 The forthcoming is adapted from a letter which was written to President Donald Trump soon after his reelection. Copies of this letter were also forwarded to Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and many other officials in the administration. The recent renaming of “Fort Liberty” back to “Fort Bragg” augurs well for us. Dear Mr. President: Congratulations, sir, on your victory, which henceforth will be known as the greatest political comeback in American history. Although there are technically greater “landslides”—LBJ in 1964, Nixon in ’72, Ronald Reagan in ’80 and ’84—yours is the greatest given the obstacles which you had to overcome. Yet the word “historic” does not fully do justice to your victory; it is not just historic, but mythic, as if the American gods were directly intervening in our affairs. You are now the ultimate underdog American hero! I voted for you in 2016, first, to regime-change the neo-conservatives out of the Republican Party, and second, to stop Hillary Clinton from out-Merkeling Angela by simultaneously invading Syria and inviting in the Syrians. The pride that I felt for my vote then is dwarfed by the pride that I feel for my vote now. I believe that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” The election, therefore, had to be compromised in 2020, an insurrection had to be invented as a pretext to repress political dissent, and you had to be the victim of unprecedented political persecution, all so that the people may at last see the truth and thus be set free. If you had taken office in 2020, we would have been spared much evil in the short run, including the evil which is, indeed, the subject of this letter, but with less hope for good over the long run. As it is, you are now bestowed with a popular mandate of Jacksonian magnitude, which in the face of a federal judiciary that has come to regard itself as supreme to every other branch of government and a federal legislature that has become a feckless and fossilized farce, is all the more fortuitous. Thus, you may say to your enemies, “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.” My name is James Rutledge Roesch. I am writing to you not only to offer my sincere congratulations, but also to ask of you a favor. I implore you, Mr. President, to restore the “Reconciliation Monument” in Arlington National Cemetery, an artistic and historic masterpiece by a world-famous Jewish-American sculptor, dismantled by Joe Biden’s Defense Department at the behest of the “Naming Commission.” You opposed the creation of this “Naming Commission” at the outset. In the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, Elizabeth “high cheekbones” Warren introduced an amendment to rename any military assets named in honor of former Confederates. You vetoed the bill for this provision alone, which you explained was divisive and revisionist. “I have been clear in my opposition to politically motivated attempts like this to wash away history and to dishonor the immense progress our country has fought for in realizing our founding principles,” you said in your official statement. Alas, your veto was overridden with the votes of many Red-State Congressmen, who as ever cower from doing any politicking unless it is in the service of one of their donors, foreign or domestic. Amazingly, a “slim majority” Americans still, in spite of a decade of agitprop, oppose the removal of Confederate flags and statues, but these ever-dwindling numbers have never availed us, as we are not a top-down and well-funded lobby, but a grassroots “silent majority.”[1] What an irony it is that you, an archetypal New-York Yankee, have been nearly alone amongst American public figures in defending the monuments to Confederate heroes! Several of our most august historians of the Civil War, such as James McPherson,[2] Gary Gallagher,[3] David Blight,[4] and even the leftist Eric Foner,[5] none of whom are “neo-Confederates” by any means, gave some guarded doubts about this iconoclastic outburst. As the media’s new motto is apparently, “All the news that fits, print,” however, sober voices such as theirs were ignored in favor of know-nothing levelers. Unfortunately, for your integrity you suffered one of the most outrageous slanders and libels of your presidency—the “very fine people” hoax. Sir, allow me to give you my thanks for what you said that day. I was not present at the Charlottesville protest myself, but I did oppose taking down the monuments of Lee and Jackson, not as a “white nationalist,” but as an American and Southern patriot. For being one of the only Republicans willing to defend people like me and the history that we are defending—our story as a people—you have my gratitude and allegiance. You, sir, are a very fine person yourself, and I give you my thanks you once more. In the press conference whence the “very fine people” fake news came, you, in Socratic style, exposed the “slippery slope” behind the removal of Confederate monuments:
At the time, your argument went unheeded, and inasmuch as it was answered, it was glibly ridiculed, as in Seth Myers’ and Jimmy Fallon’s SNL skit, where they pretended to be Washington and Jefferson and preposterously mocked Lee. Of course, since then you have been absolutely vindicated, as the destruction of American monuments has only escalated and accelerated, including those to Washington[6] and Jefferson[7] themselves. Who’s laughing now, funny guys? The fate of the monuments in Charlottesville has been especially grim.[8] Charlottesville’s Lee monument was given to a Soros-backed “Black Lives Matter” and “Democratic Socialist” group, “Swords Into Plowshares,” and--in act of sheer malice--melted down, to be refashioned into woke art.[9] (I shudder to imagine what utter ugliness is in store!) Charlottesville’s Jackson monument was sold to “LAXART” and “MOCA,” along with other Confederate monuments, to be subjected to further vandalism in a woke art exhibition sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. (Sic ‘em, “DOGE”!) Charlottesville less ceremoniously disposed of monuments to local heroes George Rogers Clark, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark. The latter two, “Lewis & Clark,” courageously explored the country where we now live comfortably, and without the former, what is now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin would still be a part of Canada. Thomas Jefferson’s hometown has become a proverb and a byword, or in a word that you may appreciate, a S—HOLE. What is this but a “cultural revolution,” a revolution against our very civilization? Indeed, the only other figure targeted as much as the Confederates has been Christopher Columbus, who symbolizes the colonization of this continent by European civilization and thus the conception of “America” itself. To celebrate, as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz each did, the removal of his statues and the renaming of his holiday, is to effectively admit that you wish that America did not exist. Worse even than the destruction of these symbols, however, has been the concomitant destruction of what it is the statues of those men symbolized. It is impudent enough to destroy a great work of art that symbolizes a great historical figure because of the sins which belonged to his time. To destroy the virtues which belonged to those men and which they bequeathed to us, however, which I believe was what the destruction of these monuments symbolized on a spiritual level, is not merely impudent, but suicidal. For example, it is no coincidence that the status in our political culture of the freedom of speech, heretofore absolutely essential in any definition of “our democracy” or “our values,” has collapsed at the same time as statues to the Founders, who enshrined the right of free speech as “the guardian of every other right,” are collapsing. It is also no coincidence that at the same time as our military is suffering chronic recruitment shortfalls, even as it slashes its standards for physical and mental fitness, the memory of heroic martial leaders from our history is being slashed.[10] A Monument to Postbellum National Reconciliation In the spring of 2009, the academic activists Edward Sebesta and James Loewen authored a letter to the recently inaugurated president, Barack Obama, exhorting him not to honor the presidential custom, dating back to Woodrow Wilson in 1914, of laying a wreath at the Reconciliation Monument in Arlington National Cemetery. As vituperative as the letter was, it did not actually call for the president to take any action against the monument itself, merely not to lend it his “prestige.” Mr. Obama, to his credit, chose to continue the tradition, acting like the post-racial unifier that Americans had hoped he would be. Joe Biden, conversely, not only discontinued this tradition, but also had the monument destroyed altogether. It is inconceivable to imagine Mr. Obama doing anything of the kind at the time. The difference is not that Mr. Biden is to the left of Mr. Obama. On the contrary, before he lost his mind Mr. Biden was known as a relatively right-wing Democrat prone to politically incorrect “gaffes,” hence why the “articulate, bright, clean, nice-looking” Mr. Obama chose him as Vice President, to allay those working-class whites clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” The difference is explained by the media phenomenon known as “The Great Awokening,” which began in Mr. Obama’s second term, and shifted Democrats far, far to the left.[11] Although the Naming Commission has sedulously labored to label the Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery with “The Myth of the Lost Cause,” the idea did not even come from the South, but from the North. To be specific, it was the idea of the twenty-fifth president, William McKinley. He is an underrated president whom I have heard you speak about with admiration—“the architect of the American century”--and I agree! As you make the GOP the party of McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft again, I urge you to remember that to these great men, graciously acceding to a Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery represented the culmination of some of Abraham Lincoln’s last, best words:
My apologies in advance for the extended quotations to come, but given all of the ahistorical calumny to which the Reconciliation Monument and the “Myth of the Lost Cause” have been subjected of late, there is simply no substitute for going directly to the sources. National reconciliation had begun before McKinley’s presidency, in 1885 under the New Yorker Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat elected president since the Civil War. He invited Southerners into his Cabinet, including former Confederates as Attorney General and Secretary of the Interior. (The latter of whom, Lucius Q.C. Lamar, he later nominated for the Supreme Court.) He also proposed returning captured Confederate battle flags to their respective states, but when the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans’ fraternity and Republican political lobby, revolted, he rescinded the order. Ambrose Bierce, a Union veteran and unsentimental satirist, wrote a poem about the controversy which ended with the following stanza:
A little later, Theodore Roosevelt, another New Yorker, although a Republican, ordered the battle flags returned without such resistance from the Grand Army of the Republic. Returning to McKinley, however, in an address before Georgia’s state legislature in 1898, the president, impressed with the spirit of national unity amidst the Spanish-American War, proposed that the U.S. government contribute to the maintenance of the graves of Confederate soldiers, as a gesture of goodwill:
Bear in mind that President McKinley was a Union soldier who fought at the battles of South Mountain and Antietam, the latter being single bloodiest battle of the war. Whatever enmity he must have once felt towards the Confederates, he was nonetheless “great-souled” enough, as the ancient Greeks said, to recognize the virtue in his onetime enemies and not to dehumanize his onetime enemies as evil simply because they had been enemies. In sum, “he who shall have borne the battle” was able to forgive his enemies, but we are unable to forgive his enemies. Two years hence, in 1900, the Congress acted upon President McKinley’s proposal and passed legislation directing the Secretary of War to have Confederate soldiers then buried in the National Soldiers Home in Washington D.C. reburied in the Arlington National Cemetery. Ultimately, over 400 soldiers were moved thither. In 1906, the Secretary of War, William Taft, an Ohio Republican now serving under President Theodore Roosevelt, who had succeeded McKinley after his assassination in office, gave the United Daughters of the Confederacy permission begin fund-raising for a funerary monument to the Confederate soldiers who had been reburied in Arlington National Cemetery. Two years hence, in 1908, President Roosevelt, speaking with members of the Arlington Confederate Monument Association, “heartily indorsed the movement for the monument,” in the words of the New York Times:
The Spanish-American War, as President Roosevelt suggested, was a turning point in the progress of postbellum national reconciliation. Yet it was not simply an incidence of the cynical truth that “nothing unites people like a common enemy.” It was also that Northerners, in their quest to “achieve a just and lasting peace” abroad, were impressed by the valor and honor of the Southerners with whom they fought, which in turn inspired them to achieve a more just and lasting peace at home, as Lincoln had once enjoined them. In 1910, four years after they received permission from the War Department, the UDC commissioned the world-famous artist from Richmond, Virginia, Moses Jacob Ezekiel, to construct their monument, which he would come to consider his crowning achievement. Ezekiel was the American-born son of first-generation Sephardic Jewish immigrants. He was the first Jewish cadet at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. There, he served as one of the corporals of guard for the casket of General Stonewall Jackson, who before the war had been a member of the faculty. At the Battle of New Market, where the VMI cadets were mustered to make a last stand, he survived the desperate charge across “The Field of Lost Shoes.” His friend, Thomas Garland Jefferson, a grand-nephew of the third president, was mortally wounded, and it was Ezekiel who recovered his body and read to him from the Bible as he lay dying. After the war, Robert E. Lee, then the president of Washington College, also located in Lexington, advised Ezekiel to pursue his passion for the arts, whereupon he went abroad. Ezekiel’s first destination was Berlin, where he studied at the Royal Art Academy, and soon thereafter he was the first foreigner to win the Michel-Beer Prix de Rome for a bas relief titled “Israel.” Thence, he traveled to Rome, where he lived out his days in a studio in the Baths of Diocletian. As his career progressed, he was knighted by the king and heaped with other honors by European nobility. When the UDC approached Ezekiel, he had been back in the States for the unveiling of his monuments to Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia, and Stonewall Jackson in Charleston, W. Va. He enthusiastically accepted their offer and promptly sketched the ladies his design. Ezekiel’s host, the Virginian author Thomas Nelson Page, introduced him to William Taft, who had succeeded Roosevelt as president, an encounter which Ezekiel described in his memoirs:
In their time, then, Confederate monuments such as Ezekiel’s were considered “to the Southern soldiers,” not to slavery or states’ rights, and were celebrated for contributing “towards the peaceful solution of our affairs.” As soon as Ezekiel returned to his studio in Rome he began work on the Reconciliation Monument, which would occupy him for the next four years of his life. It was one of the last works of his life and the work of which he was most proud. Two years hence, in 1912, President Taft was invited to preside over the dedication ceremony of the Reconciliation Monument’s cornerstone, where he gave an address:
The unreserved language that President Taft used—“universal popular approval,” “heroic dead at the South,” “oblivion of sectionalism,” “greatest satisfaction,” “benediction of all true Americans”—echoes Lincoln’s own language of “malice toward none,” “charity for all,” and “firmness in the right.” Two years hence, in 1914, the Reconciliation Monument’s bronze superstructure was installed, and Woodrow Wilson, the New-Jersey Democrat who had succeeded Taft as president, was invited to deliver the oration at its unveiling:
President Wilson’s first-person voice—“we,” “our,” and so on—evinces the sincerity of his desire to, as Lincoln put it, “bind up the nation’s wounds.” Three years hence, in 1917, Ezekiel died in Rome. “The death of Moses Ezekiel, the distinguished and greatly beloved American sculptor, who lived in Rome for more than forty years, caused universal regret here,” reported the New York Times. Although he had lived abroad most of his life, he wished to return to Virginia to be buried, and in 1921 his body was reinterred at the site of his masterpiece in Arlington National Cemetery. At Ezekiel’s reburial, a letter from the president, Warren G. Harding, another Ohio Republican, was read:
Ezekiel, the president’s letter concluded, was “a great Virginian, a great artist, a great American, and a great citizen of world fame.” Thus, in act of authentic “American Exceptionalism,” the rule of vae victis was overturned, a defeated enemy was treated as an equal, and a civil war became a unifying myth. What made national reconciliation possible, an achievement arguably as great of a moral victory as the war was a military victory? Why have we become pettier and nastier with the passage of time? Whither Reconciliation? Three changes explain what has happened:[12] First, our core “Anglo-Protestant” identity has dissolved; second, the meaning of “progressive” has transformed; and third, our historical consciousness has regressed. First, despite the personal and political differences between these presidents, they were united by a cultural and civic identity which transcended party and section. There was conflict between them, and not just between the three Republicans and the one Democrat. For example, Roosevelt, after leaving office, determined that his successors, Taft and Wilson, were unworthy, and so publicly campaigned against them, even forming a third party, the “Progressive” or “Bull Moose Party,” when he was unable to win the Republican nomination. Such unity was the outcome of centuries of, in the words of John Jay in The Federalist, “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manner and customs.” In his famous valediction, George Washington proclaimed, “With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles.” Both of these Founding Fathers extolled the American Revolution as a unifying national experience. Of course, by the 1890s Americans were no longer Anglo-Protestants united by a common ancestry and historical memory. At that time, America was in the midst of the largest and longest immigration wave in its history, exceeded only by that of the present. These immigrants were under public and private pressure to “assimilate,” however, meaning conform to Anglo-Protestant culture and civics. “The melting pot” became the metaphor for this process, a term taken from the name of a play hailed by Teddy Roosevelt: “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming!” “Ethnics” who failed to assimilate were suspected of retaining a foreign allegiance and disparaged as “hyphenated Americans.” The contrast between the waves of the pre-1924 and post-1965 immigrants is considerable. Firstly, the former originated almost exclusively from Europe, whereas the latter originates from everywhere but Europe. Secondly, despite this comparatively more alien origin, assimilation is no longer the norm, and is treated as an embarrassing nativistic and xenophobic episode. Instead, what is called “cultural pluralism” is officially encouraged, where immigrants need only demonstrate a minimal proficiency in American culture and civics to become citizens, but can otherwise identify as hyphenated Americans, if Americans at all. The Anglo-Protestant ethnic core of the country is also denied to have ever existed or is derided as the root of all evil, thereby discouraging assimilation. Thirdly, the pre-1924 wave was paused in order to assimilate the masses of immigrants, whereas our post-1965 immigration wave remains, “unrelenting, non-stop,” as Joe Biden put it in 2015.13 “It’s not going to stop. Nor should we want it to stop.” The dissolution of the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core of our country need not have caused the dissolution of the Anglo-Protestant cultural and civic core, so long as it remained the creed of our public and private institutions. Unfortunately, that creed was supplanted by Cultural Marxism and its “long march through the institutions.” Ironically, that creed undermined itself through the gnostic rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln, “a rhetoric for continuing revolution” which lulled liberals and conservatives alike. Just as this was not what Lincoln had intended, so too was Lincoln’s reinterpretation of the Declaration of Independence not what Jefferson had intended. In any event, our core has hollowed out, and in consequence, our monuments are falling down. Second, the meaning of “progressive” has been transformed. The “Progressive Era” occurred from the 1890s to the 1920s. (Grover Cleveland, who has been called “the last Jeffersonian president,” was not a progressive.) Progressivism was, in general, a movement to solve the problems caused by unregulated industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, such as economic inequality, the destruction of the environment, unhygienic cities, unsafe workplaces, vice, corruption, dysgenics, “hyphenism,” and more. Progressives modernized the public and private sectors to be more professional, or as we might say today, “technocratic.” The zeitgeist was one of reformism and activism which birthed four constitutional amendments: The income tax, popular election of U.S. Senators, “Prohibition,” and women’s suffrage. A recent documentary by Ken Burns called the national parks, a legacy of the Progressive Era, “America’s Best Idea.” President McKinley’s line in his speech to Georgia’s state legislature about solving problems “for right and humanity,” and President Wilson’s line at the unveiling of the Reconciliation Monument about lifting the burdens of mankind and showing the paths of freedom to the world, were hallmarks of progressivism. To these presidents, national reconciliation was progressive, striving on “to finish the work we are in,” as Lincoln had encouraged. “Progressivism” has now been transformed into “identity politics,” namely those of race and sex, the working class having proved unreliably reactionary. This ersatz-progressivism has demonstrated that “progress” truly is a value-neutral term. Our progressives have more in common with the assassin of President McKinley and attempted assassin of President Roosevelt, ideology and mental illness alike, than they do with their victims. Indeed, McKinley had a statue torn down by our progressives for precisely what made him great in the Progressive Era.[14] Roosevelt, too, also had a statue torn down by our progressives, a statue which was progressive in its time, but which is now “problematic” to our progressives.[15] Unsurprisingly, our progressives now condemn the original progressives for assenting to “Jim Crow” in the South. It was, at that time, coinciding with the semi-centennial anniversary of the Civil War, when most of the Union and Confederate monuments were being raised, including that in Arlington. From this coincidence, modern progressives such as the Southern Poverty Law Center have inferred that these monuments were not, like their Union counterparts, for “cause and comrades,” as they professed to be, but concealed white-supremacist ulterior motives. Although a pseudo-historical argument which is easily refuted with reference to the primary sources, it has spread virally amongst the progressives in the media and academia, as it suits their prejudice against anything traditionally American and especially Southern.[16] Third, our understanding of the Civil War, thanks to our impulsive and ignorant reductivism and revisionism, has, unnaturally, regressed as we move further away from it in time. Woodrow Wilson himself, while still a professor at Princeton University, authored a textbook on American history, Division and Reunion, which covered the period 1829 to 1889. “The South was right in law and constitution, but wrong in history,” he argued of the Civil War, whereas the North “was wrong in law and constitution but right in history.” What Wilson meant was that although it was true that the “legal theory” of states’ rights that justified secession “was one which would hardly have been questioned in the early years of the government,” it was no less true that progressive historical forces of industrialization, westward expansion, and mass-immigration militated for the unification of the government. “The South had not changed her ideas from the first, because she had not changed her condition,” he explained. “She had not experienced, except in a very slight degree,” any of the forces that were changing the rest of the Union, “for they had been shut out from her life by slavery.” The South seceded from the Union not because sectional parties had been formed; sectional parties were formed because the unequal effect of these forces had sectionalized the Union. “There had been nothing active on the part of the South in this process,” he remarked. “She had stood still while the rest of the country had undergone profound changes; and, standing still, she retained the old principles which had once been universal.” Ultimately, “both she and her principles, it turned out, had been caught at last in the great national drift, and were to be overwhelmed.” The South, by staying more or less unchanged from the eighteenth century, had thereby “fallen out of sympathy” with the rapidly changing American nation. As an example of how our historical understanding has regressed, consider Wilson’s tone. “It was of course a period of misunderstanding and of passion; and I cannot claim to have judged rightly in all cases between parties,” he confessed in the preface. “I can claim, however, impartiality of judgment; for impartiality is a matter of the heart, and I know with what disposition I have written.” Contrast that with the tone of what passes for history today--such as the Naming Commission’s report and recommendations—which is “partial” to say the least. A modern version of Wilson’s interpretation comes from another Princeton professor, James M. McPherson. “The North hurtled forward eagerly toward a future of industrial capitalism that many Southerners found distasteful if not frightening; the South remained proudly and even defiantly rooted in the past before 1861,” he writes. “The South’s concept of republicanism had not changed in three-quarters of a century; the North’s had,” he continues. “With complete sincerity the South fought to preserve its version of the republic of the Founding Fathers.” As a consequence of the war, McPherson concludes, “The old federal republic in which the national government had rarely touched the average citizen except through the post-office gave way to a more centralized polity that taxed the people directly and created an internal revenue bureau to collect these taxes, drafted men into the army, expanded the jurisdiction of the federal courts, created a national currency and a national banking system, and established the first national agency for social welfare—the Freedmen’s Bureau.” Mr. McPherson notes how subtle changes in language symbolized the scale of the revolutionary changes in government. The Founders, as did the Confederates, referred to “United States” in the plural, as “these United States are,” but after the war, the United States became singular, as “the United States is.” The Founders had referred to liberty as the “freedom from” the government infringing upon one’s rights, hence why they decentralized the powers of the government. (So, too, did the Confederates, and when they framed their new constitution, they intensified and clarified the language decentralizing government power.) After the war, however, liberty became redefined as the “freedom to” exercise one’s rights, which required the expansion of government power, in particular that of the federal over the states. In summary, wrote Mr. McPherson, “Union victory in the war destroyed the southern vision of America and ensured that the northern vision would become the American vision.” Wilson understood that the Confederates, although their cause had been lost, were no less American, and were fighting for what they considered to be their rights as Americans, or as he put it what seemed to them to be “rights of self-government as plain and as sacred any that lay at the heart of the history of English liberty.” The war was a tragic conflict between two visions of America, one rooted in an agrarian and aristocratic past, another reaching for an industrialist and egalitarian future. “Even after the southern States had acted upon the old-time theory and seceded, the North for a moment was not sure that they had acted beyond their right,” noted Wilson. “It required the terrible exercise of prolonged war to impart to the national idea diffused vitality and authentic power.” Wilson, as well as McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft, admired the Confederates for the “sheer spirit and devotion” with which they struggled, “in spite of constantly diminishing resources and constantly waning hope.” These progressive presidents looked upon their fellow countrymen not with contempt, but with pity, for they had “exhausted” and “annihilated” themselves “all for a belated principle of government, an outgrown economy, an impossible purpose.” Make Arlington Great Again! “Swords Into Plowshares” is the name of the Soros-backed project which melted down Charlottesville’s Lee monument. It is not original; woke linguistics are too laden with leaden jargon for something so poetic. It is a phrase from the book of Isaiah in the Bible, “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruninghooks,” which was overturning an older prophecy from the book of Joel, “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears.” As a matter of fact, Moses Ezekiel not only inscribed this verse upon the Reconciliation Monument, but also gave it form: Atop the monument, a statue of a woman, meant to symbolize the “New South,” was pressing a pruning hook against the stock of a plow with one hand, whilst beckoning to the buried soldiers below. Beneath her was inscribed the verse. What that verse signified was how Southerners, Jews and Gentiles alike, trusting in Providence and perhaps seeing themselves in the stories of the Hebrew captivity, accepted defeat, returned to peacetime, and embraced their place in the new nation. Where “swords into plowshares” then meant clemency and unity, it has now been irreverently redefined to mean humiliation and dissension. They have, perversely, taken the swords and spears which were beaten into plowshares before and beaten them back into swords and spears. Mr. President, as you undertake the herculean labor of reconciling these United States, I implore you to consider having the Reconciliation Monument reassembled and restored to its rightful place in Arlington National Cemetery. It would be a symbolic act of reconciliation, not only for our past, but also for our present. Just as our ancestors, after the Civil War was over, reunited as Americans, irrespective of whether they wore the blue or the gray, so too we can reunite with one another, irrespective of whether we voted red or blue. NOTES: [1] “A Majority of Americans Want to Preserve Confederate History.” The Brion McClanahan Show. Jul. 4, 2024. https://tinyurl.com/yc6666b3
[2] “As a historian, I don’t like the idea of banning statues. I think the better way would be to leave most of these memorials where they are with some kind of explanation of who put them up, and when, why, and what they stand for.”—James M. McPherson, Princeton Alumni Weekly, Nov. 2017 [3] “I don’t believe in destroying parts of our memorial landscape. I believe in interpreting them…I just think it’s better to put them in context, leave them there, and give us the ability, in looking at a memorial in context, to really trace different themes and movements and times in American history.”—Gary Gallagher, WPVC, Apr. 2016 [4] “I am for removal of some Confederate monuments. The time has come. Not all of them, not every single one of them, certainly not in cemeteries. I just want the process to be historical, deliberative, and based on research.” [5] “I’m not one of those who says, ‘Tear down every single statue of every Confederate,’ but if you step back and look at the public presentation of history, particularly in the South, where are the black people of the South?…My view is, as well as taking down some statues, I think we need to put up others.”—Eric Foner, RT, Mar. 2018 [6] Campanile, Carl. “NYC Council advances bid that could yank monuments honoring Washington, Jefferson, Columbus.” The New York Post. Sep. 18, 2023. https://tinyurl.com/mpcda98v [7] Marsh, Julia. “Thomas Jefferson statue removed from City Hall after 187 years.” The New York Post. Nov. 22, 2021. https://tinyurl.com/5da2zmcc [8] Leigh, Catesby. “Virginia’s Monuments War.” City Journal. Nov. 17, 2022. https://tinyurl.com/3xx9ts69 [9] Leigh, Catesby. “A Monumental Outrage.” City Journal. Jan. 21, 2022. https://tinyurl.com/37fzjaaf [10] “Biden’s war on Southern war memorials has backfired: Have Southern service members had enough?” Revolver News. September 29, 2022. https://tinyurl.com/37ntbcmz [11] Sailer, Steve. “The Great Awokening Conspiracy Theory.” Taki’s Magazine. June 12, 2019. https://tinyurl.com/5n84fajp [12] Livingston, Donald. “The Disintegration of Lincolnian America.” Abbeville Institute 2018 Scholars Conference. https://tinyurl.com/nhe5cfhz [13] User clip. “Joe Biden unrelenting stream of immigration.” C-Span. February 17, 2015. https://tinyurl.com/2kc6mzsb [14] Kaleem, Jaweed. “First it was Confederate monuments. Now statues offensive to Native Americans are poised to topple across the U.S.” Los Angeles Times. April 1, 2018. https://tinyurl.com/2mx5fakf [15] O’Neill, Natalie. “Theodore Roosevelt statue removed from American Museum of Natural History.” New York Post. Jan. 19, 2022. https://tinyurl.com/j7fp9ttx [16] Leigh, Philip. “Don’t Remove Confederate Statues.” The Abbeville Institute 2019 Summer School. https://tinyurl.com/yuvw96t6
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 As part of its campaign to pander to the important and urgent needs of African-Americans with extremely divisive yet ultimately performative identity politics, the Biden-Harris administration has announced that it will resume Barack Obama’s decision in 2015 to remove Andrew Jackson from the twenty-dollar bill and replace him with Harriet Tubman. Jonathan Waldman’s celebratory and condescending column in The Washington Post exemplifies the ‘smugnorance’ of ‘gliberal’ opinion: Back in 2016, when Barack Obama was president, the Treasury Department announced that the $20 bill would be redesigned to feature Harriet Tubman, the former enslaved person [this is the new politically correct terminology for ‘slave’] who led others to freedom. In order to avoid offending people too much, President Andrew Jackson, who currently occupies the front of the $20, would not be banished completely but would have his image placed on the back of the bill, rather smaller in size. ow doomed are the ‘United’ States of America when something which should be as mundane as whose faces are on the currency becomes a battleground for identity politics? Can anyone imagine the Chinese or the Russians inflicting this upon themselves? Amusingly, ‘Dr.’ Waldman (I assume a liberal pundit like him wants his Ph.D in Communications duly noted) is the obverse of the ignorant, outraged conservative to whom he condescends in his column. Despite his know-it-all tone, he clearly knows nothing about either Jackson or Tubman aside from whatever children’s stories he learned in Social Studies and Sunday School, yet he is as excited about the change as his strawman conservative is upset about it. I can already hear my inner libertarian whispering, ‘What’s worse, the government changing whose face is printed on our money or the fact that the government is printing our money in the first place?’ Admittedly, cultural and social issues like this one are often fodder for keeping the people disunited on the issues which directly affect their liberties and their livelihoods. So who really cares how the Treasury Department is rebranding its currency when the new Treasury Secretary spent the past four years collecting a small fortune in speaking fees from financial institutions which she formerly regulated and which she will now regulate again? Yet what the libertarians and the socialists who make such objections cannot understand (because they are perverted mirror-images of each other) is how degrading the heroic figures on our currency and depreciating the value of that same currency are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. The latter is a form of economic warfare which impoverishes us materially and the former is a form of psychological warfare which demoralises us (which is another way of saying ‘impoverishes us spiritually’). I have written about Jackson from the perspective of a Jeffersonian American Southerner several times before. In ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,’ I attempted a comprehensive assessment of Jackson’s biography and legacy, which if nothing else contains enough information for others to make up their own minds. In ‘The Cause of Jackson is the Cause of Us All,’ I criticised the Obama-Biden administration’s redesign of the twenty-dollar bill and the Red Team’s craven non-response. I also reviewed Bradley J. Birzer’s In Defense of Andrew Jackson, which is a good book even though the author was so drawn into the cult of personality around Jackson that he apparently forgot to do his research when it came to Jackson’s temper tantrums. Jackson is an American legend who risked his life for his country when the life of that country was itself at risk.6 The Abbeville Institute’s Brion McClanahan was right to include Jackson next to Davy Crockett in his Politically Incorrect Guide to Real American Heroes. Yet however brave and brilliant of a leader he was on the battlefield, Jackson was more of a barbarian ‘chieftain’ than a civilised ‘commander-in-chief.’ He demanded absolute personal loyalty and reacted to anyone whom he believed had betrayed him as if he had betrayed the Union itself – personal weaknesses which made it child’s play for other politicians to manipulate him to their ends and caused conflict not only within his administration but also within the Union. Needless to say, I am not a ‘Jacksonian,’ especially since the few pro-Trump neoconservatives have appropriated that term in order to rebrand their same old ‘invade the world, invite the world, in hock to the world’ agenda as nationalistic and populist instead of globalist and elitist. That said, I am absolutely opposed to this historical purging of Jackson – not so much because of who he was, but more because of who he represents. Jackson’s enemies want him erased because he was a white male slave-master and Indian fighter who was, as a Scotch-Irish frontiersman in contrast to the Anglo-descended and Atlantic-oriented Founders, arguably the first native American President. Like many Blue Teamers, Joe Biden is a left-Lincolnian American, though his Vice President, Kamala Harris, is a part of the next generation of Anti-American 1619ers (who claim that, as she herself put it in a speech calling for ‘Columbus Day’ to be renamed ‘Indigenous Peoples Day,’ our country is ‘the scene of a crime’). Pres. Biden is attempting to make a separate peace with these 1619ers, and though it may buy this doddering octogenarian enough time to pretend to be Abraham Lincoln, there will be no peace in our time. Eventually the 1619ers will come for the left-Lincolnians, too. Remember, during the horrific ‘Summer of 1619,’ all of the slippery-slope arguments that have been made against Confederate history slipped into all of American history. The Anti-American 1619ers know that the American South has always been the internal other and eternal villain in Lincolnian America, which was why they isolated and attacked it first. The Lincolnians were so self-righteous, however, that they did not realise that these 1619ers were not conventional Lincolnians like them and had no respect for the American ‘Treasury of Virtue,’ either. These 1619ers are, in other words, attacking from the high ground which feckless ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ have ceded to them in a futile attempt to remain politically correct. The right-Lincolnians on the Red Team are regressing to their traditional role of denying what is happening in the present by rewriting what happened in the past. ‘Harriet Tubman replacing Andrew Jackson is actually conservative!’ these hucksters are boasting. ‘Did you know that Jackson was a Democrat and that Tubman was a Republican?’ Scott Greer (who has written about ‘The Humiliation of the Harriet Tubman $20’ at Revolver) has termed this type of argument ‘political judo.’ This was the Red Team’s belly-up (or, to be brutally honest, bent-over) position in 2015, too, when the Obama-Biden administration first announced this change. Such stupefying ignorance must be confronted because it is so cancerous on the Red Team. Do Red Teamers really expect patriotic Americans to believe that Jackson, Martin Van Buren, John C. Calhoun, and Thomas H. Benton are in any way personally or politically comparable to Anti-American 1619ers like AOC, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib? To put it in simplistic Blue/Red terms, the Democrats in the 1800s were the party of small business and small government, while the Republicans in the 1800s were the party of big business and big government. If these Red Teamers were alive when Jackson was elected President, then they would have been Democrats (or maybe not, but that is just as useful information). There are some Jeffersonian Americans (usually the ones leaning more libertarian) who, because of their historical grievances with Jackson, reckon that he is getting what he deserved. This argument is not as intellectually debased as ‘Jackson big Democrat, Democrats big bad, Jackson big bad’ argument of Red Teamers, but it is no less petty and ultimately self-defeating. Trust me, the 1619er purging of Jackson has nothing whatsoever to do with whether he exceeded his orders during the Seminole Affair, whether he got too personally entangled in the Petticoat Affair, whether his policy of patronage made corruption better or worse, whether he was right to resort to violence when South Carolina nullified the tariff, whether he exercised his veto power properly, whether replacing the national bank with his pet banks was constitutional monetary policy, whether his disbursement of the Treasury surplus was constitutional fiscal policy, whether the gag order was the wisest way to respond to anti-slavery petitions, whether Indian removal was the lesser or greater evil facing the five civilised tribes, or any of the other issues which Jeffersonian and Lincolnian Americans have debated in good faith over the years. Do you even think that prigs like Dr. Waldman at The Washington Post have ever heard of any of the above? Like it or not, as far as the Lincolnian Americans and the Anti-American 1619ers are concerned, Jackson represents us Jeffersonian Americans at the Abbeville Institute. Although ‘representation matters’ is a reductive slogan in support of disunifying and undemocratic identity politics, there is nothing wrong with African-American historical representation per se. In fact, given the unique role that African-Americans have played in American history, they should be much more represented than they are. The fact that African-Americans are not better-represented is an example of how past racism can manifest itself in the present, albeit in an inert state. Yet as much as this remnant of racism may be well past its half-life, the Anti-American 1619ers nevertheless claim that it is literal white supremacy endangering their lives, the left-Lincolnian Americans hasten to appease this racial hypochondria, and right-Lincolnians retreat further into their historical fables. Jeffersonian Americans, meanwhile, are left by ourselves wondering how and why our country has gone so insane. Historical representation for African-Americans is fair, but why Harriet Tubman? There are many other African-Americans who made a greater contribution to the course of American history. Frederick Douglass, for example, was a major abolitionist and civil-rights leader. (The historian David W. Blight’s recent Pulitzer-winning biography on Douglass definitively claims his place in history.) Booker T. Washington braved the discrimination, segregation, and terrorism of ‘Jim Crow’ to create educational and vocational opportunities for his people (while Afro-Marxists like W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes sniped at him from up north as an ‘accommodationist’). The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who practically singlehandedly accomplished the Civil-Rights Revolution through sheer force of moral authority, should go without saying. Trailblazing athletes like Jackie Robinson and Jesse Owens – or even modern athletes like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods – arguably contributed more to the advancement of African-Americans than Tubman. If Jackson must be replaced by a black woman so that the Biden-Harris administration can check off more identity-politics boxes, then someone like Ida B. Wells (who was a truly ‘intersectional’ leader for black civil rights, women’s suffrage, and organised labour)10 is much more qualified than Tubman. ‘Sojourner Truth’ is another African-American woman whose real biography and legacy have, like Tubman’s, been distorted through affirmative-action history. Yet from what is actually known about each of them, she did more good in her life than Tubman. Although Tubman is portrayed today as an attractive action hero, her story has been sensationalised and sentimentalised in the melodramatic style of anti-slavery fiction like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Tubman was not only unable to read or write (and thus was not able to leave a definitive account of her life), but also was an epileptic and narcoleptic prone to severe hallucinations (which may account for all the contradictory and uncorroborated claims that she made about herself). Historians know that not very much is actually known about Tubman’s life and that much of what people think they know is a myth. In an essay in The New York Review of Books, Prof. James M. McPherson of Princeton University (the Pulitzer-winning author of the Oxford History of the Civil War Era who recently made headlines for joining with other experts to criticise ‘The 1619 Project’) traced the historiography of the Tubman myth and attempted to assemble a factual rather than fictional biography. According to Prof. Milton Sernett of Syracuse University (author of Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History) in ‘The Truths Behind the Myths of Harriet Tubman,’ she ‘is an American heroine, but her life story is shrouded in myth and exaggeration.’ When the Obama-Biden administration first announced the replacement of Jackson with Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, Jamiles Lartey wrote an article for The Guardian, ‘Harriet Tubman: The Woman, the Myth, the Legend Muddied by $20 Bill Plaudits,’ trying to manage public expectations. Mr. Lartey interviewed Kate Larson, a biographer of Tubman who stated, ‘I am stunned and excited and thrilled that Harriet Tubman is having her day, but at the same time, for so many years, I have been working towards rewriting those myths.’ These are just a few examples. We simply do not know very much about the truth of Tubman’s life. She was a slave who escaped from the Upper-Southern State of Maryland and braved going back there in order to help some of the slaves she knew escape, but the ‘thousands’ of slaves that she claimed to have freed throughout the Deep South are likely legends. She may have served the Union as a nurse (and maybe even as a scout and a spy) during the War, but the ‘raids’ that she claimed to have led against Confederate troops are also likely legends. Although it is not fair that history ‘forgot’ Tubman for so long, it is not all that surprising, because the politically incorrect truth is that however interesting and inspiring her individual story may be, she herself is individually not that important. If Tubman had never escaped slavery herself and was simply emancipated during the War – or even if Tubman had died when she was struck on the head by an overseer – American history would probably not have happened all that differently from how it did happen. Yet it would be impossible, by contrast – quite literally impossible – for history to forget Jackson, who was arguably the most important person alive in his time and place, ‘The Age of Jackson’ or ‘Jacksonian America.’ We do know, however, that Tubman she helped plan the ultra-abolitionist John Brown’s terrorist attack on Harper’s Ferry, which had it succeeded was intended to start a slave insurrection and exterminate the white population of the American South.13 Brown’s raid (to be specific, the refusal of Republican officials in Northern states to enforce the law, arrest the conspirators, and extradite them to Virginia, as well as the positive reaction to Brown among the Northern intelligentsia) was one of the final cuts convincing the Southern states to secede from the Union after a Republican was elected President on Northern electoral votes alone. Anti-American 1619ers are also getting a monument in Richmond, Virginia, to Brown’s predecessor, the woman- and children-slaughtering Nat Turner, which is so perverse that it is comparable to if the Muscogee Nation built a monument in honour of Col. Jackson and his Tennessean militiamen. When the 1619ers are dreaming about a nightmarish race war, surely some of the less ideological Lincolnian Americans must be reconsidering their strategy of politically correct appeasement? I stopped trying to reason with the Lincolnians and the 1619ers a long time ago. I once believed that an earnest, informed argument was capable of changing people’s minds, but I have since learned that is not how people (especially Americans in this hyper-partisan and hyper-tribal environment) think. For example, I told myself that no American could honestly hate someone as honourable and humane as Robert E. Lee. How could anyone hate one of the most tragic and heroic figures of such a tragic and heroic civil war, who said things like ‘slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country’ and ‘if the Government is disrupted, I shall return to my native State and share the miseries of my people, and save in defence will draw my sword on none’? He was no ‘slaver’ or ‘traitor’ – and if he was, then so was his father, Henry Lee III (who was one of George Washington’s most loyal soldiers), and so was Washington himself. Yet hate him they do,14 and the only thing that they see as tragic about that civil war is that more ‘slavers’ and ‘traitors’ like Lee were not shot or hanged. Lee was a much more honourable and humane man than Jackson, so if they hate the former then there is no reason for them not to hate the latter, too. I once believed that ‘presentism’ (making ethical and intellectual judgements about the past with the ethical and intellectual standards of the present) was simply political correctness run amok and that Americans were people who meant well and would stop if they knew better. Now I know that presentism is actually an authentic expression of that peculiar Yankee character of self-loathing and self-righteousness that has contaminated the American national character. I once believed that this conflict over symbols could be solved through compromise. Why could the Biden-Harris administration not do with lesser-known but no-less-important figures like Tubman what the U.S. Mint has done with our states, our parks, our historical events, and other historical figures: Issue commemorative (and collectible) coinage? Why stop at commemorative and collectible coinage, however? Why not embark on a public-works project of building new monuments to include other Americans who have traditionally been excluded from the narrative of American history? Such a project would beautify public spaces while also edifying the public’s historical consciousness. As silly as ‘The Garden of American Heroes’ seemed, it at least had the right idea. Now I know, however, that taking things away from us is the whole point and that we get nothing back for what we give up. The Anti-American 1619ers are not benevolently trying to right a wrong. They chant about ‘diversity,’ ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion,’ but to them these words are simply euphemisms for ‘victory.’ They have the barbaric mentality of one tribe that has conquered another tribe, is tearing down their idols to their old gods, and forcing them to bow down to their new gods. My mission is not to try to change anyone’s mind anymore, but to ‘preach to the choir,’ so to speak. I want to communicate with those Americans and Southerners who are afraid and angry about what is happening to our identity and our patrimony – to the people who have been curtly informed by Washington Post columnists ‘we understand your feelings, we get why you don’t like this, but we’re doing it anyway, you’ll get used to it.’ I want them to know that they are not alone and do not have to feel ashamed of who they are and where they come from anymore. Given the changing demographics of this country, it is inevitable that the symbols of our people will be removed and replaced with the symbols of a new people. The terrifying Summer of 1619 was an acceleration of this process. The Blue Team is dominated by this new American people – like the Biden-Harris administration’s nominee to lead the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Kristen Clarke, who in a published article from when she was at Harvard University argued, ‘Melanin endows blacks with greater mental, physical, and spiritual abilities – something which cannot be measured by Eurocentric standards.’ So Jackson is, in Anti-Racist America, not just racist, but actually racially inferior to Tubman. When Pres. Biden calls himself a ‘transition candidate,’ this is the future to which he is transitioning. The Red Team, by contrast, is dominated by craven collaborationists with this new occupation government (literally: look at the now-indefinite military occupation of our capital city!), such as the Lincoln Project. In an article for The American Conservative, ‘We Owe the Lincoln Project Our Thanks,’ Saurabh Sharma argues, ‘They’ve done conservatives a great service by laying bare the grift and hypocrisy at the heart of the Republican establishment.’ In ‘The Lincoln Project, Facing Multiple Scandals, is Accused by its Own Co-Founder of Likely Criminality,’ Glenn Greenwald (who had to resign from the website that he co-founded when it began colluding with the Blue Team, Deep State, and Big Tech to censor his work) argues that ‘liberals heralded this group of life-long scammers, sleaze merchants, and con artists as noble men of conscience, enabling them to fleece and deceive the public.’ Years ago, after reckoning that I had to ‘get right with Jackson,’ I came to the conclusion that instead of puritanically and pettily erasing his image (he is simply too important of a figure to pretend did not exist), it would be more edifying for us to erase the negative ways in which he influenced the office of the presidency and our national character. For example, I compared how Jackson treated the American Indians to how we have treated other poorer and browner people like the American Indians. How can we, un-shamefacedly, seriously condemn a President for atrocities from two centuries ago when we have occupied Afghanistan for 20 years, have totally isolated Venezuela from the global economy, have unilaterally broken a treaty with Iran, have abused the Palestinians living in ‘the world’s largest open-air prison,’ and are complicit in ‘the world’s worst humanitarian crisis’ in Yemen? Jackson was from a time when and a place where warfare between Americans and Indians, regardless of ‘who started it’ or whatever other games historians like to play, was ‘kill-or-be-killed.’ Even then, Jackson was never genocidal toward the American Indians, but actually paternalistic (even literally so: one of his adopted sons was an American-Indian boy orphaned during the Creek War). Of course, he was not above collectively punishing the American Indians in a state of war – as his retaliatory massacre of the Creek at Horseshoe Bend for the Creek massacre at Fort Mims exemplifies – but he did not want to exterminate their race systematically. In fact, he espoused the policy of ‘Indian removal’ in order to protect the American Indians from the literally genocidal frontiersmen, who would have exterminated them in order to annex their land. Jackson’s brutality came from his brutal experience on the frontier, where conflict between Americans and Indians was an ever-present threat, but even then he still showed some humanity. What is our excuse for using our imperial power to starve and bomb people who pose no threat to us whatsoever? At the same time, instead of puritanically and pettily erasing Jackson’s image, it would also be edifying for us to emphasise the positive ways in which Jackson influenced office of the presidency and our national character. Jackson, in many ways, continued what Thomas Jefferson started by personifying a popular revolution which significantly ‘democratised’ and ‘liberalised’ American society (which at the time was nevertheless the most democratic and liberal society in the Western world). This is why the Democratic Party, until ‘The Great Awokening,’ proudly claimed Jefferson and Jackson as its founding fathers. Now I see how utterly naïve these appeals were. The purging of Jackson is not an honest effort to reckon with the good and the bad of our history, as all truly patriotic people should be able to do. Lincolnian Americans like Pres. Biden and Anti-American 1619ers like Vice Pres. Harris are purging Jackson to make an invidious statement that they are better than him and better than the people whom they see him as representing. As Philip Leigh put it in his lecture at the 2019 Abbeville Summer School on the New South, ‘To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves.’ What makes this arrogance and contempt even more offensive is that it is not even true. Jackson, for all his faults, was a genuinely heroic figure whose life illustrates the best and the worst about our country. Anyone who is not an insufferably moralistic ‘presentist’ knows that historically speaking, ‘great’ often does not mean ‘good.’ In any event, no one in the Biden-Harris administration, despite the creepy adoration of the media class, is either great or good. Speaking in the Senate in 1836, John C. Calhoun (the greatest Southern statesman in American history) contrasted Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren: When the South was divided, the opposition must ever be feeble. It was a historical fact, that all effective opposition to the administration of this Government has come from the South. The North has never been able to turn out an administration. He [Calhoun] intended no disparagement to that great section. He spoke of the fact simply, without pretending to go into the cause; while, on the other hand, the South has never failed to overthrow an administration to which it was opposed. But two administrations had come in against its choice, both of which were speedily and decisively overthrown. General Jackson would soon be out of power, and the administration that may succeed him could not keep the South divided. He would tell the coming Administration to beware. If there be any who expected the President’s nominee [Van Buren] could successfully play the game which he has, he would be woefully mistaken. With all his objections to the President, he would not deny him many high qualities; he had courage and firmness; was bold, warlike, and audacious, though not true to his word, or faithful to his pledges. He had, besides, ‘done the State some service.’ He terminated the late war gloriously at New Orleans, which had been remembered greatly to his advantage. His nominee had none of those recommendations; he is not of the race of the lion or the tiger; he belongs to a lower order – the fox; and it would be in vain to expect that he could command the respect, or acquire the confidence of those who had so little admiration for the qualities by which he was distinguished. By the dexterous use of patronage, for which he and his party were so distinguished, an individual here and there, who preferred himself to the country, might be enlisted; but the great mass, all that were independent and sound in the South, would be finally opposed to him and his system. Van Buren may have been a vulpine figure compared to the leonine figure of Jackson, but what does that make the left- and right-Lincolnians on the Blue and Red teams today, who are lower even than Van Buren? They are downright verminous and insectile. Sometimes I am frustrated with how much time I have spent defending Jackson given that he is not someone whom I particularly admire and was often an antagonist to the Jeffersonian historical figures whom I do admire (such as Calhoun, who was far more intelligent and had far more integrity than Jackson). Yet the fact is that Jackson, in death as in life, is in the thick of the fighting, and even though we Jeffersonian Americans have our historic differences with Jackson as a man, Jackson as a symbol is one of us. If Jackson were alive today, he would tell us that you do not always get to choose the ground on which you have to fight. We shall never dishonour ourselves like the right-Lincolnians on the Red Team, who are so afraid of the Blue Team and who are so ashamed of American history that they will only defend it if they can do so on liberal terms. If Jackson were alive today, he would do the same for any of us: He would not abandon his people to others who want us to go extinct and all evidence of our existence to be erased because of comparatively trivial political disagreements. I have been asked how we can respond to such insults to our heritage as Americans and Southerners. The answer is that there is nothing that we can do in the short run. These insults are not going to stop and no one else is coming to save us. What we can do in the long run, however, is become less alienated from our heritage and less alienated from each other as a people. The Blue Team knows that it can get away with insulting us – and the Red Team knows that it can get away with not responding to these insults – because we have been reduced from Jeffersonian and Jacksonian freeholders to passive consumers and workers living atomised and deracinated lives.21 Ours must be a long-run strategy: Cultural persistence as a form of political resistance. John Devanny’s speech at the Abbeville Institute’s 2020 Scholars Conference (the last 10 or so minutes in particular) and his article ‘What Can Be Done?’ is full of wise advice. One of the most damaging delusions of Lincolnian Americans has been the pursuit of some logical or rhetorical trick to force the Anti-American 1619ers to stop insulting them with the dreary litany of ‘ists’ and ‘phobes.’ Jeffersonians know better than our Lincolnian compatriots, however, because our nomocratic tradition is aware of the fundamentally un- and even anti-conservative chiliasm and gnosticism intrinsic to their teleocratic tradition (hence why left-Lincolnians like James M. McPherson and Eric Foner describe the War and Reconstruction as ‘the Second American Revolution’ and ‘the Second Founding,’ respectively). In other words, how can any Lincolnian American oppose the extremes to which the Anti-American 1619ers take ‘equality’ when they themselves are constantly quoting ‘the proposition that all men are created equal’ to convince the 1619ers that America cannot be racist? The Lincolnians have unwittingly set themselves against history. One little act of ‘living not by lies’ which I have decided to practice is to request alternatives to the Tubman $20 whenever possible and always be happy to explain myself to curious cashiers, waitresses, etc.: ‘Nothing against Harriet Tubman, but as flawed as Andrew Jackson was, the American Union and the State of Florida would not exist as they are today without him – and without many other hardened frontiersmen, including ancestors of mine who were literally named in honour of him – and so, in my opinion, what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did was ungrateful, unpatriotic, and the opposite of “unifying.”’  Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire; strangers devour your land in your presence; and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. So the daughter of Zion is left as a booth in a vineyard, as a hut in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city. Unless the Lord of Hosts had left to us a very small remnant, we would have become like Sodom, we would have been made like Gomorrah. – Isaiah 1:7-9 Yet I will leave a remnant, so that you may have some who escape the sword among the nations, when you are scattered through the countries. Then those of you who escape will remember Me among the nations where they are carried captive, because I was crushed by their adulterous heart which has departed from Me, and by their eyes which play the harlot after their idols; they will loathe themselves for the evils which they committed in all their abominations. And they shall know that I am the Lord; I have not said in vain that I would bring this calamity upon them.– Ezekiel 6:8-10 O my God, I am too ashamed and humiliated to lift up my face to You, my God; for our iniquities have risen higher than our heads, and our guilt has grown up to the heavens. Since the days of our fathers to this day we have been very guilty, and for our iniquities we, our kings, and our priests have been delivered into the hand of the kings of the lands, to the sword, to captivity, to plunder, and to humiliation, as it is this day. And now for a little while grace has been shown from the Lord our God, to leave us a remnant to escape, and to give us a peg in His holy place, that our God may enlighten our eyes and give us a measure of revival in our bondage. – Ezra 9:6-8 (This is the third part of a three-part series. Part 1 of the Remnant begins here, part 2 begins here.) We are living through an iconoclastic terror in which irreversible and unforgivable damage will be done to our cultural heritage. It is an atrocity and a tragedy not unlike the Spanish Red Terror – when Communist revolutionaries desecrated Catholic churches and massacred Catholic clergy, even going so far as to exhume and execute in effigy the corpses of monks and nuns. For what is a monument but a symbolic grave – a grave for the memory, if not the body, of a person, or a people? Yet we, the Southern people, do not live in bronze or stone. As horrible as it is to lose our monuments, that is not to lose everything. We must become ‘living monuments’ of our people. The virtues that we admire in our heroes and that we once memorialised in these beautiful works of art? Now, more than ever, we must embody those virtues ourselves and make our lives beautiful. Our ancestors’ graves may be desecrated, but even if their memories are exhumed and executed in effigy, they themselves cannot be killed – and it is not because they are already dead. It is because they live in us. The Hebrew prophets knew that the ruling classes and the masses would not heed their message, but they also knew that their duty was not to preach to them anyway, but to ‘The Remnant.’ According to the Bible, the Remnant is what remains of a people after suffering a catastrophe – the Assyrian conquest of Israel or the Babylonian conquest of Judah – which must preserve the heritage of their people within themselves until a time comes when it can be restored to its former glory. ‘Major Prophets’ like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, as well as many other ‘Minor Prophets’ spoke of ‘a faithful remnant’ with hope for their people’s future. In the books of Ezra-Nehemiah, Haggai, and Malachi, the Jewish people who returned to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon are referred to as ‘a faithful remnant.’ The Jews have continued to survive as a people because generation after generation remained faithful to their ancient heritage in spite of their dispossession and persecution. (In fact, part of the reason that they have been persecuted in the first place was because they never fully assimilated wherever they lived and always kept themselves somewhat apart, with Jewish institutions and Jewish traditions of their own.) Because of the faith of this Remnant, the Jewish people have not only created diaspora communities around the world for thousands of years, but also created a country of their own in their ancestral homeland after thousands of years of exile. Living amid the death throes of the Roman Empire – barbarian invasions, economic crises, political corruption, and social dissolution – an Italian monk named Benedict founded the first Catholic monasteries in order to preserve a ‘faithful remnant’ of Christianity and the Classics. Because of how the Catholic monasteries which Benedict founded virtually saved Western Civilisation during the ensuing Dark Ages, Benedict has been canonised as the ‘Patron Saint of All Europe.’ Rod Dreher (a Christian author and blogger at The American Conservative who lives in Louisiana) has proposed a plan for how Christians can use what he calls ‘The Benedict Option’ in the modern post- and even anti-Christian world. Ironically, Mr. Dreher has also compared contemporary Christians to Rome’s ‘Final Pagan Generation,’ a generation which appeared to be blissfully ignorant of or even indifferent to the threat that Christianity posed to its world. We Southerners must practice a version of the Benedict Option among ourselves and become ‘The Remnant,’ so to speak, of our own people. Each one of us must be like Benedictine monks, conserving the blueprints of our culture and civilisation so that one day our children can reconstruct a new American South after these Dark Ages. Each one of us must aspire to be the ‘Patron Saint of All Dixie,’ doing great works to honour the memory of our ancestors and sacrifice for the future of our descendants. If we do nothing, then we shall go down in history for our complacency and cowardice as America’s ‘Final Southern Generation,’ born into a country where our people belonged but dying in a country where our people have been banished. M.E. Bradford, in Why the South Will Survive (a tribute to I’ll Take My Stand on its semi-centennial anniversary), summarised our mission as the Southern Remnant: For the sake of memory, let us preserve the iconic things – buildings, monuments, gardens, rites, celebrations, and stories – which have defined us for over three hundred years as a people apart, and which carry in themselves the seeds of restoration as a context for the tradition. Objections to these reminders of an earlier South or to an attention to its history must be resisted, at every turn and with every resource. Those who would destroy the icons and erase that memory are not Southerners as we define the species here, but instead serve chiefly to recall to us why we have never agreed to be absorbed by the deracinated abstractions of the Union at large Since the symbols of our ancestors will be purged from public places, we must display our pride in our ancestry ourselves. Set out family portraits and set out photo albums. Fly a flag from your porch or yard. Put a (polite) bumper sticker on your car. We must also learn about our ancestry, too. Trace your genealogy and learn family lore from your elders. Join hereditary societies like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (which are in desperate need of new blood) in order to fraternise and organise with your fellow Southerners. We must also treat our patriotic symbols with the respect that they deserve (so no ‘rebel flag’ bikinis, boxers, beer cozies, beach towels, etc.) Many Southerners are so far out of touch with their roots – who they are, where they come from, and what they have done – that they are insensible to how personal these attacks on our ancestors truly are. We must behave like traditional Southern gentlemen and ladies, practicing the Southern manners that we preach (which, as George Garrett has explained, are an expression of the Christian commandment to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ and ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’). If we treat others and ourselves with respect, then others will respect us more, we will respect ourselves more, and our spheres of influence will not only be more civilised, decent, and humane, but also will grow in influence. Describing the literature of Tom Wolfe (a native of Richmond who moved to Manhattan, where he satirised every aspect of American race, class, and sex, including/especially the poor manners of New Yorkers), Garrett explained that for Southerners manners are ‘a mean between brute savagery (barbarism) and frivolous foppery (foolish over-sophistication),’ ‘the mean between the utterly idiosyncratic (mannerism) and the tediously conventional (cliché and stereotype),’ and ‘represent a formal obligation to one’s neighbor (who is always Everyman) and the recognition of the love of God and presence of the Holy Ghost in all of one’s fellow creatures.’ We must study all 400 years of Southern history, not just the 16 years of the War and Reconstruction, which however epic is just one chapter of our story. ‘The North defeated the South in war, crushed and humiliated it in peace, and waged against it a war of intellectual and spiritual conquest,’ according to Frank L. Owsley. ‘In this conquest the North fixed upon the South the stigma of war guilt, of slave guilt, of treason, and thereby shook the faith of its people in their way of living and in their philosophy of life.’ We must renew our faith in that way of living and philosophy of life, as Owsley urged us to do, but in order to do that have to go back in time to before that conquest. As Richard M. Weaver demonstrated in his juxtaposition of the diaries of the Cavalier William Byrd II of Virginia and the Puritan Cotton Mather of Massachusetts, there were already distinct Southern and Northern identities as early as the 17th century.[1] Colonial history is often overshadowed by the Founding (which slaveholding Southern soldiers and statesmen dominated, much to the chagrin of the American ‘Girondins’ and ‘Jacobins’ alike)[2], but it was then and there that our heritage originated. Prior to the War and Reconstruction, of course, ‘America’ was synonymous with Southern history: Daniel Boone and the Cumberland Gap, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Francis Scott Key and the Battle of Fort McHenry, Andrew Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans, Davy Crockett ‘The King of the Wild Frontier,’ Sam Houston and the Texas Revolution, ‘Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!’, Kit Carson and the Rocky Mountains, Zachary Taylor and the Battle of Buena Vista, Winfield Scott and the Battle of Mexico City, and the popular literature of the ‘frontier humourists’ who fictionalised the settlement of western territory. As the monuments to our history are torn down, we must build up new ones in our hearts. That said, we must be prepared to keep ‘mowing the lawn,’ so to speak, continually refuting the lies that Yankees never tire of telling about the War and Reconstruction. They believe in the simplistic formulation that since secession was ‘all about’ slavery, the war was also ‘all about’ slavery, and therefore the Federals were ‘good guys’ and the Confederates ‘bad guys.’ We must show that secession did not cause the war – that the Union’s reasons for invading the Confederacy were not the same as the Confederacy’s reasons for seceding from the Union. We must show that slavery was a national problem which required a national solution and that no national political party (including/especially Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans) proposed such a solution. We must show that the so-called solution to slavery which the Northern anti-slavery movement proposed would have amounted to the greatest act of self-disinheritance in history with no positive precedents whatsoever. We must show that when white Southerners recoiled at these demands, the Northern anti-slavery movement only intensified their rhetoric and threatened them with the very slave insurrections that they feared the most. We must show that the Northern anti-slavery movement had non-humanitarian ulterior motives, to say the least – from the capitalists (who figured that ‘free labour’ blacks would work harder for less money) to the nativists/racists (who wanted to keep blacks out of the American West), to the statists (who wanted to weaken the power of the Jeffersonians so that they could enact the Hamiltonian programme). We must show that the Southern defense of slavery from external attacks by the Northern anti-slavery movement coincided with the internal reform of slavery by white Southerners, contradicting the Northern anti-slavery propaganda to which the pro-slavery arguments were responding. We must show, in sum, that white Southerners had inherited rather than invented the institution of slavery and that the solution to that problem was hardly as self-evident as ‘presentism’ (or ‘anachronistic moralism’) makes it seem.[3] Yankees lie that secession was treason – an illegal and undemocratic plot to destroy ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people.’ We must show, by contrast, that secession was legal and democratic. We must show that secession was the act of conventions of the people of the states, which in the American small-f federal and small-r republican tradition were elected in order to represent the people in their sovereign capacity amid great public crises. We must show that it was supreme state conventions such as these which delegated power to the general conventions in Philadelphia in the first place and ultimately had the authority to accept/reject whatever their delegates proposed. We must show that the people of the states never surrendered their sovereignty by forming ‘a more perfect union,’ but spelled out in their ordinances of ratification and constitutional amendments that they reserved whatever powers they had not delegated to that compact and enumerated in that charter. We must show that just as the people of the states had, through their sovereign authority, ratified the Constitution of the United States of America, so through that very same sovereign authority did they repeal that ratification of the Constitution and dissolve their connection with the United States of America. We must show what ‘saving the Union’ meant in practice – declaring supreme state conventions to be ‘combinations of criminals,’ overruling the ‘consent of the governed’ with sheer military power, and overthrowing the duly elected governments of the seceded states under occupation. We must show, in sum, that it was secession which exemplified ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people.’ Yankees lie that the Confederates committed war crimes. This particular lie is most popular in Hollywood because however historically inaccurate it may be, entertainment media has the creative freedom to tell whatever story it wants and audiences are often dumb enough believe whatever they watch. We must show the absurdity of this lie by reminding everyone that the War was a war of invasion – that it was the Union that invaded the Confederacy, not the other way around. ‘The Rape of Athens’ was much more representative than ‘The Lawrence Massacre,’ and even then there are notable differences between those two atrocities. The former was committed by regular Union troops at the order of their commanding officer; the latter was perpetrated by irregular Confederate ‘Bushwhackers.’ The former was an act of indiscriminate violence against black and white women alike; the latter was an act of discriminate violence against ‘Jayhawker’ men for their indiscriminate violence against women. The former was hailed throughout the Union and resulted in the promotion of the court-martialed commander by the U.S. President himself; the latter was condemned throughout the Confederacy and resulted in the outlawing of those who perpetrated the crime.[4] The former was enabled by a Union commander who was elected U.S. President after the War; the latter was committed by men who became ‘Wild West’ outlaws after the War. As far as the lie that Confederates committed war crimes against their own people is concerned, we must show that while conflict between civilians and the military is inevitable when they are fighting a war in their own country, Confederate civilians cheered on the Confederate military even after they had given up on the Confederate government. We must show, in sum, that Yankees are, with their usual insufferable self-righteousness, projecting their own war guilt onto their war victims. We must all contribute to a renaissance of Southern arts. Whatever our individual talents are – culinary? literary? performing? visual? – we must make our experience as the Southern Remnant our muse. The alleged cultural inferiority of the American South is nothing more than Yankee arrogance and ignorance – our lack of a derivative culture ‘poured in from the top,’ in Donald Davidson’s phrase, as opposed to an original culture arising from the folk. What has always made the American South a ‘Mirror for Artists,’ in another phrase of Davidson’s, is her closeness to nature, her historical consciousness, and the cohesiveness of her communities, a muse which starkly contrasts with atomised, deracinated, and citified life. We must cook Southern cuisine in our homes for our family and friends in the tradition of old-fashioned Southern hospitality. Indeed, what would American cuisine be without dishes as diverse as barbequed pork and deep-fried chicken? Buttermilk biscuits and cornbread? Greens and grits? Chili and gumbo? Peach cobbler and pecan pie? To say nothing of sweet tea and whiskey! (Note: Support local Southern restaurants, not nü-South ‘foodies’ appropriating our culture in their ironically antiquarian ‘eateries.’) We must read Southern literature and write some poetry or prose of our own when we find our voice. Indeed, what would American literature be without Southern writers as diverse as Edgar Allan Poe and William Gilmore Simms? William Faulkner and Walker Percy? Florence King and Tom Wolfe? Augusta Jane Evans and Eudora Welty? Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor? (Note: Culturally appropriating the ‘Southern Gothic’ genre in order to tell a moralistic tale about how evil Southerners are is the polar opposite of philosophical and theological beliefs about good and evil which inspire that genre.) We must listen to Southern music and write some of our own when we find our sound. Indeed, what would American music be without Southern genres as diverse as bluegrass and ragtime? Blues and jazz? Funk and soul? R&B and rock n’ roll? Gospel and sacred harp? (Note: The degeneration of country music from its folk roots into ‘bro-country’ and ‘hick-hop’ – veritable redneck minstrel shows – is the cultural appropriation of Nashville by Los Angeles.) When it comes to the visual arts, we cannot replace the great public works of art of ours which have been and will be destroyed: They were from a time when our people were self-conscious and self-confident in spite of – or, perhaps, because of – military defeat and occupation as well as economic exploitation and impoverishment. That proud sense of self has been perverted into self-hatred and self-righteousness. Our unique experience as aliens in our own country must inspire unique works of art less public and more private but no less proud. ‘By the rivers of Babylon,’ lamented the Psalmist, ‘there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.’ Our duty as the Southern Remnant is to keep the memory of Zion alive even as we are spiritually, if not geographically, exiled in a modern-day Babylon, so that our posterity will be prepared to rebuild when our homeland belongs to us again. Consider these arts our version of the Hebraic Law. For the Jewish people, the strict observance of a code of arcane (and sometimes seemingly arbitrary) laws kept them apart from host populations which otherwise would have assimilated them. We, the Southern Remnant, must keep ourselves apart from the American mainstream, but while the Hebraic Law is fundamentally unnatural, the ‘Southern Law’ should come naturally to us. What could be more rewarding than eating America’s best cuisine, reading America’s best literature, listening to America’s best music, trying your hand at yourself, and then sharing the fruits with friends and family? Rootedness – that feeling of belonging to a particular people in a particular place during a particular period – is at the core of Southern identity. ‘From that moment there crept over my spirit a feeling akin to patriotism for this piece of land – for its history and for its beauty,’ Don Anderson described the experience of rediscovering his ancestral home. ‘From that moment I have been drawn to it as a magnet.’ We must deepen our roots in land where we live by exploring the outdoors (picnics at the park with friends and family are nice, but not the same) and taking up outdoor sports like fishing and hunting (collegiate and professional sports are popular Southern pastimes, yet they are degrading diversions converged with ‘Woke Capitalism’). For a taste of that agrarian life which hardened and humbled our ancestors, try growing a garden on whatever land you own (or at least mow your own lawn). Hamilton C. Horton listed such recreational activities – gardening, hunting, fishing, etc. – as examples of how Southerners can bend their identities without breaking them, choosing to be ‘culturally agrarian’ as much as we can even as other aspects of our lives are necessarily industrialist. As Horton put it, ‘Within the South there remains a tendency to view the land as something more than just a commodity.’ At the same time, we must cultivate local and small (or ‘human-scaled) communities, where human individuality, family, diversity, and unity can flourish. It was an agrarian economy and society which created and sustained those human-scaled communities, and while few of us today can live according to the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal like Andrew Lytle and Wendell Berry, the Southern Remnant can still be good neighbors and citizens in whatever community where we live. We must go back to church – though not just whatever your family’s traditional denomination was, but to an orthodox Christian church of whatever denomination or maybe even of no denomination.[5] For one, it is what we always should have been doing together. The very reason that the Jewish people had to survive as a ‘faithful remnant’ was that they betrayed the covenant of their fathers for the false gods of the Philistines. For another, it is the only way that we are going to endure these tribulations together. The Jewish people were only able to remain faithful to their covenant because they did not disperse as individuals but cohered together in diaspora communities. Last, but not least, what Cleanth Brooks called ‘The Enduring Faith’ of the American South has historically been free from the Gnostic heresies of Puritanism which revolutionised American Christianity and (in a secularised but no less zealous form) America’s civic religion. ‘The best one can say,’ remarked Brooks, ‘is that a venerable tradition has not been wholly lost – that there remains at least a foundation upon which to rebuild.’ And it should go without saying that if you are a single young man or woman, get married, be a good husband or wife, have children, and be a good father or mother. There can be no Remnant if there is no next generation. As they say, ‘Demography is destiny.’ We must also educate that next generation, as all effective Remnants have done. (The Jewish people, for example, did not just expect their children to be well-educated, but educated their children well themselves – for if they had done otherwise then they would have been assimilated into their host populations and would no longer exist today.) Beyond ‘the three R’s,’ the purpose of education should be the individual pursuit of intellectual excellence. The American public-school system, however, is more like a factory than an academy: It is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, dominated by corrupt unions with no stake in the success of the students, designed to instill conformity/uniformity of behavior/beliefs rather than critical thinking, and is converged with ‘Cultural Marxism.’ As the Southern Remnant, we must, according to John Gould Fletcher and Thomas Fleming respectively, make education ‘an ally of culture and civilization’ in which students are ‘schooled by the best minds of the ages, rather than by those semi-literate denizens of teachers’ colleges, the writers of textbooks.’ If you can, send your children to classical Christian academies which teach the Canon and the Trivium (and are, not coincidentally, objectively superior to prep-schools in terms of ‘college and career readiness’). If there are no such an academies in your area or you absolutely cannot afford tuition, then homeschool your children. With the curricula and communities that are available online, homeschooling is easier and more effective than ever. While public-school students are taught in unsafe environments by unqualified ‘teachers’ (people with degrees in ‘education’ with one eye on the next chapter in the textbook and the other on standardised tests), homeschooled children can be taught in a safe environment by some of the best teachers of a subject in the world. Of course, there is no substitute for the family – that is, for raising your children right yourself. We must reject the hyper-partisan factionalism of the Democrats and the Republicans (which is mentally and morally degrading to spectators as well as participants) and rededicate ourselves to our political patrimony. What is this Southern political tradition? It is so much more than ‘States’ Rights,’ which is just a particular expression of it under our federal and republican form of government. (Not to belittle the importance of states’ rights, of course, which are so important that the great John Randolph of Roanoke once remarked, ‘Asking one of the States to surrender part of her sovereignty is like asking a lady to surrender part of her chastity.’) The Southern political tradition can be summarised as an order of Self, Society, and State in which the ‘Country’ must come before the ‘Court,’ governance is ‘Nomocratic’ not ‘Teleocratic,’ the ‘City of Man’ can never equal the ‘City of God,’ ‘Change is not Reform,’ and ‘The Lamp of Experience’ is ‘A Better Guide Than Reason.’ These traditions are not only ‘absolutely necessary for the continuation of our form of government,’ according to George C. Rogers, but also provide ‘a different framework of values and institutions through which we can approach the world with purpose and coherence,’ according to Samuel T. Francis.[6] The American South has, in the words of her greatest statesman, John C. Calhoun, traditionally been ‘the balance wheel of our complex and beautiful system,’ but as Democrats and Republicans have suppressed real Southern leadership in the government, the consolidation of and corruption by power combined with dissolution of public order and policy has become so catastrophic that the country is now in a permanent state of crisis. As the Southern Remnant, our political role will be comparable to that of the Hebrew prophets, who were always on the margins of their society but whose lives influenced and inspired future leaders. We are in the political wilderness[7] and cannot overthrow our own Ahabs and Jezebels, but we can, like Elijah, call down fire from heaven to expose their evil lies to our people. We can, like Daniel, read the writing on the wall at the Belshazzar’s feast that is the American civic religion. Indeed, we are living through a veritable plague which, if not called down by Moses to punish Pharaoh, has nevertheless exposed the fragility not just of our current administration but of our entire system of government. There have been sympathetic intellectual histories of the American South by academics like Richard Beale Davis, Michael O’Brien, and Eugene D. Genovese, yet according to the poseur-professor pundits and the poseur-pundit professors who dominate news panels, opinion pages, and podcasts, there is no peculiar Southern thought and whatever we say we think is either a conscious lie or a false consciousness for white supremacy. A gap has been growing between what first-rate historians (many of whom are amateurs) are rediscovering about the American South and what third-rate celebrity-historians who want to be called for comment keep echoing and exaggerating. ‘As Southerners we are so used to certain slanders that we no longer even bother to answer them,’ remarked Thomas H. Landess. ‘But there are some slanders that need answering in order to isolate our true vices as well as to affirm our virtues.’ As the Southern Remnant, we must continue to disentangle what is beautiful and valuable in our heritage from the legacy of slavery and segregation. We must be like Robert Penn Warren, who in The Legacy of the Civil War admitted that the ‘Great Alibi’[8] had turned the ‘great virtues’ of Southern heritage into ‘vicious absurdities,’ exemplified by white resistance to civil rights: Does he ever realize that the events of Tuscaloosa, Little Rock, and New Orleans are nothing more than an obscene parody of the meaning of his history? It is a debasement of his history, with all that was noble, courageous, and justifying bleached out, drained away. Does the man who, in the relative safety of mob anonymity, stands howling vituperation at a little Negro girl being conducted into a school building, feel himself at one with those gaunt, barefoot, whiskery scarecrows who fought it out, breast to breast, to the death, at the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania in May, 1864? Can the man howling in the mob imagine General R.E. Lee, CSA, shaking hands with Orval Faubus, Governor of Arkansas? Does that man in the mob ever wonder why his own manly and admirable resentment at coercion should be enlisted, over and over again, in situations which should, and do, embarrass the generosity and dignity of manhood, including his own? Does he ever consider the possibility that whatever degree of dignity and success a Negro achieves actually enriches, in the end, the life of the white man and enlarges his own worth as a human being? Contrary to the ‘white nationalists’ claiming to be ‘Southern nationalists,’ we share a heritage with our black brothers and sisters. When Martin Luther King argued that ‘the language, the cultural patterns, the music, the material prosperity, and even the food of America are an amalgam of black and white,’ he was describing the American South which he and his wife called home. The American South is not so much a race (‘white’) or an ethnicity (‘Anglo’ or ‘Celtic’), but rather a nation comprised of diverse races and ethnicities united by history, including Cajuns, Cubanos, ‘Dutch’ (i.e. German and Swiss Anabaptists), French Huguenots, Indians (Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole), Sephardim, Tejanos, and of course Africans. Indeed, of the eleven distinct ‘American Nations,’ six of them are in the American South. We are a unique ‘nation within a nation,’ however, as we are the single largest geographical region within the Union (larger than many other independent nations) and older than the Union itself (older than many other independent nations). We are, in a word, sui generis. As Clyde N. Wilson declared, ‘The South is a national asset a priceless and irreplaceable treasure that must be conserved.’ The South is a distinctly American expression of Western Civilisation, and so as the Southern Remnant we are conserving more than just our particular Southern heritage, but our Classical and Christian heritage as well. ‘Though the South is our subject,’ observed Stark Young, ‘we must remember that we are concerned first with a quality itself, not as our own but as found everywhere, and that we defend certain qualities not because they belong to the South, but because the South belongs to them.’ Southerners are (or at least were) the heirs of what was best from antiquity. When Alexander Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the USSR and began touring the Western world, Marion Montgomery argued that Solzhenitsyn believed in the same qualities of life as we do and paraphrased Young’s reminder to us: ‘He affirms and defends certain qualities of life not because they belong to the Russia he loves, but because the Russia he loves belongs to them.’ This makes the American South a fairly inclusive identity and inheritance, one which is less about ‘blood and soil’ and more about ‘soul.’ I, for example, am not someone whom most Americans would identify as ‘Southern,’ at least not until they get to know me. I was born and raised in Florida’s suburbs, where my family moved from Maryland. These suburbs are largely homogenised and have little local culture left, though it is still Southern if you know what you are looking for and where to look. I went to school for my undergraduate degree up north in Pennsylvania (where I stuck out as one of the few not from ‘PA’ or the Tri-State Area) and for my graduate degree out west in California (where I stuck out as one of the few who was not a first- or second-generation immigrant or on a student visa). After graduate school, I moved back to my suburban hometown where I live to this day. My Southern heritage is chiefly one of tastes and values – tastes and values instilled in me by my family. So you do not have to be ‘outwardly Southern’ to be ‘inwardly Southern,’ the latter of which is far more important, anyway. My wife and her family, who emigrated from the former USSR, are more ‘Southern’ than many ‘Southerners’ whom I know, even though they would never identify themselves as such, in the sense that they maintain the same ‘qualities of life’ from the Old World that the American South alone has maintained in the New World and which has differentiated her from the rest of the Union. ‘Tradition is not simply a fact, but a fact that must be consistently defended,’ argued Allen Tate. ‘It can always be defended,’ he added, ‘but a recovery and a restoration is a more difficult performance.’ Whether you are young or old, as the Southern Remnant, we are all living during a momentous time in the history of our people in which our traditions are just a single generation away from extinction. No individual can carry the burden of the whole Southern tradition himself or herself, but if each one of us contributes our God-given talents to the cause, then together we can defend and even restore those traditions. Of course, we must distinguish between living in the past and the past living in us. We must accept that we can never go back to 1650, 1750, 1850, or 1950, nor should we want to. We must accept that change is a part of life – but unlike most other Americans who mouth such clichés as they shrug off any and every change to their culture and civilisation, no matter how manifestly for the worse, we add that conservation must also be a part of life. We want to conserve what is eternal and universal about our heritage, which in 1950 was different from what it was like in 1850, in 1850 was different from what it was like in 1750, and in 1750 was different from what it was like in 1650. Yet there is no reason, by 2050, for our heritage not only to have persisted but also to have prospered. Indeed, one of the consistent themes of ‘The Remnant’ in Hebrew prophecy is not merely the survival, but the revival, of the people through those faithful few – and our people have succumbed just as much to American idolatry as the Israelites did to Ashtoreth, Baal, and Molech. As John Shelton Reed argued, the toll that ‘Industrialism’ has taken on our society has vindicated traditional Agrarian ‘ideas on the proper relation between work and leisure, on the importance of humanizing scale, on respect for nature, on autonomy and self-respect,’ which are now as popular in New England and the Pacific Coast as they were in the American South. Furthermore, argued Reed, even though we have been uprooted from an agrarian way of life, our Southern heritage – which is as much about what we remember as what we have experienced – has continued to find ways to adapt. ‘It continues to crop up here, there, and everywhere,’ he remarked, ‘like grass through concrete.’ In 1994, Eugene D. Genovese delivered a series of lectures at Harvard University titled ‘The Southern Tradition.’ The Communist-turned-Catholic Italian-American professor was one of the most prolific and prominent scholars of the South, authoring classic works such as Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made and many others with his wife, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (who was no less of a Southern historian herself). These lectures, published as The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism, were a landmark moment in his career and demanded the attention of his profession. Genovese accepted the modernisation of the American South insofar as it entailed ‘long overdue if incomplete justice for black people,’ but cautioned that modernisation’s ‘desirable features are coming at a price Northerners as well as Southerners, blacks as well as whites, will rue having to pay and need not pay.’ According to Genovese, ‘That price includes a neglect of, or contempt for, the history of Southern whites, without which some of the more distinct and noble features of American national life must remain incomprehensible.’ This ‘Southern tradition,’ protested Genovese, had been ‘silenced’ as supposedly ‘immoral and intellectually inferior’ and ‘wrongly equated with racism and white supremacy,’ and the purpose of his lectures was to redeem that tradition. ‘Rarely these days, even on Southern campuses, is it possible to acknowledge the achievements of the white people of the South,’ argued Genovese. ‘To speak positively about any part of this Southern tradition is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation.’ According to Genovese, ‘We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity – an increasingly successful campaign by the media and an academic elite to strip young white Southerners, and arguably black Southerners as well, of their heritage, and therefore, their identity.’[9] Pardon me, but in these discouraging times, part of Genovese’s encouraging introduction must be quoted at length: Recall that great speech by Martin Luther King in which he evoked a vision of the descendants of slaves and slaveholders, sitting together on the hills of Georgia as Southern brothers. That vision will be realized when, and only when, those descendants, black and white, can meet with mutual respect and appreciation for the greatness, as well as the evil, that has gone into the making of the South. Black Americans have good reason to protest vehemently against the disgraceful way in which their history has been taught or, worse, ignored, and demand a record of the nobility and heroism of the black struggle for freedom and justice. But that record dare not include the falsification and obliteration of the noble and heroic features of the white South. To teach the one without the other is to invite deepening racial animosity and murderous conflict, not merely or even primarily in the South but in the North. For it is worth noting that our most vicious urban explosions are occurring in the ‘progressive’ North and on the West Coast, not in the ‘bigoted’ and ‘reactionary’ South. Invoking Martin Luther King (an old-fashioned African-American Baptist minister who believed in communication, love, and nonviolent protest), as Genovese did, seems downright quaint nowadays. If the Rev. Dr. King were active today, the spokespersons of ‘Black Lives Matter’ would write navel-gazing think-pieces for The Atlantic or The New Yorker denouncing him as an ‘Uncle Tom,’ the balaclava-masked and brass-knuckled punks and thugs of ‘Antifa’ would attack his marches for their ‘accomodationism’ and ‘incrementalism’ with ‘white supremacy,’ and the famously ‘articulate, bright, and clean’ Joe Biden would say ‘come on, man…he ain’t black.’ As enraging and depressing as it is to witness the destruction of our monuments by fools who know nothing and fanatics who care for nothing, we must overcome our anger and despair, because the fact is that this is only going to get worse. In Richmond, in Virginia, and in the rest of the nü-South, we are utterly powerless to resist this revolution. Those places are more lost to the American South than they were during the War and Reconstruction, for at least then the destruction was coming from without rather than from within. If demographic changes have been creeping up on us like the tide, then this ‘anti-racist’ moral panic has crashed on us like a tidal wave. We must do what we can to preserve the symbols of our heritage for our posterity, of course, but what is even more important for our posterity is that we preserve our heritage itself. In other words, it is more important that we preserve what those monuments symbolise than those symbols themselves. To be sure, these barbarians and fanatics are doing irrevocable and unforgivable damage to our public spaces (as if the empty pedestals and piles of rubble were not bad enough, just wait until you see what artistic abominations are put up in their place), but one space that they can never spray-paint or sledge-hammer is our hearts and our minds. The great Southern theologian James Henley Thornwell’s stern disquisition on ‘Our Danger and Our Duty’ early in the War can still speak to the Southern Remnant today. Thornwell warned Southerners not to underestimate the danger facing them or to overestimate themselves: Our fields, our homes, our firesides and sepulchres, our cities and temples, our wives and daughters, we must protect at every hazard. The glorious inheritance which our fathers left us we must never betray. The hopes with which they died, and which buoyed their spirits in the last conflict, of making their country a blessing to the world, we must not permit to be unrealised. We must seize the torch from their hands, and transmit it with increasing brightness to distant generations. The word failure must not be pronounced among us. It is not a thing to be dreamed of. We must settle it that we must succeed. We must not sit down to count chances. There is too much at stake to think of discussing probabilities—we must make success a certainty, and that, by the blessing of God, we can do. If we are prepared to do our duty, and our whole duty, we have nothing to fear. But what is our duty? This is a question which we must gravely consider. Although the danger is now civil/political rather than military, it is not much more peaceful and the stakes have not much changed from the danger which Thornwell perceived. Using the Greek city-states’ wars against the Persian Empire as examples of how a smaller power could win against a larger power, Thornwell inspired Southerners to do their duty: Let us imitate, in Christian faith, this sublime example. Let our spirit be loftier than that of the pagan Greek, and we can succeed in making every pass a Thermopylae, every strait a Salamis, and every plain a Marathon. We can conquer, and we must. We must not suffer any other thought to enter our minds. If we are overrun, we can least die; and if our enemies get possession of our land, we can leave it a howling desert. But, under God, we shall not fail. If we are true to Him, and true to ourselves, a glorious future is before us. We occupy a sublime position. The eyes of the world are upon us; we are a spectacle to God, to angels, and to men. Can our hearts grow faint, or our hands feeble, in a cause like this? The spirits of our fathers call to us from their graves. The heroes of other ages and other countries are beckoning us on to glory. Let us seize the opportunity to make ourselves an immortal name, while we redeem a land from bondage and a continent from ruin. Southerners did their duty as best they could – indeed, they fought harder and suffered worse than any other Americans in our history – but as Thornwell would have understood better than most, the ways of Providence are often inscrutable. We cannot know when or where our people shall rise again; we can only do our duty and have hope. Robert E. Lee himself gave that very advice to Charles Marshall, a Marylander and his aide de camp who was struggling to understand how God could have willed for their cause to be lost. ‘My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor indisposed me to serve them; nor, in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future,’ wrote Lee in 1870. ‘The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow, and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged.’ As Lee put it, ‘It is history that teaches us to hope.’ [1] That essay, ‘Two Diarists,’ was intended to be a chapter in an unfinished American version of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, in which Richard Weaver would have compared the lives of famous Northerners and Southerners just as Plutarch compared the lives of famous Greeks and Romans. Two other intended chapters have been published separately: ‘Two Orators’ (which contrasts Daniel Webster’s national theory of the Union with Robert Y. Hayne’s federal theory) and ‘Two Individualists’ (which contrasts the alienated individualism of Henry D. Thoreau with the ‘social-bond individualism’ of John Randolph of Roanoke). Not one of Weaver’s North-South distinctions have anything to do with race and slavery. [2] Consider the contributions of the Virginians alone: George Washington (‘The Father of His Country’), Thomas Jefferson (‘The Father of Democracy’), James Madison (‘The Father of the Constitution’), and George Mason (‘The Father of the Bill of Rights.’ Not to mention Richard Bland, Patrick Henry, Edmund Pendleton, George Wythe, the Lees, the Harrisons, and the Randolphs, and many more. [3] ‘Historians have been debating for decades about the character of American slavery,’ the historian Thaddeus Russell commented after watching the ‘Roots’ remake in 2016. ‘Please do me a favor and read them.’ Indeed, the popular assumption (as exemplified by both versions of the melodramatic and sentimentalist ‘Roots’) is that American slavery was defined solely by physical and psychological terror against blacks by whites. This anachronistic moralism, or ‘presentism,’ is a projection of black self-pity and white-self-hatred onto their past. As Mr. Russell put it, ‘Remarkable how many people, with scant historical knowledge, think the more brutal the depiction of slavery the more accurate it is.’ The truth is that while there was surely physical and psychological terror against blacks by whites (motivated by fear of a racial insurrection á la ‘St. Domingue’ or Haiti, not racial hatred per se), economic incentives and ethical imperatives made slavery a far more humane system than anyone who gets his/her history from ‘Roots’ would ever believe. (Mr. Russell’s book, A Renegade History of the United States, has an informative chapter on slavery which is rooted in evidence instead of ideology.) So while the macabre, Mandingo-esque fetishes of Kara Walker are promoted to the public and pronounced ‘genius,’ the ‘Uncle Remus’ folklore collected by Joel Chandler Harris has been purged from the public and pronounced ‘racist’ (e.g. the literal memory-holing of Disney’s ‘Song of the South’ movie and now ride). The end result is that authentic African-American experiences have been replaced with an inauthentic dialectic which may correspond to ‘politically correct’ opinions but which is nevertheless historically inaccurate. ‘The 1619 Project’ by The New York Times is an attempt to make this presentist moment permanent. [4] In retaliation, the local Federal commander in Kansas committed ‘collective punishment’ against four counties just across the border in Missouri, virtually depopulating them by deporting the people from their homes and destroying whatever property the deportees could not carry with them. One of the deportees was Pres. Harry Truman’s mother, who could recall how her family’s farm was burned and they were forcibly removed. [5] American Christianity can feel, for lack of a better word, ‘hokey.’ I myself have always felt alienated in Evangelical Protestantism, including/especially its ‘Fundamentalist’ forms. In my opinion, this very American form of Christianity is to blame for the modern stereotype of the sanctimonious, sophistic, and superstitious Christian. Although evangelicalism and fundamentalism are nowadays associated with the American South, these were, in fact, Northern movements which spread to the South. Prior to this religious reconstruction, ‘the Real Old-Time Religion’ of the South, so to speak, had more in common with the Christianity of Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien. [6] The tragic dimension of Southern history (an alternative experience of failure, poverty, and a belief in one’s own sinfulness as opposed to the mainstream American experience of success, prosperity, and a belief in one’s own righteousness), means that the South has more in common with the rest of the world (which has also experienced such conflict) than with America the self-proclaimed ‘exceptional’ and ‘indispensable’ nation. ‘Yet America, for once in its brief and not always glorious history, must try to learn that its own experience is peculiar, that it has been unusually fortunate in coming to maturity in an epoch of untypical peace and prosperity, and that it cannot continue to judge the world by the norm of its own mythology,’ argued Sam Francis. ‘This lesson is perhaps what the South, and only the South, can teach America – has in a sense always tried to teach it, and has never succeeded in teaching it.’ [7] The nomination and presumptive election of the quintessentially status quo candidate and quasi-senile Joe Biden is a depressing vote of confidence in the system after the brief opportunity that Donald Trump on the Right and Bernie Sanders on the Left appeared to represent. [8] Robert Penn Warren was no triumphalist Yankee, however, and was just as critical of Northern self-righteousness from winning the War (what he called the ‘Treasury of Virtue’) as he was Southern self-pity from losing the War. According to Warren, these ‘psychological’ costs were of ‘a kind more subtle, pervasive, and continuing, a kind that conditions in a thousand ways the temper of American life today.’ [9] Aside from the fact that authentic expressions of African-American folk culture are condescendingly censored as ‘racist stereotypes’ (e.g. Disney’s memory-holed ‘Song of the South’), the fact is also that black people are as much the heirs of ‘The Southern Tradition’ as white people. Eugene Genovese addressed this important issue. In ‘The Southern Tradition and the Black Experience’ (his acceptance speech upon receiving the Rockford Institute’s ‘Richard Weaver Award for Contributions to Scholarly Letters’ in 1993), Genovese argued that black people’s unique history made them equally African and American: Other peoples contributed much to the development of an American national culture, but despite acute discrimination, they were not condemned as an inferior race, and they were able to progress and consolidate their gains through the steady accretion of political power. Not so for Africans and their descendants. Africans arrived with Europeans at the beginning of our history. Everything was done to separate them from their religions, languages, and general culture. Worse, unlike European immigrants, they were repeatedly driven backward and prevented from consolidating political and economic gains. Yes, they were offered the Christian religion, the English language, and the Anglo-Saxon political tradition, but they were simultaneously barred from full participation as equals and told to accept their place as menials and as, at best, second-class citizens. In the event, by forging a distinct Afro-American culture, which should not be confused with the manifestations of moral decadence now celebrated by a cynical academia and mass-media, blacks survived the ordeal of slavery and segregation spiritually as well as physically. We need to understand the black experience as that of a people at once American and yet a people apart. Historically, it has been an experience that offers rational grounds for both integrationist and black-nationalist ideologies. In response to the essay symposium which Rev. Eugene Rivers of the Azusa Christian Community initiated when he published ‘On the Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Crack’ in The Boston Review, Genovese reiterated what differentiated the African-American experience from the experience of other peoples in this country: The customary discussions of the black experience as a ‘class,’ ‘national,’ or ‘colonial’ question each offer useful insights but invariably prove partial and inadequate. The black experience in America has been unique, that is, without parallel in the experience of other peoples. Others were absorbed into an American national culture that they enriched by their Old-World experiences. Blacks came as slaves whose masters imposed a strange new religion; assaulted their family relations and indeed denied them legal sanction for any family at all; and did everything possible to destroy their African cultures while denying them access to much in white American culture. As a rich and many-sided scholarship has demonstrated, blacks survived not only physically but also spiritually. Against all odds, they forged a culture that interpenetrated with white culture and yet emerged as an Afro-American culture apart. According to Genovese, ‘Black Studies’ scholarship had documented ‘the emergence of a black community that lived in intimate contact with whites, contributed to a general Southern and American culture, absorbed much from whites and Indians too, and, withal, forged a black culture significantly distinct, significantly autonomous, significantly African-influenced, and nonetheless specifically American.’ Although Genovese, in 1997, defended some of the work that ‘Black Studies’ were doing, he was opposed to their ideological construction of an artificial ‘Afro-centrist’ identity for black people, their rejection of a black ‘American’ identity, and their general deconstruction of ‘Western civilisation’ itself: The rage over Afrocentrism is merely the latest version of this decades-old story. No time need be wasted on the blather that aims to denigrate the great civilization of the West while it presents a child’s version of Africa as well as Asia and pre-colonial Latin America. But once again the unwillingness of universities to promote full, open, honest debate has had ironic results. For not only are integrationists, black and white, being silenced: It is by no means clear that Afrocentrism, as normally preached, contributes to a serious black-nationalist interpretation of the black experience in the United States. Arguably, it encourages a black racism that would assimilate the black experience in the United States to a transnational racial myth and thereby render incoherent all attempts to construct a rational black-nationalist perspective on American history. In his response to Rev. Rivers, Genovese also pointed out that African-Americans have had uniquely negative experiences with the most unexceptional aspects of Western civilisation (i.e. the bad things that it has had in common with every civilisation) but have also had uniquely positive experiences with the most exceptional aspects of Western civilisation (i.e. the good things that makes it different from other civilisations): There is, nonetheless, a great danger in yielding to a black-separatist repudiation of American nationality as there is in yielding to a one-sided integrationism. Recall that Du Bois himself never wavered in his allegiance to Western civilization while he pioneered in African studies. And here we need to take the measure of the nihilistic denigration of Western civilization, which would deprive all Americans, white and black, of a precious heritage. Today, from the heart of the establishment that controls our universities and media, we hear calls for the repudiation of Western civilization itself as something uniquely horrible. Our children are being taught that the West has been racist, sexist, and imperialist. They are not being taught that the same could be said about every other great civilization and no few not-so-great civilizations. The undeniable truth is that the West has been unique in only one respect. It alone, thanks largely to its Christian heritage and a derivative doctrine of freedom without parallel anywhere in the world, has generated mass-movements against racism, sexism, and imperialism, and exported them across the world. The struggle of black people for equity and justice, notwithstanding all defeats and frustrations, has constituted an inseparable part of this legacy. Does, for example, anyone in his right mind advocate a separate black path of development unillumined by the Christian tradition of spiritual freedom, to say nothing of the personal and political protections of the Common Law? In his speech at the Rockford Institute, Genovese gave an example of how the Southern political tradition could benefit African-American interests in this country (that is, a degree of political autonomy if not full political separation) but has been effectively denied to them by white liberals because of its ‘racist’ history: When Lani Guinier tried to raise urgent questions about the distribution of political power, she, in effect, raised the very questions forcefully posed by the political theory of John C. Calhoun and his pro-slavery compeers – most notably, the doctrine of the concurrent majority. For in truth, racists or no, the Southern conservatives were the first to raise most of the burning questions in the early days of the republic, and we have much to learn from their efforts. The question remains: Is it possible to separate the healthy core of that thought from the indefensible framework in which it was originally presented? I have no idea how Ms. Guinier would have responded to this challenge if she had been given her day in court. I do note, as no few others have, that the liberals who control the White House and Congress went to extraordinary lengths to suppress the issues. No one was a more thoughtful scholar of ‘the world the slaves made’ and ‘the world the slaveholders made’ than Genovese. Since his death in 2012, however, academic hacks out to make a name for themselves have begun labeling him an ‘apologist’ for ‘white supremacy.’ Such outrageous and preposterous defamation says more about his critics than it does him. This piece appeared at the Abbeville Institute site on August 10, 2020.
 Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us… All these were honoured in their generations, and were the glory of their times. There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported. And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them. But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten. With their seed shall continually remain a good inheritance, and their children are within the covenant. Their seed standeth fast, and their children for their sakes. Their seed shall remain forever, and their glory shall not be blotted out. Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth forevermore. – Ben Sira of Jerusalem (This is the second part of a three-part series. Part 1 of the Remnant begins here.) Yet it is a vile lie that our monuments are ‘racist.’ After the War and Reconstruction, despite their severe impoverishment Southerners sacrificed financially in order to build monuments to Confederate veterans before that generation had completely passed (as well as to provide them with their own state pensions, in addition to having to pay for federal Union pensions). The Confederate monument which once stood where I live in Florida, for example, was the product of an eight-year fundraising campaign from 1903 to 1911, in which the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy held bake sales, sewed dolls for Christmas, sponsored spelling bees, and hosted lectures. ‘It is only once that a Confederate monument is erected in a community and this monument is not only for the memory of the men who fell fighting for the Lost Cause, but also for the further enhancing of an already beautiful city,’ editorialised the local newspaper, ‘and so all citizens are asked to join hands in this laudable endeavor and civic enterprise.’ Yet the Southern Poverty Law Center [1] has propagated a conspiracy theory that Confederate monuments were built with the insidious ulterior motive of establishing ‘white supremacy,’ claiming that there is a correlation between the construction of monuments and racial conflict. Yet correlation does not equal causation: The SPLC does not consider the fact that the construction of both Confederate and Union monuments are also correlated with the semi-centennial (1911-1915) and centennial anniversaries of the War (1961-1965). The truth is far less cynical and far more commonsensical: Southern descendants of Confederate veterans built monuments in honour of their ancestors for the same reason that Northern descendants of Union veterans built monuments in honour of their ancestors during the same period. Although the public is still opposed to the removal of Confederate monuments (44% to 32% according to Morning Consult/Politico, which unfortunately is down from 52% and up from 26% three years ago), academia and the media classes have been steadily poisoning their memory and pressuring politicians. The commemoration of the Confederate monument which once stood where I live in Florida exemplifies ‘the meaning of monuments’ and ‘what monuments stand for,’ as the local newspaper put it at the time. On 8 February 1911, the monument, named ‘Memoria en Aeterna’ (Latin for ‘In Eternal Memory’), was ceremoniously unveiled outside the county courthouse. 5,000 people (including children let out of school for the day) crowded the streets, windows, and balconies downtown. In addition to the Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy, actual living Confederate veterans from Florida attended the event. Between patriotic orations by local leaders, the crowd sang along with renditions of Southern folk songs such as ‘Dixie,’ ‘Way Down on the Sewanee River,’ and ‘Florida, My Florida,’ as well as the old Confederate anthem ‘The Bonnie Blue Flag.’ The mayor, D.B. McKay, congratulated the UDC for its contribution to the city. ‘It is a beautiful and appropriate tribute, and will stand forever as a testimonial of our undying love for the cause that we of the South believe was right, and of our pride in the splendid achievements of the hosts who through those terrible years made records on land and sea unparalleled in the history of the world,’ pronounced the mayor. ‘This monument, massive and imposing though it is, is insignificant by comparison with the love and reverence of our people for our cause and the men who espoused and defended it – and no less for the noble women who had such an important part in the great conflict.’ As the mayor put it, ‘It is a proud and priceless heritage left us – the history of the part played by the women and men of the South in the War Between the States – and every true daughter and son must be thrilled with emotions of the loftiest character as the mind dwells on those trying days and months and years.’ Mrs. Henry Brash (née Sarah Zelwicker), introduced the local chapter of the UDC. ‘It is indeed a joyous event, this being the first public monument ever erected in our city, and we should be doubly proud and honour the day as well as the deed that marks an epoch in the history of our city,’ she declared. ‘This shaft of marble though it be but cold, white stone – the sculptured work of chisel and hammer – yet it has a purpose to serve.’ Sarah hoped that building a Confederate monument would not only honour the last living members of that generation, but also keep their memory alive among future generations. ‘To the sons of veterans and daughters of the Confederacy, this monument recounts the deeds of fathers and mothers and though, we of this generation can never know their trials and hardships, yet we revere their memories for what they suffered,’ she explained. ‘To the children of the Confederacy it teaches that respect for the dead, which is ever to be praised, whether they fell victorious or conquered.’ ‘And so I reiterate the statement, that monuments serve a purpose and this shaft pointing heavenward is no exception,’ concluded Sarah, who quoted from a poem:
W.G. Brorein, an industrialist from the North who had been invited to the event, gave an extemporaneous speech in which he argued that ‘the coming into this country of the Stars and Bars had made a greater Union of States’ as well as that ‘the figure of Gen. Robert E. Lee in the National Hall of Fame is a recognition of the South and its accomplishments since the figure of Lee represents the embodiment of all that the Confederacy stood for.’ H.S. Phillips, the state attorney for the circuit court and the keynote speaker, described why the Confederacy was still enshrined in Southerners’ memories and why those memories should now be enshrined in stone: It is a good thing to honour the heroes of the Confederacy by erecting monuments to their memory. If it meant the revival of the passions of war, if it meant to foster and perpetuate a narrow sectionalism, it would be our duty to regard it as unwise and ill-time. But it means just the reverse. It means not only that the personal characters of the great leaders of the Confederacy and the heroism and courage of those who wore the gray, must be held up for the admiration of their countrymen, but that their fortitude under defeat, their manly acceptance of the result, their entire postbellum record as patriotic and upright citizens shall be set forth the inspiration and guidance of the youth of the South. No American boy can be harmed by studying the lives of the great leaders of the Confederacy and becoming familiar with the wonderful courage and fortitude of those who followed them. If a higher type of manhood and womanhood than that of the Old South can be found, let the world point it out to us and we will give it recognition. By publicly and permanently honouring Confederate soldiers with a monument, argued Phillips, posterity would be inspired to identify with and emulate them: My countrymen, the Daughters of the Confederacy did much for the present and future generations of this city when they erected yonder monument in honour of the Southern soldiers. Let it forever stand, not as a record of civil strife, but as a perpetual protest against whatever is low and sordid in our private and public life. Let it stand as a memorial of personal honour that never brooked a stain, of knightly genius unsoiled by ambition, and of heroic constancy from which no cloud of misfortune could ever hide the path of duty. Let it stand as a reproof and censure if we shall ever sink below the standards of our fathers. Indeed, I can still remember when my grandfather (a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who taught ‘The History of the Military Art’ at West Point) and I (a teenager in my first year of high school) paid our respects to the Confederate monument in his rural Tennessee hometown. I have a picture of us there on my desk. It is a cherished memory and a constant source of inspiration. The monument itself is one of the most beautiful that I have ever seen. According to the director of the Florida Public Archaeology Network at the University of West Florida, it is ‘one of the most striking Confederate monuments in Florida.’ It was sculpted in Italy out of marble from Georgia. Two soldiers stand back to back alongside an obelisk – one a determined figure going forth at the start of the war (‘united in the past, one in the future’ inscribed on his pedestal), the other a defeated figure at the end of the war (‘lest we forget’ inscribed on his pedestal). On the south side of the obelisk’s pedestal is inscribed an epitaph ‘to the honour and courage of the patriots of the Confederate States of America,’ and on the north side of the obelisk’s pedestal is inscribed a poem:
Every Confederate monument has a story just like this one. Yet a new book – Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil by Susan Neiman – compares monuments like this to the Nazis and calls for a Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung of American history. Actually, what is evil is teaching a people to hate themselves by lying to them that their ancestors were as evil as the Nazis. It evinces a hatred of a people that is quite disturbing and if anything suggests that Dr. Neiman learned the wrong lesson from the Germans. Besides, as far as Nazi comparisons go, which side was it that centralised power in a revolutionary party, conquered in the name of reuniting a mythical nation, waged total warfare against enemies whom it deemed sub-human, established collaborationist governments in occupied territory, ordered the expulsion of ‘the Jews, as a class’ from war zones, and was staffed with German nationalists/socialists? Given that any of our monuments can now be destroyed with impunity, the best that we can hope for at this point is that the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans save as many of them as possible to spare them from these horrifying sacrificial spectacles, like what befell Linn Park in Birmingham, Alabama. A statue of Charles Linn (a Finnish immigrant, citizen of Alabama, and Confederate naval captain who helped found the city of Birmingham) was spray-painted with ‘Black Lives Matter’ and torn down by a mob. The mayor had the 115 year-old Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument removed (in violation of a state law and a court ruling) after it was severely damaged by a mob and defaced with ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Antifa’ graffiti/propaganda like ‘Apartheid,’ ‘ACAB,’ ‘F—k 12,’ various anarchist signs, and even more that was illegible/illiterate. What befell the Albert Pike Memorial in Washington, D.C., was just as awful. Pike was a Massachusetts-born American who pioneered the Arkansan frontier. He was an autodidactic linguist, a captain in the Mexican War, a legal advocate for Indian claims against the U.S. government, a thirty-third degree Freemason, and a brigadier general in the Civil War who negotiated Confederate alliances with the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole. After his death, the Freemasons honoured him with a monument by Gaetano Trentanove (an Italian immigrant whose work Pike had admired) which was dedicated in 1901. A mob defaced this monument with ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Antifa’ graffiti/propaganda – ‘1312,’ ‘Abolish ICE,’ ‘ACAB,’ ‘End White Supremacy,’ ‘F—k Albert Pike,’ ‘F—k MPD’ (Metropolitan Police Department), ‘F—k The Pigs,’ ‘F—k White Supremacy,’ ‘George Floyd,’ ‘No Justice, No Peace,’ ‘Revolution,’ various anarchist signs, and even more that was illegible/illiterate. The words ‘author,’ ‘orator,’ ‘philanthropist,’ ‘philosopher,’ ‘scholar,’ and ‘soldier’ on each side of the monument were spray-painted over with words like ‘racist,’ ‘slaver,’ and ‘traitor’ (the last of which is particularly amusing from self-proclaimed revolutionary anarchists). Then, when the mob had spray-painted all it had to say on the statue, it tore it down and set it on fire. The UDC was wise to remove its 131 year-old monument in Alexandria, Virginia, and should continue to be proactive in taking back our monuments before it is too late. The alternative is the savage sacrifice described above. Whenever I see photos and videos of these angry, ugly mobs massing around the monuments of our heroes, I feel like the Pevensie sisters in ‘Triumph of the Witch’: A great crowd of people were standing all round the Stone Table and though the moon was shining many of them carried torches which burned with evil-looking red flames and black smoke. But such people! Ogres with monstrous teeth, and wolves, and bull-headed men; spirits of evil trees and poisonous plants; and other creatures whom I won’t describe because if I did the grown-ups would probably not let you read this book - Cruels and Hags and Incubuses, Wraiths, Horrors, Efreets, Sprites, Orknies, Wooses, and Ettins. In fact here were all those who were on the Witch’s side and whom the Wolf had summoned at her command. And right in the middle, standing by the Table, was the Witch herself. Just as the White Witch ritually degraded Aslan before sacrificing him, so these mobs (consumed with a maliciousness and spitefulness that can only be described as sadistic) degrade our heroes with all manner of obscene and profane graffiti/propaganda before destroying them: ‘Stop!’ said the Witch. ‘Let him first be shaved.’ As horrifying as it is for us to witness, I must confess that, like Lucy, seeing our heroes standing alone, like lions, above packs of raving hyenas and jackals actually makes them look more heroic than ever. Just as the Witch taunted Aslan before killing him that his sacrifice meant nothing and would not stop her from killing the rest after he was dead, so appeasement only makes these mobs more aggressive: When once Aslan had been tied (and tied so that he was really a mass of cords) on the flat stone, a hush fell on the crowd. Four hags, holding four torches, stood at the corners of the Table. The Witch bared her arms as she had bared them the previous night when it had been Edmund instead of Aslan. Then she began to whet her knife. It looked to the children, when the gleam of the torchlight fell on it, as if the knife were made of stone not of steel and it was of a strange and evil shape. In the United Kingdom, of all places, mobs have begun vandalising historic monuments (including those to the dead of both World Wars) and self-proclaimed ‘anti-racist activists’ have published a ‘Topple the Racists’ hit list of monuments throughout the city. British colonialists who traded in and owned slaves? Any statues of them are ‘celebrating’ and ‘glorifying’ slavery, of course! Earl Grey, the prime minister who oversaw the abolition of slavery throughout the empire? Well, abolition only passed because the government paid reparations to slaveowners (but not slaves), so topple that racist, too! Winston Churchill, the prime minister who rallied the West to fight Nazism in World War II and Communism in the Cold War, widely hailed as one of the greatest heroes of the 20th century? A monument to him has been defaced with ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Antifa’ graffiti/propaganda – ‘ACAB,’ ‘Education For The Masses,’ ‘F—k 12,’ ‘F—k Your Agenda,’ ‘F—k The Lot,’ ‘TIKB’ (Turkish for ‘Union of Revolutionary Communists of Turkey’)[2], Tupac Shakur lyrics, the words ‘Was A Racist,’ anarchist and communist signs (such as the Soviet hammer and sickle), and even more that was illegible/illiterate. ‘Enoch Was Right.’ So-called ‘art conservationists’ disgraced themselves by joining in the iconoclasm, albeit from a safe distance on social media. When a mob began massing to tear down a monument of Christopher Columbus in St. Paul, Minnesota, someone named Erin L. Thompson tweeted, ‘I’m a professor who studies the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage and I just have to say…use chain instead of rope and it’ll go faster.’ When a mob began vandalising a ‘racist monument’ in Birmingham, Alabama, someone named Sarah Parcak (an ‘Egyptologist’ at the University of Alabama) encouraged and instructed them to tear down an obelisk. ‘WATCH THAT SUMB---H TOPPLE GET THE ---- OUT OF THE WAY IT WILL SMASH RUN AWAY FROM DIRECTION,’ she mashed into her keyboard. Someone named Madeline Odent (the wife of an American banker who is a curator in an English museum) tweeted out what household solvents vandals could use to do permanent damage to bronze statues of ‘genocidal racists’ like…Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher…‘The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it,’ Hannah Arendt (a Holocaust survivor) warned in The Origins of Totalitarianism. ‘The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability.’ The ‘American Girondins,’ as Brion McClanahan and John Devanny have dubbed them, still do not understand the radical nature of the ‘American Jacobins’ who will be the death of them.[3] In just a few years, the Jacobins’ demands have shifted from removing Confederate flags from Confederate monuments – to removing Confederate monuments and placing them in museums – to mobbing Confederate monuments before they can be removed and placed in museums – to removing American monuments and placing them in museums – to mobbing American monuments before they can be removed and placed in museums – to destroying the museums themselves! Yet the latest issue of National Review (one of the premier publications of ‘Conservatism, Inc.’ or ‘Big Con’) is a massive retreat by the Right in the face of the Left, conceding on practically every issue but clinging to Social Studies and Sunday School lessons about ‘The Gettysburg Address.’ Just as these cowardly conservatives – ‘a party which never conserves anything,’ according to the great Southern theologian Robert Lewis Dabney, and ‘is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves toward perdition’ – have literally written the South out of American history in an attempt to make a separate peace for themselves, so should Southerners write them out and let them see what happens to their ‘GOP’ without us. ‘Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation,’ Dabney continued against conservatism. ‘What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in turn.’ The ignorance, indifference, and intolerance of these people are simply insufferable. They are barbarians and fanatics who will not stop until they are out of symbols to destroy – and what comes after that? What has, historically speaking, always come after that? We have been warning for years that this is a revolution which wants for us to be exterminated and for all evidence of our existence to be erased – and events are accelerating at an alarming rate without any apparent restraint. ‘Haiti Did It In 1804,’ read one sign from a ‘Black Lives Matter’ mob on the Boston Common. ‘This Is Just Round 2.’ What did Haiti do in 1804? 23 years after the slave insurrection in the colony in which most of the French (white) and Creole (mixed-race) population was massacred, the remaining white and mixed-race population was systematically exterminated.[3] To the protesters and rioters, our monuments are voodoo dolls of us. This piece was previously published at the Abbeville Institute on August 3, 2020. [1] The Southern Poverty Law Center, which once fought the good fight bankrupting the Ku Klux Klan through ‘lawfare,’ has since morally bankrupted itself by ‘blacklisting’ mainstream groups with which it disagrees for whatever reason as ‘hate groups’ akin to the KKK. Mark Krikorian of the centrist and non-partisan Center for Immigration Studies confronted the SPLC in ‘How Labeling My Organization a Hate Group Shuts Down Public Debate’ (cf. ‘Will No One Rid Me of These Turbulent Immigration Restrictionists?’ and ‘Nobody Expects the SPLC Inquisition!’)
[2] One wonders what Winston Churchill would make of Communists from Turkey trying to start a Communist revolution in London. [3] Even Tucker Carlson (who is usually the only person worth watching on the otherwise Boomer- and Republican-geared FOX News) lamely slurred/smeared Confederate history on his show. ‘To be clear: This isn’t a matter of defending the Southern Confederacy,’ he commented. ‘Few Americans would do that. We certainly wouldn’t.’ Mr. Carlson (who is as critical of Republicans for their stupidity as he is of Democrats for their evil) should know better. Appeasement only cedes higher ground to your enemy. It is a shame that he was this petty, because right now Mr. Carlson is one of the only American journalists defying the mob and ‘Don’t Destroy America’s History And Shared Heritage’ is an otherwise excellent show (as are ‘The Real Reason Mobs Across The Country Are Tearing Down American Monuments’ and ‘The Angry Children Toppling Statues Nationwide Are Not Protestors – And Are Utterly Stupid’ [4] ‘Historians have been debating for decades about the character of American slavery,’ the historian Thaddeus Russell commented after watching the ‘Roots’ remake in 2016. ‘Please do me a favor and read them.’ Indeed, the popular assumption (as exemplified by both versions of the melodramatic and sentimentalist ‘Roots’) is that American slavery was defined solely by physical and psychological terror against blacks by whites. This anachronistic moralism, or ‘presentism,’ is a projection of black self-pity and white-self-hatred onto their past. As Mr. Russell put it, ‘Remarkable how many people, with scant historical knowledge, think the more brutal the depiction of slavery the more accurate it is.’ The truth is that while there was surely physical and psychological terror against blacks by whites (motivated by fear of a Haitian-esque racial insurrection, not racial hatred), economic incentives and ethical imperatives made slavery a far more humane system than anyone who gets his/her history from ‘Roots’ would ever believe. (Mr. Russell’s book, A Renegade History of the United States, has an informative chapter on slavery which is rooted in evidence instead of ideology.) So while the macabre fetishes of Kara Walker are promoted to the public and pronounced ‘genius,’ the ‘Uncle Remus’ folklore collected by Joel Chandler Harris has been purged from the public and pronounced ‘racist’ (e.g. the literal memory-holing of Disney’s ‘Song of the South’ movie and now ride). The end result is that authentic African-American experiences have been replaced with an inauthentic dialectic which may correspond to ‘politically correct’ opinions but which is nevertheless historically inaccurate. ‘The 1619 Project’ by The New York Times is an attempt to make this presentist moment permanent.  How long will you torment my soul, and break me in pieces with words? These ten times you have reproached me; you are not ashamed that you have wronged me. And if indeed I have erred, my error remains with me. If indeed you exalt yourselves against me, and plead my disgrace against me, know then that God has wronged me, and has surrounded me with His net…Have pity on me, have pity on me, O you my friends, for the hand of God has struck me! Why do you persecute me as God does, and are not satisfied with my flesh? Oh, that my words were written! Oh, that they were inscribed in a book! That they were engraved on a rock with an iron pen and lead, forever! For I know that my Redeemer lives, and He shall stand at last on the earth; and after my skin is destroyed, this I know, that in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. How my heart yearns within me! If you should say, ‘How shall we persecute him?’ – since the root of the matter is found in me, be afraid of the sword for yourselves; for wrath brings the punishment of the sword, that you may know there is a judgment. – Job 19:2-6, 21-29 Are You not from everlasting, O Lord my God, my Holy One? We shall not die. O Lord, You have appointed them for judgment; O Rock, You have marked them for correction. You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wickedness. Why do you look on those who deal treacherously and hold Your tongue when the wicked devours a person more righteous than he? Why do You make men like fish of the sea, like creeping things that have no ruler over them? They take up all of them with a hook, they catch them in their net, and gather them in their dragnet. Therefore they rejoice and are glad. Therefore they sacrifice to their net, and burn incense to their dragnet; because by them their share is sumptuous and their food is plentiful. Shall they therefore empty their net, and continue to slay nations without pity? – Habakkuk 1:12-1 The joy of our heart has ceased; our dance has turned into mourning. The crown has fallen from our head. Woe to us, for we have sinned! Because of this our heart is faint; because of these things our eyes grow dim; because of Mount Zion which is desolate, with foxes walking about on it. You, O Lord, remain forever; Your throne from generation to generation. Why do You forget us forever, and forsake us for so long a time? Turn us back to You, O Lord, and we will be restored; renew our days as of old, unless you have utterly rejected us, and are very angry with us! – Lamentations 5:15-22 The protests and riots over ‘blue’-on-black violence which have swept across this country, shaken many of its cities, and taken on a revolutionary life of their own, are, I fear, the tipping point which will wipe out our monuments once and for all. Even worse, the destruction of these symbols shows that the memory of the men and mettle which they symbolise will be wiped out as well. Although the public has consistently opposed the removal of Confederate statues by 2-1 margins or more – where I live in Florida, it was 58% to 27% in the summer of 2017 – the mob has always overruled democracy. (Indeed, although the county commissioners initially voted to keep our 106 year-old monument but supplement it with a mural to diversity, after the rioting of ‘Black Trans Lives Matter’ and the ‘Tampa Maoist Collective,’ the lobbying of ‘Woke Capital,’ and the opinionating of journalists-cum-activists, they re-voted to remove it.) Even worse, now that the mob has a taste of ‘anarcho-tyranny’ – having seen that the authorities will neither prevent nor punish them for vandalising and even overthrowing these monuments themselves – there is nothing stopping them. ‘Heritage defense’ groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy must disabuse ourselves of the notion that legislation or litigation can keep these monuments safe in public spaces – that cause is lost – and rescue these irreplaceable works of art while we still have the freedom to do so. When it comes to blue-on-black violence, all I shall say is that without any intention of mine to marginalise real victims, the extent, causes, and solutions to the problem are far more complicated than the protesters and the rioters believe. An anonymous open letter, purportedly authored by a black person within the History Department of UC Berkeley, puts this mass-movement in perspective. ‘It’s really worth reading, in a time of widespread panic,’ commented Wilfred Reilly (a black professor of political science at Kentucky State University). UC Berkeley has, ironically, denounced the letter and denied that it originated from its History Department, but even if the provenance of the letter was faked for publicity’s sake, that is less important than the content of the letter itself. Indeed, there is nothing in the letter which preeminent black intellectuals like Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele (who are senior fellows at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution), Glenn C. Loury and Jason L. Riley (experts at the Manhattan Institute who contribute to City Journal and The Wall Street Journal), or Walter E. Williams (who is an economics professor at George Mason University) have not been arguing throughout their careers. Many of these black intellectuals and more have united at ‘The 1776 Project’ (in opposition to ‘The 1619 Project’), which however conventionally conservative is at least a sign of life somewhere. As part of the inquisition against ‘systemic racism’ in this country, ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Antifa’ mobs[1] have defaced and even destroyed classic works of public art around the country, such as those which have stood on Richmond’s Monument Avenue Historic District for well over a hundred years. These great and good men – Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, and Jefferson Davis – have always been my heroes since I learned from my grandfather who my people are, where we come from, and what we have done. I confess that while a part of me hates those protesters and rioters who dishonour their memory, another part of me pities those same people who have been so poisoned by racial resentment and suspicion that they cannot see that they were so much more than just ‘some racists,’ as someone whom I know crudely phrased it. To paraphrase the British historian Edward Gibbon, ‘their imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times; their virtues were their own.’ Richmond’s Confederate monuments were defaced with ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Antifa’ graffiti/propaganda – ‘AmeriKKKa,’ ‘ACAB’ (gang slang for ‘all cops are bastards’), ‘Blood On Your Hands,’ ‘‘Cops Are Creepy,’ ‘Cops Are Simps’, ‘Defund The Police,’ ‘Die,’ ‘End Wage Slavery,’ ‘End White Supremacy,’ ‘F—k 12’ (gang slang for ‘f—k the police’), ‘F—k Racism,’ ‘F—k You,’ ‘FTP’ (gang slang for ‘f—k the police’), ‘F—k Pigs’ (gang slang for ‘police’), ‘F—k This Statue,’ ‘Freedom,’ ‘Hold Cops Accountable,’ ‘How Much More Blood?’, ‘Justice For Floyd,’ ‘Love,’ ‘Love Not War,’ ‘Lynch Trump,’ ‘No Cops,’ ‘No KKKops,’ ‘No Más,’ ‘No More White Supremacy,’ ‘No Justice, No Peace,’ ‘One Love,’ ‘Racist,’ ‘Racist AmeriKKKa,’ ‘Solidarity,’ ‘Stop Being Racist,’ ‘Stop Killing Us,’ ‘Stop White Supremacy,’ ‘Suck A D—k,’ ‘War,’ anarchist, communist (the Soviet hammer and sickle), and peace signs, and even more that was illegible/illiterate. A mob too impatient for the formal removal of the art and architecture which put those city blocks on the ‘National Register of Historic Places’ and one of the ‘Ten Great Streets in the Country’ tore down the statue of Jefferson Davis, tied a noose around its neck, and dragged it through the street while the police stood by and waited to pick up the pieces. The statues of Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart have been formally removed, and now only Robert E. Lee is the last statue standing. It is not just Lee, Jackson, Stuart, and Davis who are facing the figurative gibbet or guillotine, of course. The Confederates may have been targeted first, but they will not be the last. To borrow a phrase, they will come for whomever is left when there is no one left to speak for them. It is Christopher Columbus, too. Monuments to Columbus in Boston, St. Paul, and Richmond have been mobbed, vandalised, and demolished. One was actually burned and beheaded in effigy. Why? It is not just because Columbus conquered the aboriginal/indigenous tribes of the Caribbean. (The pre-Colombian empires were, after all, conquered by the Spanish in collaboration with other aborigines/indigenes whom had been treated as fodder for cannibalism and sacrifice, yet the descendants of those victims now perversely identify with the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incans who victimised their ancestors.) It is because, as Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt stated in his ‘Columbus Day’ speech from 1940, he inaugurated ‘the early movement of European people to America.’ According to FDR, ‘Out of the fusion of all these national strains was created the America to which the Old World contributed so magnificently.’ (He might have added that the profound issues raised by the Old World’s encounter with the New World caused a philosophical and theological debate among Spanish Catholics from which the Western ideals of international law and universal human rights originated – ideals which have existed nowhere else in the world and which those Lilliputians destroying the monuments of Western Civilisation now take for granted.)[2] Columbus is so offensive to the protesters and the rioters because he is a symbol of Western colonisation and civilisation in the Americas, which to them was and is a crime against humanity. Mobs of ‘indigenous activists’ in Los Angeles and San Francisco have also torn down monuments of Saint Junipero Serra, the Franciscan friar who established the California mission system (hence why so many Californian cities have Spanish and Catholic names). It is the Alamo and the Texas Rangers, too. The Alamo’s Cenotaph (erected in 1936 on the centennial anniversary of the legendary battle) has been defaced with ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Antifa’ graffiti/propaganda (‘Down With White Supremacy,’ ‘Down With Profit Over People,’ and ‘Down With The ALAMO’) and at the Dallas Love Field Airport, a statue of a Texas Ranger was removed. Why? It is not just because they are protesting the Texas Revolution and the Mexican-American War, although there is also an irredentist/revanchist and ethno-nationalistic movement among Mexicans north and south of the border. Just like Columbus, the Alamo and the Texas Rangers are symbols of Western colonisation and civilisation in the Americas (specifically of the American frontiersman and pioneer), which to the protesters and rioters was and is a crime against humanity. They attack the Alamo and the Texas Rangers to attack our very right to live here on this continent – or, according to their slogan, ‘stolen land’ built by ‘stolen labour.’ To them, ‘Manifest Destiny’ is equivalent to ‘Lebensraum.’ It is the National Mall, too: The Lincoln Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and other monuments have all been the victims of petty ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Antifa’ vandalism. Are they protesting the fact that, as Joe Sobran put it, Abraham Lincoln’s dual goal was ‘to prevent the political separation of North and South while promoting the racial separation of black and white’? Or the fact that in order to defeat the Axis Powers the U.S.A. had to ally with the Communists under Stalin, whose evil was so terrible that H.L. Mencken quipped that ‘Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist’? No, what they are protesting is the very existence of the U.S.A. – or what they now label ‘AmeriKKKa’ – as symbolised in our monuments in the heart of Washington, D.C. It is the Union, too. Outside Colorado’s capitol building in Denver, a monument to Union soldiers was defaced with ‘Down With DPD’ (Denver Police Department) and a Nazi swastika. In Colorado Springs, a monument of the city’s founder, William Jackson Palmer (a Union general who won the Medal of Honour and a major philanthropist to black causes) was vandalised with ‘Black Lives Matter’ graffiti/propaganda. Are they protesting the imposition of martial law in Maryland and Missouri? The disease, starvation, and torture of POWs in Camp Douglas and Elmira Prison? The sacking and razing of Atlanta and Columbia? The besieging and bombing of Charleston and Richmond? The looting, raping, and killing of black and white Southern civilians? The damage that destroying the Southern economy and society did to the black people living there whom they were supposedly liberating? No, they are protesting any and all American symbols, which to them symbolise ‘400 years of racism.’ Underscoring the idiotic iconoclasm of whatever this movement is, during the riot at the state capitol building in Denver a monument to the victims of the Armenian Genocide (a traditional memorial stele known as a khachkar, or ‘cross-stone’) was defaced with ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Antifa’ graffiti/propaganda such as ‘Cops Are The Evil’ ‘F—k 12,’ a smiley face, and even just the words ‘Sample Text.’ The intricate stonework on the face of the memorial stele was also covered in red spray-paint. It is the National Anthem, too. In San Francisco, California, a mob defaced a monument of Francis Scott Key (the Marylander whose poem, ‘The Defence of Fort McHenry,’ which he wrote after witnessing the bombardment of Baltimore as a prisoner aboard a British ship, was adapted into ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’) with ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Antifa’ graffiti/propaganda – ‘ACAB,’ ‘F—k 12,’ ’Kill All Colonizers,’ ‘Kill Whitey,’ ‘Slave Owner,’ ‘Slaveowning Pig,’ ‘Stolen People, Stolen Land,’ and more that was illegible/illiterate. When they had spray-painted all they had to say on the statue, they tore it down and stomped on it. The American national anthem offends the protesters and rioters because the American nation offends them. It is ‘The Great Triumvirate,’ too – three out of the ‘Famous Five’ Senators. In Charleston, South Carolina, a mob defaced a monument to John C. Calhoun (by any historical standard, not just one of the greatest Southerners ever but one of the greatest Americans ever)[3] with ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Antifa’ graffiti/propaganda – ‘1312’ (gang slang for ‘All Cops Are Bastards’), ‘Abolish CPD’ (Charleston Police Department), ‘Abolish NCPD’ (North Charleston Police Department), ‘Defund The Police,’ ‘Enough Is Enough,’ ‘F—k 12,’ ‘F—k Racist AmeriKKKa,’ ‘F—k Calhoun,’ ‘F—k The Police,’ ‘F—k Racism,’ ‘F—k Relocation,’ ‘F—k White Supremacy,’ ‘It’s Time To Atone For Injustice, Take The Slaver Down,’ ‘No Justice, No Peace, No Racist Police,’ ‘No Monuments To Hate,’ ‘Racist Statues Are Not Tourist Attractions,’ ‘Rip It Down,’ ‘Say All Lives Matter If You Have A Small D—k,’ ‘Socialist States Have No Racism,’ ‘Suck Our C—ks,’ ‘Take It Down, Melt It Down,’ ‘Take This S—t Down,’ ‘Throw It In The River,’ ‘White Silence Is Violence,’ and even more that was illegible/illiterate. To appease the mob, the Charleston City Council voted unanimously to remove the monument, thus sending the message that rioting is effective. After 124 years standing in Marion Square, the statue and plaques have been stripped from the pedestal, leaving nothing behind but a barren obelisk – idiotic iconoclasm that passes for progress today. In New Orleans, Louisiana, ‘Take Em Down NOLA’ (an activist group which lobbied successfully over public opposition for the removal of historic Confederate monuments in 2017) is demanding the removal of a monument to Henry Clay of Kentucky. (They also threw a bust of educational philanthropist – but ‘racist’! – John McDonough in the river.) In Manhattan’s Central Park, a monument to Daniel Webster was defaced with ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Antifa’ graffiti/propaganda – ‘ACAB,’ ‘F—k 12,’ ‘F—k NYPD,’ ‘F—k Racism,’ ‘Racist!!!’ and ‘Racist B—h.’ Clay and Webster were once revered by Americans for making compromises between the North and the South over the issue of slavery and saving the Union for their time,[4] but now that very statesmanship is their crime. It is the Presidents, too. NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced that the monument of Theodore Roosevelt (the great conservationist and progressive of his time) outside the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan will be removed. In San Francisco, California, a mob defaced a monument of Ulysses S. Grant (who defeated the Confederacy as a general and defeated the Ku Klux Klan as a president) and then demolished it. In Washington, D.C., a mob spray-painted the words ‘Killer’ all over a monument of Andrew Jackson (the great populist of his time and founder of the Democratic Party), but for once the police intervened and stopped them before they could demolish it. It is the Founding Fathers, too. In Portland, Oregon, mobs defaced monuments of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson with ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Antifa’ graffiti/propaganda –‘Big Floyd,’ ‘Damn White Men,’ ‘Defund White Men,’ ‘F—k Cops,’ ‘George Floyd 846’ (a reference to the amount of time that he had a knee on his neck), ‘Murder,’ ‘Slave Owner,’ ‘White Fragility,’ ‘You’re On Native Land,’ and ‘1619’ (a reference to The New York Times’ racial agitprop) – and then demolished them. For good measure, they draped Washington in a burning American flag as they tore down his statue. The symbolism is right in our faces and needs no further explanation. Three years ago, when the monuments of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were targeted in Charlottesville, Virginia, Pres. Trump was uncharacteristically articulate and intelligent – downright Socratic, in fact. ‘I wonder: Is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?’ he asked at a press conference. ‘You know, you really have to ask yourself – where does it stop?’ When journalists complained about the comparison of Washington and Jefferson to Lee and Jackson, the President asked them some questions they could not answer. ‘Was George Washington a slave owner?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ answered the press. ‘So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down statues of him?’ he asked. ‘How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him?’ he asked. ‘I do love Thomas Jefferson,’ answered the press. ‘Okay, good, are we going to take down his statue, because he was a major slave owner?’ Nevertheless, the media class collectively denounced the President for the comparison and assured the public that there was cause for concern. Late-nite comedians Jimmy Fallon and Seth Myers appeared on ‘Saturday Night Live’ as Washington and Jefferson to joke about slavery and mock Lee and Jackson. Where are these ‘smugnorant’ celebrities now? One wonders what the fate will be of Alexander Hamilton, whom despite Lin-Manuel Miranda’s enthusiastic attempt to modernise for younger generations, was actually one of the most capitalistic, elitist, militaristic, and nationalistic (one might even shudder to say ‘Republican’) of all the Founding Fathers. It is even other African-Americans, too. In Boston, Massachusetts, a monument to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment (the first African-American volunteer regiment in the Civil War famous for its doomed assault on Battery Wagner) was defaced with ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Antifa’ graffiti/propaganda – ‘ACAB,’ ‘F—k 12,’ ‘No Justice, No Peace,’ ‘Police Are Pigs,’ ‘R.I.P. George Floyd,’ and even more that was illegible/illiterate. The ‘Emancipation Memorial’ in Washington, D.C., (funded by freedmen and dedicated by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass) has been targeted for destruction because it depicts Abraham Lincoln as a paternalistic figure. ‘We’re tearing this motherf—r down!’ a ringleader bellowed to a roaring mob. This is all beneath our comprehension and our contempt. Who will be next? Shaun King (a prominent ‘Black Lives Matter’ activist) has made some disturbing demands: Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been. In the Bible, when the family of Jesus wanted to hide, and blend in, guess where they went EGYPT! Not Denmark. Tear them down. Yes, all murals and stained-glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down. They are a gross form of white supremacy. Created as tools of oppression. Racist propaganda. They should all come down.[5] I apologise for the repetitive obscenities and profanities, but it is crucial that we have no illusions about what this vocal (and increasingly violent) minority thinks of us and what they want to do to us. We have been urgently warning our fellow Americans about this militant movement’s onward march for over five years. Rest assured, not one of us takes any satisfaction whatsoever in our manifest vindication. The list of monuments that have been spray-painted, smashed, and sentenced for removal over the past couple months is lengthy and is lengthening. ‘Call Them The 1619 Riots’ quipped The New York Post. ‘It would be an honor,’ retorted the editor of The 1619 Project, ‘Thank you.’[6] They are just the most prominent examples of countless acts of erasure, however, ranging from the petty (taking down flags and statues, renaming streets, etc.) to the absurd (e.g. rebranding ‘Uncle Ben’ and ‘Aunt Jemima’ or renaming the bands ‘Lady Antebellum’ and ‘The Dixie Chicks’). These ‘identity politics’ of pandering and preening may make white liberals feel better about being white, but how will they improve black lives? If it were not already undeniable, these ‘politically correct’ hate crimes have nothing to do with the historical legacy of this or that historical individual or this or that historical event. The protesters and the rioters neither know nor care; they are as indifferent as they are ignorant. Judging from their gibberish and graffiti, many of them probably could not distinguish between George Washington (the Father of His Country) and George Washington Carver (the Father of Peanut Butter). They are targeting our monuments as a form of domestic terrorism and cultural genocide meant to dishearten and threaten us. America is more than just an abstract ‘proposition’ to us; she is an organic ‘given’ of which we are a part. America is more than just a ‘creed’ to us; she is in our blood. America is more than just an ‘idea’ to us; she is our identity and our inheritance. America is not just our birthplace and our homeland, but the birthplace and homeland of our progenitors and what we hope shall be the birthplace and homeland of our progeny. James Johnston Pettigrew (a North-Carolinian scholar and Confederate officer who was killed in the retreat from Gettysburg), in his philosophical travelogue of Spain and Sardinia, expressed exactly what ‘patriotism’ means to us. ‘Local attachments are pronounced, by the modern school of social philosophers, to be relics of barbarism, ignorance, and prejudice, forgetting that prejudices are given us by the all-wise Deity, as well as reasoning faculties, and equally for some beneficent purpose,’ explained Pettigrew. ‘Patriotism, an attachment to, a preference for one’s own home, is still a virtue prolific of measureless good, and for its foundation rests upon enlightened prejudice.’ We Southerners identify with Edmund Burke’s definition of a society as ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born,’ more than other individualistic Americans. Indeed, we Southerners identify more with Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of older feudal societies (where ‘all generations become as it were contemporaneous’) than with newer democratic societies (where ‘the woof of time is every instant broken and the track of generations effaced’). Like de Tocqueville, the Southerner ‘knows his forefathers and respects them,’ ‘sees his remote descendants and loves them,’ and ‘willingly imposes duties on himself toward the former and the latter, and will frequently sacrifice his personal gratifications to those who went before and to those who will come after him.’ All of the above is why the destruction of our monuments is so demoralising and even traumatising to us: It is the destruction of that mystic link between the past, present, and future. Our one consolation is that the ‘Cabaret’-style ‘Weimerika’ into which America has degenerated does not deserve to have monuments to such heroes as Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, and Jefferson Davis anyway, but that is a very bitter consolation. That may be an argument for giving monuments due process, but it is not an argument for tearing them down, trying to set them on fire, beheading them, and then urinating on the ruins. They do not deserve that cruel and unusual punishment. The purging of Confederate monuments is the harbinger of the broader and deeper demographic reconstruction of the American South. Diversification and suburbanisation have been a form of ‘gentrification,’ turning many Southern cities (like Richmond) and even a few Southern states (like Virginia) into the ‘nü-South’ – a Southern-flavoured knockoff of hipster meccas like Brooklyn, Hollywood, and Portland, or bourgeois enclaves like North Caldwell, Scottsdale, and the San Fernando Valley. As Fred Hobson observed, the assimilation of the South into the American mass replaced the historic qualities which had made her unique (for better or for worse) with generic American materialism. ‘The South in 1981 feels it has the best of both worlds: Pleasant and comfortable, but possessing at least a mild sense of its traditions and heritage,’ he explained. ‘But is it,’ he asked, ‘a South to which one can really be committed, which one can regard as distinctly different from the rest of America, which one can love or hate?’ The nü-South is, as Hobson predicted, merely a ‘Southern chic’ version of any other American metropolitan area, but what Hobson could not have predicted is that the ‘love-hate relationship’ would not die so much as be perverted into pathological self-hatred. The nü-South is an effect of ‘The Great Replacement’ (a term for the population trends in North America and Western Europe which has been poisoned as a meme on alt-right Internet subcultures)[7] and ‘The Great Awokening’ (a term for white liberals’ shift so far to the left on ‘social justice’ issues that they alone now exhibit a pro-outgroup rather than pro-ingroup bias). When Virginia went blue in the state elections late last year (Virginia had been blue before, of course, but today’s identity-politics Democrats are nothing like the civic-nationalist Democrats before 1993), the media class openly exulted in the outcome with headlines like ‘The Demo-craphic Tide Washes Over Virginia’ and ‘Tuesday’s Election Paints Picture of Changing Demographics.’ In ‘How Voters Turned Virginia From Deep Red to Solid Blue,’ The New York Times explained how the demographic changes from diversification and suburbanisation have reconstructed the state: South Riding, Va. – Not long ago, this rolling green stretch of Northern Virginia was farmland. Most people who could vote had grown up here. And when they did, they usually chose Republican. The fields of Loudon County are disappearing. In their place is row upon row of cookie-cutter townhouses, clipped lawns, and cul-de-sacs – a suburban landscape as far as the eye can see. Unlike three decades ago, the residents are often from other places, like India and Korea. And when they vote, it is usually for Democrats… Once the heart of the Confederacy, Virginia is now the land of Indian grocery stores, Korean churches, and Diwali festivals. It never seems to occur to those at the Times that replacing the American South’s unique Tidewater culture (not just in Virginia but in Delaware and Maryland as well) with mass-culture and multi-culturalism is actually the opposite of diversity. There are plenty of places for people to celebrate Diwali in the world, but there is only one Delaware, one Maryland, and one Virginia (though not for very much longer). ‘Virginia now stands as a fearful avatar for Republicans of what the nation’s unrelenting demographic and cultural changes mean for the party, as the moderate-to-liberal urban and suburban areas grow and more conservative areas lose ground,’ reported The Washington Post. ‘Similar shifts are starting to hit states such as North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, and Texas, as minority populations increase and white college-educated voters continue to turn away from the Republican brand.’ (The death of the ‘Stupid Party’ would be cause for good cheer if it were not leaving the country in the hands of the ‘Evil Party.’) In one of the many other celebratory/self-congratulatory articles and op-eds published by the Post, ‘A Bright Blue Virginia Leaves the Confederacy Behind,’ a ‘community organiser’ explained that ‘with the Democratic sweep in Richmond, protecting Civil War monuments won’t be high on the agenda in the town that was once the seat of the Lost Cause.’ As he triumphantly proclaimed, ‘The Confederacy is dead…That page of our history is about to turn.’ Simply put, Richmond, Virginia, and the rest of the nü-South are not purging their heritage because their people have been reconstructed, but because their people have been replaced. It is not their heritage. Almost a century ago, the ‘Fugitive Agrarians’ warned that the Northern ‘Industrialism’ which promised to increase the Southern standard of living also threatened the Southern way of life in ways that markets could not measure. ‘It may be confidently said that the physical operations of agriculture will continue in the South, just as certain processes of industry are expected to continue in the South, but the human civilization now based on Southern agriculture is in no little peril, and industrial civilization under the capitalistic system does not offer a satisfying substitute in human values,’ argued Herman Clarence Nixon. ‘The South is no longer conquered territory, not quite conquered, but a protest, articulate and constructive, is needed against another conquest, a conquest of the spirit.’ Industrialism is no longer the imminent threat that it was in 1930, as there is little agrarian left for industry to destroy (and the country has since ‘de-industrialised’ what it industrialised by outsourcing industry to the Third World). Yet the nü-South is not much different from Industrialism in that it invokes the same ideology of ‘Progress’ as it deconstructs and reconstructs the South (though more thoroughly and permanently than mere machines did). Indeed, even though capitalism is no longer ‘industrial,’ the effects of Industrialism identified by Lyle H. Lanier – the consolidation of economic capital and political authority, the pathologisation of individuality, and the dissolution of community and family life – are worse today than they were back then. ‘It is not the machine, however, but the theory of the machine to which I object,’ remarked Lanier, ‘and if this theory, which we may call Industrialism, is a valid hypothesis of the course of Western civilization, all discussion of “progress” would do well to cease.’ Even as industrial capitalism undermined the American South’s traditional agrarian life, John Crowe Ransom admitted that liberal and progressive Americans were still sentimental about sympathetic toward the American South. Today we have the opposite of sentimentality and sympathy – something like self-righteous indignation – as gentrification finishes what industrialisation started. In the nü-South, an ‘unreconstructed Southerner’ like Ransom, ‘who persists in his regard for a certain terrain, a certain history, and a certain inherited way of living,’ will no longer be an eccentric and romantic ‘anachronism’ who is indulged but not taken seriously: We are ‘racists’ who shall be purged, just like our ‘racist monuments.’ [1] ‘You don’t believe that black lives matter? You’re not against anti-fascism? It’s literally in their names!’ Of course I believe that black lives matter (who really believes that they do not?) and am against fascism (who is really for it?), but any group can name itself after any truism that it wants. For example, so many of the worst oppressors of their own people have called themselves ‘people’s republics’ or ‘people’s democracies’ that it is now a joke. ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Antifa’ are to black lives and anti-fascism what the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the People’s Republic of Cambodia are to Congolese democracy and the Cambodian people. Are the Ku Klax Klan really ‘Christian Knights’ because that is what they call themselves? This is a sandbox-style argument. [2] Catholic scholar Robert Royal’s book, 1492 And All That: Political Manipulations of History (as well as articles for the Catholic magazine First Things, such as “1492 And All That,” “Consequences of Columbus,” “Since Long Before 1492,” and “Columbus and the Beginning of the World”) are exemplars of what history should and must be. [3] In 1957, when John C. Calhoun was voted one of the five greatest Senators of all time (along with his fellow ‘triumvirs,’ Henry Clay and Daniel Webster), Sen. John F. Kennedy summarised his character and contributions: Senator John C. Calhoun, of South Carolina, who served in the Senate 1832-43, 1845-50. Forceful logician of state sovereignty, masterful defender of the rights of a political minority against the dangers of an unchecked majority, his profoundly penetrating and original understanding of the social bases of government has significantly influenced American political theory and practice. Sincerely devoted to the public good as he saw it, the ultimate tragedy of his final cause neither detracts from the greatness of his leadership nor tarnishes his efforts to avert bloodshed. Outspoken yet respected, intellectual yet beloved, his leadership on every major issue in that critical era of transition significantly shaped the role of the Senate and the destiny of the nation. [4] Sen. John F. Kennedy, who chaired the special committee tasked with selecting the ‘Famous Five,’ summarised the character and contributions of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster: Senator Henry Clay, of Kentucky, who served in the Senate 1806-7, 1810-11, 1831-42, 1849-52. Resourceful expert in the art of the possible, his fertile mind, persuasive voice, skillful politics, and tireless energies were courageously devoted to the reconciliation of conflict between North and South, East and West, capitalism and agrarianism. A political leader who put the national good above party, a spokesman for the West whose love for the Union outweighed sectional pressures, he acquired more influence and respect as a responsible leader of the loyal but ardent opposition than many who occupied the White House. His adroit statesmanship and political finesse in times of national crisis demonstrated the values of intelligent compromise in a federal democracy, without impairing either his convictions or his courage to stand by them. Senator Daniel Webster, of Massachusetts, who served in the Senate 1827-41, 1845-50. Eloquent and articulate champion of ‘Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,’ he grasped in an age of divided loyalties the full meaning of the American Constitution and of the supremacy and indissolubility of the national government. Molding the symbols of the Union he cherished so strongly so that neither secession nor war could break them, his steadfast courage and powerful leadership in two of the Senate’s most historic and critical debates were brilliantly portrayed in orations attentively heard and eagerly read. Influential spokesman for industrial expansion, his dedication to the Union above all personal and partisan considerations overshadowed the petty moral insensitivities which never compromised his national principles; and his splendid dignity and decorum elevated the status and prestige of the Senate. JFK – that notorious apologist for white-supremacist racists! [5] Everyone knows that Jesus was Jewish and so would have looked Semitic (even more ‘Middle Eastern’ than modern-day Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jews, many of whom have acquired European admixture since the first century A.D.). No one believes in ‘Aryan Jesus’ any more than they believe in ‘Black Jesus.’ Christianity is an evangelical and universalist religion, yet the human race is ethno-centric and tribalist, hence people of all colours imagine Jesus looking like them. It is as historically inaccurate as it is also innocent and irrelevant. Indeed, what does any of this have to with ‘systemic racism in policing’? Why is Shaun King endorsing violent vigilantism against churches instead of endorsing the police-reform bill of Sen. Tim Scott (the African-American Republican from South Carolina)? [6] Many ‘neo-abolitionist’ historians (e.g. Allen C. Guelzo, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Gordon Wood), who have spent their entire careers falsely arguing that everything that made the American South exceptional came from slavery are now protesting as The New York Times makes the same false accusation about all of America herself in its ‘1619 Project.’ It is too late for them. [7] One of many examples of the media class’ hypocritical coverage of and commentary of the issues around ‘The Great Replacement’ is an interview which CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper did with Univision news anchor (and Hispanic/Latino spokesman) Jorge Ramos. Mr. Cooper explained that while he personally finds ‘the idea that whites will not be the majority’ to be ‘an exciting transformation of the country’ representing ‘evolution’ and ‘progress,’ he added that ‘among white supremacists, white nationalists that is viewed as a horrific event.’ Mr. Ramos interrupted, ‘I do understand, but there’s nothing really they can do against this demographic revolution – and in 2044 everyone is going to be a minority.’ In those few sentences, Messrs. Cooper and Ramos unwittingly admitted to what CNN, Univision, and the rest of the press has collectively denounced as a ‘racist conspiracy theory’ – namely, that white people are becoming minorities in the countries where they live. Enough straw-man arguments: The migration of over one million people per year to the U.S.A. – and the obvious challenges which this poses to our cultural identity, economic prosperity, political unity, and social stability as a nation and a state – is a policy which deserves to be democratically debated, and not everyone who disagrees with Messrs. Cooper and Ramos is a ‘white supremacist’ or ‘white nationalist,’ as the political scientist Eric Kaufmann has argued in Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. This piece previously appeared at the Abbeville Institute website on July 27, 2020.
Joe Biden’s campaign had collapsed. He came in fourth place in Iowa’s caucus and fifth place in New Hampshire’s primary, but was always predicted to win in South Carolina because black voters will bloc-vote for him. The media class, which favored Mr. Biden from the beginning (cf. “FAIR: Comcast-Owned MSNBC in the Tank for Joe Biden’s Presidential Run” and “FAIR: Only One View at The View, Biden Not So Bad”) but had distanced itself from him because of his obvious un-electability, turned his entirely unremarkable primary victory in South Carolina into “Joe-mentum.” Reacting to the breathless coverage of Joe-mentum, every other Democrat remaining in the race except for Bernie Sanders withdrew and endorsed Mr. Biden. Barack Obama and a number of members of his administration apparently did not just endorse their former Vice President, but pressured other Democrats to withdraw and endorse him as well. Even Kamala Harris, who earlier in the primary had made Mr. Biden’s opposition to “busing” personal, endorsed him. Mr. Biden swept two rounds of primary elections since then, winning in states where he did not even campaign and where Mr. Sanders had won just a few years earlier. In a matter of days, the established elites of the Democratic Party set aside their personal differences and united around Mr. Biden, who is now the presumptive Democratic nominee. There is just one problem, however: Joe Biden would be a steward of the consensus in Washington, D.C. – “invade the world, invite the world, in hock to the world,” or “imperialism, immigration, insolvency” – with cornpone affectations disguising an ideology and identity of the “managerial elite.” He would, in other words, be the Dubya of the Democratic Party. The Iraq War: “To say something different today is just a bald-faced lie"Mr. Biden claims that he was tricked into the Iraq War by Pres. Bush and opposed the war as soon as the truth became clear. “I did make a bad judgment, trusting the president saying he was only doing this to get inspectors in and get the U.N. to agree to put inspectors in,” Mr. Biden falsely admitted in a Democratic debate on NBC. “From the moment ‘shock and awe’ started, from that moment, I was opposed to the effort, and I was outspoken as much as anyone at all in the Congress and the administration.” Because he literally voted for the 2002 AUMF (unlike Bernie Sanders), Mr. Biden cannot pretend that he was against the war altogether, but he is saying everything he can to obfuscate his actual actions at the time. “President George W. Bush ‘got them in,’ and before we know it, we had a ‘shock and awe,’” Mr. Biden falsely admitted in an interview on NPR. “Immediately, the moment it started, I came out against the war at that moment.” Yet Mr. Biden is lying about why he voted for the Iraq War, lying about for how long he supported the Iraq War, and lying about what his eventual opposition to the war constituted. The fact is that whatever lies he tells, Mr. Biden was a staunch leader of pro-war Democratic Senators and a fierce critic of anti-war Democrats. At a speech at The Brookings Institution in July, 2003 (well after the “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad), Joe Biden avowed his support for Bush the Lesser’s invasion of Iraq and defended it from Democratic opponents, despite his differences with the neoconservatives: Some of my own party have said that it was a mistake to go into Iraq in the first place and believe that it’s not worth the cost, whatever benefit may flow from our engagement in Iraq. But the cost of not acting against Saddam I think would have been much greater, and so is the cost, and so will be the cost of not finishing this job. A few months later, in an interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN, Joe Biden criticized how Pres. Bush’s neoconservatives had managed the war yet still defended it from Democratic opponents:
Most recently, in an interview with Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC, Joe Biden further entangled himself in his pathetic lies: “The reason I voted the way I did was to try to prevent a war from happening.” (Unbelievably, Mr. O’Donnell merely nodded along and did not push back on this preposterous contradiction – some “free press”!) According to Mr. Biden, he did not believe the neoconservative propaganda that the Hussein regime possessed WMDs and so voted to authorize military force against Iraq in order to force the UN inspectors back into the country so that they could disprove that propaganda. In fact, as early as 1998 Mr. Biden was pushing for war on Iraq because of suspected WMDs, which was a line that he continued to take up to and after his vote for the Iraq War in 2003. On February 5th, 2003, after Colin Powell’s appearance before the UN Security Council – in which the Secretary State presented neoconservative propaganda as official intelligence – Joe Biden, in an address on C-SPAN, called on Bush the Lesser to make the case for a long, hard war and occupation in Iraq: There are two issues. One, informing the American public, the Security Council, and the world, about the evidence – the evidence to allow us to make the conclusion – that Saddam Hussein remains a danger because he is not cooperating, he is still harboring, and he is still seeking the accumulation of weapons of mass-destruction. That case, I believe, has been made. I hope, now, that the American people will have this regurgitated in a number of venues and fora over the next weeks, that they will be as convinced as I am. In his C-SPAN address, Joe Biden dismissed Pres. Bush’s neoconservative doctrine of “preemption” for muddling the message and insisted that it would not be “preemptive” to attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein was a “bad guy”: This is not - is not - preemption. There’s nothing preemptive about it. If you turned on now and the television showed aircraft striking Baghdad, it would not be a preemptive attack. There is nothing preemptive about it. It’s an enforcement. One of the problems I have found is – I have spoken in the last week or so with world leaders, heads of state, foreign ministers, and their counterparts, and I had the opportunity to do that extensively for five days in Davos – one of the things that confuses and allows those who don’t want to step up to the ball and meet their obligation, is when some in the administration have said we have a new doctrine of “preemption.” It allows those who want to drag their feet in doing what they know must be done to say, “Whoa, we’re not going to be involved in preemption. That’s a new doctrine that changes the Treaty of Westphalia” – of I think 1648 or whatever the year was. We get into all of that. It obfuscates the central point. Is this a bad guy, who’s violated the terms of an agreement he made to do away with weapons with the capacity to do great harm to his people, the region, and – and, possibly – the United States of America? The answer is yes, this is a bad guy - this is a guy who’s violated the terms of a peace agreement, this is a guy who continues to do it, this guy has a record of demonstrating he will use those weapons, and there is an emerging pattern that convenience may throw him into the arms of who our most central and most serious enemy is now, non-state actor called Al Qaeda. So he must be dealt with. He must be dealt with. On May 29, 2004, in a commencement speech for the University of Delaware, Joe Biden claimed that even though there was no evidence for what he had earlier claimed there was evidence for – the evidence which he used to justify the Iraq War – but still supported the war anyway: Let me tell you what I see with Iraq. We had to go into Iraq, not because Saddam was part of Al Qaeda, there was no evidence of that, not because he possessed nuclear weapons or because he posed an imminent threat to the United States, there was no evidence of that. The legitimate reason for going into Iraq, was he violated every single commitment he made and warranted being taken down. And the international community and us had a right to respond. (Imagine being such a conceited politician that you believe that college students want to hear you make excuses for your votes on their day of graduation.) From his own words at the time, then, Joe Biden believed that the Hussein regime had violated the UN resolutions against WMDs and was harboring the perpetrators of 9/11, and that as a result of these threats, the U.S.A. would not only have to invade Iraq and destroy the Hussein regime, but also occupy the country indefinitely in order to reconstruct it. As Joe Biden explained on CNN the very day before the war began, “There’s a lot of us who voted for giving the President the authority to take down Saddam Hussein if he didn’t disarm, and there are those who believe, at the end of the day, even though it wasn’t handled all that well, we still have to take him down.” Mr. Biden is now twisting the fact that he was critical of how Pres. Bush “handled” the war to pretend that he was actually against the war itself, which he never was at any point in time. In fact, there is a whole documentary on this subject, “Worth the Price? Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War.” Journalists must start confronting Mr. Biden’s lies by quoting his own words back to him. Aaron Maté of the independent investigative-journalism website, The Grayzone, recently interviewed Maj. Scott Ritter, the Marine Corps intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector whom Joe Biden berated when he appeared before the Senate. “That’s what Biden needs to be honest about,” argues Maj. Ritter. “He never supported the weapons-inspection process, he always supported regime change, and to say something different today is just a bald-faced lie.” Indeed, in the course of questioning Maj. Ritter, Mr. Biden frankly stated what would be the position of Pres. Bush’s neoconservatives a few years later – that the Hussein regime had WMDs and that unilateral military intervention by the U.S.A. was the only option: I think that you and I believe, and many of us believe here, as long as Saddam’s at the helm, there is no reasonable prospect that you or any other inspector is going to be able to guarantee that we have rooted out, root and branch, the entirety of Saddam’s program relative to weapons of mass-destruction. You and I both know, and all of us here really know, and it’s the thing we have to face, that the only way that we’re gonna get rid of Saddam Hussein is we’re gonna end up having to start it alone, and it’s gonna require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking this son of a, uh, taking Saddam down. You know it and I know it. I think we should not kid ourselves here. There’s stark, stark choices. There were many politicians who initially fell for the neoconservative war propaganda and struggled to redeem themselves afterward, like Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), but Mr. Biden is too small of a man with too big of an ego to display such honor and humility. Worst of all, because he never learned any lesson from the Iraq War, he will likely make the same mistakes again! Indeed, as Reese Erlich (an award-winning foreign correspondent for CBS News and NPR) argues in “Biden vs. Bernie - A Foreign Policy Face-Off,” Mr. Biden is the most chicken-hawkish (I refuse to use the conventional political lingo for militaristic, “hawkish,” as birds of prey only kill to eat, not out of malice) candidate in the Democratic primary, and arguably even more chicken-hawkish than Donald Trump. In response to Pres. Trump’s idea of “America First” (however much his own ignorant instincts and his advisers’ evil agenda have bastardized that patriotic creed), Mr. Biden has promoted his idea of “American Leadership” (which means more of the same, cf. Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, etc.). Should the President put the interests of the American people first as he leads the nation or should he put them last as he leads the world? Medea Benjamin (one of the founders of CODEPINK: Women for Peace) and Nicolas J.S. Davies (author of Blood On Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq) graded all of the Democrats on the issue of “war and peace.” Joe Biden got some of the lowest marks. According to Ms. Benjamin and Mr. Davies, “Like many other corporate Democrats, Biden champions a misleadingly benign view of the dangerous and destructive role the U.S. has played in the world over the past 20 years, under the Democratic administration in which he served as Vice-President as well as under Republican ones.” There is a reason that Joe Biden is a serial liar when it comes to his decisive role in the Iraq War. It was a geopolitical catastrophe – the most catastrophic event in the Middle East since the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. It was an act of rank arrogance and raw aggression which plunged an entire region of the world into chaos and incited more terrorism. It was a demoralizing blow to the soldiers who were ordered to risk their lives for a lie, as well as the civilians who could not justify the sacrifice of their friends and family. It was a holocaust to the Iraqi people, leveling entire cities like Fallujah and wiping out the lives of at least 180,000 civilians. It was a wound which continues to fester, as a new generation of Iraqi insurgents rises against the apparently endless American occupation (now a base of operations for drone strikes and special operations throughout the wider region). It was not unforeseeable, either, despite what Mr. Biden pretends today: Many on the right (such as Pat Buchanan, Bob Novak, Ron Paul, and Justin Raimondo) and on the left (such as Noam Chomsky, Phil Donahue, Dennis Kucinich, and Gore Vidal) warned the Bidens of the day, yet they were not only ignored, but also – in the crudest nationalistic manner – vilified by the Bidens of the day as unpatriotic and even disloyal. Mr. Biden is one of the many American politicians who have gotten away with murder, so to speak – no, not of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial state, but of the Iraqi nation and the literal “cradle of civilization,” not to mention Christian communities dating back to the Apostles themselves. That is why he lies about it. It is bad enough that he will not tell the truth, of course, but it is even worse that the media class will not, either (cf. “FAIR: Turning Biden’s Support for the Iraq War into Foreign-Policy ‘Experience’” Civil Rights: “The white liberal...is more deceitful than the conservative."Mr. Biden often claims that he was involved in the Civil-Rights Revolution. Shaun King (a “Black Lives Matter” activist and supporter of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign) has, in “2 Truths and 31 Lies,” comprehensively documented Mr. Biden’s history of lying about his involvement in the Civil-Rights Revolution, which began in the 1970s but nearly ended his in the 1988 presidential election, but which has reemerged in the ongoing election. “Current and former elected officials in Delaware told me that it is an open secret among them that Joe Biden is a serial pathological liar when it comes to his ‘work’ in the Civil Rights Movement,” explains Mr. King, “and that he has told such lies, for so long, so many times, that it is an unwritten rule in Delaware that one must hold their nose and go along with them or risk being ostracized in such a small, close-knit political community.” This is a particularly malignant instance of the Baby Boomers’ bad habit of taking credit for the legacy of their parents and grandparents: Mr. Biden is, as Mr. King puts it, “creating entire fictional story lines to impress white liberals & connect w/ black voters.” Yet Mr. Biden’s blatant lies have apparently worked with black voters, who comprise one of his staunchest Democratic blocs and carried him through the Southern primaries. The only explanations that I can come up with for this unearned black loyalty are too condescending and insulting for me to say aloud. I will let Malcolm X do the talking: In this deceitful American game of power politics, the Negroes (i.e., the race problem, the integration and civil-rights issues) are nothing but tools, used by one group of whites called Liberals against another group of whites called Conservatives, either to get into power or to remain in power. Among whites here in America, the political teams are no longer divided into Democrats and Republicans. The whites who are now struggling for control of the American political throne are divided into “liberal” and “conservative” camps. The white liberals from both parties cross party lines to work together toward the same goal, and white conservatives from both parties do likewise. The only rational explanation for black support of Joe Biden is that they are betting that he is another Ralph Northam – a foolish Baby Boomer afflicted with “white guilt” who will do whatever they tell him to do in exchange for political survival and social approval. This is the vicious cycle of identity politics, in particular the bottomless pit that is black self-pity and white self-hatred. The Generation Gap: “I have no empathy!"Speaking of the Baby Boomers, Joe Biden is the personification of the most narcissistic (and, as one author recently put it, “sociopathic”) aspects of that generation. On that critical issue of student debt, Mr. Biden (a former senator from Delaware, which is the second-smallest state and is the home to over 50% of publicly traded corporations and even more of Fortune 500) authored legislation deregulating the financial industry so that students could take out loans as well as to reform bankruptcy laws so that students could never discharge those loans. “Joe Biden’s Role in Creating the Student Debt Crisis Stretches Back to the 1970s,” Aida Chavez reports for The Intercept. As part of his career of deregulating the banking sector, Mr. Biden also voted to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act from the New Deal, which was one of the main causes of the last financial crisis. When the markets crashed in 2007 and 2008, Mr. Biden voted to bail out the banks which had speculated – or “gambled” – and lost. What did so-called “Middle Class” Joe do to help keep the middle class in their homes after the housing bubble burst? Nothing. Because of the severe recession which resulted from that financial crisis, Millennials are now the first generation in modern economic history worse off than their parents, the Baby-Boomers. The Wall Street Journal is hardly a Millennial-oriented company like Vice or Vox, but “Playing Catch-Up in the Game of Life” reports that Millennials are “in worse financial shape than every preceding living generation and may never recover”: American Millennials are approaching middle age in worse financial shape than every living generation ahead of them, lagging behind Baby Boomers and Generation X despite a decade of economic growth and falling unemployment. “The younger generation tells me how tough things are, give me a break,” complains the quintessential Boomer Joe Biden. “No, no, no...I have no empathy!” Is that your campaign slogan, Mr. Biden? Trade: “Possibilities"Joe Biden, as a neo-liberal Democrat, has supported “free trade” agreements such as NAFTA and the TPP, as well as permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) with China and admitting China to the World Trade Organization. “Biden’s NAFTA vote is a liability in the Rust Belt,” Joshua Green reports for Bloomberg. “His record on trade could make him a target for both the Left and the Right.” Although “growing the economies” of all the trading partners (at least in terms of GDP), these free-trade agreements also “de-industrialized” the American economy, in the process killing middle-class/small-town America as the jobs upon which that culture and society were built were outsourced across the border or overseas. GDP may have grown, but as Mr. Biden once noted in a speech plagiarized from Robert F. Kennedy, “The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play.” Mr. Biden argues that his free-trade deals have created more jobs than they have destroyed – this is a standard free-market talking point – but even if that were true, that job growth is not necessarily replacing that job loss: People who lose their jobs in a Rust-Belt factory town are not always willing or able to relocate their lives to a Sun-Belt suburb. Furthermore, while jobs are shipped abroad, many of the newly created jobs here at home are filled not by the people who lost their jobs, but by immigrants who are willing to move wherever there is work and are willing to work for less, too. In sum, the result of free trade has been the outflow of capital from the higher-wage American economy to the lower-wage Chinese and Mexican economies, as well as the inflow of labor from the lower-wage Chinese and Mexican economies to the higher-wage American economy. As a policy of dispossession, it could not be more complete. (Decadent “conservatives” like Kevin D. Williamson of National Review, who jeer that people whom fail to compete in this globalized economy “deserve to die,” are missing the point and undermining the very communities, institutions, and traditions they pretend to want to conserve.) Mr. Biden likes to tell a story about how China’s leader, Xi Jinping, asked him to define America in one word and he answered “possibilities.” Instead of platitudes about “possibilities,” Mr. Biden should consider policies to help the people whom he purports to represent. The Border Crisis: “The crisis is directly tied to U.S. foreign policy"Immigration is driven by “pull” and “push” factors: That is, positive factors in one country (say, the U.S.A.) “pulling” people there and negative factors in one country (say, Mexico) “pushing” people out of there. Joe Biden, in cooperation with the Clinton Administration when he was a Senator and in the Obama Administration when he was Vice President, has been “pushing” people out of Central America through “shock therapy” policies that slashed public services, ravaged the environment, and militarized police forces. On the independent investigative-journalism website The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal, in “How Joe Biden’s Privatization Plans Helped Doom Latin America and Fuel the Migration Crisis,” reports that despite Mr. Biden’s claim that his plans relieved “push factors” in countries like Colombia and Honduras, they actually worsened those factors. “All the U.S. media was talking about the crisis on the border without speaking about the fact that the crisis is directly tied to U.S. foreign policy,” Anya Parampil from The Grayzone explained on FOX News, “specifically U.S. regime-change policy, which has resulted of the doubling of poverty in Honduras.” It is a shame, too, because the policy of a developed country investing in undeveloped neighboring countries in order to prevent mass-migration from those countries – as Mr. Biden once put it, “You do the following things to make your country better so people don’t leave, and we will help you do that” – has the potential to be mutually beneficial, but that is not what actually happened. What Mr. Biden is claiming credit for was a classic case of what Naomi Klein termed “disaster capitalism.” UkraineGate: “I have never spoken to my son about his various business dealings"While the Bidens are not nearly as notorious grifters as, say, the Clintons, even some of the most corrupt politicians in Washington, D.C., can get away with saying that. The most notable example of the family’s corruption comes from Ukraine, where Joe Biden was put in charge of “anti-corruption.” After the Obama Administration interfered in Ukraine’s democracy and made his Vice President a Roman-style proconsul over Ukraine, his son, Hunter Biden (a cocaine-snorting, crack-smoking, alcohol-swilling degenerate who married/divorced his dead brother’s wife, and fathered a child with a stripper) was named to the board of Ukraine’s largest natural-gas company for a six-figure salary. Hunter has also held sinecures at a credit-card conglomerate that was his father’s top donor, a lobbying firm co-founded by his father’s top fundraiser, a hedge fund co-founded with his uncle, and Amtrak (which his father publicly championed – and funded to the tune of billions). “It was February when Yanukovych was overthrown, and just a few months later, Joe Biden’s son and a close friend of John Kerry’s stepson, they both join the board of this Ukrainian gas company,” Joe Lauria (editor of Consortium News and former Wall Street Journal reporter) explains in an interview with The National Interest. “So just after an American-backed coup, you have Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden and this John Kerry family friend [then the Secretary of State] joining the board of probably the largest private gas producer in Ukraine.” Max Blumenthal goes into deeper detail on this scandal at The Grayzone, exposing how Burisma (the Ukrainian gas company which put Mr. Biden’s son on its board) is funding The Atlantic Council (“NATO’s semi-official think tank in Washington, D.C.”), which is an advocate of military confrontation of Russia in Ukraine and a supporter of Mr. Biden (who is also an advocate of such a policy). Obviously, this arrangement meets the textbook definition of a “conflict of interest,” which was why other officials in the Obama Administration questioned Mr. Biden about it, but were rebuffed. An honest man would have recused himself from his role in Ukraine just to avoid any appearance of corruption, but not Mr. Biden. Even when this scandal came to light in the course of the impeachment of Donald Trump, did Mr. Biden admit that his son received this lucrative sinecure for access to the Obama Administration and apologize for this abuse of power? No, he lamely denied that he was even aware that his son was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company (even though he, Hunter, and a Ukrainian gas executive played golf together) and then lamely insisted that his son must have gotten the job on the merits (despite neither speaking Ukrainian nor having any experience in the energy industry). “Even Hunter Biden admits his work in Ukraine was a mistake,” Robert Mackey reports for The Intercept. “Why can’t his father say that?” Mr. Biden is insulting the intelligence of the people – or perhaps exposing his own unintelligence – by saying things that everyone knows are not true. “Stop Calling Them ‘Gaffes’"oe Biden has always been infamous for “gaffes,” but as independent journalist Michael Tracey argues in “Joe Biden isn’t ‘Gaffe-Prone,’ He’s Losing His Mind,” this is a term only ever used by pundits to explain away the offensive statements of politicians as something embarrassing yet also somehow endearing. And truth be told, it is only ever used to refer to the repeated blunders and errors of Mr. Biden. How many times is the media class going to help Mr. Biden get away with his “gaffes”? Take, for instance, this article in The Washington Post on a story which Joe Biden has been telling about himself for years. “Almost every detail in the story appears to be incorrect,” according to the Post. “In the space of three minutes, Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.” If this came from any other politician, it would be a called what it is – a lie told by a chickenhawk trying to trade on the troops for political gain – but because it comes from Mr. Biden, it is just another “gaffe.” The traditional definition of a “gaffe,” at least in a political context, comes from the journalist Michael Kinsley. “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth,” quipped Mr. Kinsey, “some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” Joe Biden’s “gaffes” do not come anywhere close to meeting that definition, however. A gaffe is not saying something that is not true; that is the opposite of a gaffe. As Michael Tracey says, it’s time to “stop calling them ‘gaffes.’” When it comes to Joe Biden, his supposed “gaffe-proneness” has effectively obscured his history of “lie-proneness,” which is extraordinary even for a politician. Yet Joe Biden’s stammering, stuttering word salads are starting to sound more like dementia than the usual “gaffes.” Joe Biden has always been inarticulate when he was not plagiarizing the material of other politicians like Hubert Humphrey, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy (see Shaun King’s tweet thread on his history of plagiarism), but contrasting videos of him from just four years ago with videos of him today reveals a severe loss of verbal intelligence even for someone already as dim as him. Mr. Biden is no longer the pseudo-avuncular figure from his cameo on the NBC sitcom “Parks and Rec” (which also yukked it up with the egotistical, fanatical, and hateful John McCain). At a campaign rally in Texas, Joe Biden tried and failed a hackneyed recitation of the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he began, before forgetting the words. “All men and women are created by...you know, you know...the thing.” Obviously, on the most superficial level, this is yet another example of Mr. Biden’s increasingly evident mental incapacity, but on a more “meta” level, it is evidence of the increasingly evident political incapacity of the so-called “American idea.” Over 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln, in his campaign to appropriate “the Fathers” as anti-slavery Republicans and defeat Stephen Douglas’ Northern Democrats, took the line “all men are created equal” from the Declaration of Independence out of context and twisted it to mean something which none of those fathers then intended or could have ever imagined. Lincoln ultimately succeeded in turning Thomas Jefferson’s manifesto against British tyranny into a mystical “Proposition,” but even as those Yankee revolutionaries who first sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” a-mouldered in the grave, their souls have marched on through Lincoln’s Proposition. According to the great “Agrarian Aquinas” M.E. Bradford, Lincoln’s Proposition “set us forever to ‘trampling out the grapes of wrath.’” Mr. Biden himself announced his presidential campaign by invoking Lincoln’s Proposition and a number of other American clichés and slogans, like “America is an idea.” Lincoln’s Proposition has been cited so many times in so many ways – as a mandate for everything, from counter-culturalism and multi-culturalism at home to colonialism and imperialism abroad – that it now means anything, and thus, in effect, means nothing. Mr. Biden’s garbled attempt to quote the words “all men are created equal” is a fitting symbol of how Democrats and Republicans like him have garbled the meaning of “all men are created equal.” If Joe Biden’s slurred speech, incoherent tangents, and lack of self-awareness was not troubling enough, the way that he lashes out at Democratic voters is even more shocking evidence of his dementia. “You’re a damn liar!” Mr. Biden told an Iowan farmer when asked about his son’s business in Ukraine. “Look, fat...here’s the deal,” mumbled Mr. Biden, challenging the farmer to a push-up contest and IQ test for good measure. When a South-Carolinian immigrant asked about the record number of deportations by the Obama Administration, Mr. Biden answered “go vote for Trump.” When Iowan state representative Ed Fallon asked about Mr. Biden’s energy policy, he poked him in the chest, got in his face, and said, “You oughta go vote for someone else!” Mr. Fallon told Mr. Biden that he was voting for Tom Steyer in the primary but would still vote for him in the general “if you treat me right,” to which Mr. Biden replied, “Well, I’m not.” When a CBS reporter asked Mr. Biden about Bernie Sanders’ criticism of his record on federal entitlements (cf. “FAIR: 23 Headlines Obscure Biden’s Lies About Cutting Social Security” and “FAIR: As Biden Invokes Dead Family Members Against Medicare For All, Media Play Along”), he turned around, waved his hands in the reporter’s face, and yelled, “Why why why why why why why?” When a Georgian student asked about Biden’s poor performance in the caucus, he called her a “lying dog-faced pony soldier.” When a Californian veteran of the Iraq War told Mr. Biden that “we actually fought in your damn wars” and “my friends are dead because of your policies,” Mr. Biden snapped, “So is my son!” (his son, Beau, died from cancer in 2015, not from his less than a year of service as an Army attorney). “I’m not going after your son,” replied the veteran, to which Mr. Biden snarled, “You better not.” When a Detroit union worker asked Mr. Biden about his attacks on the Second Amendment, he blurted out, “You’re full of s**t,” called him a “horse’s ass,” and threatened to “slap your face.” The union worker tried to remind Mr. Biden that “you’re working for me,” but Mr. Biden retorted, “I’m not working for you.” This is not even getting into Mr. Biden’s strange penchant for smelling and touching women and children (cf. “FAIR: Ignoring Lessons of #MeToo, Media Scrutinize Biden’s Accusers”). It may be unseemly to call attention to a near-octogenarian’s mental decline, but it is even more unseemly for an aging man with an ailing brain to run for office in the first place. Is the American political class so decrepit that we are not even to be spared a semi-senile commander-in-chief? Joe Biden may struggle to make sense and speak in complete sentences, as was widely acknowledged earlier in the primary, but since he has become the presumptive Democratic nominee, any discussion of his mental stamina has now been branded a “coordinated” campaign of “disinformation” involving Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump (which will, before the end, somehow implicate Vladimir Putin, too, cf. “FAIR: For NYT, Inconvenient Facts Equal ‘Russian-Style Disinformation’”). As Glenn Greenwald reports for The Intercept, “Democrats and Their Media Allies Impugned Biden’s Cognitive Fitness, Now They Claim Outrage.” The Enemy of My Enemy is (not always) My FriendBranko Marcetic authored a six-part article series on Joe Biden for the socialist website Jacobin and a forthcoming book against Joe Biden, Yesterday’s Man (which given the non-stop pace of the news is already “yesterday’s book”). I disagree with the arguments in half of Mr. Marcetic’s articles, of course. For one, Mr. Marcetic damns Joe Biden for opposing busing, as if that was an extreme neo-segregationist position at the time. Yet as The Washington Post reported when Kamala Harris attacked Mr. Biden over busing, his position was fairly mainstream: Most Americans, while for racial desegregation, were against busing their children to outside school districts in order to achieve racial integration (and this included blacks as well as whites). For another, Mr. Marcetic damns Joe Biden for opposing “partial-birth abortions” (technically known as “dilation and extraction”), which he consistently voted to ban. When dismembering a fetus risks damaging a woman’s cervix, a partial-birth abortion can be performed instead: The fetus, usually in the second trimester, is extracted feet first until only the head is inside, at which point scissors are used to puncture the head and crush the skull. (Don’t believe me: Believe the NPR story to which Mr. Marcetic links from which my description is copied.) Mr. Marcetic argues that Mr. Biden’s votes, along with other votes restricting federal funding of abortion, violated “a woman’s right to choose.” I retort that framing the abortion in terms of “choice” has always been facile at best and deceptive at worst, and that no woman has the right to “choose” to do whatever she wants to a fetus in utero. Sorry, but a baby is not your body. Last, but not least, Mr. Marcetic damns Joe Biden for opposing illegal immigration and voting for some (but not all) law-enforcement measures. At the same time, however, Mr. Biden has consistently favored legal immigration and voted to expand its numbers, regardless of public opinion or its costs to the host country. In other words, even the most minimalist definition of a state – that is, defining where its borders are and who its citizens are – is too far to “the right” for Mr. Marcetic. “The Anti-Busing Democrat,” “The Unreliable Pro-Choice Advocate,” and “The Anti-Immigrant Enabler” represent the pitfalls of “The Great Awokening.” Does Mr. Marcetic believe that a modern socialist movement can be built around busing, partial-birth abortions, and open borders? Joe Biden’s fairly moderate positions on these controversial issues have been attempts to prevent culturally/socially conservative Democrats who feel alienated from an increasingly counter-cultural/anti-social party from becoming Republicans, as many did in the Nixon, Reagan, and Trump elections. Of course, Mr. Biden is not to be commended as a populist hero, because as the other half of Mr. Marcetic’s articles demonstrates – “The Hawk,” “The Neoliberal,” and “The Mass-Incarceration Zealot” – he has also taken positions on war/peace, welfare/trade, and crime/surveillance which have been just as alienating to many of those same people. Schmaltzy Rhetoric & Status Quo PoliticsAll of the above is about what Joe Biden has done as a U.S. Senator and Vice President, but what is he proposing to do now as U.S. President? Joe Biden’s announcement of his campaign was a scripted and prerecorded video with black-and-white footage of immigrants waving at the Statue of Liberty, Marines hoisting the flag at Iwo Jima, protestors marching, and Martin Luther King speaking: The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America America, is at stake...America is an idea, an idea stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant. It gives hope to the most desperate people on earth. It guarantees that everyone is treated with dignity and gives hate no safe harbor. It instills in every person in this country the belief that no matter where you start in life, there’s nothing you can’t achieve if you work at it. That’s what we believe, and above all else, that’s what at stake in this election...We have to remember who we are. This is America! This is nothing more than Yankee self-centeredness and self-righteousness, which is as old as the first Puritans in New England proclaiming their colony to be “a city upon a hill.” Americans have no idea about – much less interest in – what the rest of the world really thinks of them. In a global survey by Gallup from 2013 (when the Obama Administration was “liberating” Honduras, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen and more), the U.S.A. was voted the single greatest threat to world peace. In 2017, these results were repeated in another global survey by Pew Research. Regardless, Democrats and Republicans like Joe Biden will continue to bloviate about how “exceptional” and “indispensable” they – er, the U.S.A. – is in the world. Joe Biden also announced his campaign by “waving the bloody shirt” over the white-nationalist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia: Charlottesville, Virginia, is home to the author of one of the great documents in human history. We know it by heart: “We hold these truths to be self-evident...All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” We’ve heard it so often that it’s almost a cliché, but it’s who we are. We don’t always live up to these ideals – Jefferson himself didn’t – but we have never before walked away from them. This is nothing more than hysteria. For one, the white nationalists who rioted in Charlottesville represented no one (especially not those truly “very fine people” defending Confederate monuments from destruction) and their attempted rally actually rallied public opinion against them. An event which was supposed to “unite” the alt-right ended up further dividing it and driving it further underground. For another, Donald Trump did not call the Klansmen and neo-Nazis at Charlottesville “very fine people,” as anyone with a half a clue could probably reckon. He condemned the white nationalists who were there in clear language, but noted that not everyone who was there to protest the destruction of the monuments to Confederate heroes was necessarily a white nationalist – a quote which hacks in the media class promulgated out of context. Last, but not least, if the alt-right self-destructed as a result of Charlottesville and the President’s “very fine people” quote was a base lie, then there is no “battle for the soul of this nation.” If there is such a battle, then it is between the goblins, orcs, and trolls who want to destroy the works of art and historical symbols of this nation, and the “very fine people” who have resisted. Joe Biden’s campaign announcement is equal parts kvelling and schvitzing. In a recent article for Foreign Affairs, “Why America Must Lead Again,” he makes some actual promises amid the usual platitudes. Much of this material is covered in an interview which he did with the Council of Foreign Affairs (which publishes Foreign Affairs) at the end of the Obama Administration, “The Future of U.S. Foreign Policy.” Joe Biden has nothing critical to say about a foreign policy in the Middle East which has destabilized the entire region for generations, only that Donald Trump has not been a moralistic enough leader of the American empire. Mr. Biden promises to end “the forever war” in Afghanistan, just like Pres. Trump promised when he was campaigning, but unlike then-candidate Trump, Mr. Biden insists on continuing to occupy Iraq and Syria against the will of both countries, in order to have a base of operations for carrying out the sort of drone strikes and special operations which the Obama Administration pioneered. Mr. Biden does promise to end the U.S.A.’s sponsorship of Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, an atrocity which was initiated by the Obama Administration and intensified by the Trump Administration. Hopefully Mr. Biden is more honorable than Pres. Trump, who was critical of Saudi Arabia for funding terror-insurrectionism (and Hillary Clinton’s foundation) when he was campaigning, but who has been abjectly defensive of Saudi Arabia’s barbarity since becoming President. (Pres. Trump’s daughter and son in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, who are enormously influential over him, are infatuated with the House of Saud.) Other than promising “to sustain our ironclad commitment to Israel’s security,” Mr. Biden makes no mention of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which the Trump Administration has (through his Kushner in-laws and their family-friend Netanyahus) drastically aggravated. He does not say whether he would, for instance, reverse the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital or the defunding of the UN’s humanitarian program for Palestinian refugees. Just like he did with Pres. Bush on Iraq, Mr. Biden criticizes Pres. Trump’s management of the conflict with Iran but never questions whether there should even be a conflict with Iran. (It is just what you would expect from a politician who never learned any lessons from the Iraq War.) Mr. Biden promises to return to the denuclearization deal with Iran negotiated by the Obama Administration and broken by Pres. Trump, but at the same time he promises to exploit the opportunity to demand further concessions from Iran and to continue undermining Iran’s national security, just as the Obama Administration did by intervening in the Syrian civil war and trying to overthrow the Syrian government. Mr. Biden is so committed to American imperialism in the Middle East that he cannot even muster up a categorical condemnation of Pres. Trump’s unprecedented assassination of Gen. Qassim Soleimani – a military leader from a country with which we are not war and who was on a major diplomatic mission between Tehran and Riyadh. Mr. Biden is not concerned with reforming U.S. foreign policy, but merely putting the U.S.A. – and himself – “back at the head of the table.” Joe Biden has nothing critical to say about the post-”Cold War” policy toward Russia which has squandered a historic opportunity for global peace, only that Donald Trump has not been a moralistic enough leader of the “American-run protection racket” that is NATO. For Mr. Biden, NATO is not just a mutual-defensive alliance from the Cold War which since the dissolution of the USSR has had to invent new enemies in order to justify its existence (with the help of think tanks, like Mr. Biden’s friends at The Atlantic Council, funded by Mr. Biden’s friends at Lockheed Martin and Raytheon), but is “an alliance of values” and thus “sacred.” (Mr. Biden is using the same sort of mystical rhetoric about NATO that Abraham Lincoln used about the Union, but what “mystic chords of memory” do Americans share with Turkey?) Mr. Biden promises to keep escalating “The New Cold War,” just like the Obama Administration did by intervening in a Ukrainian revolution in order to overthrow a Russian-aligned government and install a Western-aligned one. Mr. Biden promises to “impose real costs on Russia” for its “aggression” (i.e. intervening in wars on its border) and to “stand with Russian civil society” (i.e. interfering in its elections). Mr. Biden cites the Obama Administration’s “Nuclear Security Summit” as an example of the sort of diplomacy that he would conduct as President, but on the question of nuclear security, he makes no promise to return to the INF treaty which the Trump Administration killed or the New START treaty which the Trump Administration is going to let die. However undiplomatic it was to destroy those arms-control treaties essential to ending the Cold War, Mr. Biden probably sees it as an unwitting windfall for the U.S.A. in the New Cold War. Mr. Biden’s idea for a summit, however, is not one which would be about nuclear disarmament or diplomatic engagement with Russia, but a self-righteous “Summit for Democracy” to signify the New Cold War. Despite the fact that the Trump Administration is on the opposite side of Russia in virtually every world conflict (such as attempting to overthrow Russia-aligned governments in Syria and Venezuela) and has taken actions against Russia which the Obama Administration deemed to be too aggressive (such as sending Ukraine anti-tank missiles and sniper rifles to use against Russia), Mr. Biden still accuses the President of kowtowing to Vladimir Putin. Indeed, in the New Cold War, suggesting that you would like “to get along with Russia,” as Pres. Trump did when he was campaigning – the germ of the RussiaGate conspiracy theory which dominated the news for over three years – is nothing short of treasonous. As much as Joe Biden is offended by what the white-nationalist rioters in Charlottesville said about race, he is just as offended by what Vladimir Putin said about Western liberalism in an interview with The Financial Times: Putin wants to tell himself, and anyone else he can dupe into believing him, that the liberal idea is “obsolete.” But he does so because he is afraid of its power. No army on earth can match the way the electric idea of liberty passes freely from person to person, jumps borders, transcends languages and cultures, and supercharges communities of ordinary citizens into activists and organizers and change agents. This is, in insufferable Yankee form, chauvinism cloaked in idealistic-sounding language, with some Russophobia for good measure. It never occurs to bigoted, ignorant, prejudiced Yankees like Joe Biden that other peoples in the world might have other ideas different from what they believe is right. “Liberalism” (not American center-leftism, but the modern combination of a capitalist economy, a democratic government, and a pluralist/secularist culture) which emerged as an idea in the 18th-century West and became a reality in the 19th-century West, is, according to Yankee chauvinists like Mr. Biden, objectively superior to the less egalitarian and less individualist traditions of uncivilized and uncultured peoples like the Chinese and the Russians (or even Europeans for that matter). Yankee chauvinists like Mr. Biden have no respect for the heritages of nations and states thousands of years older than theirs, such as China and Russia, only a desire to degrade them in the name of “democracy.” Yankee chauvinists are not just ignorant of foreign political and spiritual philosophies which have nothing to do with “liberalism,” but are ignorant of their own pre-”liberal” heritage as well: Classic Western political and spiritual philosophers (Plato and Aristotle, Saint Augustine and Saint Aquinas, and John Adams and James Madison) condemned “democracy” as one of the worst forms of government, as just one example. There are modern Western intellectuals on the Left and the Right alike who are critical of the contradictions and decadence of “liberalism,” but to Mr. Biden (for whom reconsidering anything that he learned in Social Studies must be how the Communists brainwash you) these are all just “dupes.” Joe Biden has nothing critical to say about a trade policy that has hollowed out the economy of his country, only that Donald Trump has not been a moralistic enough champion of world-flattening globalization. Instead of fighting a “trade war” with China in order to force that country to trade freely and fairly – not to practice its policies of dumping/flooding, discriminatory non-tariff barriers, industrial subsidies, forced technology transfers, and currency manipulation – Mr. Biden promises that he would “invest” in “education” and “infrastructure” instead, which is just treating the symptoms of the disease that is economic dependence on China. Mr. Biden’s promise to support a “clean-energy economy” with “net-zero emissions,” as the Obama Administration did (along those lines, he also promises to rejoin the Paris Climate Accords), is not necessarily a bad idea, but such an economic transition must be supported by a protective trade policy. Mr. Biden promises to pressure China on issues such as reducing its emissions but at the same time promises not to use the one policy that has effectively pressured China – namely, trade policy. The Trump Administration – as personally loathsome as The Donald may be – has fought hard to force China to end its abusive trade practices and has won back some of the economic ground that Mr. Biden and others lazily ceded to China. That is the “trade war” which Mr. Biden promises to surrender. The Trump Administration also successfully renegotiated NAFTA on fairer terms to the U.S.A. and is trying to renegotiate outdated and asymmetric trade deals with the European Union (deals originally intended to rebuild their economies after World War II). Although he does not say it outright, when Mr. Biden talks about trade agreements as a way “to build a united front of U.S. allies and partners to confront China’s abusive behaviors and human rights violations,” what he is talking about is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the Obama Administration negotiated with other Pacific-Rim countries to reduce their economic dependence on China. Though the TPP was repudiated by the Trump Administration – and not supported by any other presidential candidate from 2016 – Mr. Biden would almost certainly rejoin it. To Mr. Biden, who condemns “protectionism” as an expression of “America First” nationalism, the imperial policy of economically isolating China takes precedence to protecting the American economy. Mr. Biden has nothing critical to say about an immigration policy that has made a mockery of the laws of his country – not to mention fostered a humanitarian crisis on its border – only that Donald Trump has not been as moralistic as “The Mother of Exiles” commands. As with trade, the Trump Administration – as personally loathsome as The Donald may be – has made progress on the persistent crisis of illegal immigration, mainly by realizing that enforcing the law is a much more effective deterrent than “building a wall.” Mr. Biden promises to end the Trump Administration’s policy of “tearing apart families” – the media class’ hysteric distortion of the routine administrative procedure of holding adults and minors separately and temporarily while they are processed through the legal system, if for no other reason than to protect minors from the notorious sexual abuse that occurs at the border. (Perhaps as a sign of moderation, Mr. Biden did not recite the familiar litany of “children in cages” and “concentration camps,” which is what the media class calls chain-link fences.) The only alternative to family separation, which Mr. Biden does not admit but cannot avoid, would be to return to the Obama Administration’s policy of “catch and release,” or catching illegal immigrants at the border then releasing them into the interior of the country where they can live for years until their trial (assuming they even show up on their day in court). Mr. Biden calls family separation “senseless,” but does “catch and release” make any more sense? Mr. Biden promises that he would also end the Trump Administration’s “Migrant Protection Protocols” (i.e. asylees who illegally enter the U.S.A. from Mexico are required to “remain in Mexico” while their cases are pending), “Third-Country-Transit Bar,” (i.e. asylees who pass through other countries without applying for asylum in them first are ineligible for asylum in the U.S.A.), and “Asylum Cooperative Agreements” (i.e. asylees who pass through other countries before illegally entering the U.S.A. are returned to one of those “safe third countries” while their cases are pending), three previously unenforced laws which helped to end the disastrous “border crisis” of 2018 and 2019. Mr. Biden argues that these “detrimental” policies violate the “dignity” of immigrants and deny them their “right” to claim asylum, but the truth is that these policies were only a detriment to immigrants’ undignified abuse of the right of asylum. Mr. Biden promises to end the Trump Administration’s policy of “targeting” illegal immigrants (vibrant “communities” such as drug-dealing gangs and dog-fighting rings) and the businesses which exploit illegal immigrants as quasi-slave labor. In other words, Mr. Biden promises to return to the Obama Administration’s policy of not enforcing the law on the border or in the interior. While Mr. Biden promises to put an end to “the travel ban” (a thoroughly lawful executive power which the Trump Administration has, shamefully, abused to insult and injure people from other countries like Iran), he should not reject a “travel ban” altogether, a power which even the Obama Administration used in the appropriate circumstances. Another promise of Mr. Biden’s is to multiply refugees by nearly 700%, a quota he will have no trouble filling so long as he continues to destabilize the Middle East as the Obama Administration did. Mr. Biden’s immigration system would exemplify what the great Sam Francis termed “anarcho-tyranny,” or when the government refuses to carry out its legitimate powers (i.e. to protect the innocent and punish the wicked) and instead makes up illegitimate powers (i.e. to protect the wicked and punish the innocent). From his Foreign Affairs article, Joe Biden defines himself as a conventional establishmentarian and institutionalist who “has learned nothing and forgotten nothing,” so to speak. For Mr. Biden, “restoring the soul of this nation” – his moralistic campaign slogan – apparently means just going back a few years to what he is now calling “the Obama-Biden Administration,” that is a restoration of the status quo ante Donaldus Trumpus. It is as if all of the Americans who rejected that status quo by voting for a right-wing populist like Donald Trump and a left-wing populist like Bernie Sanders do not even matter to Mr. Biden. How the Scarecrow with No Brain Beat the Lion with No Hear Enough about Joe Biden, who is the doddering figurehead of a shambling order. What Bernie Sanders represents – or, perhaps, represented – is much more interesting. There are a number of reasons that Mr. Sanders, after giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money in 2016 and galvanizing the “progressive” movement of a generation, failed so miserably in 2020. Two of the most obvious are that Ms. Clinton was a far more repellent opponent than Mr. Biden and that the Democratic race in 2020 was far more crowded than in 2016, but in the end, Mr. Sanders has nobody to blame for his failure but himself.
First is that Bernie Sanders himself is an incompetent leader who missed key opportunities and undermined his own progress. In 2016, after journalists were caught colluding with Democratic officials on Hillary Clinton’s behalf in the primary election, Sen. Sanders did not cry out that he had been cheated or call out RussiaGate as a distraction from that terrible scandal, but groveled to the Democratic nominee and embraced RussiaGate. So far, in 2020 Sen. Sanders has bent the knee again and again. Criticizing someone for their low character or poor record is not “getting personal” or “going negative,” but Sen. Sanders has steadily refused to criticize his biggest opponents – notably Joe Biden – and instead lamely echoed Democratic talking points about unity against Donald Trump. Sen. Sanders is under the impression that he can win by making the same speech that he has been making for years without talking about any of the other candidates, but politics is as much about personality as policy. Indeed, when one of his campaign surrogates made headlines with an op-ed in The Guardian, “‘Middle Class’ Joe Biden Has A Corruption Problem – It Makes Him A Weak Candidate,” Sen. Sanders denied that Mr. Biden was corrupt (without disputing any of the facts in the article) and disavowed his own supporter! When another one of his campaign surrogates made headlines with an op-ed in a South Carolina newspaper, “While Bernie Sanders Has Always Stood Up For African-Americans, Joe Biden Has Repeatedly Let Us Down,” Sen. Sanders backed off that accusation in a debate. When accusations of “Russian interference” in his favor were reported in the news, Sen. Sanders did not reject RussiaGate as a discredited conspiracy theory and condemn such anti-democratic tactics, but rather accepted the overstated reports at face value and made a show of threatening Vladimir Putin on TV, thus propping up the paranoia and xenophobia used to criminalize left- and right-wing criticism of American empire. Speaking of critics of American empire, Tulsi Gabbard is an American-Samoan woman who represents Hawaii in the Congress and is a major in the National Guard which she has served since 2003 (including two tours of duty in Iraq). In 2016 Rep. Gabbard resigned as Vice-Chair of the Democratic National Committee in order to nominate Mr. Sanders for President and has defended him throughout his presidential campaign, including the latest McCarthyite attack. Since Rep. Gabbard announced her own presidential candidacy – hers was the only voice for peace in the Democratic primary – she has been collectively denounced in terms even more bilious and venomous than those used against Sen. Sanders. While Sen. Sanders has often hastened to assure Democratic voters that “I respect Joe Biden” and “Joe Biden is a friend of mine,” he has hardly raised his voice in Rep. Gabbard’s defense. As Tucker Carlson put it on his FOX News show, “Bernie Sanders may be the lamest revolutionary ever.” Second is that Bernie Sanders is vain. Instead of identifying as a “democratic socialist” and then debating about the meaning of that rather contrived term, Sen. Sanders should have just identified as what he actually is - a “social democrat.” Even the Scandinavian countries which Sen. Sanders cites as examples of “democratic socialism” have pointedly disavowed that label in favor of “social democracy,” that is a free-market economy which supports a welfare state. Sen. Sanders wanted to sound special, however, and so called himself something controversial that he ended up wasting his breath having to defend ad nauseam. At the same time, by identifying as a socialist, Sen. Sanders attracted “antifa” types to his campaign who, as the undercover journalists at Project Veritas revealed (cf. part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 of their investigation) actually are totalitarians who believe in a planned economy, a one-party dictatorship, and state terror. Were wannabe Communists such as these punks the best “field organizers” for Iowa and South Carolina? Third is that Bernie Sanders is unpatriotic. Instead of looking abroad for examples and inspiration – how many Americans are familiar with what life is like in Denmark or Norway? – Sen. Sanders should have rooted his vision in American heritage, laying claim to the legacy of progressive leaders already admired by Americans such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. There is nothing in Sen. Sanders’ policies inconsistent with the Progressive Era and the New Deal, and in fact, Sen. Sanders could have made a persuasive case that he was trying to finish what they had started but what the Cold War had interrupted. One of the reasons which Sen. Sanders might have avoided drawing such historical connections is because of the “political incorrectness” of those original progressives (Teddy Roosevelt was a “colonialist,” Wilson was a “segregationist,” and FDR was an “anti-Semite”) but more on that later. Fourth is that Bernie Sanders was – and is – a “fellow traveler” of Communism. In the 1980s, Sen. Sanders visited Third-World Communist states in Latin America, such as Fidel Castro’s Cuba and Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua, and compared them favorably to the U.S.A. When journalists and other candidates pressed him on his past comments, Sen. Sanders doubled down, praising Cuba’s “literacy program” for instance. (The Nazis had an excellent engineering program, too, but no one is so obtuse as to insist on giving Adolf Hitler his due credit for the Autobahn!) Has Sen. Sanders ever even spoken to a Cuban-American immigrant? If a trip to Florida was too much, then in Sen. Sanders own state lived the great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - an exile from the Soviet Union, a Nobel-winning author, and the most famous anti-Communist figure in the world. Fifth and finally is that Bernie Sanders embraced identity politics and political correctness. For example, at one point Sen. Sanders understood basic economics: Mass-immigration drives up the labor supply and thus drives down wages, especially for the working class, which was why in an interview with Ezra Klein of Vox he shocked liberals by dismissing “open borders” as “a Koch-Bros. proposal.” Indeed, as early as 1974, when Mr. Sanders was running to be Vermont governor in the Labor Union Party, he opposed orchards bringing in Jamaican guest-workers to pick apples instead of locals. “With the Vermont unemployment rate one of the highest in the nation,” protested Mr. Sanders, “I could never support importing foreign workers when our own people are out of work.” Nowadays, however, Sen. Sanders mouths all of the same clichés and slogans of that “Koch-Bros. proposal.” Today, Sen. Sanders himself would condemn the expression “our own people” as “nativist,” “xenophobic,” and even “white supremacist.” For campaign surrogates, Sen. Sanders turned to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (so woke that she is against growing cauliflower in “communities of color” because it is a “colonial” vegetable), Ilhan Omar (so woke that she voted “present” on the historic resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide because that resolution did not also recognize every other unrecognized genocide ever), and Rashida Tlaib (so woke that she called the Detroit Police Department’s facial-recognition technology “bulls**t” because it is racist and told the black Detroit Police Chief that only black people should work in the facial-recognition lab). Other campaign surrogates include the radical black activist Jesse Jackson and the radical black intellectual Cornel West, as well as outspoken Hollywood actresses like Susan Sarandon and Cynthia Nixon. Are these hyper-polarizing figures the best choice to reach out to older voters afraid that a Pres. Sanders would be too far to the left? Sen. Sanders traded populism for “intersectionality,” or numbers for diversity. Neither the grouchy leftist Bernie Sanders nor the sleepy centrist Joe Biden are worthy of a vote. Is Donald Trump worthy of a vote? That is another question for another time which will come soon enough, though suffice it say that on the vital issues on which Pres. Trump campaigned, he has been quite good on trade (the Wuhan coronavirus underscores the danger of economic dependence on China), fairly decent on immigration (the Wuhan coronavirus also underscores the danger of open borders), but utterly horrendous on foreign policy (he has not stopped bombing Iraq and blockading Iran even as they both struggle with massive Wuhan-coronavirus outbreaks). Yet the Wuhan-coronavirus outbreak in the U.S.A. has exposed many of Pres. Trump’s worst qualities – his arrogance, belligerence, and incompetence. In the coming presidential election, the media class is going to play defense for Joe Biden as strongly as it plays offense against Donald Trump. It is important to know the truth about Mr. Biden, then, and be able to translate his pretentious platitudes and self-righteous references into real policies. There are legitimate reasons to not vote for Pres. Trump, of course. I have many Democratic and even Republican friends who find “The Donald” so repulsive – chauvinistic, demagogic, kleptocratic, misogynistic, xenophobic, etc. – that they are already determined to vote for whomever runs against him. I am not sure that I shall dishonor myself once again by voting for someone as fat-headed and foul-mouthed as Pres. Trump if he continues to be disloyal to his “America First” voters whenever Zionist billionaire Sheldon Adelson makes a donation. Yet the only power that we, the people, have over politicians is our vote. Once we give away our vote, politicians lose all interest in and respect for us, and move on to the more lucrative business of servicing the financial and ideological interests of their donors. (Many mothers have had a similar talk with their daughters when they start dating.) Voting for a narcissistic Boomer, a corporate cronyist, military interventionist, and serial liar just because he is more “civil” than his opponent and speaks in all of the bipartisan clichés, is, in effect, a vote for all of the above, as much as it is against Pres. Trump. It has often been observed that populism rises when elites fail. Populism is not perfect, of course (as the above discussions of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders make painfully clear), but whatever its faults, what populism is reacting against is far worse than populism itself. Populism is a modern expression of the “Country-Court” conflict – that is, “the country,” or local and regional communities, resisting the tyranny of “the court,” or the central state – which is a key to Anglo-American politics. “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to Abigail Adams. “It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.” In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson wrote that rebellion “prevents the degeneracy of government, and nourishes a general attention to the public affairs.” Jefferson was talking to Adams and Madison about outright rebellion, of course – the Shays Rebellion of 1787, which was neither the first nor the last domestic rebellion – but the same could be said of populism, which is a sort of “civil” rebellion. Indeed, to paraphrase Jefferson, rebellion – or populism – is “as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical” and “a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.” A victory for Joe Biden (who has an altogether sentimentalized memory of his 40 years in Washington, D.C.) would be a victory for failed elites whose response to populist discontent has not been to reflect on themselves, but rather to refuse any reform and repress the people. As Jefferson wrote to Madison, “Unsuccessful rebellions indeed generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them.” That is what a Biden presidency would be – a consolidation of the institutional powers and individual personalities which caused the problem in the first place. 
In August, 2019, The New York Times introduced an essay symposium on the legacy of slavery: In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully Titled “The 1619 Project,” the symposium will be an ambitious attempt by The New York Times to “retcon” American history according to the seemingly bottomless pit that is black self-pity and white self-hatred: The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are. “In the days and weeks to come,” announced New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay, “we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.” Americans should learn about the real history of race in their country: The enslavement of Africans, the extermination of Indians, and the exclusion of Asians – and that such brutality is entirely unexceptional in world history, as grim as that may be. Slavery? Prof. David Brion Davis (a historian of slavery from Yale University and the founder of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition) began Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World with “The Ancient Origins of Modern Slavery,” a chapter which showed that slavery has been a part of human civilization for thousands of years – not since 1787 in the U.S. Constitution, but since the 2nd millennium B.C. in the Code of Hammurabi. Genocide? In War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Prof. Lawrence H. Keeley (an archaeologist from the University of Illinois) showed just how savage – yes, literally “savage” – the aboriginal and indigenous peoples of the Americas were toward each other before European colonization. Xenophobia? In The Unguarded Gates, Prof. Otis L. Graham (a historian from the California State University and University of California systems) showed that as soon as immigration became a worldwide phenomenon, the “Neo-Europes” (new countries colonized by Europeans, like the U.S.A. and Canada in North America, Argentina and Brazil in South America, and Australia and New Zealand in Oceania) all adopted protective, restrictive, selective policies during the “Great Wave” of human migration from the 1890s to the 1920s in order to determine their own demographics. The 1619 Project, however, is not real history. It is, quite uselessly, replacing a self-serving history which appeased “white guilt” (call it “Sunday School” history) with another self-serving history which appeases black grudges (call it “Spray Paint” history). The New York Times is further mainstreaming the anti-white identity politics which are already polarizing and radicalizing the country. If other events are any indication (Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Juneteenth” Congressional testimony and the 2020 Democrat presidential primary), the ultimate objective of The 1619 Project is reparations – not merely a racialized redistribution of wealth, but a comprehensive racialized reconstruction of culture, economics, politics, and society. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ groundbreaking cover story for The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” illustrated in disturbing detail how systems of white supremacy have harmed black people in the past and continue to harm them in the present. (Not the way that “pumpkin spice lattes” are “white supremacist,” but the way that slavery and segregation were “white supremacist.”) The sort of “conservatives” who read The Federalist love to lie to themselves (by religiously quoting “The Gettysburg Address,” for instance) about just how large the question of race has loomed in American history and just how long of a shadow it casts to this day. While the revolutions of “Reconstruction” and “Civil Rights” were significant victories for establishing equal rights for black people – as well as significant defeats for the rights of the states – when one party has injured another, it is not enough for the offending party to just stop and say sorry. “Reparations” (or “compensation” or “restitution”) for whatever damage was done is a well-established principle of justice. Because of the damage that racism – institutional as well as individual – has done to black people, some form of reparations is not necessarily an unreasonable idea. Reparations would have to be limited to actual descendants to American slaves, of course, and not open to any aggrieved African alien like Barack Obama, Ilhan Omar, and Colin Kaepernick’s girlfriend. What happened to affirmative action – a policy put in place to help African-Americans which other non-white minorities with no history of discrimination in this country ended up mooching – could not be allowed to happen to reparations. Imagine how the many diverse tribal groups which have contributed to “The Browning of America” (their non-colorblind term, not mine) over the last 50 years would scramble to get a bigger piece of the pie for themselves! “Reparations” in the interest of righting past wrongs once and for all could be a cathartic and constructive experience. Yet The 1619 Project is not about righting past wrongs. It is meant to be destructive rather than constructive, traumatic rather than cathartic, malicious rather than empathetic, and divisive rather than unifying. It is a “great leap forward” in the anti-white identity politics which are pulling many further left while pushing others further right. If, as The New York Times has pronounced, everything that defines American civilization is the result of evil, then American civilization itself – our communities, institutions, and traditions – is evil. There is no other way to interpret such a statement. Indeed, in a leaked transcript of a New York Times staff meeting, an anonymous activist – excuse me, “journalist” – made such a complaint: I have another question about racism. I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting. Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? Like these conversations about what is racist, what isn’t racist. I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all the systems in the country. And I think particularly as we are launching a 1619 Project, I feel like that’s going to open us up to even more criticism from people who are like, “Okay, well you’re saying this, and you’re producing this big project about this, but are you guys actually considering this in your daily reporting?” New York Times editor Dean Baquet did not respond by reminding that journalist that none of them should be so ideological in their reporting, but by assuring that journalist that the newspaper would indeed be so ideological: You know, it’s interesting, the argument you just made, to go back to the use of the word “racist.” I didn’t agree with all of this from Keith Woods, who I know from New Orleans and who’s the ombudsman for NPR. He wrote a piece about why he wouldn’t have used the word “racist,” and his argument, which is pretty provocative, boils down to this: Pretty much everything is racist. His view is that a huge percentage of American conversation is racist, so why isolate this one comment from Donald Trump? His argument is that he could cite things that people say in their everyday lives that we don’t characterize that way, which is always interesting. You know, I don’t know how to answer that, other than I do think that race has always played a huge part in the American history. In Mr. Baquet’s opening statement to his reporters, the editor announced that The New York Times would be switching from “Russia” to “race” to explain how and why Donald Trump was elected: If we’re going to be a transparent newsroom that debates these issues among ourselves and not on Twitter, I figured I should talk to the whole newsroom, and hear from the whole newsroom. We had a couple of significant missteps, and I know you’re concerned about them, and I am, too. But there’s something larger at play here. This is a really hard story, newsrooms haven’t confronted one like this since the 1960s. It got trickier after [inaudible] went from being a story about whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia and obstructed justice to being a more head-on story about the President’s character. We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well. Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story. I’d love your help with that. As Audra Burch said when I talked to her this weekend, this one is a story about what it means to be an American in 2019. It is a story that requires deep investigation into people who peddle hatred, but it is also a story that requires imaginative use of all our muscles to write about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years. In the coming weeks, we’ll be assigning some new people to politics who can offer different ways of looking at the world. We’ll also ask reporters to write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions. I really want your help in navigating this story. “The forces that led to the election of Donald Trump” are obvious to everyone except the sort of journalists and pundits who work for The New York Times. They would rather be fed conspiracy theories by rogue soldiers and spies with militarist agendas (aka “RussiaGate”) than appreciate why the American people voted for an “isolationist,” “nativist,” and “protectionist” campaigning like a demagogue over a “cosmopolitan,” “globalist” and “internationalist” campaigning on the status quo. If they were not still in denial about what happened in the 2016 election, they could be covering how Pres. Trump has betrayed or at least failed his base on every one of the issues that got him elected, but instead they will be covering how “racist” (and thus ultimately a manifestation of “the legacy of slavery”) it is for the American people to vote for their own interests. Ironically, the media class, with its insufferable elitist ideology, is so biased and prejudiced that it still does not seem to realize how its own bias and prejudice helped get Pres. Trump elected. The 1619 Project is not merely a surrender of professional journalistic standards, then, but a declaration of war against the American people. Anti-American propaganda like The 1619 Project represents a more explicit and overt phase of the ongoing iconoclasm and ressentiment against symbols of American heritage and identity, the ulterior motive and ultimate objective of which has always been the delegitimization of the American nation-state. However buffoonish he may be, never has Pres. Trump’s label for the media class – “Enemy of the People” – been truer. Matthew Yglesias of Vox describes the sharp leftward shifts on racial questions which have occurred among white liberals over the past five years as “The Great Awokening.” Amusingly, white liberals are actually to the left of African-Americans on affirmative action and discrimination, as well as to the left of Latino-Americans on immigration and diversity – and unlike African-Americans, Latino-Americans, and every other American ethnic group, actually report a pro-outgroup (as opposed to pro-ingroup) bias. In an article on the Jewish website Tablet, “America’s White Saviors,” Georgia State Ph.D student Zachary Goldberg documents how “The Great Awokening” has been driven by the sharp leftward shift in the media class’ coverage of racial issues (specifically The New York Times, the racial content of which has spiked) as well as by social media’s exposure of people to more of such news (specifically white liberals, who use it far more than other whites). Dr. David Rozado, using his website “Media Analytics,” has tracked the increasing frequency of “woke” jargon from The New York Times. Given the influence of elite media like The New York Times on white liberals, then, The 1619 Project will probably make rational discussion of race impossible and anything – any idea, individual, and institution – even tangentially associated with racism utterly anathema. In the face of this evil, what do the staunch “conservatives” at The Federalist do? Refute the crackpot history that slavery built the American economy and reject the money grab exploiting that crackpot history? No, practicing Republican pundit Dinesh D’Souza’s “P.C. Judo” (a debating martial art which tries to turn identity politics against the Left), they claim that “the Democrats are the real racists.” In “The Ghost of John C. Calhoun Haunts Today’s American Left,” John Daniel Davidson argues, “The irony of the New York Times’ 1619 Project is that it embraces the critique of the American Founding espoused by the leading defender of Southern slavery, Sen. John C. Calhoun.” To get more of an idea of who the Political Editor of The Federalist is and what he believes, consider his praise of Ben Shapiro’s The Right Side of History (the ludicrous neo-conservative lie that “Western Civilization” is a Judeo-Christian ideology that begins and ends with “The Enlightenment,” even though the latter was in many ways a rejection of the former) for the Jaffite Claremont Review of Books. Mr. Davidson describes Calhoun as “a figure the Left desperately wants to associate with Republicans but whose legacy is alive today nowhere so much as in the far-left wing of the Democratic Party” and claims that Calhoun “had to construct an entirely new political philosophy, based on junk science and metaphysical determinism, of American government.” Mr. Davidson links to another article of his no less execrable and risible, “The Confederacy Still Lingers Within the Progressivism That Birthed It.” According to Mr. Davidson, Calhoun was determined “to undermine the philosophical basis for American constitutionalism and replace it with a theory based on the faddish ‘science’ of Darwinism and race theory.” Given that Charles Darwin did even begin to write about the theory of evolution until eight years after Calhoun’s death, it is unclear just what Mr. Davidson what means here. As far as “race theory” is concerned, while Calhoun’s views on slavery were peculiar to the American South, he held the same “white supremacist” beliefs as most other white people in the 18th and 19th centuries, whether “pro-slavery” like Stephen Douglas or “anti-slavery” like Abraham Lincoln. In fact, Calhoun’s “junk science” about race was not much different from Thomas Jefferson’s own “junk science” about race in Notes on the State of Virginia. What makes the “P.C. Judo” that Mr. Davidson is attempting here so self-destructive is that it concedes “presentist” moral premises to the Left and strengthens the name-calling tactics (“ist” this, “phobe” that, and so on) which the Left uses to intimidate the Right. Like most “conservatives,” Mr. Davidson still clings to the aforementioned “Sunday School” history, derived from Republican Party’s civic religion and made to seem scholarly by the sophistry of Prof. Harry V. Jaffa of Claremont McKenna College and the Claremont Institute: As early as the 1820s, Calhoun was trying to correct what he saw as a monumental error by the Founders. To Calhoun, it was folly to base the republic on universal ideals like “all men are created equal,” or to suppose that something like the Bill of Rights could protect the rights of a minority from the “tyranny” of the majority. Mr. Davidson is correct that Calhoun has nothing in common with the GOP – “the Stupid Party” – but wrong to assume that Calhoun would want anything to do with corrupt and cowardly careerists like Mark Sanford, Joe Walsh, and Bill Weld, not to mention crude demagogues like Donald Trump. In support of his Sunday-School history, Mr. Davidson borrows yet another argument from Abraham Lincoln: The Northwest Ordinance put into practice what had been promised in the Declaration of Independence, proving that the Founding Fathers always intended to abolish slavery gradually. Lincoln accused Democrats like Sen. Stephen Douglas and his Kansas-Nebraska Act – which departed from the Northwest Ordinance – of betraying the anti-slavery legacy of the Founders. It is true that in 1781 the slaveholding state of Virginia ceded her territorial claims north of the Ohio River to the Confederation, and that in 1787 the Congress established an ordinance governing that northwestern territory (the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota) which included the exclusion of slavery. Yet it is also true that Virginia retained her territorial claims south of the Ohio River, from which the slaveholding state of Kentucky was formed in 1792. Other slaveholding states followed suit. In 1789, slaveholding North Carolina ceded territory to the Union which became slaveholding Tennessee in 1796. In 1787 and 1802, respectively, slaveholding South Carolina and slaveholding Georgia ceded territory to the Union which became slaveholding Alabama in 1819 and slaveholding Mississippi in 1817. In other words, four of the old slaveholding states which had agreed to keep slavery out of the territory ceded by Virginia also kept slavery in the other territories which they ceded. Furthermore, two more slaveholding states – Louisiana in 1812 and Arkansas in 1836 – were formed from the territory which Pres. Thomas Jefferson (the author of the so-called “promissory note” to abolish slavery) purchased from France, not to mention Missouri in 1821. If Mr. Davidson tried reading something besides Harry Jaffa’s long-winded commentaries on Lincoln’s speeches – D.L. Robinson’s Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820? Glover Moore’s The Missouri Controversy, 1819-1821? Michael Holt’s The Political Crisis of the 1850s? – then perhaps he would understand why Virginia ceded so much of her territory and why she and other slaveholding states agreed to exclude slavery from that territory: Not to sow the seeds of their own destruction, but as a beneficent gesture to their non-slaveholding confederates. Virginia’s sacrifice may have earned her slaveholding confederates some goodwill for a generation, but Lincoln’s generation seized upon that act of good faith in bad faith. What is it that Calhoun believed about equality which Mr. Davidson finds so offensive? Well, in Calhoun’s opinion, the phrase “all men are created equal,” even in its proper historical context, was a sentimentalist statement that neither could nor should be taken literally without undermining the progress of civilization. Calhoun’s most comprehensive thoughts on this controversial question come from a speech on the admission of Oregon to the Union in 1848: If he should possess a philosophical turn of mind, and be disposed to look to more remote and recondite causes, he will trace it to a proposition which originated in a hypothetical truism, but which, as now expressed and now understood, is the most false and dangerous of all political errors. The proposition to which I allude, has become an axiom in the minds of a vast majority on both sides of the Atlantic, and is repeated daily from tongue to tongue, as an established and incontrovertible truth; it is, that “all men are born free and equal.” I am not afraid to attack error, however deeply it may be entrenched, or however widely extended, whenever it becomes my duty to do so, as I believe it to be on this subject and occasion. How, exactly does Calhoun’s criticism of equalitarianism deny man’s nature as a free and reasonable being, as Harry Jaffa so outrageously put it? The contradiction between liberty and equality – and that either in extreme will end in tyranny – has been a recurring problem in Western philosophy since Plato. American “conservatives” should be aware of Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations on liberty and equality in the classic Democracy in America, at the very least. Of course, if Mr. Davidson’s definition of Western Civilization is Ben Shapiro’s “reason and moral purpose,” then it is no surprise that he finds Calhoun’s argument so offensive. What was the original meaning of the phrase “all men are created equal”? Was the Declaration of Independence really a “promissory note” to abolish slavery? During the “Missouri Crisis” of 1819-1821, when Northerners and Southerners clashed over slavery for the first time since their unification under the Constitution, the latter answered with common sense. “The meaning of this sentence is defined in its application,” argued Sen. Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky. “That all communities stand upon an equality; that Americans are equal with Englishmen, and have the right to organize such government for themselves as they shall choose, whenever it is their pleasure to dissolve the bonds which unite them to another people.” According to Sen. Nicholas Van Dyke of Delaware, “the recital of abstract theoretical principles, in a national manifesto” was “correct, and intelligible in the political sense in which they were used by the men who signed that manifesto,” which was to justify the right of the colonies to govern themselves as free and independent states. “The distinguished statesmen who pledged to each other ‘their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor,’ in support of that declaration, were not visionary theorists,” explained Sen. Van Dyke. “They were men of sound, practical, common sense, and, from the premises assumed, arrived at sound practical conclusions.” Sen. William Pinkney of Maryland was brutally honest: “The self-evident truths announced in the Declaration of Independence are not truths at all, if taken literally; and the practical conclusions contained in the same passage of that declaration prove that they were never to be so received.” Why did the Founding Fathers not abolish slavery if that was what they really wanted? Once again, Southerners spoke plainly during Missouri Crisis. “Is it not wonderful that, if the Declaration of Independence gave authority to emancipate, that the patriots who made it never proposed any plan to carry it into execution?” Sen. Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina wondered sarcastically. “And is it not equally wonderful, that, if the Constitution gives the authority, this is the first attempt ever made, under either, by the federal government, to exercise it?” (Sen. Macon was using the word “wonderful” in its most literal and neutral sense, of course.) “Who were the parties – the slaves? No,” Sen. James Barbour of Virginia asked rhetorically about the Declaration. “Did slavery not exist in every State of the Union at the moment of its promulgation? Did it enter into any human mind that it had the least reference to this species of population? Is there not at the present moment slaves in the very States from which we hear these novel doctrines?” Sen. Macon and Sen. Barbour were correct: No one at the time (not even anti-slavery Founders) comprehended that the phrase “all men are created equal” was anything like a promissory note to abolish slavery. On the contrary, as the Continental Congress was debating the adoption of the Declaration, slave-owning Southerners and slave-trading New Englanders objected so vehemently to language critical of the slave trade that it was removed from the final draft. “The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving of the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it,” Thomas Jefferson recalled in his memoirs. “Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for though their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.” As Nikole Hannah-Jones argues in her contribution to The 1619 Project, “they struck the passage” because “in the end…neither Jefferson nor most of the Founders intended to abolish slavery.” Ms. Hannah-Jones may be oversimplifying the past and overstating her case at times (e.g. British efforts to incite slave revolts in the colonies ignited revolutionary action, but the American Revolution itself was not about protecting slavery from the British), but she is telling Sunday-School history a hard truth that it needs to hear: There was never a “promissory note.” Indeed, one of the fatal flaws in the Sunday-School history that Mr. Davidson has learned from Harry Jaffa is that it is so indefensible that it is actually susceptible to the criticisms of otherwise illiterate Spray-Paint history. What was the position of living authors/signers of the Declaration, like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, during the Missouri Crisis? Did they announce to the public, “Rufus King is right: We have defaulted on our obligations under the ‘promissory note.’”? No, Jefferson abhorred King and other anti-slavery Federalists for what he perceived as political ambition and ideological fanaticism. “King is ready to risk the Union for any chance of restoring his party to power and wriggling himself to the head of it, nor is Clinton without his hopes nor scrupulous as to the means of fulfilling them,” Jefferson told Pres. James Monroe. “I hope I shall be spared the pain of witnessing it either by the good sense of the people, or by the more certain reliance, the hand of death.” Adams simply deferred to Southerners like Jefferson. “I have been so terrified with this phenomenon that I constantly said in former times to the Southern gentlemen, I must leave it to you,” Adams told Jefferson. “I will vote for no measure against your judgements.” When Benjamin Banneker (a freedman and self-educated scientist from Maryland) confronted Thomas Jefferson with the apparent hypocrisy of owning slaves while writing the words “all men are created equal,” did Jefferson respond, “You’re right: I have defaulted on my obligations under the ‘promissory note.’”? No, he politely implied that he did not believe that black people were equal – yet – to white people: Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colours of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa and America. I can add with truth that nobody wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body and mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circumstances which cannot be neglected, will admit. What about the “universal ideals” contained in that “promissory note,” Mr. Davidson? It is not that the “universal ideals” in the Declaration of Independence do not apply to black people because Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers did not believe that they were equal to white people. Obviously not! It is that, contrary to Harry Jaffa, Jefferson and other Founders did not believe that the “universal ideals” of the Declaration constituted a “promissory note” at all. In context, the Declaration meant no more was what its immediate antecedent, the Lee Resolution – adopted July 2nd – stated much more succinctly: “Resolved, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, and that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” The Declaration was not meant to proclaim the reconstruction of the Thirteen Colonies, but to protect the Thirteen Colonies from destruction (and the same goes for the Constitution, mutatis mutandis). The 1619 Project, in contrast to Calhoun, affirms that “all men are created equal” (denying even the most undeniable differences in human population groups is another project of The New York Times’ intersectional-science reporter Amy Harmon), but argues that all men have not been treated as if they were created equal, or rather that white people have not treated black people as equals. In other words, while Calhoun argued that “all men are created equal” was a lie because it is literally untrue, The 1619 Project argues that “all men are created equal” is literally true but that white people were lying about believing it. Here is the passage from The 1619 Project – Nikole Hannah-Jones’ “America Wasn’t a Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One,” to be specific – which Mr. Davidson believes is something of a séance with Calhoun himself: The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves – black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights. According to Ms. Hannah-Jones, regardless of whatever the Founding Fathers intended – in fact, in spite of what she herself admits they intended – the Declaration of Independence nevertheless “proclaimed” an equalitarian “creed” which black people, as well as feminists, homosexuals, immigrants, and other alienist blocs have forced the U.S.A. “to live up to” throughout its history, by leveling whatever communities, institutions, and traditions interfered with their “rights.” Far from embracing Calhoun’s legacy, then, The 1619 Project is yet another example of the sort of radicalism that Calhoun saw coming if “all men are created equal” continued to be taken literally: Such being the case, it follows that any, the worst form of government, is better than anarchy; and that individual liberty, or freedom, must be subordinate to whatever power may be necessary to protect society against anarchy within or destruction from without; for the safety and well-being of society is as paramount to individual liberty, as the safety and wellbeing of the race is to that of individuals; and in the same proportion, the power necessary for the safety of society is paramount to individual liberty. On the contrary, government has no right to control individual liberty beyond what is necessary to the safety and wellbeing of society. Such is the boundary which separates the power of government and the liberty of the citizen or subject in the political state, which, as I have shown, is the natural state of man – the only one in which his race can exist, and the one in which he is born, lives, and dies. Indeed, for better or for worse, every radical intellectual and activist movement in American history – including the emotionally and intellectually infantile “Great Awokening” – has, just as Calhoun predicted over 150 years ago, turned America’s so-called “universal ideals” against America herself. (Even worse, these falsified “Founding ideals” have radicalized American foreign policy into a Manichean, Messianic, Millenarian militarism which the Founding Fathers themselves would have abhorred but never could have anticipated.) Yet in the face of the angry, ugly anti-American revolution that is The 1619 Project, Mr. Davidson’s feckless response is to shoot the messenger. Just as bad as Mr. Davidson’s conflation of Calhoun’s “all men are not created equal” with The 1619 Project’s “all men are created equal but have not been treated equal” (at least Harry Jaffa, however much of a sophist he was, would have been intelligent enough to tell the difference) is his misrepresentation of Calhoun’s constitutionalism. Calhoun, from his “South Carolina Exposition” and “Fort Hill Address” to his Disquisition on Government and Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, (all of which can be read here, in this Liberty Fund collection of his greatest works) desired to preserve the American federal republic. Calhoun avowed this purpose again and again, up to the very last speech of his life. In fact, Calhoun’s conservative legalism frustrated the “Fire-Eaters,” such as the Bluffton Boys in 1844, whom had already made up their minds that secession was the only way to preserve Southern rights. The number of reforms which Calhoun proposed (especially his theory of “interposition” and “nullification”) were drawn directly from Jeffersonian-Madisonian constitutionalism and were intended to strengthen, not weaken, the Constitution and the Union. Unlike Harry Jaffa, who taught “conservatives” like Mr. Davidson to interpret the legacy of the Founding Fathers in the same terms as Abraham Lincoln – as if his partisan speeches are authoritative sources on anything other than Yankee nationalism – Calhoun studied the actual records of the framing and ratifying of the Constitution. Responding to an inquiry from the English Whig John Cartwright, Thomas Jefferson explained the process for resolving disputed powers between the state and federal governments: With respect to our State and Federal governments, I do not think their relations correctly understood by foreigners. They generally suppose the former subordinate to the latter, but this is not the case. They are co-ordinate departments of one simple, and integral whole. To the State governments are reserved all legislation and administration in affairs which concern their own citizens only, and to the Federal government is given whatever concerns foreigners, or the citizens of other states; these functions alone being made Federal. The one is the domestic the other the foreign branch of the same government; neither having controul over the other, but within its own department. There are one or two exceptions only to this partition of power. But, you may ask, if the two departments should claim each the same subject of power, where is the common umpire to decide ultimately between them? In cases of little importance or urgency, the prudence of both parties will keep them aloof from the questionable ground. But if it can neither be avoided nor compromised, a convention of the States must be called to ascribe the doubtful power to that department which they may think best. In a nutshell, this was Calhoun’s theory of interposition/nullification – hardly the obstructionist and even seditious conspiracy described by Mr. Davidson. What Harry Jaffa told Mr. Davidson was so subversive of the Constitution and the Union was, to Thomas Jefferson, the fairest and safest way to resolve the conflicts over constitutional authority which would inevitably occur within a federal union formed by sovereign states. Calhoun, quoting the above passage from Thomas Jefferson, elaborated on how such a process would operate and why it was so important: It is thus that our Constitution, by authorizing amendments, and by prescribing the authority and mode of making them, has, by a simple contrivance, with its characteristic wisdom, provided a power which, in the last resort, supersedes effectually the necessity, and even the pretext for force. A power to which none can fairly object; with which the interests of all are safe; which can definitively close all controversies in the only effectual mode, by freeing the compact of every defect and uncertainty, by an amendment of the instrument itself. It is impossible for human wisdom, in a system like ours, to devise another mode which shall be safe and effectual, and, at the same time, consistent with what are the relations and acknowledged powers of the two great departments of our government. It gives a beauty and security peculiar to our system, which, if duly appreciated, will transmit its blessings to the remotest generations; but, if not, our splendid anticipations of the future will prove but an empty dream. Stripped of all its covering, the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or a consolidated government; a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting ultimately on the solid basis of the sovereignty of the States, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice, and violence, and force must finally prevail. Let it never be forgotten that, where the majority rules, the minority is the subject; and that, if we should absurdly attribute to the former, the exclusive right of construing the Constitution, there would be, in fact, between the sovereign and subject, under such a government, no Constitution; or, at least, nothing deserving the name, or serving the legitimate interest of so sacred an instrument. Calhoun described the process outlined by Thomas Jefferson – the states convening and amending the Constitution in order to affirm or deny an act of interposition/nullification – as “the vis medicatrix of the system” and its “great conservative principle.” Calhoun’s theory of “the concurrent majority” was not an undemocratic conspiracy to undermine the Constitution and the Union, either, but was intended to make the government even more democratic by requiring that it be based on a broader consensus rather than narrow majoritarianism: I am not ignorant, that those opposed to the doctrine have always, now and formerly, regarded it in a very different light, as anarchical and revolutionary. Could I believe such, in fact, to be its tendency, to me it would be no recommendation. I yield to none, I trust, in a deep and sincere attachment to our political institutions and the union of these States. I never breathed an opposite sentiment; but, on the contrary, I have ever considered them the great institutions of preserving our liberty, and promoting the happiness of ourselves and our posterity; and next to these I have ever held them most dear. Nearly half my life has been passed in the service of the Union, and whatever public reputation I have acquired is indissolubly identified with it. To be too national has, indeed, been considered by many, even of my friends, to be my greatest political fault. With these strong feelings of attachment, I have examined, with the utmost care, the bearing of the doctrine in question; and, so far from anarchical or revolutionary, I solemnly believe it to be the only solid foundation of our system, and of the Union itself; and that the opposite doctrine, which denies to the States the right of protecting their reserved powers, and which would vest in the general government (it matters not through what department) the right of determining, exclusively and finally, the powers delegated to it, is incompatible with the sovereignty of the States, and of the Constitution itself, considered as the basis of a Federal Union. As strong as this language is, it is not stronger than that used by the illustrious Jefferson, who said to give to the general government the final and exclusive right to judge of its powers, is to make “its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers,” and that, “in all cases of compact between parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of the infraction as of the mode and measure of redress.” Language cannot be more explicit; nor can higher authority be adduced… Calhoun’s intentions were to make the Constitution and the Union more durable by making them both more flexible – a willow as opposed to an oak. Calhoun, who had been a national-unionist with presidential ambitions before the sectional conflict challenged his priorities, was more interested in finding a practical method of preserving the Union than in idly praising the Union: As the disease will not, then, heal itself, we are brought to the question, Can a remedy be applied? And if so, what ought it to be? According to Calhoun, “Unionists” who hailed “the Union! the Union! the glorious Union!” while voting for sectionalist policies which divided that supposedly “indissoluble Union” against itself were hypocrites. It is not unlike an unfaithful husband lecturing his faithful wife that they cannot get divorced – or even go to marital counseling – because of “the sanctity of marriage.” What Mr. Davidson misses about Calhoun – because Harry Jaffa loathed him as a sort of evil genius – is that however convoluted his “concurrent majority” seems at times, it was intended to be a constitutional method of preventing the consolidation or dissolution of the Union, both of which the Founding Fathers had dreaded as equally catastrophic events. Interposition/nullification was not even used by Southern states to prevent Northern interference with slavery, but rather by Northern states – many of which quoted Jefferson, Madison, and Calhoun’s words – to prevent Southern interference with anti-slavery. In the end, Calhoun’s concurrent majority presented a much more civilized and democratic resolution of the sectional conflict than the mystical “more perfect unionism” of Abraham Lincoln, which amounted to nothing more than brute force in the end. When Pres. Andrew Jackson threatened to invade South Carolina during the “Nullification Crisis” of 1828-1833, Calhoun (who had resigned the Vice Presidency to serve South Carolina in the Senate) furiously denounced the threat of force: It has been said…to be a measure of peace! Yes, such peace as the wolf gives to the lamb – the kite to the dove! Such peace as Russia gives to Poland, or death to its victim! A peace, by extinguishing the political existence of the State, by awing her into an abandonment of every exercise of power which constitutes her a sovereign community. It is to South Carolina a question of self-preservation; and I proclaim it, that, should this bill pass, and an attempt be made to enforce it, it will be resisted, at every hazard – even that of death itself. Death is not the greatest calamity; there are others still more terrible to the free and the brave, and among them may be placed the loss of liberty and honor. There are thousands of her brave sons who, if need be, are prepared cheerfully to lay down their lives in defence of the State, and the great principles of constitutional liberty for which she is contending. God forbid, that this should become necessary! It never can be, unless this government is resolved to bring the question to extremity, when her gallant sons will stand prepared to perform the last duty – to die nobly… According to Calhoun, it was preserving the Union by force, not defending the rights reserved by the states in the compact which the states ratified, which was the true treachery. “Caesarist,” “Cromwellian,” and “Bonapartist” were words which the Founding Fathers might have used to describe a President who resorted to force to settle personal scores. How can someone identify as a conservative –a “federalist,” even! – yet be so ignorant of and bigoted toward one of America’s greatest philosophical statesmen? Indeed, Mr. Davidson’s article is one of the worst “conservative” – that is, “Straussian” – butcheries of Calhoun’s thought that I have ever read. Even Harry Jaffa, one of the Dr. Strangeloves of the American Right, was never so malicious, mendacious, and misinformed. Mr. Davidson mocks Jamelle Bouie’s pitiable contribution to The 1619 Project, “What the Reactionary Politics of 2019 Owe to the Politics of Slavery,” yet his own understanding of American history is just as stupid for different reasons. Mr. Davidson summarizes “the central tenets of Calhounian thought” as “the American Founding was a monstrous lie,” “natural law is pure folly,” and “the promissory note is worthless.” Obviously, Mr. Davidson is using as poisonous of language as possible, but his own words can be turned against him. First of all, Mr. Davidson’s conception of “the American Founding” is indeed a “monstrous lie.” The Founders were not so ideological as Mr. Davidson that they based their government on “universal principles” – like the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks – but were Whiggish conservatives who based their government on historical experience: An idealized/mythical Teutonic constitution which the Saxon conquerors brought to England and codified in the “The Great Charter of the Liberties of England” (1215), as well as the Charter of the Forest (1217), the Provisions of Oxford (1258) the Petition of Right (1628), the Declaration of Rights (1688), the Bill of Rights (1689), the Act of Settlement (1701), and more. “Has not every restitution of the ancient Saxon laws had happy effects?” Thomas Jefferson asked Edmund Pendleton. “Is it not better now that we return at once into that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the eighth century?” Indeed, when Jefferson was tasked with commissioning an official seal for the newfound government, he recommended “Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.” During the framing and ratifying of the Constitution, the Founders did not base their government on abstract “universal principles,” but on actual examples from the past (e.g. the Graeco-Roman historian Polybius) and the present (e.g. the Dutch Republic). Nor were the Founders so naïve as Mr. Davidson that they believed that signing a piece of paper was all that it took to limit government: Written constitutions stated what the people’s rights were and what the government’s powers were, but it was still up to the people to enforce those limitations on power and protect their rights. “Will it be sufficient to mark, with precision, the boundaries of these departments, in the constitution of the government, and to trust to these parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power?” asked James Madison at the beginning of The Federalist #48. “The conclusion which I am warranted in drawing from these observations,” Madison answered, “is, that a mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments, is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.” Calhoun took what Madison suggested seriously and formulated a strategy for enforcing those “parchment barriers,” yet ever since has been denounced by Jaffite “conservatives” like Mr. Davidson whose results speak for themselves – so much so that Prof. Angelo M. Codevilla (a political scientist from Boston University as well as a senior fellow at the Jaffite Claremont Institute) has actually recommended “federalism” as a forgotten form of “statesmanship” which would neutralize “the cold civil war.” Second of all, Mr. Davidson’s perverted version of the Western philosophy of “natural law” is indeed “pure folly.” Natural law, whether by the ancient Aristotle, the medieval Saint Thomas Aquinas, or the modern Sir Isaac Newton, is a quintessentially human endeavor to understand our own nature, the nature of the rest of God’s creation, and even the nature of God himself through the rational faculties with which God has endowed us, thereby glorifying him in the process. John Locke, a seventeenth-century English liberal reacting against absolutist monarchists like Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes, used deductive reasoning to understand the “nature” of governments – that is, what they should be if they could be designed according to pure reason. Of course, Locke’s conclusions are deduced from a premise which, as Calhoun argued, not only is altogether hypothetical, but also is altogether inimical to human nature. Mr. Davidson may ignore Calhoun’s argument because he was “racist” (which makes him little better than The 1619 Project), but he cannot as easily ignore the contemporaneous arguments of European philosophers uncorrupted by slavery, such as Jeremy Bentham, de Bonald, de Maistre, von Savigny, and von Ranke. In any event, in the eighteenth century, it was the “Commonwealthmen” or “Country Party” (e.g. the author of the republican play Cato, a Tragedy and the authors of the republican pamphlets Cato’s Letters), and not Lockean liberals, who were the most influential on their American brethren – and, in fact, even more influential in the colonies than in their own country. These Commonwealthmen advocated for their constitutional rights “as Englishmen,” which could be found in the British constitution, not for the “natural rights of man,” which could not be found anywhere. Not to imply that Locke had no influence on the American Revolution, of course (Thomas Jefferson told Benjamin Rush that Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton were “my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced”), but to the extent that he was influential, it was for his impressive apologia of the Glorious Revolution in Two Treatises of Government – a peaceful removal and replacement of a government which natural law did indeed rationalize after the fact but which positive law actually achieved in the moment. Mr. Davidson dismisses “the faddish ‘science’ of Darwinism,” yet Lockean natural law – with its grandiose pronouncements about the present based on unfalsifiable hypotheses about the past – is the Darwinism of political philosophy. Last, but not least, Mr. Davidson’s faith in the Declaration of Independence as a “promissory note” is indeed “worthless.” Mr. Davidson is clearly captivated by this expression (which he accurately attributes to Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, at least), yet notably no Founding Father ever used such language. The language of the abolitionist and civil-rights movements, which appropriated the language of the Declaration for the appearance of political legitimacy, has been read back into the language of the American Revolution so thoroughly that Mr. Davidson now takes the Founders as something which they never were and never even could have been. Needless to say, such an anachronistic interpretation not only takes the phrase “all men are created equal” out of context, but also takes the rest of the document itself out of context. The Declaration should be read in its entirety (not overlooked in favor of a lone nebulous phrase) and should also be read as one of many primary sources (not as a summa of the American Revolution). When read in this way, it is clear that the Declaration is consistent with as well as complementary to the fundamentally conservative colonial argument for their established, inherited rights, and has nothing to do with “all men are created equal” as a universalist ideology.[1] Thomas Jefferson’s other works, such as A Summary View of the Rights of British America and A Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, contain no “promissory notes” whatsoever. Even in Notes on the State of Virginia, which has always been selectively quoted for its foreboding denunciations of slavery, Jefferson concluded that however degrading slavery was to blacks and whites alike, differences between the races meant that they neither could nor should live together equally and freely. Mr. Davidson is correct that The 1619 Project is “sweeping historical revisionism in the service of contemporary left-wing politics,” yet he himself has fallen for Harry Jaffa’s sweeping historical revisionism in the service of neoconservative politics. Unfortunately, Mr. Davidson’s response is fairly representative of conservative criticism of The 1619 Project, most of which has also been along Jaffite lines: The Founding Fathers were proto-abolitionists who added coded anti-slavery language into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution for a Lincolnian figure to one day bring to fruition. The problem with this “conservative” defense is not just that it is historically untrue, but that if Americans believe it to be true, then neoconservatives will use that belief – that is, the belief that their country’s mission is to revolutionize the world – to justify “invading the world” to bring their native institutions to aliens and “inviting the world” to bring aliens to their native institutions. At a conference for “Building the Zionist Dream” in Jerusalem, Israel, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA (one of the latest “Conservatism, Inc.” youth groups) unwittingly demonstrated the implications of having an entirely ideological identity: I reject this idea of dual-loyalty. I have loyalty to ideas. And of course I love the Grand Canyon and I love the Rocky Mountains. And I love Boston, and I love Chicago. But if all that disappeared and all I had was ideas, and we were on an island, that’s America…America is just a placeholder for timeless ideas, and if you fall too in love with the specific place, that’s not what it is. Israel would be the exception because there is a holy connection to this land. The neo-conservative belief that “America is more than a nation; it is an idea” reduces the actual parts of a nation – a particular people living in a particular place during a particular period – to meaninglessness. The truth is, as “Old Right” paleo-conservatives like M.E. Bradford and Paul E. Gottfried have always argued against neo-conservatives like Harry Jaffa, “America is more than an idea; it is a nation.” While The 1619 Project is an overt attempt to degrade both the American idea and the American nation (i.e. “nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery”), the “conservative” response, exemplified by Mr. Davidson, represents a more insidious attempt to replace the solid rock of the American nation with the sinking sand of the American idea. 
The burning of Notre-Dame de Paris was a catastrophe and a tragedy – not just to Paris, not just to France, but to the world. “We are filled with emotion and our hearts are broken,” according to UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay. “Notre Dame represents an architectural, cultural, and religious heritage, a unique literary heritage that speaks to the whole world.” Notre-Dame de Paris (literally “Our Lady of Paris”) is a prime symbol of the French nation, the Catholic church, and Western civilization. Construction began in 1163 A.D. and was carried on generation after generation until completion in 1345. It is considered to be, next only to the Notre-Dame de Chartres and the Notre-Dame de Reims, one of the finest examples of French Gothic architecture, with its extensive and innovative usage of flying buttresses, rib vaults, stained-glass rosettes, and sculptural decorations. In 1458, Protestant Huguenots vandalized it for its “idolatry,” and in 1793, atheistic Jacobins vandalized it for its “superstition,” but Notre Dame survived both of these revolutions. France was once the most faithful of all the kingdoms of Europe, known as “the eldest daughter of the church” for early Christian monarchs like King Clovis (who converted the Franks to Catholicism) and Emperor Charlemagne (who unified the Catholic church and the French state). Yet even as France in particular and Europe in general have undergone the strange post-WWII process of secularization/de-Christianization and diversification/Islamification, Notre Dame still stands proudly as a patriotic symbol of Paris and of France. In “The Wound at the Heart of Paris,” Rachel Donadio, a Paris-based staff writer for The Atlantic, describes what it was like to witness the Notre Dame go up in flames: To those of us who live in Paris, Notre-Dame is as familiar as a landscape, and as solid as a mountain. How could it have burned so fast? I walk past it so often. I like it best at night, when the sculptures on the outside come alive under the spotlights, the gargoyles and saints and the few fallen angels plunging upside down from heaven above the central door. In barbaric “Amerika,” ethno-masochistic white majorities ceremoniously destroy works of art in order to appease the tribal grievances of ethno-centric non-white minorities which still hate them anyway. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, at least 113 Confederate monuments have been destroyed since 2016 alone – irreparable and unforgivable damage to Southern heritage and identity. In civilized France, however, such hyper-ideological iconoclasm is unwelcome. On the contrary, the French government has an entire ministry – the Ministry of Culture and Communication – devoted to preserving and restoring the nation’s heritage sites. When, at the height of the “gilet jaune” protests in Paris, the Arc de Triomphe was vandalized, it became a serious scandal that made the news and got the French President personally involved. By contrast, when mobs of American “antifa” overthrew the 106 year-old “Silent Sam” statue at the University of North Carolina, the authorities defied the will of the people (70% and 50% of North Carolinians were against illegal and legal removal, respectively) by doing nothing to stop it and even going along with it. In “The Cathedral: Mirror of the West, Then and Now” at National Review, the (somewhat-reformed) neo-conservative Victor Davis Hanson reacts to this angry, ugly American phenomenon: The contemporary West is in an age not of builders but dismantlers. We topple statues by night and rename streets, squares, and buildings – now judged wanted by our postmodern, always metastasizing standards of race, class, and gender – to virtue-signal our angst over our preindustrial moral superiors. Most silently acknowledge that few of us could have endured the physical hardship, pain, or danger of guiding three tiny 15th-century caravels across the Atlantic or could have walked the length of California founding missions. Discovering the New World was difficult, but a dunce can topple Columbus’ statue. How many contemporary American monumental buildings will last for the next 800 years? The French would never dream of desecrating the symbols of their history just to appease, say, Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian immigrants. In fact, it was in France where historical conservationism originated, and it was Notre Dame itself which was the subject of the first historical-conservationist campaign. The famous French author Victor Hugo was revolted by the demolition of classic, historic French architecture and its replacement with buildings of a derivative, pseudo-“classical” style – particularly the neglect of the “majestic and sublime” Notre Dame, “the aged queen of our cathedrals.” “All manner of profanation, degradation, and ruin are all at once threatening what little remains of these admirable monuments of the Middle Ages that bear the imprint of past national glory, to which both the memory of kings and the tradition of the people are attached,” lamented Hugo. “While who knows what bastard edifices are being constructed at great cost (buildings that, with the ridiculous pretension of being Greek or Roman in France, are neither Roman nor Greek), other admirable and original structures are falling without anyone caring to be informed, whereas their only crime is that of being French by origin, by history, and by purpose.” According to Hugo, “A universal cry must finally go up to call the new France to the aid of the old!” Hugo’s novel, Notre-Dame de Paris (“The Hunchback of Notre Dame” in English), combined with his essay, “Guerre aux Demolisseurs!” (“War on the Demolishers!”), galvanized public outrage over “the numberless degradations and mutilations which time and men have both caused the venerable monument to suffer,” leading to its first restoration in 1844. Alas, in cruel twist of irony, it was the latest round of restoration work that appears to have caused the fire, though exactly what happened is still unknown. Thankfully, the fire was extinguished before all of Notre Dame was leveled, although it was a very close call. “I say this to you solemnly this evening: We will rebuild this cathedral,” swore Pres. Emmanuel Macron the night of the fire. “We will rebuild because it is what the French people expect, because it is what our history deserves, because it is our profound destiny.” The roof (made from a veritable “forest” of trees) and spire (reconstructed in 1844) are cinders. Yet the towers and much of the stained glass (such as the “South Rose Window”), along with many artworks and relics (such as the legendary “Crown of Thorns”), are safe. In 2010, an art professor at Vassar College, Andrew Tallon, laser-scanned the exterior and interior of Notre Dame on his own initiative – data which will be an invaluable resource in the reconstruction. As Sophie Gilbert, writing “All Isn’t Lost” in The Atlantic, observes, “The saving grace of Monday’s tragedy is that the stone structure of Notre-Dame still stands, that most of its treasures seem to have been saved in time, that none of the 400 firemen who fought the blaze for nine hours lost their lives, and that much of the interior to the cathedral seems to have survived, including the three astonishing rose windows.” According to Gilbert, “None of this makes the Notre-Dame fire less catastrophic, or less of a wound to the soul of Paris, but it’s comforting, maybe, to consider how many sites have recovered from the grievous damage of natural and man-made disasters.” Yet despite the admirable French culture of historical conservationism, this disaster has brought forth many ambitious Ellsworth Tooheys. “France Debates How to Rebuild Notre-Dame, Weighing History and Modernity,” reports The New York Times: Jean-Michel Wilmotte, a French architect who recently designed a Russian orthodox cathedral in Paris, told FranceInfo radio on Thursday that rebuilding a “pastiche” of the destroyed spire, which was added to the cathedral in the 19th century, would be “grotesque.” Indeed, some of the architects who have entered France’s international reconstruction competition have proposed rebuilding the roof out of glass and steel (in the style of an Apple Store) and replacing the spire with a minaret (in the style of a mosque). While conceding that modern materials/methods should probably be used for safety’s sake and refraining from any reactionary criticisms of modernity, it must be stated that giving Notre Dame a “modern makeover” would be an act of sheer vanity. There is nothing wrong with modern buildings being built in modern styles. Architecture, like any other form of art, should be a reflection of its time and place, and not merely imitative. Notre Dame is not a modern building built in a modern style, however, but rather an old building built in an old style that reflects its time and place. Thus, the rebuilding of Notre Dame is not supposed to be an opportunity to “update” Notre Dame’s style, but simply to reconstruct it in its original style. It is that building in that style which has made Notre Dame one of the world’s “most popular tourist attractions” and a “world heritage site.” Reconstructing a French Gothic cathedral like Notre Dame, an absolutely exemplary reflection of its time and place, to reflect a different time and place altogether, robs it of its very identity and defeats the very purpose of its existence. What would be the point of reconstructing Notre Dame as something other than Notre Dame? In short (and pardon my French), “Build your own damn building!” “Conservation,” as opposed to “creation,” requires the repression of these narcissistic impulses, a quality lacking in many modern artists and architects. As Steve Sailer quips in Taki’s Magazine, “Ironically, they don’t realize that contemporary architects with their egomaniacal hatred of tradition represent white maleness at its most Promethean and annoying.” Modernist narcissism is not the only threat to Notre Dame’s historical integrity, however. There is also “ethnic sado-narcissism,” which the Claremont-based American Greatness defines as “a demonstration of self-love that perversely manifests itself as a desire to denigrate and punish the broader ethnic group to which one belongs.” According to American Greatness, “Among all ethnic groups, only white liberals are biased against their own ethnic group.” “Give Notre Dame a Modern Roof the Alt-Right Will Hate” the ethnic sado-narcissist Erika Harlitz-Kern demands in The Daily Beast. While Notre Dame was burning, conspiracy theories began to surface, and declarations were made of the fire portending the end of Western civilization and its Judeo-Christian values. Instead, what was happening was the destruction of a medieval past that has, in all honesty, never existed What does Harlitz-Kern mean by “alt-right”? Does she mean the ghettoized Internet subculture of anonymous trolls with Nazi anime-chick avatars? (Because it is not worth redesigning a world-famous cultural, historical, and spiritual monument just so a “hate group” will “hate” it.) Or is she vilifying anyone who loves history and wants to see Notre Dame faithfully reconstructed as “alt-right”? (Because that is illogical and unfair.) Harlitz-Kern is trying to bolster her shoddy argument by implying that the opposing argument is “alt-right,” and thus evil. Western civilization is a term that grew out of the creation of history as a topic of study at the universities in England, Germany, and France in the 19th century. In her book History. Why It Matters, historian Lynn Hunt states that “history grew as an academic discipline in tandem with nationalism and a growing conviction of European superiority over the rest of the world.” This conviction led to the West “being portrayed as the source of technical innovation and cultural advancement,” also known as “modernity.” Harlitz-Kern is resorting to semantics – a form of sophistry – in an attempt to deconstruct Europe’s sense of self-consciousness and self-confidence. The fact that the terms used today to refer to Europe were only recently coined does not mean that Europe had no sense of itself prior to the 19th century or that its sense of itself was formed in colonialist, imperialist, and “white supremacist” contexts. Before there was “the West,” there was “Christendom,” which from the 11th to the 13th centuries waged “the Crusades” to defend Christian civilization from various Islamic caliphates and continued to fight against the Ottoman Empire until the 17th century. That is evidence of a sense of self. Furthermore, it is not even true that the idea of “the West” was invented by proto-Nazis in the late-1800s. It originated in the 5th century A.D., when the Roman Empire split into “East” (where it survived until Ottoman conquest in 1453) and “West” (where it collapsed from unstoppable “barbarian” immigrations and invasions, though was reunited under Pater Europae Charlemagne in the 8th century). The fact that in 331 B.C. Alexander the Great, a Macedonian king from the west, crowned himself “King of Asia” when he conquered the Persian Empire to the east and made enemies trying to forge a “brotherhood of man” among the manifold nations under his rule, suggests that an “East-West” self-awareness originated even earlier, perhaps even stemming back to that first “clash of civilizations” – the Graeco-Persian Wars of the 5th century B.C. Would Harlitz-Kern ever argue that because the idea of “Africa” is largely a “Western” construct that, therefore, “Africa” has never really existed? This brings us to the notion of Judeo-Christian values, where once again the Middle Ages are used to make an argument that actually misrepresents the time period. In the eyes of those who promote the ideas of Western civilization and so-called Judeo-Christian values, the Middle Ages stand out as the ideal time period when Europe was a white society united in a homogeneous Christian culture led by one single Christian institution. Like Dinesh D’Souza’s crackpot historical revisionism, “multicultural Medieval Europe” relies on gross exaggeration and sheer obfuscation, as well as an all-around ignorant audience. Of course Europe was aware of and interacted with the outside world, but Harlitz-Kern twists every economic, diplomatic, or military “contact” that Europe had with another civilization to argue against the very existence of a distinct, coherent civilization in Europe. (Curiously, the reverse is never the case: Harlitz-Kern would never, ever claim, for example, that Marco Polo’s mission to Kublai Khan made Mongolian civilization any less Mongolian than it made Italian civilization any less Italian.) Indeed, hucksters like Harlitz-Kern are constantly searching for any “Moorish” ambassador or merchant who visited Europe once whom they can then transmute and multiply into a subpopulation of black Africans living throughout Europe. (The Moors were Middle-Eastern colonists in North Africa, not indigenous sub-Saharan Africans, but whatever.) Harlitz-Kern’s “multicultural Medieval Europe” is just as political as D’Souza’s “Democrats are the real racists,” too: it is meant to degrade and subvert Europe’s sense of self. History is an ongoing process of human activity. Notre Dame is an example of history being a living, breathing thing. History is not static, and neither is Notre Dame. Or as medievalist Lisa Fagin Davis puts it, “Nothing makes it from the Middle Ages to the 21st century without being transformed along the way. Harlitz-Kern, an adjunct professor at Florida International University, is so shameless and soulless that she is actually taking advantage of the destruction of Notre Dame to publicize her malicious and mendacious revisionism. In “How Should France Rebuild Notre Dame?” Rolling Stone hears out both sides of the debate: Birignani and Harwood’s criticism is just modernist narcissism rearing its ugly head again. Why on earth should Notre Dame be rebuilt as “a reflection of France today”? The whole point of historical conservation is to preserve “reflections of an old France.” New buildings are what should reflect the France that is “currently in the making,” not old buildings. Birignani and Harwood are just like the “demolishers” whom Victor Hugo denounced as “ignoble speculators whose honor has been blinded by self-interest…so idiotic that they don’t even understand that they are barbarians!” As for the idea that “non-secular, white European France” is a “France that never was,” that is just ethnic sado-narcissism. Charles de Gaulle, France’s heroic wartime and peacetime leader, rejected this multi-cultural, multi-religious mirage in its inception, as “decolonized” North Africans began immigrating to France. According to de Gaulle, “We are still primarily a European people of the white race, Greek and Latin culture, and the Christian religion.” While De Gaulle believed that France could be “open to all races,” it was only open “on condition that they remain a small minority…otherwise, France would no longer be France.” Although the author of the Rolling Stone article, E.J. Dickson, is clearly in favor of the deconstructionists, she gives the last word to the conservationists: [Jeffrey] Hamburger, however, dismisses this idea as “preposterous.” Now that the full extent of the damage is being reckoned with – and is less than many initially feared – he sees no reason to not try to rebuild and preserve one of the few remaining wonders of medieval architecture. “It’s not as if in rebuilding the church one is necessarily building a monument to the glorification of medieval Catholicism and aristocracy. It’s simply the case that the building has witnessed the entire history of France as a modern nation,” he says. “You can’t just erase history. It’s there, and it has to be dealt with critically. What The Daily Beast and Rolling Stone are not going to publicize is the reverse-colonialist vengefulness revealed in the literal celebrations of the destruction of Notre Dame. “Hafsa Askar,” the vice-president of the French Student Union at Lille University, boasted, “I don’t give a damn about Notre Dame because I don’t give a damn about the history of France,” and asked, “How much are you people going to cry for some bits of wood?” According to “Sarah Sahim,” a writer for The Independent and The Guardian, “Notre Dame burning is cosmic karma for all the historical sites and artifacts France destroyed and stole when being colonialist scum.” Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, who recently emigrated from France to Israel, speculated that the burning of Notre Dame was “divine retribution” for French anti-Semitism in the 13th century. In a letter to The Atlantic, “Ken Mondschein” sneered that Notre Dame was a symbol of the nation “that exiled Captain Alfred Dreyfus and, in more recent times, has marginalized its Muslim citizens.” Mondschein asked, “Will the rebuilding use aped medieval materials to conjure an imagined past, or will it be built in the same spirit, but employing a diversity of modern materials, to bespeak the reality of contemporary France?” Vice interviewed a number of young Parisians about the fire, one of whom, an artist from Israel named “Jonathan,” praised the fire in the name of equality and diversity: I thought it was sad but beautiful. It was an important lesson: Nothing lasts forever, everything comes to an end. We’re watching the beginning of a new modernity; religion and the church don’t have the same influence they did before, and it’s always a good thing when white men lose their power…I saw the fire with my own eyes. It was really beautiful, as though Satan was speaking to us humans to say, “The end of your world is coming!” I identify as queer or gay, I’m a spiritual person, and I believe in the same light that burned the cathedral. I think we need to burn all churches and get rid of all organized religions. We need to reconnect with spirituality, to understand that all human beings are equal so that we can finally all accept one another…In Muslim countries, when ISIS came into power, they destroyed Egyptian and religious places that were clearly more important, and nobody cared. Now this happens in Paris and the whole world feels invested; that makes me cynical. If you ask me, it’s crazy that in just a few hours, people have given more than 450 million Euros for a little f*****g church! We have plenty of other problems affecting actual human lives Andy Ngo, an investigative journalist at Quillette, compiled a list of Twitter users cheering the fire. Many of these people, such as “El Buchón Mariwano,” who tweeted, “idgaf [i.e. “I don’t give a f**k”] about Notre Dame burning down because how many times have white colonizers burned or destroyed our religious structures?…F**k the Catholic church,” received thousands of “likes” and “retweeets.” For my own part, I came across one such cretin on Facebook – a friend of a friend – who had shared a picture of Notre Dame on fire with the caption, “When the Paris police are knocking and you need to get rid of your child-porn collection.” He was both befuddled and amused with why anyone would be “offended” by him “making fun of the place getting torched,” because while “it sucks that it burnt…the religious aspects mean jack s**t to me.” This hate – this bile, this poison – does not stop with mere words. “Catholic Churches Are Being Desecrated Across France – and Officials Don’t Know Why,” Newsweek reported a month before the fire at Notre Dame. “France has seen a spate of attacks against Catholic churches since the start of the year, vandalism that has included arson,” continued Newsweek. “Vandals have smashed statues, knocked down tabernacles, scattered or destroyed the Eucharist, and torn down crosses, sparking fears of a rise in anti-Catholic sentiment in the country.” “And then, in the 21st century,” the philosophical Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky foretold, “to the accompanying howl of the triumphant mob, a degenerate will pull a knife from his boot, climb the stairs to the marvelous image of the Sistine Madonna, and slash this image in the name of universal equality and brotherhood.” The opening of Sir Kenneth Clark’s documentary series, “Civilisation: A Personal View,” features Notre Dame in a very moving way. Standing on the banks of the River Seine, the famous art historian and museum director posed a question. “What is civilization,” he asked. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I can’t define it in abstract terms.” Turning around and beckoning toward the majestic cathedral, Clark concludes, “But I think I can recognize it when I see it, and I’m looking at it now.” In his same opening monologue, however, Clark includes a word of caution: Looking at those great works of Western man and remembering all that he’s achieved in philosophy, poetry, science, law, it does seem hard to believe that European civilization could ever vanish. And yet it has happened once. All the life-giving human activities that we lump together under the word “civilization” have been obliterated once in Western Europe, when the barbarians ran over the Roman Empire. For two centuries, the heart of European civilization almost stopped beating. We got through by the skin of our teeth. In the last few years we’ve developed an uneasy feeling that this could happen again, and advanced thinkers (who even in Roman times thought it fine to gang up with the barbarians) have begun to question if civilization is worth preserving Notre Dame may have survived the fire by the skin of its teeth, but modernist narcissism, ethnic sado-narcissism, and reverse colonialism, which questions whether civilization is even worth preserving, will prove far more dangerous to that 800 year-old cathedral – and the even older civilization that it represents – than any fire.
Tom Wolfe, with his perceptive eye and eloquent pen, was a Charles Dickens and Mark Twain for our time. He not only satirized patrician vices and eulogized plebeian virtues to devastating effect, but also created many unique expressions which enriched the language. Wolfe was born on March 2nd, 1930, in Richmond, Virginia. He was accepted to Princeton, but attended Washington and Lee because he wished to stay close to home, and when he left for graduate school at Yale, he hated it. Wolfe enjoyed writing and had already developed a signature style in college (his dissertation on the organizational activities of the Communist Party in American literature had to be rewritten because it was too colorful), but after doing some workmanlike reporting in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., he grew bored and moved to New York City. There, writing for The New York Herald Tribune and New York Magazine, was where he broke out and wrote some of his most iconic pieces. Articles such as “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” and “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening” quickly turned Wolfe into the sort of writer that people bought whole publications just to read. Of all Wolfe’s journalism during this period, The Right Stuff (originally serialized but ultimately republished as a book) is the most impressive: he spent years traversing the country talking to whomever he could, and the result was not just a timely history of Project Mercury, but an intimate portrait of the lives of the first astronauts as well. Wolfe’s first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was a critically acclaimed bestseller, as was his much-anticipated second novel, A Man in Full. In “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel,” published in Harper’s Magazine shortly after The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe responded to his critics, arguing that the role of a novelist was to “document” real life – an opinion popular with many readers but unpopular with many other writers. Sadly, but after a well-lived life stretched over 88 years and packed full of adventure, Wolfe died on May 14, 2018. In Wolfe’s last novel, Back to Blood, he asked the question, “Could Miami with its clash of cultures be the American city of the future?” In an interview with The Telegraph, Wolfe explained his motives behind writing such a book:
Cubans are one of the largest immigrant groups to the U.S.A., comprising 3% of the entire immigrant population. Mass-immigration from Cuba began in 1959 after the Cuban Revolution. Cubans being refugees from a Cold-War enemy, the U.S.A. expedited their immigration. In the 1960s alone, the Cuban-immigrant population in the U.S.A. increased nearly 600% – from 79,000 to 439,000. The Cuban-immigrant population continued to rapidly increase, to 608,000 by 1980, 737,000 by 1990, 873,000 by 2000, and 1,105,000 by 2010. Between 1995 and 2015, when the “wet foot, dry foot” policy was in effect, 650,000 Cubans immigrated to the U.S.A. Today, there are approximately 1,272,000 Cuban immigrants living in the U.S.A., with 78% in Florida and 64% in Miami. Originally, Back to Blood was going to be about the Vietnamese in Orange County, California (which has also been demographically transformed by virtue-signaling and pathologically altruistic immigration policies from the Cold War), but became interested in Miami when he learned about the scope of the population replacement that has taken place there and that its government is now entirely under the control of Cubans. Wolfe brought his signature style of journalism-turned-fiction to Back to Blood, doing lots of legwork to learn about his subject from the bottom up; the result are lots of little details that make his big picture feel real. He was shown around the city by a Cubano reporter, an Anglo police chief, a Haitian anthropologist, and more. The reporter made a PBS documentary about Wolfe’s research process for the novel, “Tom Wolfe Gets Back to Blood.” Three of the novel’s most striking chapters – set in a regatta gala, an art show, and a strip club – are drawn from Wolfe’s own firsthand experiences. Edward T. Topping IV, the Anglo editor of The Miami Herald, sets the stage as he recollects how and why he ended up in this city where he is so uncomfortable:
Indeed, the novel’s title and theme also come from Ed’s stream of consciousness:
Ed is a thoroughly conventional liberal who wallows in fear and self-hatred. In quasi-1984 fashion, Ed self-censors his politically incorrect thoughts, although as a writer, he often winces at the damage that political correctness has done to the English language. “Aw, shit, the kid is PC…the way he almost said ‘him’ and switched it to ‘person’ on the edge of a cliff…and then gave up on ‘person’ for ‘they,’ so he wouldn’t have to deal with the gender in the singular, the ‘hims’ and ‘he’s,’” Ed thinks when talking to a young reporter. “I fucking don’t want to believe it was Yale that made my man here mangle the goddamn English language this way.” When his wife gets into a racially charged shouting match with a Latina who stole their parking space, Ed cringes. “‘Herald Editor’s Wife in Racist Rant.’” he imagines the headlines. “He could write the whole thing himself.” Anglos like Ed are the only people in Back to Blood who have little to no sense of self-consciousness or self-confidence. In Back to Blood, figurative human sacrifices are necessary to keep the peace in Miami. For following orders, risking his life, and saving the life of a Cuban refugee, Nestor Camacho (a Cubano cop), is actually punished in just to appease the outraged Cubanos, to whom any deportation of one of their own is an unforgivable offense. In one of the novel’s most striking passages, the mayor, Dionisio Cruz (who is Cubano), explains to the police chief, Cyrus Booker (who is black), Miami’s conflict between democracy and diversity:
Nestor is, privately, medaled for his bravery and reassigned from the Marine Patrol to the Crime Suppression Unit. When a recording of Nestor insulting a subdued black criminal spreads online, Dio demands his head. Cy, however, argues that the recording was taken out of context: Nestor had just saved the life of another cop, whom the criminal had nearly killed. “You know very well that one of the main reasons you were made chief was that we thought you were the man to keep the peace with all these – uh, uhhh – communities,” Dio snaps back at Cy. “So you think I’m gonna stand by and let you turn racial friction into a goddamn conflagration on my watch?” Cy knows that amongst themselves, Cubanos like Dio differentiate themselves from the Anglos, but amongst other races – such as “African-Americans” like Cy – the Cubanos define themselves as white:
Miami is now known as “the Capital of Latin America,” or as Wolfe puts it, “Plan B for everyone in Latin America.” When Ed’s wife yells at the Spanish-speaking Latina that she is in America and so should speak English, the Latina laughs in reply, “No, mia malhablada puta gorda [you impudent fat bitch] – we een Mee-ah-mee now! You in Mee-ah-mee now!” Later, when the Cubano cop Nestor and an Anglo reporter John Smith, drive out of Miami into Broward County (which is hardly the American heartland), they can both sense a change:
(By the way, the character “John Smith” is always referred to by his full name, “John Smith” – never “John” or “Smith.” It is not just that it is an archetypical name among “Anglos” (i.e. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), but that it is also name of the original American and Virginian, Captain John Smith.[1]) In Back to Blood, everybody does indeed hate everybody, as Mayor Dio explained. Everybody does not just hate everybody, but everybody hates everybody over everything, too – not just over cultural and social differences or economic and political conflicts, but even over the most superficial things, such as how other races dress or speak. Nestor, for instance, is irritated by the clothes that his partner, John Smith, wears. “The Americano stood there dressed so Americano, it was annoying,” he thinks to himself. This instinctive awareness of and animus toward other races is exemplified by Magdelana Otero, a Cubano nurse who is prejudiced against any Americano she meets, no matter how friendly or helpful:
Wolfe’s portrait of Miami’s Cubans makes a mockery of Americano confidence in immigrant assimilation, particularly Republicans’ belief that Latinos are “natural conservatives.” If any Latinos were going to assimilate, it would be the Cubans, who are given extra-preferential immigration status (they are automatically legalized as soon as they enter the U.S.A., even illegally), are eligible for affirmative-action privileges (originally intended as one form of reparations to blacks for white discrimination), and are one of the most powerful foreign-policy lobbies in the U.S.A. (as vengeful to their homeland as the Israel Lobby is to the Palestinians). Yet Wolfe shows that these Cuban-“Americans” do not identify as Americans at all. “Americano” is not a term that they ever apply to themselves – they are Cubanos! – but is basically a racial epithet against “Anglos.” While patrolling Biscayne Bay with two other cops – Americanos – Nestor considers the irrationality of these racial categories:
As far as Miami’s Cubanos are concerned, the sole business of the U.S. government should be to transfer the population of Cuba to Miami and overthrow the Cuban government (and, as a voter bloc, they present a united and uncompromising front on this issue). There is no gratitude toward the Americanos for rescuing them, however, just entitlement and resentment. Indeed, Ed not-so-fondly recalls the Cubano blowback to one of his first big stories at The Miami Herald:
Amongst themselves, moreover, the Cubanos expect and enforce tribal loyalty. When Nestor saves the life of a Cuban refugee (but, in the process, deprives him of automatic asylum due to the U.S.A.’s “wet foot, dry foot” policy), he is cast out not just by other Cubanos, but by his own family as well. “DETENIDO! 18 METROS DE LIBERTAD,” announces the front page of the El Nuevo Herald. “A Cuban refugee, reportedly a hero of the dissident underground, was arrested yesterday on Biscayne Bay just eighteen meters from the Rickenbacker Causeway – and asylum – by a cop whose own parents had fled Cuba and made it to Miami and freedom in a homemade dinghy.” Nestor briefly takes some pride in The Miami Herald’s more neutral headline (which highlights the fact that what happened was a “rescue,” after all) only to remember what the Cubanos say: “Yo no creo el Miami Herald” – “I don’t believe The Miami Herald.” When Nestor comes home to Hialeah after he is on the news, he is told that he has dishonored the family name:
Later, at his grandmother’s birthday party, Nestor is berated even by distant relatives:
Back to Blood, though about race in the main, also includes the other American anxieties of class and sex which Wolfe so often satirized. Magdalena, a Cubano nurse, is an ambitious social climber who uses her body to get what she wants from men, yet is unaware that men are only using her for her body to get what they want. While Magdalena is having sex with Nestor, she starts having sex with Norman, and while she is with Norman, she starts having sex with the gangster-turned-philanthropist Sergei Korolyov, and after she realizes that Sergei has disposed of her, she tries to get back with Nestor again. Norman, an Americano psychiatrist who treats sexual disorders, is an ambitious social climber who uses his rich and famous clients to increase his own public profile. Norman is cocky, petty, and creepy: he lies to make himself seem like more of a celebrity than he is, puts down Magdalena’s weaker grasp of the English language, and is in denial about his own sex addiction. One of the most interesting characters in the novel is Professor Antoine Lantier, a light-skinned Haitian-American linguist. Lantier, who identifies as French (he is apparently descended from old Norman aristocracy) and considers himself to be a bearer of Western Civilization, is disgusted with the primitive black Haitians from whence he came. Lantier’s greatest hope is for his light-skinned daughter, Ghislaine (who is cultured, educated, and innocent), to “pass” as white, while his greatest disappointment is that his darker-skinned son, Philippe, identifies as black. “Right now he wants to be a Neg, a black Haitian,” Ghislaine says of Philippe, “and they want to be like American black gangbangers…and I don’t even know what American black gangbangers want to be like.” Wolfe’s journalism, in addition to influencing how he wrote, also influenced what he wrote. For years, Wolfe followed the emerging field of “sociobiology” as well as rapid advances in the field of neuroscience (e.g. “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died” and “Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill”). Wolfe, who had himself been the target of ideological purges by the literati (because of his populist literary philosophy which criticized elitist literature), took particular pleasure in ridiculing the malcontents of neuroscientific progress. “If I were a college student today,” admitted Wolfe, “I don’t think I could resist going into neuroscience.” Accordingly, in I Am Charlotte Simmons, published a few years after these essays, the title character takes classes on neuroscience, which she sees as the most cutting-edge and wide-open field of study. Likewise, parts of Back to Blood are clearly influenced by Wolfe’s earlier journalism on the faddishness of modern art and architecture, summed up in his books, The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House. In his chapter on Art Basel Miami Beach, “The Super Bowl of the Art World,” ignorant wealthy collectors, advised by self-interested art dealers, mindlessly compete for tasteless and otherwise worthless works of art. Maurice Fleischmann, a pornography-addicted Jewish billionaire, spends $17 million in 15 minutes on “No-Hands” and “De-Skilled Art” –an artist hired someone else to take pictures of him having sex with a prostitute, then hired someone else to etch the photographs into glass, and did not even touch the photographs when they were sent or the etchings when they were received. “And there you’ve got the very best, the most contemporary work of the whole rising generation,” Fleischmann’s art dealer, “A.A.” tells him. “Maurice…you…have…really…scored this time.” Magdalena thinks to herself, “Fleischmann looked very pleased, but his smile was the baffled smile of someone who can’t explain his own good fortune.” Wolfe was sometimes labeled a reactionary railing against changes which he did not understand. Oftentimes, however, his critics did not understand the changes that they were idly accepting and applauding. For instance, Slate’s Stephen Metcalf denounced I Am Charlotte Simmons as “an eminently foolish book, by an old man for whom the life of the young has become a grotesque but tantalizing rumor.” Metcalf, with all the wit of the sophomore-cum-philosopher, pronounced, “The stupidity here may actually be boundless.” What Metcalf seems not to have known, however (probably because, to him, any moral criticism of anything is puritanical), is how degenerate campus life had actually become. By contrast, when the judge-turned-professor Richard Posner first read The Bonfire of the Vanities, he commented that “it didn’t strike me as the sort of book that has anything interesting to say.” Yet after the Tawana-Brawley rape hoax, the arrest of the bond-trader Michael Milken, the Crown-Heights riot, the Rodney-King riot, and the O.J.-Simpson trial (all of which Wolfe had anticipated in some form in that 1987 novel), Posner changed his opinion, admitting that he had been “ungenerous and unperceptive.” Wolfe was never a reactionary, however, neither a nativist nor a xenophobe. On the contrary, Wolfe, like many members of the Baby-Boomer generation, celebrated the U.S.A.’s post-1965 immigration wave as proving, once and for all, that Americans were not the racists that American “Rococo Marxists” (or “sweaty little colonials forever trying to keep up with Europe and, above all, France”) claimed that they were:
In fact, Wolfe celebrated mass-immigration as a natural outgrowth of “The American Idea,” reified in the open, equal seating arrangements at Pres. Thomas Jefferson’s state dinners (described by the British ambassador and his wife as “pell-mell”):
Ironically, however, the “Rococo Marxists” whom Wolfe so deftly ridiculed got the last laugh, benefiting enormously from the worldwide immigration wave to the U.S.A. If mass-immigration discredited their paranoia about non-existent American “isms” and “phobias,” as Wolfe rather optimistically predicted, then they have been too busy enjoying the importation of loyal activists and obedient voters to realize it. As a recent article in The New York Times, “Why the Announcement of a Looming White Minority Makes Demographers Nervous” notes, the policies that are changing the U.S.A.’s demographics have made the Left complacent and triumphalist about the future:
The new Rococo-Marxist Congress (which, if not “the blue wave” of expectation, is still “the most diverse ever”) is a prelude to that “demographic destiny,” with the Rococo-Marxist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as its arrogant, ignorant face. Conservatives and libertarians criticize Ocasio-Cortez’s “Democratic Socialism,” “Green New Deal,” and “Modern Monetary Theory” as if she is driving these ideas herself, but she is merely representative of the demographic shift that is driving the political shift. Now that “all politics is identity politics” (this is a truth which diversity brings to light), it does not really matter if Ocasio-Cortez represents a “rotten borough,” lies about her upper-middle-class background, and dismisses any criticism as prejudice. All that really matters, in her own words, is whether she represents her tribe (“intersectional working-class Ocasio voters”) against other tribes (“homogenous working-class Trump voters”). If Back to Blood is correct that Miami is “the city where America’s future has arrived first,” then America’s future has arrived in Ocasio-Cortez. (Ocasio-Cortez, whose high opinion of herself actually seems to increase with each passing blunder, would have made a memorable character in one of Wolfe’s novels.)
Only late in his life, in Back to Blood, did Wolfe seem consider the consequences of “people of every land, every color, every religion…pouring into the United States.” As Wolfe put it, “This is a book about immigrants in America and the way in which immigrants change life in America.” Yet the question is why would anyone want to live in such a city, let alone such a country? What took place, perhaps, with Wolfe (and what is certainly taking place with Americans), is a “great relearning” on the issue of immigration – a vital issue which has, lately, been governed more by schmaltz than sense. In “The Great Relearning,” Wolfe argued that the 20th century was defined by intellectual movements and political activism which “swept aside all rules and tried to start from zero.” In architecture, there was the Bauhaus School, which resulted in sterile buildings ugly at which to look and uncomfortable in which to live. In culture, there was the hippy subculture, the communal living of which quickly resulted in rare disease outbreaks. In morality, there was the Sexual Revolution, which resulted, frankly, in AIDS. In politics, there was Communism, which resulted in dysfunction and repression. Optimistically, as was his nature, Wolfe predicted that Americans were looking back on “the amazing confidence, the Promethean hubris, to defy the gods and try to push man’s power and freedom to limitless, god-like extremes” and learning their lesson. Likewise, in 1965, the qualitative and quantitative regulations which had controlled immigration since 1924 were ceremoniously abolished. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, itself the culmination of a series of increasingly selective and restrictive acts from the late-1800s and early-1900s, established a system of national-origins quotas which ensured that the immigrants would be of assimilable character and number. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act repealed some of the outright racial discrimination in the 1924 act (citizenship was limited to whites only), but otherwise retained the national-origins quota system. Yet by 1965, the idea that a foreign country’s immigrant quota should be proportional to the percentage of its people among the host country’s population was considered “discriminatory,” at least according to the politicians. Not so much the people, however: “U.S. Public is Strongly Opposed to Easing of Immigration Laws,” reported The Washington Post, citing a Harvard-Harris survey of 58% to 24%, but the politicians had already set their brains to zero. It was not all a “Great Unlearning,” however; there was plenty of base politicking. For one, there was Rep. Michael A. Feighan of Ohio, who as chairman of the House’s immigration subcommittee agreed to stop obstructing the act in exchange for prioritizing family reunification over skills, so that he could pander to the labor unions (which did not want to compete with skilled foreign labor) and Eastern-European blocs (which wanted to import more of their own people) in his district. For another, there was Sen. James O. Eastland of Mississippi, who as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee also agreed to stop obstructing the act, seemingly for no other reason than as a personal favor to the President and the Kennedys. More common, however, was the well-meaning gullibility and high-minded sanctimony typical of a “Great Unlearning.” Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota, for example, declared that while the act was “a recognition of the great contribution made to the development of our nation by peoples from all regions of the world” and “reflects a fundamental principle in our laws and traditions: that of the equality of nature of all men,” he also believed that it “would not greatly increase the number of immigrants, but it would provide that those admitted would be judged on the basis of a national-origins quota.” (McCarthy later admitted that he and his colleagues had “never intended to open the floodgates” and that they had made a terrible mistake.) In a ceremony at the Statue of Liberty, Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act into law with reassuring words. “The bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” he explained. “It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to our wealth or power.” According to Johnson, “The days of unlimited immigration are past, but those who do come will come because of what they are, and not because of the land from which they sprung.” (In the same speech, Johnson announced that Cuban refugees would continue to receive their privileged treatment.) The “Great Relearning” began when the character of immigrants started changing and the number of immigrants started rising, which was not ever supposed to happen. The bill’s sponsors, Rep. Emanuel Celler of New York and Sen. Philip A. Hart of Michigan, along with many other confident Congressmen, had predicted that their reform would have no such effect and had dismissed their opponents as mere contrarians and cynics. Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York had made an effort to “set to rest any fears that this bill will change the ethnic, political, or economic makeup of the United States,” while also attacking criticism of the bill as “emotional, irrational, and with little foundation in fact…out of line with the obligations of responsible citizenship.” LBJ-Administration officials, such as Attorney-General Nicholas D. Katzenbach, Secretary of State D. Dean Rusk, and Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz, had been called to the Congress to testify the same: there would be no noticeable difference in the quality or quantity of immigrants, and anyone who suggested so was suspicious. John F. Kennedy himself, in his highly romanticized and sentimentalized Nation of Immigrants (published by the Anti-Defamation League in 1958), had avowed that he “does not seek to make over the face of America.” Yet the Hart-Celler Act that is remembered today for exactly that – for making over the face of America. The Pew Research Center’s timeline of the racial composition of the American population, “The Changing Face of America,” begins in 1965, the year Hart-Celler became law. In a report on Hart-Celler, “1965 Immigration Law Changed Face of America,” NPR’s Jennifer Luden described how “it marked a radical break with previous policy and has led to profound demographic changes in America.” At the Migration Policy Institute’s 2015 symposium in honor of Hart-Celler, Muzaffar Chisti explained that it “literally changed the face of America.” According to Chisti, Hart-Celler “ushered in far-reaching changes that continue to undergird the current immigration system, and set in motion powerful demographic forces that are still reshaping the United States today and will in the decades ahead.” A recent book by Peggy Orchowski on the 50th anniversary of Hart-Celler, “The Law that Changed the Face of America,” argues that “this historic law that made the United States the highly diverse nation of immigrants that it is today.” The American people quickly learned about the unintended consequences of policies such as “birthright citizenship,” “chain migration,” “diversity lotteries,” “refugee protocols,” “workers visas,” and more. Reforms were passed in 1986 and 1996, but they were half-hearted and simple-minded, and only worsened the problems by delaying the necessary solutions. Further reforms were attempted in 2007 and 2013, but these were so transparently exploitative that they did not even manage to pass. In 2012, Pres. Barack Obama took it upon himself to decree amnesty for the children of all illegal immigrants, resulting in a surge of illegal immigration at the southern border still ebbing and flowing seasonally. In 2016, Donald Trump (a world-famous businessman, celebrity, and demagogue) ran a self-funded presidential campaign with an “isolationist,” “protectionist,” and “nativist” message, including not only the revocation of Obama’s amnesty but also the construction of a wall along the southern border. Since his stunning victory, however, he has struggled against bipartisan resistance at every turn, even in his by-the-book efforts to enforce the law at the national border. Early in 2018, when Pres. Trump was making a major attempt to negotiate a deal with the Congress, a Harvard-Harris poll found that not only did a substantial majority of 65% (cutting across dividing lines of class, race, and sex) support his position of trading amnesty for reforming the system and boosting border security, but also that an even greater majority of 81% supported reducing immigration levels. One year later, just days before Pres. Trump caved on the government shutdown, another Harvard-Harris poll found that immigration, at 38%, was the single most important issue to the public (and while his proposed border wall was opposed by 55% to 45%, there was more support for other border-security measures, including a “security barrier”). Yet when it comes to immigration reform, the Democrats and the Republicans are less responsive to and less representative of public opinion than the Bourbons and the Romanovs. What the American people are “relearning” – and Back to Blood is a sign of the times – is that nothing comes free, especially not immigration. Like every other policy, immigration has costs as well as benefits, losers as well as winners, and so on. Indeed, how could a policy which literally determines the composition of a country’s population – and populations are not merely interchangeable masses – be anything less?  “The Declaration of Independence is to be taken with a great qualification. It declares those men have an inalienable right to life; yet we hang criminals – to liberty, yet we imprison – to the pursuit of happiness, yet we must not infringe upon the rights of others. If the Declaration of Independence is taken in its fullest extent, it will warrant robbery and murder, for some may think those crimes necessary to their happiness.” – Rep. Joseph Clay of Pennsylvania on the slave trade (1806) “I should not have noticed this strange and ridiculous vision, that the Declaration of Independence was a decree of universal emancipation, had it not issued from respectable sources, and been seriously enforced upon the credulity of the public. Instead of attempting to answer or refute these visions of a disturbed imagination, let us recur to principles and facts.” – Rep. John Holmes on the Missouri Crisis (1820) “I cannot, in the first place, believe that Mr. Jefferson ever intended to give the meaning or force which attempted now to be applied to this language when he said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ I hold it to be a self-evident lie…I speak what is the judgment of all men, if they dare say it, that neither morally, mentally, socially, physically, nor politically, does equality exist in any country on the earth. It cannot exist in the nature of things. God himself has not created them equal. It is not, therefore, a truism, as Jefferson put it forth, but is false in form, and false in fact.” – Sen. John Pettit of Indiana on the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1853) “The object of that war was to disenthrall the united colonies from foreign rule, which had proved to be oppressive, and to separate them permanently from the mother country. The political result was the foundation of a federal republic of free white men of the colonies, constituted, as they were, in distinct and reciprocally independent State governments. As for the subject races, whether Indian or African, the wise and brave statesmen of that day, being engaged in no extravagant scheme of social change, left them as they were, and thus preserved themselves and their posterity from the anarchy and the ever-recurring civil wars which have prevailed in other revolutionized European colonies of America.” – Pres. Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire in the State of the Union (1855) John Dickinson, known as the “Penman of the Revolution” for his “Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer” essays, as well as his “Petition to the King,” “Olive Branch Petition,” and “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms,” ultimately refused to sign the Declaration of Independence. His objections had nothing to do with the ways in which the Declaration could be perverted by posterity, but were entirely pragmatic concerns about whether the American Colonies were prepared for war and whether their supposed allies in Europe would actually come to their aid. If he had any idea, however, that the Declaration – at the time, nothing more than an act of secession – would one day be cited to justify transforming his free and independent country into a “Colony of the World,” where immigration policy was conducted in the interest of alien immigrants first, economic policy was conducted in the interest of multi-national businesses first, and foreign policy was conducted in the interest of foreign states first – never “America First” – then Dickinson would not have been the only delegate who refused to sign it; not a single delegate would have signed such a suicide pact. The so-called “equality clause” of the Declaration of Independence is neither about “equality” (at least not as in the equalitarian “capital-E” sense) and is not even a “clause.” Calling this phrase plucked from the second paragraph a “clause” is meant to invest it with constitutional authority – to make it a mandate, so to speak. The Development of Neo-Conservatism in America It is the neo-conservatives, or “neocons,” who want to make this “equality clause” a mandate. The neocons are a clique of ideologues who have become highly influential in both parties – the Evil Party and the Stupid Party (you figure out which is which). They are not normally politicians, but rather advisers and speechwriters influencing elected officials, or appointees to powerful but unseen positions. They are journalists spinning and slanting stories, pundits supplying prepackaged opinions and fueling ready-made outrage, financiers funding campaigns and foundations, wonks ensconced in think tanks inventing policy initiatives, and so on. They infiltrate institutions, subvert their values, and appropriate their identities. “Neocon” is a term that most Americans first heard during the Bush Administration, when that clique was at the height of its power. Dimwitted “Dubya” was desperate to “do something” after 9/11, and the neocons were ready and waiting with a plan, the same plan that they had been pushing on presidents since the end of the Cold War: now that the Soviet Union was no longer a rival empire, the U.S.A. and Israel could unilaterally intervene in the Middle East. Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, and David Wurmser were a few of Bush’s highest-placed neocons, though many more were crawling in and out of the administration. Most of them were members of Project for the New American Century (a think tank which advocated “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity” and obsessively urged “the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power”) and some of them were authors of “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” (the report of an Israeli study group which recommended reestablishing the “principle of preemption” to “contain, destabilize, and roll back” Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine). The neocons were the architects of “the War on Terror,” which should go down in history as the most notorious example of what the Old-Right thinker and writer Samuel T. Francis called “anarcho-tyranny” – a dystopia unforeseen even by Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury, in which the government does not do what it should do but does do what it should not do. In other words, anarcho-tyranny is when the government, whether through mere incompetence or sheer malice, permits widespread lawlessness (“anarchy”) and commits abuses of power (“tyranny”). While the beneficiaries of anarcho-tyranny are the dysfunctional, dependent underclass and the established, elite managerial class, the victims of anarcho-tyranny are law-abiding, tax-paying, “Middle-American” citizens trapped between the anarchy from below and tyranny from above. 9/11 was committed by radical Sunni fundamentalists, so what did the neocons do? They declare war on the secular powers in the Middle East who had been on the front lines fighting radical Sunni fundamentalists for years. 9/11 was committed by illegal immigrants who overstayed their visas, so what did the neocons do? Instead of establishing an entry/exit visa system to prevent such oversights, they have repeatedly undermined the enforcement of immigration laws and even tried to sneak through amnesty. 9/11 was committed by Muslims from foreign countries, so what did the neocons do? Instead of using statistical probabilities to “profile” potential terrorists, all American citizens were subjected to a regime of snooping and bullying. A real “War on Terror” would have meant forming a grand alliance between Iraq, Syria, and Iran (a triumph of statesmanship of which the jingoistic, chauvinistic neocons would certainly have been incapable) to wage a moral crusade against the two chief destabilizers of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Israel. The neocons were also the architects of the Iraq War – not just the waging of the war itself (although in many cases these eggheads and pinheads did indeed overrule the actual military brass), but more importantly, the case for the war. The fraudulent case for the Iraq War – that if Saddam Hussein, an evil dictator and state sponsor of terrorism, were overthrown, then the Middle East would become safer and freer – was the fault not only of the neocons’ arrogance and ignorance, but also of their dishonesty and disloyalty. Just recently, the political party of Moqtada al-Sadr (a radical Muslim cleric who led the insurgency against American occupation), won a plurality of seats in the Iraqi elections. The Iraq War is going to go down in history as the greatest catastrophe in the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Just recently, the neocons have been leading resistance to Donald Trump from within the Republican Party, not because they have any moral qualms about his character or his competence, but because Trump is an old-fashioned populist and nationalist who, in the course of the primaries and the general election, clearly rejected their designs of “world policing” and “nation building.” The founding generation of the neocons came from two factions of the American Old Left: Communist exiles (specifically, Trotskyites who were ousted by Stalin in the power struggle after Lenin’s death) and Cold-War liberals (Democrats like Sen. Henry Jackson of Washington). The proto-neocon Trotskyites were organized around Max Schachtman, a Polish-Jewish immigrant involved with the AFL-CIO and the Democratic Party. The far-left Schachtmanites, alarmed by Stalinist imperialism and “anti-Semitism,” supported the U.S.A. countering the USSR militarily and creating the State of Israel as a national home for Jews. The Schachtmanites began as Trotskyites who believed that “the maintenance of the dictatorship in one land was dependent on the extension of the proletarian revolution on a world scale,” but ended up as anti-Communists who believed that “U.S. power could be used to promote democracy in the Third World” (and thus supported the bungled invasion of Cuba and the Vietnam War). Interestingly enough, a superpower imposing its ideology on other countries is a constant throughout every phase of Schachtmanite thought, from hardcore Communism to hardcore anti-Communism. The proto-neocon Cold-War liberals were organized around Leo Strauss, a German-Jewish immigrant who became a sort of rabbinical figure to “social democrats.” They were for supporting “the New Deal” at home and fighting Communism abroad, which to them meant not only militarily countering Soviet expansion, but also promoting mass-immigration to the U.S.A. in order to signal to the Third World that they were more humanitarian than the USSR. Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, both Straussians, founded the now-neocon Commentary and The Public Interest as center-left, social-democratic publications for liberals who wanted “to return to the original sources of liberal vision and liberal energy so as to correct the warped version of liberalism that is today’s orthodoxy.” There were two events in the 1960s and 1970s which resulted in these different factions of the Old Left coming together to reinvent themselves as “conservatives.” The first was when the USSR became officially anti-Zionist, aligning with the Arab states against Western powers and their ally, Israel. In the 1967 war, for instance, the Soviets were on the side of the Arabs, whom they had been arming and advising, and represented them in cease-fire negotiations with the U.S.A. The 1967 war – and the fear of another “Holocaust” – reinvigorated the ethno-religious roots of these proto-neocons, who realized that they cared less about their ideology than they did their identity and that the future of their ethno-state depended on the U.S.A. The second was when the “New Left” displaced the “Old Left” in the Democratic Party. The New Left cared less about the “hard” economic and social doctrines that animated the Old Left, and more about “soft” cultural issues such as diversity, pluralism, and tolerance. The candidacies of the anti-war George McGovern and the race-baiting Jesse Jackson disgusted these proto-neocons, who longed for the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. In addition, and probably most importantly, the New Left was pro-Soviet and anti-Zionist, expressing solidarity not just with the Palestinians against Israel, but with any Third-World revolutionaries against capitalist and imperialist powers. Reacting to Israel’s geopolitical situation and their loss of influence in the Democratic Party, the Old Left defected, so to speak, to the Old Right, where they immediately clashed with existing conservatives (now known as “paleo-conservatives,” i.e. “old conservatives”). These “neo-conservatives” (i.e. “new conservatives”) did not want to assimilate to the Old Right, but rather to deconstruct and redefine it into a host for their preexisting center-left, social-democratic, anti-Communist, pro-Zionist ideologies. The “paleo” and “neo” prefixes should indicate which side won. While paleocons were traditionalists, neocons were ideologues. Paleocons believed, in Russell Kirk’s phrase, that they had a responsibility “to preserve a particular people, living in a particular place during a particular time.” Neocons, like right-thinking Marxists, believed in carrying certain principles – or “propositions” – to their logical conclusions, no matter the human cost. Paleocons believed, again in Kirk’s phrase, in maintaining “custom, convention, and continuity.” Neocons believed in the moral abstractions devised by “classical liberals” during the Enlightenment, “free minds, free markets, and free people.” Paleocons did not have detailed “policy prescriptions,” as did the neocons. As Kirk put it, conservatism was properly an “adjective,” describing “a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the social order,” and was thus “the negation of ideology.” By contrast, the “think tank,” an industrialized ivory tower which manufactures opinions like a factory manufactures widgets, is a distinctly neocon invention. Neocons were “painfully deficient,” according to Kirk,” in the understanding of the human condition and in the apprehension of the accumulated wisdom of our civilization,” instead preferring “to engage in ideological sloganizing.” The paleocons never really stood a chance against this Catilinarian conspiracy. The neocons were far shrewder and fiercer than the paleocons, who were, chiefly, scholarly and gentlemanly types unprepared for the neocons’ verbal brawls and power grabs. “Eager for place and preferment and power, skillful at intrigue, ready to exclude from office any persons who might not be counted upon as faithful to the neo-conservative ideology,” Russell Kirk summed up and put down the neocons. “Often, backstairs, they have seemed more eager to frustrate their allies than to confute those presumptive adversaries the liberals and radicals.” Indeed, this network of neocon pundits, politicos, professors, and outright plutocrats has remade the Right into something unrecognizable – a cartoonish band of free marketeers like Jack Kemp and Paul Ryan, armchair militarists like John Bolton and Dick Cheny, religious fundamentalists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and amoral “consultants” like Karl Rove and Steve Schmidt (with the “traditionalist” paleocons blackened as “extremists.”) The fate of M.E. Bradford exemplifies the neocon takeover. In 1980, President Ronald Reagan announced that he was nominating Bradford, a professor of English at the University of Dallas, to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities. The neocons, who had long-coveted the cultural influence of the NEH, organized a smear campaign against Bradford, calling him a “neo-Confederate” for identifying with his Southern heritage and criticizing Abraham Lincoln. The neocon columnist George Will was particularly snide and insincere in his attacks on Bradford. “I’m through,” Bradford told his friend and colleague, Thomas H. Landess. “If they want it that bad to do something like this, then let them have it.” Ultimately, Bill Bennett, a Democrat who was friends with Bradford’s detractors, was appointed instead. Paul Gottfried, who also lost an academic position at due to neocon lobbying, described the neocons as “ideologically motivated pursuers of power” who “have never made a secret of their fear and loathing of that part of the Right which they cannot reshape or convert to their views.” The Lincolnian Revolution and the Renegade Neo-ConservativesBefore the neocons politicized American history, the Declaration of Independence was simply a significant, symbolic historical document with a clear textual and contextual meaning, to be studied by students and scholars as the culminating point of the American Revolution and honored by the public on the Fourth of July. Now it is endlessly “interpreted” and “reinterpreted” to divine mystical new “meanings,” as if it were the Talmud. The Straussian Harry V. Jaffa, repackaging the anti-slavery rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln for post-WWII Americans, invented what has become the kosher meaning of the Declaration, and by extension, the meaning of America herself – because countries cannot simply be “givens” anymore, but must be “propositions.” The neocon interpretation of the Declaration is, in fact, derivative of Lincoln’s own reinterpretation, and thus descended from what the biographer Edgar Lee Masters called “Hebraic-Puritanism” – the Manichaean, Millenarian, and “Old Testament” worldview of the Puritans. By the time of the Civil War, this Hebraic-Puritan mission had been secularized, but had (and has) lost none of its crusading zeal. Accordingly, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” quite literally sanctifies the U.S.A. and demonizes its enemies: the abolitionist author sees “the glory of the coming of the Lord” in the Union military (“burnished rows of steel” are a “fiery gospel”), which is marching forward to “trample out the grapes of wrath,” “crush the serpent,” “sift out the hearts of men,” and “die to make men free.” According to Lincoln, the meaning of the Declaration is contained in the sacred words – “the Proposition” – that “all men are created equal.” From this sentence fragment, which he reinterpreted at once obtusely and abstrusely, the modern-day Lincolnites (i.e. neocons) have deduced, no less obtusely and abstrusely, what they call “the American Creed,” which proceeds as follows:
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay never mentioned any of the above in the Federalist. It is as if they never took any courses at Hillsdale College or PragerU! All that matters to the doctrinaire neocons is that one sentence fragment from the second paragraph – no need to read the rest of the document, and really no need to learn about the historical context of the Colonial Crisis, the Continental Congresses, the Revolutionary War, or really to learn about any American history for that matter. Once “the Proposition” is understood, all other truths are, mystically, revealed. The neocons are always lecturing about the “lessons” and “laws” of history, like right-thinking Marxists, yet it seems that the only history they know is this sole sentence fragment from the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, the “New Colossus” poem on the Statute of Liberty, and, of course, Munich and Auschwitz. The neocon reinterpretation of the Declaration of Independence is a sort of historical fundamentalism – a simplistic and sentimental civic religion (or, to use a term more familiar to these Marxists, “false consciousness”) with little to no relation to human experience or even human reason. “They repeat, as the fundamental maxim of our civil policy, that all men are born free and equal, and quote from our Declaration of Independence,” Chancellor Harper explained as early as 1838. “It is not the first time I have had occasion to observe that men may repeat with the utmost confidence, some maxim or sentimental phrase, as self-evident or admitted truth, which is palpably false, or to which, upon examination, it will be found that they attached no definite idea.” It is indeed simplistic and sentimental: all men are most certainly not created equal. As individuals, human beings each have different capacities and characteristics determined by their genetic inheritance. For instance, cognitive ability, or “IQ,” has been demonstrated to be strongly predictive of life outcomes, and while not entirely heritable, still strongly heritable. Even the idea of “equality of opportunity” (as opposed to “equality of outcome”) is an illusion: just as a footrace in which some runners started ahead and some behind would not be considered “fair,” true “equal opportunity” requires an equal starting point for everyone, or “equality of outcome.” Yet in spite of the empirical untruth of the proposition “that all men are created equal,” Americans are seriously expected to live and die by it simply because Thomas Jefferson, writing under the heady influence of the Enlightenment, pronounced it so. Yet Jefferson was a member of a committee tasked with writing the first draft for a public statement of a resolution that the Continental Congress had already passed, not a Promethean lawgiver. According to John C. Calhoun, “that all men are born free and equal” was “a proposition which originated in a hypothetical truism, but which, as now expressed and now understood, is the most false and dangerous of all political errors.” Calhoun continued that he was “not afraid to attack error, however deeply it may be entrenched, or however widely extended, whenever it becomes my duty to do so,” and proceeded to refute this heresy in every particular: Taking the proposition literally (it is in that sense it is understood), there is not a word of truth in it. It begins with “all men are born,” which is utterly untrue. Men are not born. Infants are born. They grow to be men. And concludes with asserting that they are born “free and equal,” which is not less false. They are not born free. While infants they are incapable of freedom, being destitute alike of the capacity of thinking and acting, without which there can be no freedom. Besides, they are necessarily born subject to their parents, and remain so among all people, savage and civilized, until the development of the intellect and physical capacity enables them to take care of themselves. They grow to all the freedom of which the condition in which they were born permits, by growing to be men. Nor is it less false that they are born “equal.” They are not so in any sense in which it can be regarded; and thus, as I have asserted, there is not a word of truth in the whole proposition, as expressed and generally understood. All of the above is indeed contrary to the American civic religion of absolute individualism and egalitarianism, as preached by the Clintons and the Bushes, or the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, or Samantha Bee and John Oliver, or Jon Meacham and Eric Foner, or “The West Wing” and “The Newsroom,” but an “appeal to authority” is a logical fallacy (especially an appeal to such pathetic authorities). In what way was Calhoun wrong? “The act was, in fact, but a formal and solemn annunciation to the world that the colonies had ceased to be dependent communities, and had become free and independent States,” Calhoun wrote in his 1850 masterpiece. Even John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, a proto-Lincolnite, quintessential Hebraic-Puritan, and one of Calhoun’s nemeses, did not disagree with the South Carolinian on this question. “The Declaration of Independence, in its primary import, was merely an occasional state paper,” Adams said on July 4th, 1821. “It was a solemn exposition to the world, of the causes which had compelled the people of a small portion of the British Empire, to cast off their allegiance and renounce the protection of the British king, and to dissolve their social connection with the British people.” This politicization of the Declaration of Independence can be traced back to the Missouri Crisis. When Southerners pointed out that the Congress had no constitutional authority to prohibit slavery in a new State, Northerners like Sen. Jonathan Roberts of Pennsylvania and Sen. David L. Morril of New Hampshire pointed out that slavery itself seemed to violate the so-called “equality clause” in the Declaration. Sen. Rufus King of New York, in particular, incensed Southerners with a forceful speech arguing that slavery was a violation of “the law of nature” and “the law of God,” which were, as he put it, one and the same. According to King, this law was “established by the Creator, which has existed from the beginning, extends over the whole globe, is everywhere, and at all times binding upon mankind: a law which applies to nations, because their members are still men; a law which is the foundation of all constitutional, conventional, and civil laws, none of which are valid if contrary to the law of nature; that according to this law all men are born free.” In his Second Inaugural Address (written by the neocon Michael Gerson, in consultation with other neocons and even the Israeli official Nathan Sharansky), Dubya took this same ideology and extended it globally – a perfect example of what Burke, in reference to the Jacobins, called an “armed doctrine.” Rep. John Tyler of Virginia (who would be President in 1841) argued that the phrase “all men are created equal” was a fallacy: Gentlemen have exultingly read to us the Declaration of Independence. From it they have gathered that which, as an abstract truth, I am not disposed to deny: “That all men are, by nature, equally free, sovereign, and independent.” Can this proposition admit of application to a state of society? Does not this fallacy meet you in every walk of life? Distinctions will exist. Virtue and vice, wealth and poverty, industry and idleness, constitute so many barriers, which human power cannot break down, and which will ever prevent us from carrying into operation, in extenso, this great principle. Take this principle and preach it up to the monarchs of the world; will they descend from their lofty eminences, or raise mankind to a level with themselves? No, sir, the principle, although lovely and beautiful, cannot obliterate those distinctions in society which society itself engenders and gives birth to. Liberty and equality are often captivating sounds; but they often captivate to destroy. England had her Jack Cades and Levelers. Look, I pray you, to revolutionary France. These were the principles of that day. Mark the consequences! Murder and rapine stalked over the land, and the guillotine, the work, too, of a philanthropist of that day, was the sad monument of this fallacy. Liberty and equality was proclaimed by Robespierre and his associates, at the very moment that they were enriching the fields of France with the blood of her citizens. Nor was the doctrine confined to political institutions, but, advancing with a daring step, fought even with the Creator, and mocked at the immutable truth of religion. Turn your eyes also to South America. The throne of the Incas was washed from under them by the tide which flowed in from Spain. The native of the forest was deprived of his freedom, and made to toil for his new master. Then, too, sprung up a philanthropist, who claimed for the Indian an equal rank in creation with the inhabitants of Spain. His claim was admitted, and Africa mourned over the mistake, and her deepest curses may still be uttered against the memory of Las Casas. “Although I do not believe that this principle of equality can be applied to man in extenso, yet I love it, and admire it as an abstract truth, and will carry it into operation whensover I can,” explained Tyler. “If we cannot raise the black man up to the level with the white – and that we have not the constitutional power to do so none here have denied – let us raise, at least, the white man up to this level,” he concluded. “Extend an equality of rights to the people of Missouri.” Sen. William Pinkney of Maryland argued that it was self-evident that the phrase “all men are created equal” was never meant to be taken so literally: Of the Declaration of Independence, which has also been quoted in support of the perilous doctrines now urged upon us, I need not now speak at large. The self-evident truths announced in the Declaration of Independence are not truths at all, if taken literally; and the practical conclusions contained in the same passage of that declaration prove that they were never to be so received According to Pinkney, “the infinite perfectibility of man and his institutions, and the resolution of everything into a state of nature,” as preached by King, were “sentiments the most destructive, which, if not borrowed from, are identical with, the worst visions of the political philosophy of France when all the elements of discord and misrule were let loose upon that devoted nation.” Sen. William Smith of South Carolina condemned King’s near-religious belief in natural law and natural rights, or “the religion of nature,” as a recipe for a revolution: This religion of nature, and the application of it, which the gentleman has recommended for your consideration, is the very system which gave rise to that state of things which so lately convulsed Europe to its center. This was the religion preached up in the French Convention in the days of Robespierre. They, like the gentleman from New York, were not bound by written systems. They were too limited for the great projects of revolution. They presented in their gallery the Goddess of Liberty, draped in transparencies… declared the laws of nature to be the laws of God and of religion, by which all men were born free and equal. This theory intoxicated the nation, and the reform in their government, which was their great object, was lost in the designs of aspiring ambition; and the fairest portion of that nation was sacrificed on its altar. Robespierre paved his way with blood, until the nation sickened at the sight. In the midst of those scenes of horror and dismay, Napoleon, for the pious purpose of securing the liberty, and promoting the tranquility of the nation, assumed the reins of government, and in his career would have prostrated all Europe, if all Europe had not combined to prostrate him.
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