neo-confederacy

see confederacy south

tag so

see 2 am red blue polarization

see statue monuments

see story 1 CRT BS

see CRT desantis slaves got job training

i'm forgetting how this cat is distinct; 9/20 it used to be a pretty small and out- there club of OG's but potus and VP speaking up for confed monument and base names?

segregation/anti-busing a sort of model to resistance to fed gubmint (tho ironic b/c trump in WH and control senate)

see lost cause uber1: https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-5492

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AN 6 26

A former Republican presidential adviser just called out President Donald Trump for promoting treasonous ideas on his social media accounts.

“A gift generated by AI. Except there's a problem — can you count the stars?” Steve Schmidt, who advised President George W. Bush, posted on his Substack on Tuesday. “The star count of the Confederacy. The Confederate flag is, and always has been, the MAGA flag. And so on this — the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg, on the edge of the 250th anniversary of our independence — when a corrupt Supreme Court will decide whether the 14th Amendment means what it says and says what it means.”

The Confederacy consisted of 11 states that illegally seceded from the United States of America in 1860 and 1861 to preserve slavery within their jurisdictions and guarantee that it could be spread to the Western territories acquired during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). President Abraham Lincoln, who like Trump was a Republican but unlike Trump supported the Constitution over far right elements in the South, ultimately defeated the Confederacy, preserved the Union and emancipated the slaves.

“On that day, this day, Donald Trump has — is — once again raised high the stars and bars, the symbol of treason that killed 800,000 Americans and is a ready replacement for the swastika at European hate rallies,” Schmidt wrote. “It is very simple, and it is what it has been for ten years: on America, or Trump. But know this — any man who would post this abomination is no American president. What he is, is Jefferson Davis's successor. A traitor to American liberty.”

As of 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) determined there were roughly 2,000 Confederate monuments remaining in the United States.

“While the term ‘domestic terror’ did not exist back then, the actions of those who championed the so-called Lost Cause mirror what we see today,” Lecia Brooks, the SPLC’s Chief of Staff and Culture, wrote to Salon in 2022. “All of this iconography was used as racist props to intimidate and remind African Americans of their place, first and foremost. Their widespread placement allowed the Confederacy to reimagine its treasonous acts as a noble effort while minimizing their brutal role in preserving slavery.”

She added, “The perception of being disrespected, dishonored, rejected, or treated as inferior — what psychological professionals call ‘narcissistic wounds’ — can be powerful drivers of violence.”

Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 presidential election is similar to the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause” mythology, according to experts, because both rely on myths to justify their cause. While the Lost Cause mythology claims that the Confederacy fought for a noble cause rather than being treasonous white supremacists, Trump’s Big Lie holds that the 2020 election was stolen from him even though the president has long claimed that any contest he loses was rigged (including the Emmy Awards for not nominating his reality TV show “The Apprentice,” the 2016 Republican Iowa caucuses and the 2016 popular vote) and his claims about the 2020 election were conclusively debunked by the American legal system.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” conservative writer George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post in February. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

Upon taking office in both of his terms, Trump has tried to promote Confederate iconography such as by hanging a portrait of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at the West Point library.

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LILSIS Charles Koch's Neo-Confederate Network - LittleSis

Charles Koch's Neo-Confederate Network

by ralephwilson

Created on March 20, 2018. Last updated on September 24, 2018.

Koch and the Radical Austrians

We believe that understanding the Charles Koch Foundation’s material support for, and ideological confluence with, a network of Neo-Confederate and white nationalist scholars is integral to understanding the Koch-network’s past and present efforts to resegregate our nation’s schools, dismantle voting rights, and expand the prison industrial complex -- all at the expense of people of color.

MARSHALL DEROSA

apee MISES INST LEague of south

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CMD REF 1 millions-of-students-are-quietly-being-taught-the-koch-1823742091

VID?

Millions of Students Are Quietly Being Taught the Koch Brothers’ Whitewashed Version of Black History

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hegs put confed statue back in arlington, changed base names bACK

rww 8 25

08/08/2025

Peter Montgomery

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is promoting a CNN interview with Christian nationalist Douglas Wilson in which Wilson asserts that women should not have the right to vote. Hegseth boosted the interview on social media, adding “All of Christ for All of Life.”

Notorious for publishing a book downplaying the evils of slavery, Wilson publicly stakes out extreme Christian nationalist positions. As People For the American Way President Svante Myrick noted in a recent column for The Hill, in the kind of Christian nation Wilson wants the U.S. to be, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and other non-Christians would not be allowed to hold public office — not even liberal Christians. There would be no public expressions of other faiths allowed, because “the public spaces would belong to Christ.” He would like sodomy to be a felony in all 50 states and have the Apostles’ Creed inserted into the U.S. Constitution.

Hegseth, who seems intent on purging women from the top ranks of the military, belongs to a Wilson-affiliated church in Tennessee, and he has attended the new church Wilson has planted in DC to boost his influence over the conservative Christians who work in the Trump administration.

The Idaho-based Wilson already exerts influence nationally through the Canon Press publishing house, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a network of “classical” Christian academies, and a cadre of far-right “theobros” like Joel Webbon who promote a similar patriarchal Christian nationalist ideology.

Hegseth has begun hosting monthly Christian prayer services during working hours at the Pentagon. Brooks Potteiger, the pastor of his Wilson-affiliated church in Tennessee, was the main speaker. Joshua Haymes, another pastor at the church, has claimed that the Founding Fathers had not envisioned “mosques being erected” and publicly asserted, "The First Amendment was designed to ensure that every American can be any kind of CHRISTIAN he wants. It was not designed to ensure every American has the right to publicly worship demons. False religion can and should be banned from public life."

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SEE HEGSETH ~ DEI JACKIE ROBINSON MEMORY HOLE

AN 6 25

'Making America racist again': Trump slammed for renaming military bases after 'traitors'

Ailia Zehra

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no lnx

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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no lnx

Alternet

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.

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).

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.”

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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

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.

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…

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see story 1

an 12 23 no lnx

What Nikki Haley’s gaffe reveals about the GOP

John Stoehr

December 28, 2023

The new Nikki Haley news is that she refused to say that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. During an event in New Hampshire, she said that the bloodiest conflict on US soil was about, well, anything but slavery: “how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” she said, among other ridiculous things.

Magdi Jacobs, an Editorial Board contributor, said that “the fascinating thing about Haley's response was her discomfort. You could feel her flailing as she reached for the perfect combo of a pre-Donald Trump conservative ‘states’ rights’ answer to appeal to centrist voters, all while knowing that the insurrectionists want more racist red meat.”

“This is a balance no one can strike,” Magdi concluded. “It shows how fundamentally weak the current GOP is, even if our political media doesn't want to admit it. You can't win without Trump. I firmly believe – and I think Haley does, too – that you can't win with him either.”

More precisely (and I think Magdi would agree) is that this balance is impossible to strike because there’s nowhere to put it. There’s no such thing as a moderate position inside today’s Republican Party. There’s no foundation on which to build the broad coalition of voters that’s necessary to winning (ie, candidates need more than a base.) If such a position existed, Haley would have found it. It doesn’t, so all she can do is reach for a reason, any reason, as the true cause of the Civil War.

To her credit, Haley quickly walked back her remarks. Perhaps she sensed something was at risk in sounding so unreasonable. “Of course, the Civil War was about slavery,” she said. “We know that. That’s the easy part of it.” Then she went on to say that it was about “more than that,” citing, among other ridiculous things, “the role of government.”

That she walked back her initial remarks may seem “reasonable,” but it won’t matter. Remember, even if she wanted to strike a balance between “conservative states’ rights” and “racist red meat” – and that’s apparently what she wanted to do – there is no foundation inside the Republican Party on which to put it. There is no moderate position.

To be a moderate, you have to sound reasonable, but according to David Atkins, a frequent contributor to the Washington Monthly, the GOP base “doesn’t want even the perception of a more reasonable candidate. They want a dictator to punish their enemies.”

“Haley has zero chance of winning” the presidential election, David told me. “Even if she did win New Hampshire, it wouldn’t help her any more than it did Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Pete Buttigieg in 2020.”

There’s always makebelieve, though. Fortunately, Haley has a lot of help in that regard. The billionaire Koch brothers gave her their blessing. So did the popular governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu. They portray Haley as the champion of “conservative values,” as if “conservative values” was still shorthand for “moderate,” and as if Donald Trump’s gravity has not pulled the entire party to the far right.

While makebelieve is a powerful force in politics, it’s probably not going to be enough for Haley or any of the other GOP candidates. Oh, sure, they did OK while the neutral press was casting them as “legitimate alternatives” to Trump. But once the neutral press gets bored – and the neutral press always gets bored – whatever promise these “legitimate alternatives” once had melts into the air. It happened to Ron DeSantis. It happened to Vivek Ramaswamy. It will probably happen to Haley. Everything begins and ends with Trump. As Magdi said, the GOP can’t win with him and it can’t win without him.

In the following interview with me, David Atkins explains not only why he thinks Haley is doomed, but why, in 2024, the Republicans are, too.

JS: New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu endorsed Republican candidate Nikki Haley after the Koch network did. Could that be enough for her to win New Hampshire? And will that matter in the long run?

DA: GOP megadonors need to come to terms with the reality that their base cannot be controlled. They let the MAGA flames burn out of control and now they get to reap the whirlwind. Haley has zero chance of winning absent some issue impacting Trump’s health, because the GOP base doesn’t want even the perception of a more reasonable candidate. They want a dictator to punish their enemies.

And let’s be clear: Haley is also a radical rightwing extremist, as her embrace of a six-week abortion ban makes clear. She just doesn’t seem like she wants to destroy the entire federal bureaucracy, send Democrats to gulags, weaponize the Justice Department and the IRS against all their domestic opponents, and institute mass deportation camps of immigrants. So she’s not the candidate of the GOP base, which does want those things and wants Trump to deliver them.

The Republican Party’s base isn’t in the thrall of Trumpism; Trump is the avatar of their desires, which is why he will be the nominee. Also, even if Haley did win New Hampshire, it wouldn’t help her any more than it did Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Pete Buttigieg in 2020.

JS: You said the culture war is over. Taylor Swift won, Elon Musk lost. I have written that obituary, too, only to see myself proven wrong.

DA: The culture war is over in the sense that people under the age of 50 in the areas of the country that make up more than 80 percent of the national GDP despise the theocratic conservatism that animates Republican activists. That isn’t going to change.

This doesn’t mean that Republicans can’t win elections, and institute rearguard policy actions, like restricting abortion and LGBT rights. They can. The threat of hard-right fascist dictatorship is very real.

But most of the culture wars can be explained by the fact that the marketplace responds primarily to 18- to 45-year-old consumers in cities, while the electoral system responds primarily to 65-plus-year-olds in exurbia. The electoral system can produce a fascist takeover, but it will do so by oppressing a majority that wants nothing to do with it. Such tyrannies rarely last for long.

In the meantime, the weight of popular culture is increasingly shifting to treat cultural progressivism as normative, if for no other reason than that’s the population advertisers want to appeal to. The engines of capitalism are working against social conservatives now, which is why you see such a growing rift between the evangelical base and the urbanite business Republican crowd.

JS: You said the GOP will lose 2024. You cited the fact that they have lost every special election. Special elections attract partisans. Presidential election attracts everyone. Am I wrong in noting the difference?

DA: It’s no secret that Trump and Biden at the top of the ticket will make for an interesting dynamic in 2024, since neither are popular, at least at the moment. But in this environment, a generic Democrat is consistently beating a generic Republican. If the public’s concerns about both Trump and Biden as individuals were sidelined, and the voters were to choose a party and its policies, Democrats would be marching into a confident victory in 2024.

The key will be to remind voters of the tremendous legislative accomplishments of the Biden administration, emphasize Trump’s rampant criminality and danger to democracy, and remind people that no matter what they think of the candidates, the policy choices are very real. Republican rule would be a cruel disaster.

JS: I think the GOP is going to impeach Biden. How does that factor into your thinking, if it does, that the Republicans are going to lose 2024?

DA: Republicans want to play tit-for-tat by impeaching Biden to take some of the sting out of Trump’s double impeachments. More generally, if they can make impeachment into a routine partisan clown show, then it minimizes and defangs the one tool in the Constitution that’s designed to stop an authoritarian, criminal unitary executive.

The flip side of doing this is that any impeachment of Biden by Republicans on flimsy pretexts is likely to have as minimal an impact on voters as Trump’s impeachments apparently have.

JS: What if there's a major polling error and Trump isn't really a mile ahead of every other Republican candidate? Most of us just assume he's going to be the nominee. Iowa and New Hampshire might be stunners?

DA: What’s particularly interesting about Trump seizing the GOP nomination is the low-key panic among many Republican activists. While Trump’s indictments have so far not impacted his popularity, we are in uncharted territory. It’s impossible to predict what impact multiple public trials and possible felony convictions of the sitting GOP nominee might have on public polling and electoral outcomes.

One could speculate that the polling might be wrong, and GOP voters in Iowa and New Hampshire might choose a different nominee out of self-preservation. But Trump has developed a cult-like following, and one thing that we know about cults is that they are largely impervious to even their leaders going to jail. If anything, it makes them feel like martyrs. So I find it extremely unlikely that Iowa and New Hampshire will surprise us by selecting a Haley or Ron DeSantis.

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rww

01/02/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Trump flunks 3 key tests following deadly New Orleans attack

Within hours of the New Year’s attack in New Orleans, the president-elect simultaneously flunked tests of accuracy, decency and credibility.

David Edwards @ Raw Story: Christian MAGA TV host calls for government 'blanket crackdown on mosques' after attacks

David Brody, a Christian pro-MAGA TV host on Real America's Voice, called for a "blanket crackdown on mosques" by the government after two potential attacks on New Year's Day.

Hemant Mehta @ Friendly Atheist: Oklahoma's new social studies standards go all in on Christian Nationalism

As part of his ongoing efforts to brainwash children into Christianity, Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters just released the new standards for public school social studies classes. (These are the required topics teachers must incorporate into their lessons.) And, as expected, the standards include all kinds of religious indoctrination.

Kevin Drum @ Jabberwocking: Trump already planning to break the law

Trump isn't going after gray areas. If the Journal is right, he plans to enact policies that he flat out knows to be illegal. He's just hoping that his hand-picked Supreme Court will let him do it.

[Daniel Desrochers @ The Kansas City Star](https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article297317844.html "(opens in a new window)"): Josh Hawley thinks America needs a religious revival. Is this man helping him find it?

> H.W. Crocker III thinks Western civilization is in trouble. He supports conservative Christian moral values and has decried the rise of a new, secular America where a growing number of people answer “none” to surveys asking which religion they practice. He’s lauded the Confederacy and its soldiers and generals in books like the “Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War” and “Robert E. Lee on Leadership.” And, this year, he picked up a new job: communications consultant for Sen. Josh Hawley’s Senate campaign.

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an edit bd 11 23

there exists in this country a small community of people who grew up with religious authoritarians, but no longer lives among them. As a consequence of having grown up with them, this small community knows something that the rest of the country doesn’t know – that religious authoritarians may sound like kooks, but they’re extremely dangerous.

This small community knows the kookiness is the point. If religious authoritarians can make people, especially young people, believe anything, they can control them, not just their choices, but the way they think. If they think the choice is between individual identity and group identity, they will gladly surrender their individualidentity.

This is why the small community I’m talking about no longer lives among religious authoritarians. They can’t, not without experiencing psychic death. They understand the subtle dangers of living among people who believe that everyone in the group must think and act and speak the same way, and that a difference of opinion is betrayal.

This small community I’m talking about, because they have such intimate knowledge of religious authoritarians, knows something else that the rest of the country does not know. They know the unique horror of witnessing “normal people,” which is to say, people who did not grow up among religious authoritarians, laughing at the religious authoritarians and all the unbelievably kooky things that they say.

This unique horror is not a consequence of religious insult. The small community I’m talking about started doubting everything they were taught as children a long time ago. This unique horror is a consequence of knowing what the rest of the country doesn’t know – that the kookiness is the tool by which religious authoritarians exert control. That’s not something to laugh at, then dismiss as inconsequential.

And yet that’s what the rest of the country seems to be doing when religious authoritarians, such as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, say things that are stupendously kooky. “Normal people,” which is to say, people who did not grow up among religious authoritarians, seem to think that Johnson and his comrades can’t possibly believe what they say, so what they say can be dismissed as partisan politics.

The question, for those of us who are part of the small community I’m talking about, isn’t about the dangers posed by religious

authoritarians. We already understand them. Rather, the question is about getting “normal people,” who can’t possibly understand the trauma of trying and failing to live among people who demand psychic death as the price of membership into the group, to understand the danger.

I posed that question to Matthew Sheffield. He seems to be a fellow member of the small community I’m talking about. He’s also an outcast of the rightwing media apparatus that labors to hide the dangers of religious authoritarianism. He’s now committed to pluralistic democracy, he said, as the founder of the Flux Media Network.

“The beliefs of Mike Johnson and his fellow extremist Christians are so idiotic that the natural reaction for many non-religious people is to point and laugh – not realizing that evil is usually also ridiculous.”

JS: You said: "Many people who are secular or non-fundamentalist theists don't pay attention to the disturbing worldview of people like new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson." Can you explain please?

MS: Christian fundamentalism has been a minority opinion in the United States since Biblical literalism became a movement in the early 20th century, inspired by the work of people like John Nelson Darby.

In the south, this theology was explicitly intertwined with the "Lost Cause" myth about the Confederacy's defeat in the Civil War into a regional form of Christian nationalism that began spreading into other regions at the expense of mainline and progressive Protestantism.

The eventual religious identity politics that emerged, Confederate Christianity, is not popular. Its doctrines are obscure and often devolve into picayune debates about Bible verses that most people don’t know.

The southern flavor of its sermonizing and its explicit anti-intellectualism make Confederate Christianity distasteful. A vast majority would rather have their teeth pulled than listen to obvious scammers like evangelical preacher Kenneth Copeland.

Despite its comparative obscurity, only 10 percent of Americans are committed Christian nationalists, because it is a political identity more than a religious one. Confederate Christianity punches far above its weight thanks to hundreds of national and regional groups who motivate fundamentalist citizens to vote.

Most journalists have only been trained to be interested in the activities of prominent elected officials, so more obscure figures like Mike Johnson have long managed to evade their scrutiny.

At the local level, far-right Christians often mask their rhetoric in secular language, so they are often able to pull off things like

taking over school boards without others noticing.

JS: It seems to me that the problem of explaining the dangers is sheer disbelief. How do communicators like you address that problem?

MS: The beliefs of Mike Johnson and his fellow extremist Christians are so idiotic that the natural reaction for many non-religious people is to point and laugh – not realizing that evil is usually also ridiculous.

For those who are Christian but not fundamentalist, a common reaction is to simply roll their eyes.

I get where they're coming from.

Johnson believes that Noah's ark was real and that humans lived with dinosaurs. These are asinine superstitions. But he also believes homosexuality is a Satan-inspired choice that should be illegal and that birth control should be criminalized. Voltaire's aphorism that believing in absurdities leads one to justify atrocities is absolutely true.

The vicious ignorance of Johnson and his fellow Confederate Christians presents a real conundrum for those of us who are committed to pluralistic democracy. People seem to have an easier time recognizing screaming dictator-wannabes like Donald Trump for what they are than they do with folksy authoritarians.

That realization is why I decided to launch a comedy news discussion podcast called "Doomscroll" with my friend Lisa Curry.

Ridiculing the stupid beliefs of the Christian right is an important thing to do because there are a lot of smart people who were born and raised as fundamentalists who innately know that the beliefs are false and contradictory. But the humorous jabs must always carry the larger truth that these ideas are not only foolish, they are dangerous.

JS: On the funding of truly liberal media, you said there's no shortage of money. It's just spent in ways different from rightwing

media.

MS: As my friend Anne Nelson has documented in her book, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, there is a lot of money out there for center-to-left activists and causes. Unfortunately, much of this money is not spent with an eye toward public advocacy. From the very beginning of their movement, reactionary elites realized that they were a small minority but that it didn't matter because they could use voter suppression and advocacy media to suppress their opponents' voters and whip up their own.

The other crucial advantage of funding advocacy media is that these investments are more durable and can eventually become

self-sustaining, as Fox, talk radio, and far-right podcasts have become.

There are tens of millions of people who want to hear a progressive message in the media, but Democratic donors seem to prefer wasting their money on advertising that's ineffective and short-lived.

This needs to change, especially since rightwing propaganda is beginning to fill in the gaps in local media left by the decay of

traditional media outlets. Those who control the information will control the age. People who believe in liberal values need to fund

them.

JS: You have explored "how American evangelicalism is collapsing on itself." That's a bold statement that I have to hear more about.

MS: People often perceive religion and science to be in conflict, but up until the last 100 years or so, they were the same thing. The

Bible, Quran, Vedas and other ancient scriptures were not just theological sources. They were also scientific explanations for how

things came to be and how they work. But once the disciplines of science, history and linguistics emerged, it soon became evident to educated people that these books were about as accurate as Homer's Iliad.

Unfortunately, while the academic world came to accept evolution, the pagan origins of Judaism, and a host of other discoveries, this knowledge did not filter down to religious fundamentalists. The central problem of our age is that religious fundamentalism has been utterly humiliated in the intellectual realm and that its adherents (of any faith) are only now realizing it – to their great

consternation.

JS: You said: "Hope is the belief that we're capable of something better and the determined desire to make it so." Can you go into that more?

MS: The continuously successful efforts of pro-choice advocates to protect abortion rights through ballot initiatives demonstrates that people like us are the majority, but we must use this power to usher Confederate Christianity into the dust-bin of history.

Public opinion surveys show that people born after around 1975 are dramatically less likely to believe in scriptural literalism, and that each successive generation of Americans is more supportive of racial justice, bodily autonomy and sound reasoning.

The reactionaries who took over the GOP have been aware of this. The minoritarian strategy that they were able to effect for several decades was predicated on manipulating people through religion, sexism or racism into supporting their corrupt and authoritarian candidates.

As I discussed recently on my other podcast, "So This Just Happened," the Christian right knows that its time is coming to an end.

Far-right former Senator Rick Santorum spoke for many of his compatriots this past Election Day when he lamented that it was a

"secret sauce for disaster" that young Americans are interested in supporting abortion access and decriminalization of marijuana.

It's important to celebrate victories like we experienced in 2023, but the arc of history will only bend if we make it. Demographics are not destiny. The future belongs to those who can achieve it.

---

an no lnx orig

Thom Hartmann August 27, 2023

America is rapidly bifurcating — becoming two nations — and one of the main drivers of the process is a federal system that encourages Red states to mooch off Blue states, using essentially stolen tax money to reinvent the old Confederacy, “own the libs,” and wage “war on woke.”

Most Red states have become oligarchic white supremacist medieval-like fiefdoms with obscene levels of often multigenerational wealth at the top, extreme poverty at the bottom, and working people, women, and minorities kept in subordinate roles through explicit government and corporate policy.

In this, these Red states are following the once-classic European and later Southern US tradition of a patriarchal, hierarchical society run by male kings, nobles, plantation masters, and wealthy churchmen, with all the work done by serfs, slaves, women, or impoverished wage-slaves.

Frederick Douglass, who was born into Southern slavery, described the South as “a little nation by itself, having its own language, its own rules, regulations, and customs.”

Fewer than 2000 families — six-tenths of one percent of the Southern population — owned more than 50 enslaved people and ruled the oligarchy that we call the Confederacy with an iron fist. The 75 percent of white people in the South during that era who did not own any enslaved persons generally lived in deep poverty.

Women had no rights, queer people were routinely tortured and murdered, education for both enslaved Africans and poor whites was generally outlawed, religious attendance was often mandated, and hunger and disease stalked all but those in the families of the two thousand morbidly rich planter dynasties.

Modern-day Red states are doing their best to recreate that old Confederacy, right down to state Senator Kathy Chism’s new effort to return the Confederate battle flag to Mississippi's state flag. Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence have both emphasized their presidential pledges to restore the names of murderous Civil War traitors to American military bases, celebrating their armed defense of the “values” of the Old South.

Today’s version of yesteryear’s plantation owners are called CEOs, hedge and vulture fund managers, and the morbidly rich.

They use the power of political bribery given them by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court — with Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking Citizens United vote on behalf of his sugar daddy Harlan Crow — to lord over their Red states, regardless of the will of those states’ citizens.

Working people in Red states are kept in poverty by “Right to Work for Less” laws based on the GOP’s 1947 Taft-Hartley Act (passed over Harry Truman’s veto), deprived of healthcare by their governors’ refusal to expand Medicaid to cover all low-wage working people, and draconian cuts along with byzantine bureaucratic obstacles to getting state aid ranging from housing support to food stamps to subsidized daycare to unemployment insurance.

Women are returning to chattel status in Red states, the property of their fathers or husbands, their bondage enforced by bounty systems and the threat of imprisonment should they try to assert agency over their own bodies.

Multiple Red states have outlawed teaching the actual history of slavery, Jim Crow, and the ongoing violence and persecution suffered by racial, gender, and religious minorities. Many are using government tax revenues to subsidize typically-all-white “Christian” religious schools, a trend spreading across Republican-controlled states like an out-of-control fungus.

Almost a dozen GOP-controlled states have passed laws criminalizing protests against Republican policies, and, writes The Atlantic quoting the International Center for Non-for-Profit Law, “several of those states have simultaneously provided civil or criminal protection for drivers who hit [and kill] protesters…”

Others have banned books and fired teachers who dare discuss diversity or basic sex education. Many, as I wrote here yesterday, are withholding state funds from banking and investment institutions that consider the environment, social justice, or governance on behalf of the working class and the poor (ESG) when making business decisions.

Climate change, they’ll tell you as they take campaign funds from the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it’s created, is a hoax perpetrated by liberal scientists who are somehow “getting rich” by warning the world of its consequences.

Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis no longer rule the South on behalf of the notorious “2000 families” but their spiritual heirs, today’s Red state governors, would make them proud with their restrictions on voting, encouragement of armed white supremacist vigilantism, and state tax subsidies for American oligarch billionaires and theircorporateempires.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp — whose family, investigative reporter Greg Palast discovered, was the first to bring enslaved Africans to Georgia— famously signed a law codifying 10-hour voting lines in Black neighborhoods and giving his state the power to throw people off voting rolls without justification in a closed-door ceremony before a painting of one of the 2000 families’ Georgia slave plantations.

It’s said that Red states are trying to take us back to the 1950s. In fact, most are shooting for the 1870s, when women were the property of their husbands, poor children worked 12-hour days for pennies, queer people were invisible, and Black, Asian, Native American, and Hispanic people could be murdered with impunity.

On the other hand, Blue states have embraced 21st-century values of inclusiveness, tolerance, education, healthcare, a clean environment, worker’s rights, higher minimum wages and unionization, gun safety, paid sick leave, and are working to override the electoral college to bring democracy to the race for president.

Most have enacted gun control laws that often include assault weapon bans, outlawed forced “captive audience” union-busting meetings, expanded drug treatment programs, decriminalized marijuana, strengthened abortion rights protections, raised their minimum wages, and are moving quickly to green their economies to mitigate climate change.

They’re offering protections to asylum seekers, women seeking medical care, and transgender individuals fleeing overt persecution in Red states. They celebrate gay marriage and honor the holidays of religious minorities. Women and racial minorities make up large parts of their legislative bodies and occupy many of their governor’s offices.

In this, Blue states are following the vision and values laid out by several of America’s Founders who helped create the first nation in world history espousing the idea that nobody should have to live in poverty and an important role of government was to prevent people from falling through the cracks.

Thomas Paine, for example, laid out a proposal for what we today call Social Security in his pamphlet Agrarian Justice, and Thomas Jefferson created the nation’s first totally free university (the University of Virginia). Half the delegates to the Constitutional Convention spoke against slavery as a curse against our nation’s ideals, although it took a bloody war to end that “peculiar institution” held so tightly in the grip of the 2000 families.

Even in the first years of our republic, the founding generation understood that caring for the public good was an essential function of government, as referenced in the preamble to the Constitution. President George Washington signed the first legislation providing federal funds for poorhouses that including food, clothing, shelter, and medical care along with job training.

Three decades later, when the legislation was up for renewal, President James Madison (the “Father of the Constitution”) vetoed a provision proposed by Southern states that would have cycled those revenues through local churches, writing in his veto message that federal funding of churches — even for charitable antipoverty purposes the government supported — “would be a precedent for giving to religious societies as such a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.”

So, how did we get here and what can we do about it?

Ironically, it turns out that Red states are able to carry out their campaign of reviving the old Confederacy and its values of patriarchy, hierarchy, and wage slavery in large part because Blue states are subsidizing them.

While Donald Trump carried 2,497 counties in the 2020 election compared to Joe Biden’s 477 counties, the Blue counties Biden carried generated a total of 71 percent of the nation’s economic activity.

The fiscal health of Blue states and counties — along with widespread Red state poverty exacerbated by Red State tax breaks for the morbidly rich — accounts for the bizarre reality that Blue states are subsidizing the brutal and retrograde policies of Red states.

A March 2023 report from the Rockefeller Institute lays out how glaring this appropriation of Blue state revenue is by the Red states. In just New York, for example, they write that over a five-year period:

“New York taxpayers have given $142.6 billion more to the federal government than New York residents have received back in federal spending.”

As the Associated Press summarized in an article titled AP FACT CHECK: Blue high-tax states fund red low-tax states:

“Mississippi received $2.13 for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington in 2015, according to the Rockefeller study. West Virginia received $2.07, Kentucky got $1.90 and South Carolina got $1.71.

“Meanwhile, New Jersey received 74 cents in federal spending for tax every dollar the state sent to Washington. New York received 81 cents, Connecticut received 82 cents and Massachusetts received 83 cents.

“California fared a bit better than other blue states. It received 96 cents for every dollar the state sent to Washington.”

When the Biden administration tried to just slightly slow down the Red state gravy train, specifying in the American Rescue Plan that the subsidies to the states for helping people who lost their jobs due to Covid could not be misappropriated and redirected to tax cuts for local billionaires, their politicians — dancing to the tune of their in-state oligarchs — went ballistic. As Forbes documented:

“So far, a total of 18 red states are plaintiffs in five separate lawsuits challenging a provision in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Biden signed into law last month which says that state governments cannot use any of the $350 billion in federal pandemic relief funds coming their way to ‘either directly or indirectly offset a reduction’ in their net tax revenue resulting from state tax cuts.

“In a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, 21 Republican state attorneys general described it as ‘the greatest attempted invasion of state sovereignty by Congress in the history of our Republic.’”

Federal policy fails to equalize revenue flowing to Red states against the tax money they send Washington DC. This loophole in US tax law is driving this bizarre process where citizens in Blue states are forced by law to pay for all-white “Christian” academies, enforcement of abortion restrictions, persecution of asylum seekers and immigrants, and political attacks on queer people.

Red state “welfare queen” governors and legislatures are going to happily continue this grift as long as we let them get away with it. Congress should pass legislation mandating that Red state revenues to DC must at least match 90 percent of the money they get back; 100 percent would be better, and help hugely with our nation’s budget deficit.

It’s time to end Red state welfare!

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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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

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.”

an 620

Why the toxic myth of the ‘Lost Cause’ still appeals to so many white American

blk car w/ blm logo?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/nascar-driver-who-quit-over-confederate-flag-ban-slammed-dems-over-checks-to-illegals/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/confederate-battle-flag-banned-marine-corps-declares-it-a-threat-to-our-core-values/

sons of Confederate Veterans member-turned VA secretary tells Congress he won’t remove headstones engraved with swastikas

620 an

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/sons-of-confederate-veterans-member-turned-va-secretary-tells-congress-he-wont-remove-headstones-engraved-with-swastikas/

eterans Affairs (VA) Secretary Robert Wilkie has refused to remove three headstones engraved with swastikas at the graves of German prisoners of war in national cemeteries in San Antonio and Utah, offering instead to make adjustments that put the markers in “historical context.”

“I happen to think that making sure that when people visit our cemeteries they are educated and informed of the horror is an incredibly important thing to do,” Wilkie testified to the House Military Construction-VA Appropriations subcommittee.

“Erasing these headstones removes them from memory,” he added. “And as we continue to study the Holocaust, the last thing any Holocaust scholar wants to do is erase that memory.”

Subcommittee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., pushed back.

'The Nazi swastika is prohibited in Germany from being displayed, because it is not seen as a reminder to prevent the hatred that it spawned,” she said. “It is seen as something to be snuffed out.”

Wilkie responded that he instead wanted to work with lawmakers to put the anti-Semitic iconography in proper “historical context.”

German law bars the public display of swastikas, and all known monuments which featured the Nazi symbol have been removed or replaced. The headstones in all three U.S. cemeteries feature a swastika circumscribed in an Iron Cross, a medal of valor. Those at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio also bear a phrase honoring Adolf Hitler.

Wasserman Schulz asked Wilkie to testify last week after a military religious freedom watchdog called on the VA to remove the headstones from the prisoner-of-war “Section Z” in Fort Sam, originally reported in Salon.

“The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) condemns in the harshest terms possible the disgusting, disingenuous and dishonest testimony of VA Secretary Robert Wilkie before members of the United States Congress yesterday regarding the sordid matter of Nazi-adorned headstones at the gravesites of the three German POWs from World War II who are buried at two VA National Cemeteries,” MRFF chair Mikey Weinstein, a Jewish Air Force vet and activist, told Salon in an email Friday.

The VA routinely changes out headstones in response to appropriate requests, such as for typographical errors. The military also keeps an official registry of available emblems of belief for placement on government headstones and markers. Neither the Iron Cross nor the swastika appear on the list.

Still, VA officials have claimed that U.S. law prevents them from removing the stones.

Les A. Melnyk, head of public affairs and outreach at the National Cemetery Administration, told Salon in an email that the Trump administration “will continue to preserve these headstones.”

“The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 assigns stewardship responsibilities to federal agencies, including VA and Army, to protect historic resources, including those that recognize divisive historical figures or events. For this reason, VA will continue to preserve these headstones, like every past administration has,” he wrote.

Melnyk would not say whether he knew of any requests filed with past administrations, and a follow-up investigation by Salon could not uncover any.

The VA said it was also obliged to follow international laws guaranteeing enemy combatants burials with full honors.

Norman Rosenshein, an Army vet and former national commander of the Jewish War Veterans of the USA, suggested to The Wall Street Journal that the VA swap out the headstones and preserve them in storage.

Weinstein pointed to what he sees as an ideological through-line in Wilkie.

“Let’s be quite clear who this Robert Wilkie person is: Wilkie’s support of these Nazi headstone is not at all surprising,” he said in an email. “He is a well known and documented advocate of the Civil War Confederacy who has praised Confederate President Jefferson Davis as a ‘martyr’ and an ‘exceptional man in an exceptional age’ while also condemning, in the most ignoble and vicious terms, the abolitionists who opposed slavery as ‘radical,’ ‘mendacious’ and ‘enemies of liberty.'”

The Washington Post reported ahead of Wilkie’s July 2018 Senate confirmation hearings that Wilkie had been a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Wilkie was confirmed anyway.

Then in 2019, CNN reported that, in violation of Senate rules, Wilkie had failed to disclose a speech he gave in 2009 to a chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and a 1995 address in which he praised former Confederate President Jefferson Davis at the U.S. Capitol.

Wasserman Schultz, who will author the VA’s funding bill for the next year, told Wilkie in his hearing Thursday that “this is going to be dealt with one way or another.”

She called on him to follow an investigatory process made available in the National Preservation Act, which would determine whether removal would be inappropriate.

Wilkie argued that would mean he would have to engage in “a very long process” but tried to assure the chairwoman that a compromise could still be reached.

“I don’t think we’re that far off, because I do think that putting those in context in the cemeteries is the way forward,” he said.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trumps-confederacy-loving-fans-accused-of-treason-in-brutal-new-lincoln-project-ad/

another no-holds-barred ad from the Lincoln Project — headed up by Republicans Rick Wilson, George Conway and Steve Schmidt — Donald Trump is linked to the Confederacy and, by extension, treason against the United States.

The ad notes the prevalence of the Confederate flag at Trump rallies — some even bearing his name — and notes, “The men who followed this flag 150 years ago knew what it meant: Treason against their country. Death of the United States,” in the voiceover.

With clips showing the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, the ad goes on to ask, “What does it say that they’re all in for Trump?”

The ad concludes with what might likely become a campaign slogan against the president asking voters, “This is a time for choosing: America or Trump?"

according to CNN, the Lincoln Project isinvesting $500,000 to air that ad in the battleground states of Florida, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Watch below:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/top-us-marine-corps-commander-orders-removal-of-all-confederate-paraphernalia-from-installations-around-the-world/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/instagram-wont-pull-these-racist-violent-russian-inspired-accounts?ref=home

no lnx pix many

Instagram Won’t Pull These Racist, Violent, Russian-Inspired Accounts

HATEFEST

Neo-Confederates are posting murderous scenes and racist memes—when they’re not reusing material from Kremlin trolls. But Instagram says the accounts don’t violate its rules.

Adam Rawnsley

Casey Michel

Published Dec. 16, 2019 5:12AM ET

EXCLUSIVE

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

American racists are reusing some of the ugliest elements of Russia’s election interference operation.

Memes published by some of the worst Kremlin-backed trolls of the 2016 campaign are being echoed online by American neo-Confederates. The Russian accounts, overseen by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), have since been taken down. But American parrot accounts running some of the same racist crap—and worse—are still live on Instagram, an investigation by The Daily Beast and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found. At least one of these live accounts claims to belong to a Russian network persona.

The accounts—which hail the Confederate flag as “Protecting Us From Tyranny Since 1861” and claim that “The Civil War was not about slavery”—highlight the blurry and politically charged boundaries between domestic and foreign trolling. The American racists didn’t need Russia’s help to hate, of course. But the Kremlin supplied a well of ready-made memes for lazy neo-Confederates to post online.

“I think the similarities between these accounts and those of the IRA highlights how complex the IRA operations around elections have been. It is possible that memes originally created by the IRA have found new or renewed life on social media,” Kanishk Karan, a research associate at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, told The Daily Beast. “The way they camouflaged within the political conversations is also a fascinating detail: We’ve reached a point where it is harder to verify whether an online social or political movement is astroturfed or from grassroots participants.”

When Russian trolls went hunting for targets and content during the 2016 election, race was their “preferred target,” according to a Senate Intelligence Committee study.

Instagram

South United, a Russian Facebook and Instagram persona that featured in the IRA’s 2016 meddling campaign, took this theme and ran with it, plastering followers with all kinds of racist, bigoted appeals to the Confederacy.

During the 2016 election, South United was one of the “10 most active IRA-administered Facebook pages,” according to a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. It was also undoubtedly Russian. The ads that South United ran were paid for in rubles using a Russian payment processor, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller cited the page as the work of the IRA in a 2018 indictment of 13 IRA employees and officials.

Some of the images published by South United included racist memes of former President Obama dressed as a Nazi with the caption “Don’t support illegals, support own people.” One meme published by the IRA’s account showed a picture of Black Lives Matter protesters next to the question “Black lives or black thugs?” These memes can still be found on active Instagram accounts that pose as state chapters of the original South United page.

The accounts also published the same racist and neo-Confederate images originally published by Russian trolls, such as one with a Confederate flag middle finger bidding viewers to "Say hi to the Yanks” and another wondering, “How many likes can this battle flag get?” The IRA’s South United watermark can still be viewed on these posts.

It’s unclear when the IRA’s South United Facebook and Instagram accounts were first created, but Twitter users were reposting material from the accounts as early as November 2015. Facebook ad data shows that the IRA’s @South_United Instagram page started running ads that same month. By contrast, the earliest post from among the dozen American-run echo-chamber mimic accounts was in May 2016.

In August of that year, the operators of some of these state chapter Instagram accounts also promoted a Russian-organized pro-Trump rally. As The Daily Beast first reported, the IRA announced a “patriotic state-wide flash mob” in support of Trump’s candidacy on a separate Facebook page it ran called “Being Patriotic” using an image of Hillary Clinton in a prison cell. Two of the state chapter Instagram accounts, @south_united_fl and @south_united_il, promoted the rally using the Hillary image taken from an IRA-run Facebook page.

The accounts still live on Instagram also share considerable overlap with the original Russian page in other ways. All of the accounts, for instance, claim to be state chapters of the original South United page, with names like “South United Iowa” and “South United Tennessee.” They all use a similar logo to the IRA Facebook account, and some posts even use memes with stilted phrases like “History is written By victor...” and “Can it be any simple?”—language reminiscent of the non-native English used in some IRA propaganda memes.

Some of the accounts on Instagram even claim to be directly related to the original Russian page. “South United Louisiana” says it’s “the South United page for the state of Louisiana,” while the “South United Georgia” page says it’s the “@south_united page made for the great people of Georgia.” (The latter was taken down at some point prior to The Daily Beast’s discovery, although the Louisiana page remains live.)

The parrot accounts used not just IRA memes but other inflammatory content from outside the South United network. The accounts reposted a variety of memes along the same lines of Southern political and cultural resentments, including pro-Confederacy, pro-gun, anti-Islam, and anti-Hillary Clinton content. In one particularly egregious example, the @south_united_florida account posted an image of four bodies with gunshot wounds to the heads and the words “King Barrak, Queen Michelle, Usurper Hillary, George Soros” above each corpse.

The Daily Beast made repeated attempts to contact the owners of the Instagram accounts still up but received no reply.

Nathan Gleicher—head of security policy at Facebook, which owns Instagram—said the accounts, for now, haven’t violated company policies aimed at helping users distinguish between “inauthentic behavior and authentic speech.” So they're staying online.

“When we take down influence operations, we take action based on the behavior we see on our platforms, not the content they post,” Gleicher told The Daily Beast. “We’ve seen these manipulation campaigns reuse content created by innocent people.Most of the content shared by coordinated manipulation campaigns isn’t provably false, and would in fact be acceptable political discourse if shared by real people. That’s why content alone is not a strong signal for identifying these operations.” To disinformation researchers at the DFRLab, the Instagram accounts that are still live show signs of being dedicated to amplifying IRA material.

DFRLab researchers found evidence that someone may have used engagement-for-hire services to interact with the American Instagram amplification accounts.A few accounts with defunct jewelry and crystal storefronts posted generic comments on the state chapter network accounts’ images.

Not that the IRA needed much help in amplifying its neo-Confederate content. The IRA’s South United Facebook page reached a height of 138,000 followers and harvested a total of 1.5 million likes and 2.3 million shares before it was shut down in 2017. Of the dozen American state chapter Instagram accounts, none have more than 1,000 followers and most have just a few dozen.

Facebook told The Daily Beast that the parrot network accounts appeared to be authentically American. "It appears that these accounts belong to real people in the United States whose content was likely mimicked by these operations we removed in the past," Gleicher told The Daily Beast.

Instagram

DFRLab researchers found some evidence that the IRA’s neo-Confederate persona may have copied organic memes created by authentic American bigots outside the state chapter network. The IRA’s South United Instagram account published a picture of a Confederate stick person attacking an LGBT pride flag stick person in late 2016—a meme copied from an unrelated American Instagram account posted in 2015.

In other words, the Russians copied the American racists. And the racists copied the Russians. It’s a circle of hate.

During 2016, the Kremlin’s sophisticated understanding of the United States led its propaganda to amplifyit. They invented memes to exploit racism, secure in the knowledge that the memes would find wide purchase in America. But while the larger social-media firms purged the accounts that promoted them, the memes have achieved exactly what the Russians wanted: persistence.

And sadly, material aimed squarely at Confederate sympathizers apparently remains a popular topic for Russian trolls: Facebook announced just two months ago that it had removed dozens of Instagram accounts that originated in Russia, some of which published pro-Confederate material targeted at American audiences.

Adam Rawnsley

adam.rawnsley@thedailybeast.com

Casey Michel

@cjcmichel

How the Daughters of the Confederacy Spoiled Christmas
The Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy marched for decades without a peep from public officials. Just asking about that was enough for two towns to cancel Christmas parades. By Kali Holloway The following was originally published on theDaily Beast. Click to read the article online. For several years, the town of Garner, North Carolina, has held a Christmas parade featuring—along with traditional marching bands, dance troupes and local politicians—floats sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The same is true of the nearby town of Wake Forest, where for more than two decades, SCV and UDC members in gray Civil War uniforms and antebellum hoop skirts have marched along the Christmas parade route while waving Confederate flags. That tradition was suddenly halted this year, after the activist group Move Silent Sam posted video and photos of the neo-Confederate groups in past parades, along with the question: “Is the Town of Garner trying to send the message that racism is welcome in the community?” The answer is “yes.” Both towns have canceled their parades, while making clear that their problem is with “outside agitators” ruining Christmas, not with the Lost Cause loyalists who are part of their Christmas traditions. As online outrage grew, Garner officials announced last month they would be canceling the parade “due to concern that the event could be targeted for disruption.” On Wednesday, Wake Forest Mayor Vivian Jones released a tearful video message announcing the same. Both blamed “outsiders,” not neo-Confederates. “For over 70 years, our community Christmas parade has been a beloved holiday tradition enjoyed by thousands of Wake Forest residents and visitors alike. Not once in all that time, has our event been anything less than a peaceful, family-friendly celebration that highlights the wonderful spirit of our community. But sadly, times have changed, and this year is different,” said Jones, before citing “information... received in recent days” about potential “protests between clashing” outside groups. “The decision to cancel this year’s parade is not a reflection on our community or our wonderful people. Rather, it’s an unfortunate consequence of what happens when outside agitators make it known they will use local events like our parade to sew hate and spark chaos.” That’s a dog whistle to people who miss the fabricated past when we all shut up and got along. Jones didn’t acknowledge how decades with Confederate-flag-waving Civil War apologists in Wake Forest’s Christmas parades felt to black constituents. Instead, she leaned into the boogeyman of “outside agitators” supposedly planning to “use the occasion as a platform to promote their political agenda without any regard for the safety of others” to fret over how “times have changed.” She mourned the “wonderful spirit” of Wake Forest that had been on display in past holiday parades offering unmasked nostalgia for the pre-emancipation South. Similarly, Wake Forest Police Chief Jeff Leonard talked about lawless “outside agitators” and a town nearly deluged by “professional protesters who have no regard for the safety and well-being of others.” If Wake Forest officials were truly worried about a group planning to use the parade for their own highly partisan political ends, they would’ve banned neo-Confederates, along with the Confederate flag, from the Christmas parade route decades ago. Both the SCV and UDC have long been dedicated to propagating the ahistorical Lost Cause mythology, a campaign of racist historical whitewashing in service of white supremacy. The ideology denies black chattel slavery was the cause of the Civil War and suggests black enslavement had a wealth of underrated benefits for both enslavers and those they enslaved. It also casts the Civil War not as the result of the treasonous South’s secession, but as a consequence of the hyper-aggressive North’s intrusion into the affairs of the unspoiled South. Consider it the ultimate myth about “outside agitators” coming in and ruining a perfectly good slaveholding situation. Despite contending they’re merely “heritage organizations”—social clubs for those whose Confederate ancestors fought to defend slavery—the SCV has documented connections to overt hate groups and the most prominent players therein. As Move Silent Sam noted, SPLC-identified Holocaust denier Boyd Cathey was a guest speaker of the Wake Forest SCV as recently as February, and his author biography on numerous websites suggests he’s still a card-carrying member of the organization. Jack Kerwick, whom the North Carolina SCV touted as an honored guest at their annual Confederate Flag Day celebration in March, has penned articles arguing white indentured servants had it “worse” than black enslaved people and mocking the notion that “that there are no differences between blacks and whites in terms of criminality.” Kirk Lyons, head of North Carolina SCV’s “Southern Highland Brigade,” according to the group’s own Facebook page, has a lengthy history of proudly working with racist hate groups. Harold Ray Crews, a white supremacist lawyer involved in a legal campaign to derail the life of Charlottesville beating victim DeAndre Harris, has publicly declared membership in North Carolina SCV and the overtly racist League of the South. Over its 125-year history, the UDC has become the group responsible for erecting more Confederate monuments than any other single entity. In 1926, a North Carolina chapter of the group put up a monument to honor the Ku Klux Klan. From the early 20th century through the 1980s, the UDC wrote and vetted history textbooks for Southern schools to ensure white children were steeped in Lost Cause propaganda to the exclusion of any accurate Southern history. The effort was successful in creating waves of racist white citizens and segregationist leaders. More recently, while publicly declaring themselves apolitical, the UDC has funded—often surreptitiously—efforts to keep Confederate monuments from being removed, generally by filing lawsuits against those who try to remove them. Complicity with the SCV and UDC’s racist goals seems to be a problem that extends beyond a local parade and touches other entities across North Carolina. The Move Silent Sam activist coalition was formed as part of a broader effort to remove a Confederate statue known as “Silent Sam” from the University of the North Carolina-Chapel Hill campus.Erected by the UDC in 1913, the monument’s dedication ceremony included a speech by industrialist Julian Carr in which he bragged about having “horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds” near the statue site and lauded the Ku Klux Klan violence for having “saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South.” In August 2018, the monument was toppled by protesters, and for more than a year, school officials waffled on plans for the statue. Last month, the university announced it would give $2.5 million to the SCV for “care and preservation of the monument”—essentially providing support to the neo-Confederate effort. It’s good to be wary of tradition, because the way things have always been done is often a precise measure of how long they’ve been done wrong. Years of Christmas parades in Garner and Wake Forest are a testament to that truth. Mayor Jones has already stated that planning for next year’s Christmas parade will begin in early 2020. Instead of concern over troublesome “outside agitators,” planners might want to consider folks like Stephanie Brandt, a white Garner resident who’s been active in voicing opposition to neo-Confederate inclusion in holiday events. “I just felt ashamed,” Brandt told me about her reaction to seeing the SCV in last year’s parade. “Because in my opinion, they’re a hate group—they hate people that have a different color of skin. And I just don’t feel like that belongs in a parade. To see those symbols going down the street, it just felt so wrong.”

**How the Daughters of the Confederacy Spoiled Christmas**

The Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy marched for decades without a peep from public officials. Just asking about that was enough for two towns to cancel Christmas parades.

By Kali Holloway

The following was originally published on theDaily Beast. Click to read the article online.

For several years, the town of Garner, North Carolina, has held a Christmas parade featuring—along with traditional marching bands, dance troupes and local politicians—floats sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The same is true of the nearby town of Wake Forest, where for more than two decades, SCV and UDC members in gray Civil War uniforms and antebellum hoop skirts have marched along the Christmas parade route while waving Confederate flags.

That tradition was suddenly halted this year, after the activist group Move Silent Sam posted video and photos of the neo-Confederate groups in past parades, along with the question: “Is the Town of Garner trying to send the message that racism is welcome in the community?”

The answer is “yes.” Both towns have canceled their parades, while making clear that their problem is with “outside agitators” ruining Christmas, not with the Lost Cause loyalists who are part of their Christmas traditions.

As online outrage grew, Garner officials announced last month they would be canceling the parade “due to concern that the event could be targeted for disruption.” On Wednesday, Wake Forest Mayor Vivian Jones released a tearful video message announcing the same. Both blamed “outsiders,” not neo-Confederates.

“For over 70 years, our community Christmas parade has been a beloved holiday tradition enjoyed by thousands of Wake Forest residents and visitors alike. Not once in all that time, has our event been anything less than a peaceful, family-friendly celebration that highlights the wonderful spirit of our community. But sadly, times have changed, and this year is different,” said Jones, before citing “information... received in recent days” about potential “protests between clashing” outside groups.

“The decision to cancel this year’s parade is not a reflection on our community or our wonderful people. Rather, it’s an unfortunate consequence of what happens when outside agitators make it known they will use local events like our parade to sew hate and spark chaos.”

That’s a dog whistle to people who miss the fabricated past when we all shut up and got along. Jones didn’t acknowledge how decades with Confederate-flag-waving Civil War apologists in Wake Forest’s Christmas parades felt to black constituents. Instead, she leaned into the boogeyman of “outside agitators” supposedly planning to “use the occasion as a platform to promote their political agenda without any regard for the safety of others” to fret over how “times have changed.” She mourned the “wonderful spirit” of Wake Forest that had been on display in past holiday parades offering unmasked nostalgia for the pre-emancipation South.

Similarly, Wake Forest Police Chief Jeff Leonard talked about lawless “outside agitators” and a town nearly deluged by “professional protesters who have no regard for the safety and well-being of others.”

If Wake Forest officials were truly worried about a group planning to use the parade for their own highly partisan political ends, they would’ve banned neo-Confederates, along with the Confederate flag, from the Christmas parade route decades ago. Both the SCV and UDC have long been dedicated to propagating the ahistorical Lost Cause mythology, a campaign of racist historical whitewashing in service of white supremacy. The ideology denies black chattel slavery was the cause of the Civil War and suggests black enslavement had a wealth of underrated benefits for both enslavers and those they enslaved. It also casts the Civil War not as the result of the treasonous South’s secession, but as a consequence of the hyper-aggressive North’s intrusion into the affairs of the unspoiled South. Consider it the ultimate myth about “outside agitators” coming in and ruining a perfectly good slaveholding situation.

Despite contending they’re merely “heritage organizations”—social clubs for those whose Confederate ancestors fought to defend slavery—the SCV has documented connections to overt hate groups and the most prominent players therein. As Move Silent Sam noted, SPLC-identified Holocaust denier Boyd Cathey was a guest speaker of the Wake Forest SCV as recently as February, and his author biography on numerous websites suggests he’s still a card-carrying member of the organization. Jack Kerwick, whom the North Carolina SCV touted as an honored guest at their annual Confederate Flag Day celebration in March, has penned articles arguing white indentured servants had it “worse” than black enslaved people and mocking the notion that “that there are no differences between blacks and whites in terms of criminality.” Kirk Lyons, head of North Carolina SCV’s “Southern Highland Brigade,” according to the group’s own Facebook page, has a lengthy history of proudly working with racist hate groups. Harold Ray Crews, a white supremacist lawyer involved in a legal campaign to derail the life of Charlottesville beating victim DeAndre Harris, has publicly declared membership in North Carolina SCV and the overtly racist League of the South.

Over its 125-year history, the UDC has become the group responsible for erecting more Confederate monuments than any other single entity. In 1926, a North Carolina chapter of the group put up a monument to honor the Ku Klux Klan. From the early 20th century through the 1980s, the UDC wrote and vetted history textbooks for Southern schools to ensure white children were steeped in Lost Cause propaganda to the exclusion of any accurate Southern history. The effort was successful in creating waves of racist white citizens and segregationist leaders. More recently, while publicly declaring themselves apolitical, the UDC has funded—often surreptitiously—efforts to keep Confederate monuments from being removed, generally by filing lawsuits against those who try to remove them.

Complicity with the SCV and UDC’s racist goals seems to be a problem that extends beyond a local parade and touches other entities across North Carolina. The Move Silent Sam activist coalition was formed as part of a broader effort to remove a Confederate statue known as “Silent Sam” from the University of the North Carolina-Chapel Hill campus.Erected by the UDC in 1913, the monument’s dedication ceremony included a speech by industrialist Julian Carr in which he bragged about having “horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds” near the statue site and lauded the Ku Klux Klan violence for having “saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South.” In August 2018, the monument was toppled by protesters, and for more than a year, school officials waffled on plans for the statue. Last month, the university announced it would give $2.5 million to the SCV for “care and preservation of the monument”—essentially providing support to the neo-Confederate effort.

It’s good to be wary of tradition, because the way things have always been done is often a precise measure of how long they’ve been done wrong. Years of Christmas parades in Garner and Wake Forest are a testament to that truth. Mayor Jones has already stated that planning for next year’s Christmas parade will begin in early 2020. Instead of concern over troublesome “outside agitators,” planners might want to consider folks like Stephanie Brandt, a white Garner resident who’s been active in voicing opposition to neo-Confederate inclusion in holiday events.

“I just felt ashamed,” Brandt told me about her reaction to seeing the SCV in last year’s parade. “Because in my opinion, they’re a hate group—they hate people that have a different color of skin. And I just don’t feel like that belongs in a parade. To see those symbols going down the street, it just felt so wrong.”

foner 2nd revo 13-15 amend

EC stanton knew const window narrow and indeed closed for 50 yrs; no state gave women vote (vs black men had?)

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-november-27-2019/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/white-supremacists-see-escalating-tensions-in-small-north-carolina-town-as-an-opportunity-to-radicalize-armed-neo-confederates/

no lnx

White supremacists see escalating tensions in small North Carolina town as an opportunity to radicalize armed neo-Confederates

Written by Jordan Green / Raw Story October 20, 2019

Neo-Confederate activists and antiracists clashed briefly in Pittsboro, NC, a town west of Raleigh, on Saturday, when a man wearing a “Trump 2020” hat and a face mask attempted to drive a front-end loader festooned with Confederate flags down a street where the two groups were facing off.

After antiracists blocked the driver, a local man identified as Sam White, neo-Confederate activists spilled into the street demanding that he be allowed to pass. Neo-Confederates, at least one of whom was armed with a holstered pistol, and antiracists engaged in shoving and grabbing before police separated the two groups and cleared the roadway.

For weeks, Pittsboro has been the scene of increasingly tense confrontations between neo-Confederates, many of them armed, and antiracists, after the Chatham County Board of Commissioners voted 4-1 to give the United Daughters of the Confederacy an Oct. 31 deadline to remove the Confederate monument in front of the Chatham County Historic Courthouse — at the center of a roundabout in the middle of town. A conglomeration of neo-Confederate groups led by the Virginia Flaggers responded about a month ago by erecting a Confederate flag across the street from Horton Middle School, a historically black school named for Moses Horton, a former slave and published poet. The move has been received by many townspeople, black and white, as a deliberate act of racial intimidation.

A scuffle broke out in Pittsboro after antiracists blocked a masked man on a front-end loader with Confederate flags pic.twitter.com/SdBgPgm7dY

— Jordan Green (@jordangreentcb) October 19, 2019

The escalating conflict over the monument has attracted the attention of overtly white supremacist groups who see an opportunity to radicalize neo-Confederate groups that claim that they are not racist and are merely motivated by a desire to protect “heritage.” Members of the League of the South, a group that advocates the creation of a white ethno-state in the former states of the Confederacy and took part in the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. two years ago, have shown up in Pittsboro on three previous occasions.

Saturday’s rally also caught the attention of Billy Roper, a neo-Nazi organizer in Arkansas, who warned his followers that antiracists would attempt to tear down the Confederate monument. Roper promised in a post in advance of the rally that he would have a report this weekend on his podcast about “the accelerating situation in Pittsboro.” Accelerationism is a concept embraced by an array of white power groups, including Atomwaffen, that violence and chaos is desirable because it will hasten the collapse of society and bring on a race war.

Antiracists march thru Pittsboro, NC to counter-protest neo-Confederates opposed to the removal of a Confederate monument #Pittsboro pic.twitter.com/ljIqhUsVRy

— Jordan Green (@jordangreentcb) October 19, 2019

Pittsboro lies on a political and cultural fault line in North Carolina, with a split between the more progressive residents in the urbanizing northeast corner closer to the Triangle — the urban area comprised of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill — and more rural, conservative areas to the west. Chatham County was narrowly carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016, while in some rural precincts Trump earned as much as 88.8 percent of the vote. After protesters tore down Confederate monuments in Durham and Chapel Hill, and the city of Winston-Salem removed its monument, neo-Confederates view the impending removal of the monument in Pittsboro as a dangerous tipping point.

“The conflict was unavoidable, given what’s happening across the nation, and what’s happening in the Triangle,” said Randy Voller, the former mayor of Pittsboro and former North Carolina Democratic Party chairman. “We’re the next logical place. The added fuel to the fire is the notion of putting up a Confederate battle flag across from a historically black school. They know that the Confederate flag is negative iconography, and they’re trying to use it as leverage to get the county commission to back down from removing the monument.”

The “Pittsboro Confederate Monument Rally” was advertised as taking place in front of the historic courthouse at noon. Antiracists from Chatham County and across the Triangle region responded with a “unity march” to a parking lot across from the courthouse beginning at 10 a.m. The unity march, which drew about 200 antiracists, represented a compromise between local residents rooted in nonviolent traditions and more seasoned activists from the Triangle who uphold a principle of de-platforming to make neo-Confederates feel uncomfortable.

Kirsten Coleman, one of the speakers at the rally, recalled attending Northwood High School in Pittsboro and seeing the Confederate soldier atop a pedestal in front of the historic courthouse.

“Every single day that was what I had to face, and see that this town was not welcoming to me or my people,” Coleman said. “This is a clear indication that we have never been welcome here. And yet it is a place where we have built our families. We have worked tirelessly, and yet we have never been welcomed. I want a place, a nation — not just in Pittsboro, but all across the United States where we can live up to the principles that some of the founding fathers put into the Constitution about all men being equal.

“We as people of color have to circle that statue and deal with the intimidation,” she said in an interview afterwards. “We’re not going to be intimidated anymore. We’re going to discard the fear and intimidation. We’re going to get our rights.”

The promised neo-Confederate rally never transpired at the historic courthouse. Instead, they gathered at the Confederate flag site across from the middle school over the course of the day, reaching a peak of about 60 people. After the antiracist rally across from the courthouse, antiracists dressed in black massed across the road, with the auxiliary antiracist gathering outnumbering the neo-Confederates two to one.

The League of the South did not play a prominent role in Saturday’s flag rally, although James Shillinglaw, who attended a conference co-hosted by the League of the South in June in Tennessee, showed up.

League members have conspicuously displayed their flag at previous rallies in Pittsboro, and on Oct. 5, a North Carolina activist displayed the League flag, along with a black “Q” flag from a pole on his truck at the site across from Horton Middle School.

The “Q” flag, which is embraced by League members and more extreme members of the neo-Confederate movement, honors William Quantrill, a Confederate guerilla leader who led an 1863 raid on Lawrence, Kans., resulting in the massacre of civilians and burning most of the town.

Howard Graves, a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Quantrill’s campaign holds a particular relevance for current-day neo-Confederates and white secessionists.

Graves said that Michael Hill, the president of the League of the South, has “said about Charlottesville that it should suffer the same fate as Lawrence, Kansas. That encapsulates the view that any municipality that goes against Confederate values should suffer violence, full stop.”

“With Pittsboro, it seems like there are protesters that have centered on this iconography,” Graves added. “We’re seeing them incorporate this more into their identity.”

In addition to an array of neo-Confederate groups, including CSA II, ACTBAC NC and Heirs to the Confederacy, Saturday’s flag rally attracted several members of the Hiwaymen, a far-right group with an anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ stance that participated in the Unite the Right rally and a Patriot Prayer gathering in Portland, Ore., along with at least one member of the Proud Boys.

Responding to a statement by the rally organizers that League of the South members would not be welcome n Pittsboro on Saturday, Hiwaymen leader Billy Helton angrily declared on Facebook Live: “We will stand with LOS. We will stand with Billy Roper.”

While insisting that he and the Hiwaymen are not white supremacists or “Jew-haters,” Helton told his audience they agree with the League and Roper on a couple points. “And that’s keeping our society together and putting Christianity out front, and protect our history and heritage,” Helton said. “Sorry, if you ain’t into that, you can go to hell.”

On Saturday, Pittsboro resident Crystal Wright surveyed the neo-Confederate flaggers with dismay.

“They have hidden motives,” she said. “There are things that are very dark here.”

She recalled that on Sept. 28, a North Carolina neo-Confederate activist named Tom Parnell pointed at a black antiracist protester and said, “I got a rope for you.

“If you’re standing out here for this monument, what correlation does a rope have?” she asked.

Artis Johnson,who was also standing across the road from the neo-Confederate flaggers on Saturday, confirmed that he was the recipient of the racist threat.

Tempers flared as the afternoon wore on. Twice after the front-end loader festooned with Confederate flags was turned back by counter-protesters, antiracists crossed the road to the side where the neo-Confederate flaggers were gathered. In one instance, they stole a Bible, and Molly Conger, an antiracist from Charlottesville taunted them by tearing the pages out and lighting it on fire, while admonishing, “Sweetie, I looked and I didn’t see anything about the defense of the Confederacy. Are you sure you got the right version?”

Later, after the two groups dared each other to fight, antiracists crossed the street to oblige, and Proud Boy Jay Thaxton shoved an antiracist before police broke up the altercation.

The taunts continued from one side of the road to the other. Among those still itching for a fight was Johnson.

“Meet me in the fucking grass, bitch,” he yelled across the road. “I’m from a fucking slave family.”

Joran Green is the senior editor at Triad City Beat, an altweekly in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina.

===

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ginni-thomas-teams-up-with-james-okeefe-in-dark-money-operation-to-protect-trump/

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a right-wing political activist, has launched a new set of organizations meant to “protect President Trump” and attack Democrats and left-leaning organizations, according to an article published by The Intercept this week.

The well-connected Thomas, a former Heritage Foundation staffer, presented her plans to build a “robust infrastructure” to a meeting of the secretive Council for National Policy last month. The CNP is a strategy-development-and-sharing network that includes leaders across the U.S. religious and political Right, including people like neo-Confederate Christian Reconstrucionist Michael Peroutka. CNP members pushed Trump to sign an executive order on religious liberty.

Thomas is planning to build a “robust infrastructure” of affiliated organizations.Among her partners in the new project are longtime right-wing operative Richard Viguerie; undercover videographer and political tricksterJames O’Keefe;Republican campaign lawyer Cleta Mitchell; and Bill Meierling, chief marketing officer for the American Legislative Exchange Council, a matchmaker for corporate lobbyists and conservative legislators willing to do their bidding.

A slide from Thomas’s presentation at Council for National Policy notes, “Long Term teams taking shape will focus on Education, Media, Entertainment/Arts, Faith, Corporate/Economic, Government, Science, and more”—nearly identical to the list of spheres of cultural influence targeted by Religious Right proponents of Seven Mountains Dominionism.

The Intercept also reported that Thomas had spoken at another CNP event last October, at which she declared, “The hard left is in control of the Democrat Party … And they’re controlling the media and corporations and Hollywood and education.”

This January, Thomas organized a White House meeting where she was joined by anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney and others where, among other things, they complained that White House aides were blocking right-wing Trump supporters from getting administration jobs.

Thomas and many of her partners were among conservative activists who mobilized a year ago to try to replace then-House Speaker Paul Ryan with right-wing favorite Rep. Jim Jordan.

Thomas presented United in Purpose “Impact” awards to O’Keefe, Gaffney, and Sean Hannity in 2017. In 2016, TPM reported that Thomas “wanted to ‘target’ the ‘most questionable’ precincts in Virginia with an anti-voter fraud campaign.”

Thomas also interviewed right-wing radio host Jesse Lee Peterson for the Daily Caller in 2016. The two talked about what Thomas called “race hustlers” who she said are “in the business of keeping blacks angry” and about Black Lives Matter, which Peterson called “evil,” “wicked,” and “worse than the KKK.” Last year, Thomas reportedly hired a former Turning Point USA staffer who had resigned after The New Yorker published screenshots of text messages that included a text that said “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE.”

Tags: Bill Meierling Cleta Mitchell Ginni Thomas James O'Keefe Richard Viguerie Election 2020 Seven Mountains ALEC American Legislative Exchange Council Council for National Policy

https://theconversation.com/brazils-long-strange-love-affair-with-the-confederacy-ignites-racial-tension-115548

the aroma of fried chicken and biscuits roused my appetite as the country sounds of Alison Krauss, Alan Jackson and Johnny Cash played over the loudspeakers.

This might have been a county fair back home in Tennessee, but it wasn’t. I was in a cemetery in rural Brazil, at the “Festa Confederada” – the “Confederate Party” – an annual celebration of southern U.S. heritage held each April in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, in São Paulo state.

A sign explaining “What the Confederate Flag Really Means” in both English and Portuguese greeted the roughly 2,500 visitors – most of them white – at the entryway of the American Cemetery. Inside, women wearing Antebellum-style hoop skirts square danced with men clad in gray Confederate uniforms. Couples in T-shirts were doing the two-step.

Just outside cemetery grounds stood black activists protesting the April 28 party with signs and banners saying, “Down with the Confederate flag.”

How did an American debate about racism make its way to Brazil? That’s a tangled question I’m unraveling in my dissertation research on the history and meaning of Confederate symbols in Brazil.

The Confederacy comes to Brazil

Brazil has a long, strange relationship with the United States Confederacy.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, ending slavery in the United States, some 8,000 to 10,000 Southern soldiers and their families left the vanquished Confederacy and went to Brazil.

There, slavery was still legal. Roughly 40% of the nearly 11 million Africans forcibly brought across the Atlantic between 1517 and 1867 went to work on sugarcane plantations in Brazil. It was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to formally abolish slavery, in 1888 – 23 years after the United States.

Legal slavery may have been a draw for the Confederate soldiers who migrated to Brazil after abolition.

Brazilian political economist Célio Antonio Alcântara Silva analyzed letters sent to Brazilian consulates and vice-consulates in the United States at the end of the Civil War and found that 74% of Southerners inquiring about emigration were slaveowners.

At the time, 25% of white Southern households owned slaves. That means the people interested in moving to Brazil in the 1860s disproportionately represented a relatively small, slaveholding slice of the free Southern population.

Because the exact number of Confederate families that migrated to Brazil is unknown, it is impossible to state with certainty how many rejoined the slave trade upon arrival. Silva’s research finds records of 54 Confederate families that purchased, in total, 536 enslaved Africans in Brazil.

The Brazilian historian Luciana da Cruz Brito has also found evidence in the 150-year-old Confederado journals she dug up that slavery attracted white Southerners to Brazil.

In one, an American named Charles Gunter wrote about his desire to purchase enslaved people in Brazil at a lower price than he could in the U.S. Another Confederado, James Gaston, expressed disappointment that he couldn’t bring recently freed African Americans to Brazil.

...

Rural expertise

Despite these historical records, many descendants of the Confederados dispute that slavery brought their forefathers to Brazil.

As early as the 1860s, Brazil was actively recruiting Southern American plantation owners, part of an immigration policy aimed at attracting Europeans, European-American and other “white” migrants. According to historians Cyrus and James Dawsey, who were born and raised near Confederado communities in São Paulo, Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II also promised cheap land to any American farmer who would come with a plow – a technology Brazil lacked.

Either way, thousands of white southerners made Brazil their new home after the Civil War. In São Paulo state, they established a somewhat closed and culturally homogeneous community that maintained its southern traditions for generations.

Brazil’s Confederados continued to speak English and to practice their Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian faiths, introducing Protestantism to the Catholic country.

To this day, many Confederado descendants still describe the Civil War as the “War of Secession” – one of its original southern names.

And, since 1986, at the American Cemetery where their ancestors were laid to rest – as Protestants, they were barred from burial alongside Catholics – the Fraternity of American Descendants has held a low-profile, annual celebration of their southern heritage.

Racism and the legacy of Charlottesville in Brazil

For three decades, Brazil’s Confederate Party was relatively uncontroversial.

That changed after the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 when an anti-racist protester Heather Heyer was murdered by a white supremacist at the “Unite the Right”march protesting the Virginia city’s planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Racism is a persistent social problem in multicultural Brazil, where about half the population is of African descent. White Brazilians on average earn twice as much as black Brazilians, and two-thirds of all prisoners are black.

Efforts since 2010 to set racial quotas for university admissions and government jobs have been controversial. In a country where people use dozens of categories to identify their race, allegations of fraud and questions about who is and isn’t “black” have plagued the affirmative action system.

One month after the violence in Charlottesville, black activists in São Paulo organized a public with the Fraternity of American Descendants, which organizes the annual Confederate Party. The activists wanted to discuss its embrace of Confederate symbols.

“You can leave the flag behind,” said professor Claúdia Monteiro of UNEGRO, a member organization of Brazil’s national Unified Black Movement. “Black people can’t. The stigma [it represents] is in the color of our skin.”

Activists from Brazil’s black rights movement protest the Confederate Party in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, São Paulo state, April 28, 2019. Courtesy of UNEGRO, Author provided]

The Fraternity of American Descendants insists their group does not represent racism. In a 2018 bulletin, the organization stated that it “does not discriminate based on race, gender, color, age, religion or on any other basis.”

Marcelo Dodson, ex-president of the Fraternity of American Descendants, said in the 2017 debate that the Civil War was a battle not for slavery but for small government, low taxes, free commerce and states’ rights – a stance many American defenders of the Confederacy’s “lost cause” also maintain.

Confederate culture lives on

The 2017 dialogue between black activists and Confederados, which was filmed and, did not resolve their disagreement.

Last year, visitors to the Confederate Party were greeted by protesters who said the Confederate flag was a symbol of oppression.

This year, black activists outside the cemetery in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste carried the same message, saying “a lot of blood” was shed under the auspices of the Confederate flag. They also played drums and practiced capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian dance and martial art form, in a display of Brazil’s deep African roots.

A week after the Confederate Party, at least 100 civil society groups from across the country had signed a manifesto criticizing the event’s use of “symbols that elevate white supremacy” – a sign of growing Brazilian awareness about the complicated, controversial history of the American Confederacy.

Jordan Brasher is a member of the American Association of Geographers

The association is a funding partner of The Conversation US.

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/02/new-nra-president-carolyn-meadows-helped-block-construction-bell-tower-honoring-martin-luther-king/223615

Newly elected National Rifle Association President Carolyn Meadows led an organization that blocked a proposal to construct a bell tower honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Stone Mountain, GA. The organization viewed the proposed tower as antithetical to a monument honoring the Confederacy located at the same site.

Meadows, who sits on the NRA board of directors and was serving as the group’s second vice president, was elected president of the NRA during an April 29 meeting of NRA board members following weeks of public infighting that led to the ouster of President Oliver North. According to a report from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, following her election, Meadows declined to discuss NRA infighting but said the NRA was gearing up for the 2020 elections and focused in particular on defeating Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA), who represents the district where Meadows lives. McBath ran for Congress in 2018 on a gun law reform platform following the murder of her son Jordan Davis by a man who later attempted to use the NRA-authored “Stand Your Ground” law at his criminal trial.

In addition to her work with the NRA, Meadows is the chairman of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association (SMMA), an organization that maintains the largest memorial to the Confederacy in the United States. Stone Mountain, GA, features an enormous relief carving that depicts Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis on horseback. A 2017 article in Smithsonian magazine noted that “the monument in question is carved 42 feet deep and 400 feet above ground into a granite mountain” and “is a testament to the enduring legacy of white supremacy.”

In 2015, the CEO of SMMA proposed constructing a tower with a replica of the Liberty Bell on top of Stone Mountain to honor King. In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, King said, "Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia."

Press reports from 2015 indicated that the proposal would go forward, but the bell tower has not been built. As The Atlanta Journal-Constitutionreported in January, “the park’s all-white governing board decided” that “such a monument would clash with the legislated purpose of the state-owned park as a memorial to the Confederacy.” Meadows is a member of that governing board, having served continuously since at least 2011via appointments by former Republican Gov. Nathan Deal. According to SMMA meeting minutes, Meadows has served as the group’s chairman dating back to at least 2013.

In addition to being the location of the largest Confederate memorial in the United States, Stone Mountain is closely associated with the Klu Klux Klan. KKK leader William Simmons “ushered in the modern era of the Ku Klux Klan, founding the Second KKK at the top of Stone Mountain on November 25, 1915,” in an event that included a cross burning and that signaled “a new era of white nationalist terrorism,” according to *Smithsonian*magazine. Plans for the Confederate memorial were already being made at the time of the Klan ceremony, but the project ended up being shuttered for several decades and was revived only following right-wing anger over the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision ending school segregation. The monument was eventually completed in 1972.

The NRA -- which falsely calls itself the U.S.’s “oldest civil rights organization” -- and its media arm often use the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday to distort King’s comments and actions relating to gun ownership to portray King, a committed nonviolent activist who was felled by an assassin's bullet, as a pro-gun advocate.

Attempts to build the King monument have recently been revived. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the idea to erect a Liberty Bell on Stone Mountain to honor King was discussed at an April 2018 event Meadows attended. After the event, Meadows was asked by a reporter about the proposal and claimed she hadn't previously heard of the idea, even though the idea of a bell tower memorial to King on the mountain made national news in 2015. And according to SMMA meeting minutes from June 16, 2015, Meadows recognized Georgia resident Mark Pozner to speak at the meeting in favor of placing a plaque honoring King at Stone Mountain because of his “I Have a Dream” speech. The minutes say, “Ms. Meadows thanked Mr. Pozner for his comments and stated the board would look at his request.” The CEO of SMMA had in fact been considering a memorial as well, and he spearheaded the 2015 effort to get a bell tower built.

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.