low-income Democrats. No other advanced industrial democracy bars former prisoners for life, and some, like Germany, actively encourage incarcerated inmates to vote. But for the Bush administration, the disproportionate racial impact is fine.

This brings us back to Maine, or any other state where Republican Senators claim to call themselves moderates. With heavy black turnout and modest white support helping Mary Landreau eke out her Louisiana victory, the Republican Senate margin is down to a single vote. Maine’s Republican Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins have already condemned Lott’s words. But even though Lott’s stepped down from his position as majority leader, by remaining Republicans, they allow the politics he represents to continue to hold sway. They let the neo-Confederates stay in charge--and with enough regressive court appointments, potentially consolidate power for decades. If they followed the path of James Jeffords, perhaps joined by one of the few other remaining Republican moderates, like Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island, Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter, or Nebraska’s Chuck Hagel, the legacy of race-baiting could be stopped. It would take ample courage for any of these Senators to do this, but it took extraordinary courage to charge down the hill at Little Round Top. And taking a political risk isn’t the same as risking your life. Given the current administration’s propensity to impose their Big House style of politics on the entire globe and to pillage an already threatened environment, I’d suggest the stakes may be nearly as high as at that critical battle 140 years ago. If Maine’s Republican Senators or others step up with enough courage now, they might also change history.

http://www.paulloeb.org/articles/Confederates.htm

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Defending Dixie: A Family Affair

Pruden was elevated from managing editor to top dog of the Times in 1992. It was pivotal time for the paper. With the Cold War won and conservative politics in the ascendant, the paper needed a fresh sense of mission. When he sat down for a long interview with Southern Partisan not long after his promotion, Pruden left little doubt about where he would lead the paper.

After singling out the Southern culture warrior,Sen. Jesse Helms, as a political hero,Pruden bragged about his great-grandmother shooting a Union cavalryman and boasted that the Times was the most "in-your-face" conservative newspaper in America. When Robert E. Lee's birthday rolls around every year, he said, "I make sure we have a story" — especially because the occasion "falls around Martin Luther King's birthday."

Pruden started with the Times shortly after its founding. He was originally hired on a probationary basis, founding editor and publisher James Whelan told the Washington Business Journal, because Pruden had run into ethical problems as a reporter.

According to Whelan, Pruden was fired in 1978 by the now-defunct National Observer, where he had worked for 14 years, under suspicion that he had "manufactured" quotes in his stories. (Pruden refused to comment on the reasons for his ouster, except to say it involved "a couple of stories I'd done.")

Born and raised in Arkansas, Pruden has a deep-rooted affection for Dixie. His father, the Rev. Wesley Pruden Sr., was a leading spokesperson for Little Rock's racist Capital Citizens Council, which fought bitterly against school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. During the landmark confrontations at Little Rock High School in 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower sent National Guard troops to protect nine black teenagers as they entered the white school, Pruden Sr. reportedly told the assembled mob: "That's what we've got to fight! Niggers, Communists, and cops!"

The Rev. Pruden's son has avoided commenting on his father's politics. But in 1995, the Times ran two long op-ed pieces by the senior Pruden's old Citizens Council cohort,"Justice Jim" Johnson.

According to an investigation by Salon.com, Johnson'sWashington Timesstories were part of the anti-Clinton Arkansas Project, which mounted a well-financed campaign to discredit Henry Woods, the federal judge originally appointed to preside over criminal proceedings in the Whitewater case. The doubts about Judge Woods raised in Johnson's op-ed pieces percolated through the media for months, and Woods was eventually replaced by a judge more friendly to Whitewater investigators.

Pruden's contribution to the anti-Clinton efforts didn't stop there. Even as he oversaw his paper's wall-to-wall coverage of Whitewater and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the editor was creating a stir with his own op-ed columns about Clinton — including one that broke the "news" about Bill, Monica and the cigar. Pruden is also legendary, as an editor, for manipulating headlines and stories to ratchet up their political slant — so much so that Washington Times staffers coined a verb, "Prudenizing," to describe the tampering that has led some of them to resign in protest.

In 1998, Pruden, whose newspaper is the only major daily in America that runs a weekly page about a war that ended 138 years ago, spoke to the United Daughters of the Confederacy at the Manassas Battlefield Park. He began by making the kind of promise most editors avoid at any cost: "I will never fail to respond to you when you call on me for help, because I believe in what you are doing to cherish and protect and preserve the heritage of our great Southern people."

Concluding with a flourish, Pruden said "Southerners ... hold loyalty to two countries in our hearts." The second country is one "baptized 137 years ago on this very field in the blood of First Manassas, a country no longer at the mercy of the vicissitudes in the tangled affairs of men, a country that lives within us, a country that will endure for as long as men and women know love. ... God bless America, God bless the Confederate States of America, and God bless you all."

Extremism Gets a Voice

Though he declined to talk with the Intelligence Report for this story, Pruden has denied that his personal beliefs color The Washington Times. "We are editorial page conservative," Pruden told Southern Partisan. "But we like to think that on news we just lay it down the middle and let people make up their own minds."

In 1995, Pruden appeared to strike a blow for "down the middle" fairness by firing The Times' other voice of the extreme right, syndicated columnist Samuel Francis. A new book by neoconservative stalwart Dinesh D'Souza had quoted Francis' speech at a 1994 conference on "Race and American Culture" sponsored by American Renaissance, a white supremacist journal that promotes eugenics and believes, among other things, that whites are inherently smarter and less violent than blacks. After D'Souza portrayed Francis as a purveyor of the "new spirit of white bigotry," Pruden told him the Times would no longer run his column.

The firing was something of a mystery, since Francis had often expressed views on race that appeared quite compatible with Pruden's. (Ironically, Francis now edits the Citizens Informer, a newsletter published by the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, successor to the Citizens Council that Wesley Pruden Sr. belonged to.)

In 1994, Francis had been demoted to a half-time staff position after he wrote a column lambasting the Southern Baptist Convention for officially "repenting" for its support for Southern slavery — even though Pruden had expressed a similar view in a column of his own, published in Southern Partisan.

Still, if the reasons for Francis' dismissal were murky, the public symbolism was clear enough: Even on its unabashedly conservative editorial page, the Times did have its limits.

But only two years later, the Times reversed coursedramatically, hiring a writer whose views on race and Southern heritage are arguably more extreme than either Francis' or Pruden's. And this time, those views would be expressed not in op-ed columns but on the Times' news pages.

With the arrival of Assistant National Editor Robert Stacy McCain in 1997, the Times' disassociation from the racism of American Renaissance became a distant memory. McCain, who wrote the story about Democrats and Dixie, has covered the group's biannual conferences in 1998, 2000 and 2002, making the Times the only major American newspaper to devote news stories to American Renaissance. Since 1999, the Times has also reprinted at least six excerpts from American Renaissance in its page-2 culture section, never acknowledging the highly controversial nature of the source.

"Activist warns of border war," blared the headline for McCain's latest American Renaissance story on Feb. 25, 2002. McCain was covering an American Renaissance conference on immigration, and his opening paragraph was almost as sensational as the headline: "A border war between the United States and Mexico 'could happen any day,' a California activist warned at a weekend conference in Virginia."

All 572 words of the story either paraphrased or quoted this same "activist," Glenn Spencer, who runs the anti-immigration group, Voice of Citizens Together, which the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League officials have described as a hate group. Without questioning their factuality, McCain's story reported Spencer's assertions that Mexican leaders were conducting an "invasion" of the United States and that "I love Osama bin Laden" T-shirts were all the rage south of the border after 9/11. No opposing viewpoint was offered or even referenced.

"Sending a reporter to this conference was like sending a reporter to a Ku Klux Klan rally," a flabbergasted reader wrote to the Times. Though the paper printed his letter, the reader's objections appear unlikely to be heeded. McCain has made no bones about being a fan of American Renaissance, writing a letter of "warm congratulations" to the magazine in 1997. It is extremely rare — in fact, it is typically expressly forbidden — for a journalist to publicly express admiration (or disdain) for a group he writes about. end p2

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'A Natural Revulsion' p3

Something else about McCain is even rarer: he belongs to a hate group — the League of the South (LOS) — that shares some of American Renaissance's views on race. The League, a white-supremacist organization that opposes racial intermarriage, has defended historical segregation and even slavery, and advocates a second Southern secession from the U.S.

Washington Times readers have not been informed of McCain's hate-group membership, even when he's written on subjects near and dear to the hearts of his co-religionists. (McCain has been identified as a League member on DixieNet, the Web site that has reprinted several of his stories and essays from the Times, and he's mentioned his affiliation with the League in on-line postings.)

If McCain and his editors followed the usual rules of journalistic ethics, steering him clear of subjects related to his partisan beliefs, his hate-group membership might not be an issue. But the 43-year-old Georgia native, who left the Rome News-Tribune (circulation 17,000) for The Washington Times in 1997, has specialized in subjects that are vital to League of the South members: race, religion, guns, immigration, and controversies over Confederate flags and "heritage."

An avid poster on Internet discussion groups, McCain has aired strong personal views on these subjects. In December, New York Press media critic Michelangelo Signiorile published some of McCain's contributions to FreeRepublic.com, written under the pseudonym BurkeCalhounDabney.

McCain asserted that the civil rights movement inspired "black criminality" by encouraging people to get arrested at demonstrations. "I am disturbed … by [Jesse] Jackson's idea that 'breaking white folks' rules' was somehow inherently just," McCain wrote. "If rules were to be broken merely because they were the work of white folks, then hasn't Jackson gone a long way toward explaining the explosion of black criminality that began in the 1960s?"

Signiorile, who was alerted by a reader to McCain's postings, told the Intelligence Report he was "amazed" by what he found. In one posting, McCain suggested that Harvard University President Lawrence Summers be "persecuted and run out of town" for supporting gay rights.

In another, McCain gave his take on interracial relationships: "[T]he media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion," McCain wrote. "The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us."

Shortly after Signiorile's story appeared, and McCain's extremist views began to circulate around journalistic and political circles, every posting by BurkeCalhounDabney was deleted from FreeRepublic.com.

Taking His Stand in Dixie

McCain's beliefs often creep into his stories in ways that readers might not notice. In 1998, McCain wrote the Times' obituary for George Wallace, the Alabama governor who became the South's most famous segregationist.

Hailing Wallace as "a man who transformed American politics" and paved the way for conservative electoral triumphs, McCain quoted three scholars on Wallace. All the scholars were identified as history professors — but not as leaders in the same hate group McCain belongs to, the League of the South.

"[A]s a working journalist with 10 years' experience," McCain once wrote on the League's DixieNet Web site, "I am well aware of how reporters can subtly frame their stories to suggest which side in any controversy is in the right." McCain's stories for the Times often display this expertise, relying on sources from hate groups without acknowledging the controversial nature of their views — and immediately shooting down any opposing viewpoints, like those of the NAACP leader in McCain's story on Dixie-loving as a "hate crime."

If McCain's not-so-subtle framing of the news has raised eyebrows around the Times' newsroom, it doesn't appear to have affected the kinds of stories he's assigned to write. In 2000, when African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr. published a controversial book accusing Abraham Lincoln of being a racist (see related story Lincoln Reconstructed), McCain wrote an approving feature about the book even though — perhaps unbeknownst to his editors — he had already expressed vehement opinions on the subject.

In an Internet discussion group, McCain had written that Lincoln was a "war criminal" who should have been tried for "treason." On DixieNet, McCain — using his own name — had even concocted a mock "Wanted" poster for Lincoln, whom he described as the "1st RULER and TYRANT of the AMERICAN EMPIRE" and a perpetrator of "Murder, False Imprisonment, and numerous HEINOUS crimes against the SOUTHern states and AMERICANS in general!"

"I cannot believe that they allow him to stay" at the Times, says Signiorile. "I don't think any paper should have anyone in a racist group covering these issues, or covering racial politics. It's completely outrageous to have someone like that covering news at all."

McCain and his editors declined several invitations to talk to the Intelligence Report about his League of the South affiliation and its impact on his reporting. But McCain has expressed typically strong views on who should be covering news — especially news about the South.

In 1996, a year before he was hired by The Washington Times, McCain co-wrote a manifesto called "Down on Dixie: the Confederate Cause and the South's Scalawag Press." Advertised for $1.50 apiece on DixieNet, the 16-page pamphlet looks nostalgically at "a time, not so many years ago, when newspapers in the South were also expected to be newspapers of the South and newspapers for the South." By contrast, McCain and his co-author, now-deceased Sons of Confederate Veterans member Gilbert Smith, accuse modern-day Southern journalists of waging "a vicious campaign of propaganda and distortion" by saying, among other things, that the Civil War was fought over slavery.

"[L]et Southern journalists continue to sneer in ignorance at those things which they imagine are represented by the Confederate battle flag," McCain concludes, in a condensed version of the pamphlet that appeared on DixieNet. "But this I shall not do. I shall not buy into the North's hypocritical claims of moral superiority. Like my ancestors before me, I'll take my stand in Dixie."

And as long as he continues to take that stand in The Washington Times, with the powerful backing of his editor in chief, one thing is for sure: Nobody will accuse the Times of succumbing to the Scalawag Press....end all end p3

Intelligence Report, Summer 2003, Issue Number: 110

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2003/summer/defending-dixie?page=0,2

America's Newspaper

America's Newspaper?

The Washington Times has a long record of hyped stories, shoddy reporting and failure to correct errors

SPLC

By Heidi Beirich and Bob Moser

In the summer of 1999, The Washington Timesignited a scandal that embarrassed Al Gore's fledgling presidential campaign— and became a famous example of the paper's talent for floating sensational stories into the mainstream media, even when those stories turn out to be riddled with factual errors and laced with baldly deceptive rhetoric.

A month after announcing his bid for the White House, Gore had tried to highlight his environmental message by paddling down the Connecticut River with a canoe full of reporters and local politicians. At the end of the ride, he stopped for a press conference where he announced some big grants designed to protect rivers. So far, so good.

But Gore's outing backfired the next morning, when the Times'front page reported that local authorities had blown $7 million to keep Gore's canoe from running aground on the drought-stricken river, raising the water level by releasing nearly 4 billion gallons from a nearby dam.

"New Hampshire opts to float Gore's boat," read the chiding headline. A scandal that would soon grow to such proportions that it had a name — "Floodgate" — was born.

"The implication was clear," Eric Boehlert later wrote in Rolling Stone magazine. "In a clumsy abuse of power, Al Gore, a supposed friend of the environment, gladly wasted precious natural resources to stage a political event."

The Timesexposé was much too juicy for the scandal-hungry press to pass up. The same afternoon the Times undammed Floodgate, the impact of the scandal was already being debated on CNN's"Inside Politics."

The print media hopped on board, too: "Gore in environmental quandary," said the Associated Press. "Critics Paddle Gore in 'Dam' Rowing Row," said the New York Post. "A Canoe Trip Becomes a Political Misadventure for Gore," said The New York Times.

One problem: The Washington Times had gotten the story wrong. No one affiliated with the Gore campaign had requested the water level be raised; the head of the river commission had come up with the idea, hoping Gore's canoe ride would bring national attention to her cause.

The $7 million price tag was wildly misleading; the local utility company that owned the dam had already planned the release the water, as it habitually does, and simply moved up the release time to accommodate Gore's trip.

Rather than being wasted, the water passed through hydroelectricturbines and generated power that was sold to other utility companies. And the amount of water released was not 4 billion gallons, but perhaps 500 million — a fact that the Times didn't correct until a week after the original story, long after other media outlets had taken Floodgate and run with it.

'Gong Show Journalism'

For most American newspapers, making so much noise with an inaccurate story would have been a huge embarrassment. Heads would roll. Penitent promises of stepped-up fact-checking and editorial trustworthiness would be made to readers.

But The Washington Times is not most American newspapers.

"It's the Fox News of the print world," says Gene Grabowski, who in 1988 became one of a number of Timesreporters to resign in protestof the paper's flouting of journalistic ethics.

While interviewing a relative ofMichael Dukakis, Grabowski had asked whether the Democratic presidential nominee sought psychiatric help during a low period in his life. "

It's possible but I doubt it," the relative had replied.

Grabowski's editors removed the phrase "but I doubt it,"highlighted the phrase "It's possible" in a dramatically misleading opening to his story, and headlined the piece "Dukakis kin hints at sessions."

For 20 years, the most notoriously ideological editor at the Times has been Wesley Pruden, the right-wing Arkansan who rose from managing editor to editor in chief in 1992.

In 1991, Pruden ordered major changes to a story the Times' Supreme Court reporter, Dawn Ceol, had written about Anita Hill, the law professor who accused Clarence Thomasof sexual improprieties during his confirmation hearings.

In the paper's first edition on Oct. 14, Ceol's article was headlined, "Thomas accuser lauded, assailed." In subsequent editions, with the story rewritten to play up accusations against Hill, the headline was changed to something far less balanced: "Miss Hill painted as 'fantasizer.'"

Ceol, the daughter of influential conservative fund-raiserPaul Weyrich, was certainly no left-winger. Still, she resigned over the editorial meddling, though it should not have come as a surprise; in his "Pruden on Politics" column, Ceol's editor had become one of Thomas' most boisterous defenders, taking aim at "hysterical feminists" engaged in "media harassment" of the judge.

Pruden and the other men who call the shots at The Times say their news is no more ideologically driven than anybody else's. But many media critics disagree. Summing up a widely held view, Bob Somerby, who edits the online "Daily Howler," calls the Times, "gong-show journalism."

Putting a kinder spin on it, Howard Kurtz of CNN and the Washington Post has deemed the Times "a happy anachronism — a throwback to a simpler time, when Whigs and mugwumps strode the land and newspapers … were unapologetically partisan vehicles."

When the Times' unapologetic partisanship has led it into error, the paper has not always issued the kinds of factual corrections that are de rigeur elsewhere.

Even when Kurtz revealed last year that two hard-hitting Times stories about Palestinian atrocities against Christians in the West Bank had been written under a false byline— a practice unheard of in contemporary journalism, and largely verboten even in the days of mugwumps and Whigs — the paper defended its decision not to inform readers of the deception. The reporter "said his life would be in danger" if he used his real name, explained Deputy Foreign Editor Willis Witter.

Managing Editor Francis Coombs did admit, when questioned by Kurtz, that a "legitimate case could be made that we at least should have informed the reader" that the stories were not really written by a reporter named Sayed Anwar.

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Intelligence Report, Summer 2003, Issue Number: 110

Defending Dixie

The Washington Times has a long record of hyped stories, shoddy reporting and failure to correct errors.

By Heidi Beirich and Bob Moser

starts here

When President George W. Bush nominated John Ashcroft for attorney general, it didn't take long for the press to unearth Ashcroft's 1999 interview in Southern Partisan magazine. Ashcroft had praised the neo-Confederate publication for "defending Southern patriots" such as Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, and he'd pledged to follow the magazine's example.

"I've got to do more," Ashcroft said. "We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."

Most media outlets depicted the flap over Ashcroft's pro-Dixie sentiments as a side issue, just one more reason why his nomination was controversial. But the nation's "conservative paper of record," The Washington Times, saw something different. On Jan. 16, 2001, the day Ashcroft began facing his critics in Congress, the Times devoted a chunk of its front page to an unusually long story with a provocative headline: "How the Democrats made loving Dixie a hate crime."

For a paper with a loyal readership on Capitol Hill, the story, written by Assistant National EditorRobert Stacy McCain, was nicely timed for maximum impact. But despite the headline, it did not detail a Democratic effort to outlaw Dixie-loving.

Instead, it described a growing resistance to Confederate displays and symbols as seen through the eyes of six experts, five of them arch-conservatives with well-established neo-Confederate sympathies. An NAACP representative was also quoted, deep in McCain's story, but his comments were immediately rebutted by Charles Lunsford (see Hate and Heritage), the neo-Confederate activist who coined the phrase, "heritage, not hate," and by leftist-turned-rightist David Horowitz (see Center for the Study of Popular Culture), who called the NAACP "a defamation and shakedown organization."

Casual readers of The Washington Times might well have been puzzled. Why would a major daily newspaper — one that bills itself as "America's Newspaper," no less — turn the Ashcroft controversy into a battle over loving Dixie? And why would it showcase a story so heavily slanted toward neo-Confederate opinions on race and heritage?

For devoted readers of the Times — a group that includes many of the nation's leading conservative politicians, journalists and think-tankers -- McCain's story was old hat. These readers know theTimes loves to stir controversy with headlines and stories so provocative that other media outlets can't resist repeating them. They know the Times is the only major American newspaper that still features a weekly Civil War page. They know the Times has become a reliable source for extremist views on race, religion, immigration and Dixie.

What they don't know is why.

Money, Media and Moonification

Founded in 1982 by the Rev. Sun Myong Moon, the right-wing cult leader from South Korea, The Washington Times quickly made a name for itself with an approach to news reporting that was unusually ideological.

While mainstream media critics scoffed at "The Moonie Times" for enthusiastically championing the Rev. Moon's staunch anti-communism and his efforts to move the Republican Party farther right, the Times made a splash in conservative circles. President Ronald Reagan said it was his favorite paper. Right away, the Times showed a knack for taking its message to the mainstream,advertising itself as the "third most quoted paper" in the U.S. by its third year.

The Times' quotability and importance to conservative leaders quickly gave it a stature that outstripped its relatively small circulation. While the crosstown rival Washington Post moves more than 800,000 papers each weekday, the Times' circulation has never climbed much higher than 100,000. By his own estimate, Moon has spent upwards of $2 billion to keep the unprofitable paper afloat.

While the Times made itself must reading for right-wingers, it was also developing a reputation for shoddy journalism. From the start, the Times' front page was studded with scandalous stories bearing catchy headlines and sensational openings that more closely echoed the style of European tabloids than that of large American newspapers.

Whether they were taking aim at Democratic politicians like Barney Frank and Bill Clinton, assailing out-of-step conservatives like Sen. John McCain, or slamming "liberal" organizations like the National Education Association and the NAACP, these eye-popping stories often rippled through the rest of the scandal-hungry media --even though some of them were later proven to be slanted, deceptive, or downright false.

"The Washington Times is like no major city daily in America in the way that it wears its political heart on its sleeve," said the nation's leading journalistic watchdog, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), in 1995. "No major paper in America would dare be so partisan."

The folks who call the shots at the Times insist that their news is no more infected with ideology — or riddled with error — than anybody else's. The Intelligence Report made repeated attempts to talk with Washington Times Editor in Chief Wesley Pruden, Managing Editor Francis Coombs and National Editor Ken Hanner about the allegations and criticisms in this story. These requests were either ignored or, in Coombs' case, declined.

But Pruden has given his side of the story to Southern Partisan and CJR. "I don't ever want the Times to be known as a newspaper that writes the news from a conservative point of view," he told Southern Partisan. Where the conservatism creeps in, he told CJR, is in which stories the paper chooses to designate as news. The Times, Pruden said, is different simply because it reports "stories other papers are loath to cover."

One such story appeared in early July, when "Inside the Beltway" writer John McCaslin endorsed the so-called "NORFED Liberty Dollar" in his column. This "alternative currency" has been marketed aggressively to antigovernment "Patriots" as a challenge to the Federal Reserve, which is seen as responsible for a host of financial ills.

McCaslin uncritically repeated NORFED founder Bernard von Nothaus' claim that widespread use of the Liberty Dollar could eliminate the national debt "completely." The currency is supposedly fully backed by silver, but in fact is sold for almost twice the market value of the silver that it can be reimbursed for.

Even more stunning, the expert source McCaslin cites on Liberty Dollars — calling him "a Web development consultant for political and corporate clients" — is Bill White, a notorious anti-Semite who runs the neo-Nazi web site Overthrow.com. "I spend them everywhere," White gushes. In fact, they can be used almost nowhere.

A few days later, The Washington Times' knack for floating stories into the mainstream �� no matter how outrageous — was demonstrated once again.ABC Radio stalwart Paul Harvey, in his unmistakable boom of a voice, aired a glowing story about the Liberty Dollars.

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start p2

Defending Dixie: A Family Affair

After singling out the Southern culture warrior,Sen. Jesse Helms, as a political hero, Pruden bragged about his great-grandmother shooting a Union cavalryman and boasted that the Timeswas the most "in-your-face" conservative newspaper in America. When Robert E. Lee's birthday rolls around every year, he said, "I make sure we have a story" — especially because the occasion "falls around Martin Luther King's birthday."

Pruden started with the Times shortly after its founding. He was originally hired on a probationary basis, founding editor and publisher James Whelan told the Washington Business Journal,because Pruden had run into ethical problems as a reporter.

Born and raised in Arkansas, Pruden has a deep-rooted affection for Dixie. His father, the Rev. Wesley Pruden Sr., was a leading spokesperson for Little Rock's racist Capital Citizens Council, which fought bitterly against school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. During the landmark confrontations at Little Rock High School in 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower sent National Guard troops to protect nine black teenagers as they entered the white school, Pruden Sr. reportedly told the assembled mob: "That's what we've got to fight! Niggers, Communists, and cops!"

The Rev. Pruden's son has avoided commenting on his father's politics. But in 1995, the Times ran two long op-ed pieces by the senior Pruden's old Citizens Council cohort,"Justice Jim" Johnson.

Pruden's contribution to the anti-Clinton efforts didn't stop there. Even as he oversaw his paper's wall-to-wall coverage of Whitewater and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the editor was creating a stir with his own op-ed columns about Clinton — including one thatbroke the "news" about Bill, Monica and the cigar.Pruden is also legendary, as an editor, for manipulating headlines and stories to ratchet up their political slant — so much so that Washington Times staffers coined a verb, "Prudenizing," to describe the tampering that has led some of them to resign in protest.

In 1998, Pruden, whose newspaper is the only major daily in America that runs a weekly page about a war that ended 138 years ago, spoke to the United Daughters of the Confederacy at the Manassas Battlefield Park. He began by making the kind of promise most editors avoid at any cost: "I will never fail to respond to you when you call on me for help, because I believe in what you are doing to cherish and protect and preserve the heritage of our great Southern people."

Extremism Gets a Voice

Though he declined to talk with the Intelligence Report for this story, Pruden has denied that his personal beliefs color The Washington Times."We are editorial page conservative," Pruden told Southern Partisan. "But we like to think that on news we just lay it down the middle and let people make up their own minds."

In 1995, Pruden appeared to strike a blow for "down the middle" fairness by firing The Times' other voice of the extreme right, syndicated columnist Samuel Francis. A new book by neoconservative stalwart Dinesh D'Souza had quoted Francis' speech at a 1994 conference on "Race and American Culture" sponsored by American Renaissance, a white supremacist journal that promotes eugenics and believes, among other things, thatwhites are inherently smarter and less violent than blacks. After D'Souza portrayed Francis as a purveyor of the "new spirit of white bigotry," Pruden told him the Times would no longer run his column.

Still, if the reasons for Francis' dismissal were murky, the public symbolism was clear enough: Even on its unabashedly conservative editorial page, the Times did have its limits.

With the arrival of Assistant National Editor Robert Stacy McCain in 1997, the Times' disassociation from the racism of American Renaissance became a distant memory. McCain, who wrote the story about Democrats and Dixie, has covered the group's biannual conferences in 1998, 2000 and 2002, making the Times the only major American newspaper to devote news stories toAmerican Renaissance. Since 1999, the Times has also reprinted at least six excerpts from American Renaissance in its page-2 culture section, never acknowledging the highly controversial nature of the source.

"Activist warns of border war," blared the headline for McCain's latest American Renaissance story on Feb. 25, 2002. McCain was covering an American Renaissance conference on immigration, and his opening paragraph was almost as sensational as the headline: "A border war between the United States and Mexico 'could happen any day,' a California activist warned at a weekend conference in Virginia."

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2003/summer/defending-dixie?page=0,2

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'A Natural Revulsion' p3

Taking His Stand in Dixie

McCain's beliefs often creep into his stories in ways that readers might not notice. In 1998,McCain wrote the Times' obituary for George Wallace, the Alabama governor who became the South's most famous segregationist.