Livingston, Donald Ihs
==
https://www.thenation.com/article/how-charles-koch-is-helping-neo-confederates-teach-college-students/
no many lnx
How Charles Koch Is Helping Neo-Confederates Teach College Students
The Koch Foundation is often praised for its higher-ed funding, but the money is going to some radical professors
By Alex Kotch MARCH 21, 2018
Billionaire industrialist and conservative political mega-donor Charles Koch first entered the political world through the John Birch Society, a secretive anti-Communist outfit that campaigned against the civil-rights movement. Since then, he and his brother David amassed enormous wealth and put together a powerful conservative political network that rivals either major party in size and funding.
A new report from activist group UnKoch My Campus shows that Charles Koch’s ties to white supremacy have persisted throughout his adult life. The report details an array of instances where Koch has funded neo-Confederate scholars—a largely unnoticed aspect of the Koch Industries CEO’s ambitious project of funding higher education.Most alarming is a collaboration between Florida Atlantic University, the Charles Koch Foundation, and a major private-prison company, which is led by a professor who was a member of the research arm of a white-nationalist hate group.
While raking in corporate profits as the head of the family’s oil-refining business since the mid-1960s, Charles Koch and his top tactician, Richard Fink, developed a “Structure of Social Change,” which they would deploy to pull America as far to the right on taxes and regulations as they could. Koch, a libertarian, had resigned from the John Birch Society after opposing its position on the Vietnam War, and created a regressive sphere of influence. The first step in this strategy was funding higher education, because, as he said at a 1974 gathering of the Institute for Humane Studies, now a George Mason University center that he finances and directs, “educational programs are superior to political action, and support of talented free-market scholars is preferable to mass advertising.”
Koch and his family foundations have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to colleges and universities around the United States. In 2013, the Charles Koch Foundation began donating to Florida Atlantic University, offering $5,000 that year. By 2016, the annual donation had risen to $32,000.
Marshall DeRosa, who runs a prison-education program with financial backing from the Koch Foundation, is a Florida Atlantic University political-science professor who has written extensively on the Confederacy. He also has ties to its modern remnants.
From 2000 until at least 2009, according to archived web pages,DeRosa was a “faculty member” at the League of the South Institute, the “educational arm of the Southern independence movement” where “the South’s finest unreconstructed scholars” taught summer institutes and seminars. The LOS Institute acts as the charitable nonprofit of the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center considers aneo-Confederate hate group, and supports a second Southern secession in order to form a nation ruled by “Anglo-Celtic” people.
The LOS was co-founded in 1994 by an original member of the Center for Libertarian Studies, which was launched in 1976 with seed money from Charles Koch. Michael Tubbs, a white nationalist who once stockpiled military weapons and planned to target businesses owned by African Americans and Jews, is still the current chairman of the Florida LOS chapter, according to Newsweek, and has appeared at the side of LOS president Michael Hill as recently as January 2018. In 1987, Hill and three accomplices called themselves “guardians of the gene pool.”
The League of the South Institute is “the educational branch of the Mary Noel Kershaw Foundation,” named after the wife of the late Jack Kershaw, longtime leader within the violent White Citizens Council and founding board member of the League of the South. In 1998, Kershaw erected a statue of Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest and declared, “Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery. Where in the world are the Negroes better off today than in America?”
Recently, LOS was a prominent white-nationalist force at the infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hill, a board member of the Kershey Foundation, had told supporters to prepare for violence. Another LOS member was charged in January for brutally beating a 20-year-old black man at the rally.
Regarding his LOS affiliation, DeRosa told The Nation, “That was a long time ago. I disengaged early on. They’d invite me to things and I’d go to talk about my scholarship, especially the Confederate constitution, but I got an inkling as to some of the characters involved…. I didn’t feel comfortable.”
Experts on hate groups have a different view. “The LOS was different when DeRosa was involved, not as militant, but it still had very, very bad racial views,” said Heidi Beirich, an expert on right-wing extremism and director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “He can’t scurry away from the fact that for a long time he was a member of a group that had white-supremacist view
DeRosa isn’t the only former LOS Institute academic in the Koch higher-ed network. The founder of the institute, Donald Livingston, who served on the Institute for Humane Studies Academic Review Committee—which grants Koch’s “Humane Studies Fellowships” (originally “Claude R. Lambe Fellowships”)—from 1996 to 1999, has stayed in the network’s orbit. Last spring, he lectured at an Institute for Humane Studies seminar at George Mason University.
Thomas DiLorenzo, an “affiliated scholar” of the LOS Institute as recently as 2008, was an economics professor in George Mason University and worked on policy for the Koch-funded, libertarian Cato Institute. In 2005, several years after the Southern Poverty Law Center classified LOS as a hate group, he defended the organization, writing that it “advocates peace and prosperity in the tradition of a George Washington or a Thomas Jefferson.”
DeRosa and DiLorenzo taught a three-day LOS “summer school” together in 2000 on topics including “Why secession was, and is, constitutional” and “How the ‘Fourteenth Amendment’ was never constitutionally passed by Congress nor ratified by the States.”
Not long after SPLC labeled the LOS a hate group in the early 2000s, Livingston left the LOS Institute and founded its successor, the Abbeville Institute, named after the birthplace of fierce slavery advocate John Calhoun, and is still president. (DiLorenzo is currently affiliated with the Abbeville Institute, as well.) In 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education dubbed the Abbeville Institute a place where scholars “nostalgic for the Old South” went to “study the virtues of secession.” The Chronicle reported that Abbeville scholars argued that the Civil War, or “the War of Northern Aggression,” was “not about slavery…and that the antebellum Southern states had every right to secede.”
Beirich said that while Livingston did leave the LOS when it became especially extreme, “he runs his own incredibly neo-Confederate institute…. A question [for the Koch Foundation] is, why are you affiliated with a person like that? His position is not a serious historical position. The South did not just fight for states’ rights—it was about slavery. These are distorted views of history.”
DeRosa remains part of Abbeville as well, and other ex-LOS Institute scholars including DiLorenzo have recently been active with the group.
Several former LOS scholars are also part of the Mises Institute, a think tank formed in 1982 that the Southern Poverty Law Center says has “strong neo-Confederate principles.” Its founder, Lewis Rockwell, argued that the Civil War “transformed the American regime from a federalist system based on freedom to a centralized state that circumscribed liberty in the name of public order.”
At least nine Mises Institutes scholars have worked with LOS, according to the UnKoch report, and Mises employs several Koch-funded academics. Mises scholars collectively received $12.5 million in academic funding from the Charles Koch Foundation between 2005 and 2016.
“Through their support for these faculty, the Koch Foundation is subsidizing and strengthening an already booming wave of violent, alt-right anarcho-capitalists,” said Ralph Wilson, the UnKoch report’s author and the group’s co-founder.
When asked for detailed comment about several aspects of this reporting, the Koch Foundation issued a two-sentence reply to The Nation: “The Charles Koch Foundation’s criminal justice reform work is rooted in the principles of human dignity. We do not tolerate racism in any shape or form.”
THE PRISON-TO-WHITE-SUPREMACY PIPELINE
But Florida Atlantic students aren’t the only minds that DeRosa is being paid to shape. After getting commitments from the Koch Foundation and GEO Group, one of the world’s largest private-prison companies, DeRosa got state certification for a pilot program, the Inmate Civics Education Enhancement Project. He taught the first class at a South Bay, Florida, GEO Group prison in 2015.
“It’s disturbing that people of color might be exposed to neo-Confederate ideas in prison,” said Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “If you’re going to find someone to teach in prisons you’d think you could find someone who wasn’t involved with a neo-Confederate hate group.”
Meanwhile, at least four GEO Group executives have served on the Florida Atlantic University board of trustees. GEO Group had an agreement with FAU to donate $6 million to the university in 2013 in exchange for naming rights over the football stadium, but it was withdrawn because it sparked significant controversy. “GEO is very much committed to recidivism. They have a reentry program. They’re amazing,” said DeRosa.
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Feb 25, 2016
Lies the Neo-Confederates Told Me
by Jim Loewen
:{*:{Sociologist James W. Loewen is the author ofLies My Teacher Told Me.}:
Recently Amazon.com listed a new "book," Lies My Teacher Told Me: The True History of the War for Southern Independence, by Clyde Wilson. As the author of the "original" Lies My Teacher Told Me, whose subtitle is "Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong," naturally this intrigued me.
It is not likely that Wilson, professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina, was ignorant of my book when he chose his title. Lies My Teacher Told Me has sold more than a million and a half copies, making it the best-selling book by a living sociologist. Moreover, Chapter 6 treats secession and other unseemly aspects of the Confederacy, putting me clearly in the historical camp that Wilson despises. He calls it "the current fashion in historical interpretation."
So I suppose I'm flattered that Wilson has chosen to appropriate my title for his "book." But not really — because Wilson's "book" gives history a bad name. Book titles are not copyrightable, so I shall not sue, but I do want to give my opinion of this "book" that sounds so familiar.
First, let me explain why I keep calling it a "book," complete with quotation marks. Lies My Teacher Told Me: The True History of the War for Southern Independence is only 38 pages long. So far as I can tell, most of it is a single essay that Wilson published two years earlier on the website of the semi-clandestine Abbeville Institute.[[1]](https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/blog/153737#_ftn1)
Then there is Wilson's level of scholarship. He quotes not a single word from any secession document — indeed, from any source other than Robert E. Lee's farewell address to his troops at Appomattox. From that speech he quotes seven words: Lee's praise of the "valor and devotion" and "unsurpassed courage and fortitude" of Confederate soldiers. I have no quarrel with praising those qualities of the men. Grant paid them the same tribute, calling them "a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought."
Wilson will have nothing to do with that last phrase, however. Instead, he claims, "Although their cause was lost it was a good cause and still has a lot to teach the world today." He then actually asserts that the South Carolina delegates seceded on behalf of states' rights! In Wilson's words, "the Union was no longer to their benefit but had become a burden and a danger. They said: We have acted in good faith and been very patient. But obviously you people in control of the federal government intend permanently to exploit our wealth and interfere in our affairs."
He does not have to contend with why South Carolina's leaders said they seceded, because he does not quote them. In fact, South Carolina's leaders seceded because they were upset with states' rights. In the key document, “Declaration Of The Immediate Causes Which Induce And Justify The Secession Of South Carolina From The Federal Union,” adopted on Christmas Eve of 1860, delegates to the South Carolina secession convention made this clear. We are seceding, they wrote, because “fourteen of the States have deliberately refused for years past to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own statutes for the proof.” Constitutional obligations? Sounds pretty vague! But the delegates go right on to spell out why they are leaving:
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: “No person held to service or labor in one State under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”
The “general government,” South Carolina goes on, “passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery has led to a disregard of their obligations.”
South Carolina went on to list the states whose attempts to exercise states’ rights deeply offended them:
The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the acts of Congress, or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from the service of labor claimed....
South Carolina goes on to charge other states with other unpardonable offenses. New York, for example, no longer allows owners the right to take slaves through New York or use them temporarily there. South Carolina is outraged. Some states, South Carolina charges, let African Americans vote. Who votes in America was at this time, of course, a state's right, until the passage of the 15th Amendment, two whole eras later, but the delegates refer to the Dred Scott decision and are offended that New Hampshire, for instance, lets blacks vote.
This key document from South Carolina is all about — and all against — states' rights. It makes no claim that the federal government has wronged the South. Why would it? Under Buchanan, South Carolina had no problem with the federal government.
What about Mississippi, next to secede? What do its leaders say about why they seceded?
They copied South Carolina’s title, passing “A Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union” in January. “[I]t is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course,” they begin.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery ¯ the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.
Secession is not the only subject that Wilson gets backward. He denies all agency to the Confederacy in the coming of the war. “The U.S. government, under the control of a minority party, launched a massive invasion of the South,” Wilson writes. Well, yes, eventually it did, but first, the Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter, for starters. No administration could have simply turned the other cheek to that initiation of war and remain in office. James McPherson makes this point at length in his 1989 essay, “The War of Southern Aggression.”
Wilson also repeats the old “Lost Cause” claim that only overwhelming numbers caused the South’s defeat. Indeed, he goes that claim one further: “Though they had four times our resources,[[2]](https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/blog/153737#_ftn2) they were not able to defeat our men, so the U.S. government launched an unprecedentedly brutal war of terrorism again [sic] Southern women and children, white and black.” Nonsense! Even other neo-Confederate historians admit that Northern soldiers defeated “our men” at Appomattox, as well as Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and many other battlefields, ending in Bentonville, North Carolina, in 1865.
As for the “unprecedentedly brutal war of terrorism against Southern women and children,” Wilson apparently does not realize why plantation mistresses often secreted gold and jewelry on their persons when U.S. forces came through. Because it worked! That is, U.S. soldiers rarely touched white women. Nor does Wilson seem to know that C.S.A. policy in the North was to seize all African Americans they met and sell them as slaves, whether they had ever been enslaved or not. Indeed, within sight of the unfortunate and soon-to-be-moved bronze Confederate soldier at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Rockville, Maryland, Confederates under J.E.B. Stuart seized over a hundred African Americans and dragged them to Virginia in chains.
Wilson’s project is blatantly anti-intellectual. “History is human experience,” he writes, “and you do not have to be an ‘expert’ to have an opinion about human experience.” To be sure, I am on record as favoring helping every student to do history, but not just based on their “opinion about human experience.” "People have a right to their own opinions, but not to their own facts," I wrote some years ago. (George Zimmerman made these sentences modestly notorious by using them on his website.) "Evidence must be located, not created," I went on, "and opinions not backed by evidence cannot be given much weight." One wonders how Wilson dealt with those occasional hapless students at the University of South Carolina who argued based on their own experience, rather than from oral history or documents. For that matter, what is one's "human experience" about the Civil War in 2016? Conversations with your dad? Does not one's view of the Civil War have to be grounded in research?
Wilson does not agree. “History is not some disembodied truth,” he assures us. “All history is the story of somebody's experience," he goes on. "It is somebody's history. When we talk about the War it is our history we are talking about, it is a part of our identity. To tell libelous lies about our ancestors is a direct attack on who we are.” Therefore, he implies, we don’t need evidence. There is "more than one perspective," he writes, and he implies that all perspectives are legitimate. So much for the discipline of history.
Early in his essay, Wilson does say something with which I can whole-heartedly agree. “It is useless to proclaim the courage, skill, and sacrifice of the Confederate soldier while permitting him to be guilty of a bad cause.” The Confederate cause was “bad.” Grant got that right. Wilson cannot, without traducing the evidence, make secession on behalf of slavery into a good cause. Therefore, it is time for him (and his neo-Confederate clique at Abbeville) to surrender. Further resistance is futile.
Across the South, from before the 1860 crisis down to now, some white Southerners have worked on behalf of the rights of Southerners of all races. Their stories go unsung today because from 1890 to 2015, the white South was busy singing the misbegotten praises of the miscreants who took it out of the Union. Now much of that activity has ceased, has even reversed. The new activity — taking down the statues of Jefferson Davis, J.E.B. Stuart, and Robert E. Lee in favor of people like James Longstreet, Elizabeth Van Lew, and Print Matthews – that is a historical project worthy of Dixie. This work helps us actually to realize “The True History of the War for Southern Independence.” Recognizing such people helps African Americans realize not all whites were racist, while providing white Southerners with positive role models. How much better for the world and the history profession this new activity is, compared to the false mythologies that Wilson still hawks – misusing my book title to do it.
[1]The rest of this article is based on the Abbeville essay. Thus I do not have to buy the "book" by sending Amazon $5.38, some of which would trickle down to Abbeville and Wilson. Donald Livingston, a philosophy professor retired from Emory, operates the Abbeville Institute from his house. Besides Wilson, its other marquee member is Thomas DiLorenzo, the notorious anti-Lincoln writer.
[2]See "Getting Even the Numbers Wrong" in Loewen, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, for a critique of this claim that overwhelming numbers caused the Confederate defeat.
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GGL 6 26
[### Donald Livingston
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Donald_Livingston](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Livingston)
Donald W. Livingston is a former Professor of Philosophy at Emory University and a David Hume scholar. In 2003 he founded the Abbeville Institute, ...Read more
Missing: HUMANE | Show results with: HUMANE
[### The Moral Challenge of Slavery and Confederate ... Abbeville Institute
https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org › the-moral-challenge-...](https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/the-moral-challenge-of-slavery-and-confederate-emancipation/)
Feb 24, 2021 — Donald Livingston is the founder of the Abbeville Institute and retired Professor of Philosophy at Emory University.Read more
Missing: HUMANE | Show results with: HUMANE
[### Donald Livingston Abbeville Institute
https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org › author › donald-livin...](https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/author/donald-livingston/)
Don Livingston discusses Northern profit and interest in slavery at the Abbeville Institute Summer School, July 5-8, 2022, at Seabrook Island, SC.Read more
Missing: IHS | Show results with: IHS
[### the union and the confederacy
Mises Institute
https://cdn.mises.org › ...](https://cdn.mises.org/16_2_4.pdf)
by DW Livingston · 2002 · Cited by 1 — An Analysis of President Lincoln's Legal Arguments. Against Secession,” and Donald W. Livingston, “The Secession Tradition in. America,” in Secession, State and ...Read more
45 pages
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[### The Real Reason the South Seceded by Donald Livingston
YouTube · Abbeville Inst
538.4K+ views · 10 years ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S96iQYL0bw)
47:17
Dr. Donald Livingston discusses "The Real Reason the South Seceded," at the Abbeville Institute Stone Mountain Conference, October 2015.
10 key moments in this video
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[### The Abbeville institute says abolitionists were actually ...
Reddit · r/badhistory
60+ comments · 5 years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/likk5b/the_abbeville_institute_says_abolitionists_were/)
Hello all, a few months ago I made a post here about Donald Livingston, a former professor of Emory university and founder of the Abbeville ...Read more
Missing: IHS | Show results with: IHS
[### Donald Livingston | Historica Wiki - Fandom
Historica Wiki
https://historica.fandom.com › wiki › Donald_Livingston](https://historica.fandom.com/wiki/Donald_Livingston)
Donald Livingston (1938-) was an American academic and the founder of the neo-Confederate Abbeville Institute. Donald Livingston was raised in South ...
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[### Secretive Scholars of the Old South
The Chronicle of Higher Education
https://www.chronicle.com › article › scholars-nostalgic...](https://www.chronicle.com/article/scholars-nostalgic-for-the-old-south-study-the-virtues-of-secession-quietly/)
Dec 6, 2009 — Donald W. Livingston, a philosophy professor at Emory U., sits in a historic plantation house. He founded the Abbeville Institute, ...Read more
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[### How the North Prolonged and Profited from Slavery, Part I by ...
YouTube · Abbeville Inst
9.6K+ views · 3 years ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeLF8Qxef_c)
49:15
Don Livingston discusses Northern profit and interest in slavery at the Abbeville Institute Summer School, July 5-8, 2022, ...
10 key moments in this video
Missing: HUMANE | Show results with: HUMANE
[### Lies the Neo-Confederates Told Me
History News Network
https://www.historynewsnetwork.org › blog](https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/blog/153737)
Feb 25, 2016 — Donald Livingston, a philosophy professor retired from Emory, operates the Abbeville Institute from his house. Besides Wilson, its other marquee ...Read more
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