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Andrew Johnson, Democrat, set the stage for today’s racial strife

September 9, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Democrat Andrew Johnson was one of America’s worst presidents, for he set the stage for the racial strife that today’s Democrats encourage and exploit.

Democrat President Andrew Johnson ReconstructionYesterday afternoon, I joined a friend for a dog walking expedition. As we were walking along, we talked about the racial divisions the Left has stoked in America.

“This is all Andrew Johnson’s fault,” I said.

“Wah?” asked my companion.

“Yeah, Andrew Johnson. The moment that Johnson, a Democrat, was sworn in as president after Lincoln’s assassination, he set about undoing the racial component of Reconstruction. The military hung onto its strength in the South, which is why there are so many military bases still operating there. Politically, though, Johnson and his administration backed away from every effort to reform Southern culture. This meant that the losers in the war got to continue their previous behavior of denying blacks all civil rights. In other words, Johnson enabled the defeated Southerners to reduce blacks to a perfect simulacrum of slavery, only this was arguably even worse than actual slavery, for it denied blacks the food and shelter (no matter how meager) that slave owners once provided, while adding in chronic racial terrorism. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Lefties on Parade Tagged With: Andrew Johnson, Barack Obama, Civil War, Democrat Presidents, James Buchanan, Jim Crow, Jimmy Carter, Reconstruction, Woodrow Wilson, Worst Presidents

Jack Phillips, Public Accommodation, Monopolies, and Social Media

June 12, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Thinking about Jack Phillips’ martyrdom at the hands of the QueerBorg leads me to a proposal for ending Leftist social media and search engine monopolies.

Jack Phillips Monopolies Tech Giants Social Media Censorship Public AccommodationJack Phillips, the Colorado baker, is rapidly being forced into martyrdom thanks to rabid Leftists intent upon making him an example of the need to bow down before the LGBTQIYKWIMAITYD+ monolith that has, in merely eleven years, come to dominate America’s politics. Indeed, for those of you familiar with Star Trek : The Next Generation, the LGBTQWYSIWUG+ monolith is the Borg: It’s a collectivist hive that has as its motto “We are the QueerBorg. Lower your shields and surrender your rights. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.”

To me, it’s patently clear that Phillips, one of many bakers in his community, has a First Amendment right to exercise his religion freely and to choose those with whom he wants to associate. Anyone is welcome to come into his store and buy his products without discrimination. The Colorado government, though, is trying to coerce him into hanging with people whose values are antithetical to his (and that’s true even if we’re not talking about religious values) and to force him to use his artistic talents in the service of those same people.

The QueerBorg, to advance its demand that all surrender before it, is trying to frame its battle as a civil rights battle and to liken Phillips’ refusal to bake a cake to the closed doors a black man would face in the Jim Crow South when he tried to rent a room for the night or dine in a restaurant. The way in which Congress broke that monopoly of closed doors was through the notion of “public accommodation,” something it enshrined in Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The relevant language states as follows: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Free speech, GBLT, Lefties on Parade Tagged With: Civil Rights Act of 1964, facebook, First Amendment, Free speech, Google, Green Book, Jack Phillips, Jim Crow, Marketplace of Ideas, Monopolies, Pinterest, Public Accommodations, Social Media, Twitter

The Bookworm Beat 8/31/17 — another “Leftist insanity” edition

August 31, 2017 by Bookworm 24 Comments

There’s so much Leftist insanity that one Bookworm Beat wasn’t enough to contain it all. It takes two posts to grasp what’s really going on.

Leftist Insanity

An un-retouched photo of Lynn Yaeger, the fashion writer who criticized Melania Trump’s shoes.

The craven FBI refuses to stop Leftist insanity. Although the mainstream media is silent, the conservative media is appropriately outraged that James Comey had already decided in April or May of 2016, in the very early stages of the investigation into Hillary’s national security violations, to clear her of wrongdoing. That is, his decision came about far in advance of the evidence — and nobody in the FBI called him on it.

I’m disgusted but not surprised that the FBI’s employees would do nothing about their head’s manifest violation of his duty to Americans. You see, I already predicted this outcome in early April 2016:

No matter how principled they’d like to think they are, most middle-class people will turn a blind eye to corruption in their midst rather than run the risk of being unable to pay their mortgage or fund all of the other payments necessary to support a middle-class lifestyle. They don’t think of themselves as dishonest or complicit in dishonesty. They think of themselves as cautious people who aren’t going to risk their children’s future for some grand-standing that, rather than resulting in applause, could leave them unemployed and desperate.

This episode from my past makes me doubt very strongly that Hillary Clinton will be indicted. I know that the rumor mill keeps saying that FBI agents, from Comey on down, will quit if Loretta Lynch lets Hillary walk. Some of the FBI agents whispering this to friendly reporters may even believe that they’ll quit.

Mostly, though, this is a bluff. Why? Because the people talking about quitting are middle-class people with mortgages, and school fees, and insurance, and all the other expenses that keep us in the middle-class living up to our own expectations. If Hillary really does walk, 99% of those “I’ll quit if she’s not indicted” agents will manage, very quickly and easily, to convince themselves to stay in their jobs, and get their salaries and pensions.

Was Jim Crow a cruel but necessary reality? David P. Goldman couldn’t writing something boring if he tried. His most recent post riffs off the fact that the North allowed the South the illusion of victory for almost 100 years after the Civil War. According to Goldman, this was an unpleasant necessity required to protect America against foreign threats and analogizes it to the West’s necessary decision to absorb former Nazis to protect against the Communist threat.

I’m not familiar enough with America’s foreign policy in the years between the Civil War and WWI to judge critically what Goldman wrote, but it’s an interesting argument. Certainly America needed its Southern fighters in WWI and WWII. Indeed, we still need them today.

Some Leftist Jews are catching on to the Left’s antisemitism. Lately, I’ve been totally obnoxious on Facebook. Every time my Facebook friends goes off about neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and antisemitism, I’ve stated in bold language that I don’t take them seriously because they’ve completely ignored the fact that, for well over a decade now, I’ve made them aware of the vile, pervasive, normalized antisemitism in the Democrat party and, especially, on American campuses.

Thankfully, a few Leftist Jews are figuring out that their Leftist cohorts are not feeling the love. At Forward, a Leftist Jewish publication, Benyamin Moalem says what I’ve said forever, which is that antisemitism (and racism) on the right consists of a few bottom feeders, while antisemitism on the Left is large, mainstream, and very dangerous. After discussing Roger Waters (who revels in antisemitic imagery the Nazis would have loved) and the aggressive antisemitism on campuses, Moalem has this to say: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Lefties on Parade Tagged With: African-Americans, Antifa, Antisemitism, Charlottesville, Cold War, College, Comey, Europe, Ha'aretz, Jews, Jim Crow, Leftist Antisemitism, Leftist Insanity, Leftist Jews, Lynn Yaeger, Millennials, Nazis, Ole Miss, Pope Frances, Racism, University of Mississippi

#BoycottTheBoycotters: Searchable database of businesses boycotting Breitbart

February 9, 2017 by Bookworm 3 Comments

#BoycottTheBoycottersIn my first #BoycottingTheBoycotters post, making people aware that there are businesses that have decided they’re too good for you, the half of America who support a president who wants to stop the Obama anomaly and take America all the way back to 2005 or 1995, only 194 businesses were involved. It was therefore easy enough to make a little chart that anybody could glance at in a second.

In only two months, that number went up by almost 500%, with almost 1,000 businesses chiming in on a new Jim Crow — one that is, in some ways, worse than the old Jim Crow because the businesses are joining in voluntarily rather than being coerced by bigoted governments. Given the chart’s size, people have been requesting a searchable chart.

Those who want a searchable chart can of course go to the original chart that the boycotters proudly assembled. Or, if you prefer, I put up another chart that you can view and search, although you cannot edit. All of you need to do is use your own web browser’s search function (usually Ctrl-F). As is true for the PDFs I’ve been pasting in my posts, those businesses that have recently volunteered to boycott half their potential customer base are in red.

There’s nothing magic about my chart. It’s just mine, and not theirs.

Photo by twicepix

Filed Under: Economics, Lefties on Parade Tagged With: #BoycottTheBoycotters, Boycotts, Breitbart, Jim Crow

#BoycottTheBoycotters — it’s Jim Crow when merchants boycott customers

February 8, 2017 by Bookworm 14 Comments

#BoycottTheBoycottersExactly two months ago, I put up my first post arguing that consumers shouldn’t stop at boycotting Kellogg’s, which said that Breitbart’s support for Donald Trump was so awful they were going to stop advertising there. Instead, I argued, consumers should also boycott all of the purveyors of goods or services, not just Kellogg’s, who refused to advertise at Breitbart’s. When I started this campaign, which I called #BoycottTheBoycotters, 193 companies had pledged to do everything within their power to ensure that their goods and services would no longer appear at Breitbart. In intervening two months, another 743 companies have agreed that you are so awful because you support Trump that they don’t want you to buy their goods and services.

If you think about it, the last time that Americans merchants decreed that certain people were so awful merchants couldn’t be expected to sell to or serve them was during the Jim Crow era. Blacks were not welcome in hotels, at restaurants, in markets, on buses, in movie theaters, or any other places that Southern racists — or weak-minded people bullied by Southern racists — determined should be “whites only.” Sixty years later, we have almost one thousand companies announcing loud and clear that half the American population is so evil and hate-filled that they, like those Southern blacks, must be denied access to the marketplace.

I don’t know about you, but I find that pretty darn offensive. I don’t want to give my money to people who think I’m so evil that they won’t even touch my money.

But you know what? It’s bigger than that. I’m damn tired of a world in which Democrats keep trying to fix every one into little boxes. During the Democrats’ racism heyday, from Andrew Jackson’s ferocious support for slavery to the South’s efforts to marginalize and economically destroy blacks, Democrats consistently broke people down into derogatory racial groups. Heck,they even devised derogatory sub-racial groups. It’s only been fifty years since Democrats were as offended by “mulattos” and “quadroons” as they were by full-blooded “nigras.”

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Lefties on Parade Tagged With: #BoycottTheBoycotters, 84 Lumber, Boycotts, Breitbart Boycott, Invanka, Jim Crow, Kelloggs, Virtue Signalling

I’m screaming here: #BoycottTheBoycotters who hate conservatives

February 5, 2017 by Bookworm 9 Comments

#BoycottTheBoycottersI’m not sure that I’m hollering this loudly enough: Republicans and other conservatives need to #BoycottTheBoycotters: That is, they need to stop giving money to the rapidly growing list of businesses, both at home and abroad, that have taken the pledge to stop advertising at Breitbart based upon the claim that Breitbart is racist, bigoted, and evil.

You know what that decision means? It means that all of these companies have decided that, by extension, you, mainstream people who reject the MSM’s endless lies, hysteria, and hate, and who turn to an up-and-coming media presence that eschews that garbage, are also racist, bigoted, and all sorts of evil. This has nothing to do with whether the boycott is actually affecting Breitbart. It has everything to do with the fact that, if the Left is going to politicize everything, we need to start politicizing everything right back.

Please remember: The Left has turned the NFL into a political football (yes, pun intended), first with the disgraceful “take a knee” campaign and, just recently, with the foul attacks against Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, and the whole Patriots team, simply because Brady and Belichick are friends with President Trump. Again, it doesn’t matter if these attacks affect Brady, Belichick, and the Patriots. What matters is that these attacks target you. If it’s not going to kill you, don’t watch the Super Bowl tomorrow. Your viewing decision won’t affect the game’s outcome, but it might tell the NFL that you matter just as much as the hate-filled Progressives.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Economics, Lefties on Parade Tagged With: #BoycottTheBoycotters, Audi, Bill Belichick, Boycotts, Breitbart Boycott, Budweiser, Ivanka Trump, Jim Crow, New England Patriots, Nieman Marcus, Nordstrom, Sleeping Giants, Super Bowl, Tom Brady

#BoycottTheBoycotters: The Left Never Rests

December 26, 2016 by Bookworm 25 Comments

Boycott

#BoycottTheBoycotters continues to be an urgent battle cry. While you were busy enjoying the holidays with your family, Progressives were equally busy, targeting more businesses to join with them in saying that American conservatives are so beyond the pale that American businesses should no longer desire them as customers. As I’ve argued before, this is the new Jim Crow and we conservatives are the new blacks.

And please don’t think that this is just a marginal movement that we can ignore without consequence. Kurt Schlichter gets just how relentless the Left is and knows that this is a battle that the last man standing wins:

Understand that they will not stop. They will not change. We must therefore defeat them, because otherwise there will be no peace. As with so much in life, Dolph Lundgren shows us the way, though in this case liberals are less a macho, tough prizefighter named “Rocky” than a 23 year-old gender-fluid Oberlin grad named “Fussy” who lives in Brooklyn off of his/her/xes dad’s money while trying to be a non-rhyming poet.

We must keep fighting. We must never give an inch, never back down, never give up. We must respond to every attack upon us, large or small, with overwhelming firepower. But defense is not enough – we must go on offense, seize the initiative, and aggressively destroy anything that will aid liberals in their long-term goal of rendering us silenced and subservient.

The Democratic Party? Smash it.

The mainstream media? Crush it.

Academia? Nuke it ‘til it glows, preferably from orbit.

It’s the only way to be sure.

[snip]

Fight. Every time, in every way.

Some jerk mouths off to you on Twitter? Smack ‘em back until they are a quivering mass of whiny liberal Jell-O.

Some company decides to take sides against us? Boycott their crappy products and let them know it. Hey Kellogg’s, hope your liberal constituency enjoys its diabetes. And support the companies that reject liberal scams – fly Delta!

Some mainstream media liar lies? Carpet bomb the comments and unsubscribe to his dying paper.

Oh, and some spazz starts shrieking at you and your kids? Use appropriate force within the bounds of the self-defense laws in your state, of course, to protect yourself and your family.

I would add the following to Kurt’s list: “Some corporation refuses to place advertisements at Breitbart, a mainline, major conservative news outlet, because its support for America’s new president proves that the outlet and its readers are racist, bigoted, homophobic, hate-filled idiots? Boycott the hell out of those companies and show them that there is no profit in America for businesses that repeat Jim Crow antics by boycotting customers at the Democrats’ behest.”

My latest #BoycottTheBoycotters chart shows that, while the move to marginalize American conservatives in the marketplace is slowing a bit, the Progressives fascists were still able to add almost 30 companies to the chart — and some of them are quite big, such as IAMs dog food or Goretex (click on image to enlarge):
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Lefties on Parade Tagged With: #BoycottTheBoycotters, Breitbart, Jim Crow

#BoycottTheBoycotters: Organizing against the new Jim Crow

December 16, 2016 by Bookworm 15 Comments

#BoycottTheBoycottersI have to admit to being baffled that more people are not angry and joining with me in #BoycottingTheBoycotters. Instead, they seem disturbingly comfortable with the fact that a growing list of businesses at home and abroad have determined that 62,000,000 Americans have placed themselves so far beyond the pale that these businesses will no longer accept their custom and their money. To that end, they’ve promised, not only to pull ads from Breitbart, but to pull ads from any other site the mentally decompensating Progressives deem “racist” or “bigoted.”

As far as I’m concerned, we’re looking at the new Jim Crow. In this 21st century variation on a Democrat theme, Trump supporters, based upon the vile libel that Donald Trump is a racist, are cast in the role of American blacks. The boycotting businesses, meanwhile, are precisely replicating those Democrat-run businesses in the Jim Crow South who would not serve blacks.

To get a sense of the speed with which this Jim Crow initiative is growing, check out the latest chart I made which highlights in red the businesses that have gone Jim Crow in just three days (click on the chart to enlarge). I’m willing to bet that you’ve done business with several of these companies in the last few years. (I mean, Elsevier, for goodness sakes, which is one of the largest information sites in the world, and Kaplan Test Prep, which all of us, or are children, have used.)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Lefties on Parade Tagged With: #BoycottTheBoycotters, Brietbart, Jim Crow, Kellogg's Boycott

#BoycottTheBoycotters: Conservatives are the new blacks in Jim Crow America

December 13, 2016 by Bookworm 6 Comments

#BoycottTheBoycottersThe number of American and overseas businesses joining in the boycott against Breitbart and other so-called “racist” outlets continues to grow, so it’s important that we continue to #BoycottTheBoycotters. What these companies are doing is the same thing that businesses in the South did: At the behest of ignorant, hate-filled people, they are closing the door to customers they deem unworthy. The merchants’ voluntary participation in commercial apartheid greatly contributed to the Jim Crow South’s perniciousness and longevity. This has to stop and we need to move hard to make it stop.

As many of you have pointed out, there are other businesses waiting to take the place of those who have announced war on half of America. But here’s the thing: Unless we stop giving our money to those businesses that have decided we’re the new American blacks — “you can’t sit in our restaurants, buy our goods, stay in our hotels, use our services” — those business that are better, more liberal, and more open-minded aren’t going to have the opportunity to move in and move up. Any change has to start with us.

Here’s the latest chart of businesses that have declared that America is a Jim Crow nation and that conservatives are the new blacks. The businesses highlighted in yellow — more than 30 — are those that have joined the boycott against ordinary Americans in just the past two days! (Click on image to enlarge.)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Lefties on Parade Tagged With: #BoycottTheBoycotters, Jim Crow

Destroying the libelous claim that “Trump supporters are racist”

March 28, 2016 by Bookworm 27 Comments

Illegal immigrants crossing into USReaders know that I hold no brief for Donald Trump, whom I view as a media-created Big Government demagogue, whose politics have half-tones of both Left and Right ideology, but whose dominant top-note is pure self-interest.  The fact that I dislike Trump, though, does not mean that I dislike or disrespect the majority Americans who support him.  I understand the frustration driving them, although I believe that they’ve put their faith in a false Messiah. Few things, therefore, make me go more ballistic than having Leftists smugly claim that the majority of Trump supporters are racist white men.

It’s true that the majority of Trump supporters are white men, although a lot of other people support him too.  But about that racist bit?  Let’s dig into that more deeply, because it’s a slander by which Leftists manage to avoid looking at their own appalling racism.

Let’s start with racism on the Right side of America’s political spectrum because the media and academia are so excited about tracking it.  It’s true that there are small pockets of old-fashioned white supremacists still wandering around America.  These are people who openly express their belief that any racial or religious groups other than white Christians are inferior and should be isolated, banished, or even killed.

Thankfully, in addition to being disgusting in attitude, these white supremacists are small in number.  Out of an American population of roughly 318,000,000, the high estimate for “hate groups” is only 892 such groups.  This number comes from the Southern Poverty Law Center which memorably, and entirely inaccurately, characterized the entire Tea Party movement as a “hate” group.

While it loves counting “hate” groups, the SPLC is coy about how big these groups are.  I’d be very surprised if any of the listed groups boasted a thousand active members. I suspect most have a few hundred at best.  Still, even if you assume that high of 1,000 active members, you’re still looking at fewer than 1,000,000 hardcore, old-fashioned KKK-type racists — or less than three-tenths of one percent of the American population.

The Left likes to claim that these groups vote Republican because Republican candidates keep “dog whistling” racism.  This is a ludicrous claim to make given that the field, before being winnowed down, had blacks, East Asians, and Hispanics.  It’s the Democrats who have no one to offer other than old white people.  Still, the Democrats sneeringly ask, if Republicans aren’t selling racism, why do the David Duke’s of this world vote Republican?  You have to go back a few decades to figure out the story.

Once upon a time, right up until the early 1960s, the Democrat Party was the openly racist party (more on that later).  However, when the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and LBJ’s electoral strategy (more on that later too) meant that the Democrat Party started courting blacks, rather than actively discriminating against them, the white supremacist groups needed to find a new political home.

After 1964, government could no longer be the supremacists’ ally — and do remember that it was Southern government that gave Jim Crow its control in the South.  The supremacists therefore concluded that their best bet was small government.  They reasoned that small government would mean less welfare, and less welfare would harm the black population (I’ll get to that later, too).  That’s why so many such groups came out of the woodwork when Ronald Reagan was elected — and became even more excited when Ron Paul, a solid libertarian, tied himself to the Republican party.  With white supremacists having discovered the virtues of limited government, the Republican Party unwillingly had its minute population of fringe racists and the Democrats had their narrative:  “Republicans are racist.”

What’s really funny, of course, is that the really racist political party in America is the Democrat Party.  Worse, among Democrats, the racism isn’t confined to a minute fringe (less than 3/10 of 1% out of the American population) as the case with the Republicans.  Instead, institutional racism is front and center in every Democrat Party policy.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: African-Americans, Immigration, ISIS, Islam, Jihad, Race Tagged With: African-Americans, American Blacks, Condie Rice, Democrat Racism, Donald Trump, Herman Cain, Jim Crow, Racism, White Supremacists

Novels that changed the way Americans viewed slavery and the South *UPDATED*

July 28, 2015 by Bookworm 56 Comments

Uncle-Toms-CabinKen Burns’ epic Civil War documentary came out in 1990. That was during my years as a lawyer in a very big firm and as a single gal enjoying life. My lifestyle then matters because it explains why, back in 1990, I managed to watch only the first episode of the 9-part series.

Now that we’ve been to some of the Civil War’s most famous battlefields — Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Bull Run — my husband and I are taking the time, finally, to watch the Civil War series in full. There’s something about having seen the battlefields, even though they are now green and peaceful places, that makes the series reach me at a visceral level in a way that could never have happened when I was a flighty young thing. The series moves me deeply.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin appears in the very first episode, of course. As Lincoln allegedly said to the author of this phenomenal bestseller, “So you’re little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”

If he did indeed say it, it was not an exaggeration. While the abolitionist movement had been agitating for around one hundred years by the time the war started, it was Stowe’s book that took the abolitionists from being a fringe religious movement to one that galvanized the general public. In the North, slavery was suddenly no longer just a peripheral issue that troubled people’s consciences; instead, it was a central issue that drove the South out of the union (“How dare those arrogant Yankees tell us what to do?”), triggering the biggest conflagration in American history.

I don’t know how many of you have read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but I have. It is not a literary masterpiece. Stowe’s prose is the modern equivalent of a dime store novel — but that’s completely irrelevant. What matters is that she is a writer of marvelous narrative power. The characters may be hackneyed, but they are vivid and the slaves’ travails reach out and grab you by the throat. This is especially true for an audience that wasn’t made callous by Jerry Springer and Oprah, and that wasn’t exposed to every image known to man thanks to television and the internet. Mid-19th century Americans carried their true emotions quite close to the surface.

Ironically enough, just as Stowe’s book initiated the fervor that led to a war that left more than 600,000 American dead in its wake, I think it was another woman’s book that helped keep Jim Crow alive by creating across America a passion for the romance and gallantry of the old South. I speak, of course, of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, which was published in 1936, and then kept alive for generations of Americans thanks to one of the best movies ever made in Hollywood.

I first read GWTW when I was 12, and probably read it annually for the next six or seven years. I read so often because, at least to my adolescent self, it was one of the greatest, and most tragic. romances ever written.

Scarlett O’Hara is a deeply flawed character who ought to be despicable because of her grasping, greedy, self-centered ways. That she is not — that she is peculiarly compelling and that her valiant spirit causes us to feel for her even at her worst — makes her something of a metaphor for the pre-war South itself, at least as Mitchell wrote both the character and the culture. While Southern culture may have been wedded, selfishly, to an utterly evil institution, Mitchell brought to that society the same fire, charm, courage that Scarlett had herself.  Her characterization of a lost time touched many people who still had enough moral center to condemn slavery.

Scarlett’s travails — which are also the travails of a war-torn South (and it’s worth remembering that, barring the foray into Gettysburg and some skirmishes out West, Union soil and towns saw no battles) and a Reconstruction South — inevitably elicit sympathy. How can they not? Even though Scarlett and the South were in the wrong, their sufferings were very real and their attempts to cope with that suffering had a peculiar courage.

Moreover, Margaret Mitchell, unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe, was a good writer. GWTW may not be great literature, but it’s damn good writing, so the reader inevitably begins to empathize with the lead characters — and the South itself is the true lead in this grand tragedy.

GWTW taught a generation of Americans who had no memory of the actual war that the South was gracious, genteel, mannered, gallant, valiant, brave and, when defeated, as heroic in defeat as it was during the War. (Ken Burns’ Civil War makes it very clear that the South had a much better military than did the North. A few brilliant generals with a fairly small cadre of committed troops saw victories far in excess of what their materiels and numbers should have allowed.)

autant en emporte le ventgone with the wind1939réal : Victor FlemingVivien LeighHattie Mc DanielCollection Christophel

autant en emporte le ventgone with the wind1939réal : Victor FlemingVivien LeighHattie Mc DanielCollection Christophel

GWTW also taught a generation of Americans who had little contact with black people that blacks were a fundamentally childish race and therefore were always at their best when they had good whites to look up to and take care of them. Certainly, when I was a child, the romanticized world of GWTW’s beloved house slaves (especially Mammy) seemed infinitely preferable to the realities of South Central LA, Watts, or other major American slums. My immature mind concluded that anyone with half a brain could see that it was nicer to wear clean, bright clothes, and scold spoiled Southern heiresses while lacing them tightly than it was to live in a modern American housing development.

It was actually quite a while before I was able to understand that slavery is so intrinsically evil, and so at odds with core concepts of human individualism and liberty, that it can never be accounted a good thing, no matter how superficially pleasant it may appear. I think it was this eventual understanding — when I cast off the last shackles of “Gone-With-The-Wind-ness” — that also enabled me to understand that a welfare state is just another form of slavery.

And when I say “welfare state,” please understand that I am not referring to a moral country that cares for its old and weak, its helpless and frail. Instead, I am referring to a country that systematically tells vast swaths of its citizens that they are better off living the most marginal existence possible at the government’s expense, than they would be were they to strike out on their own. The only difference in modern slavery is that the slaves are instructed not to work (“white privilege owes you”), than being instructed to work (“you owe white privilege”). Either way, the new slaves have been deprived of the ability to learn the skills and make the decisions that are the hallmarks of a free people.

I’m a more bookish person than most, but I am quite convinced that Margaret Mitchell’s powerful, romantic, tragic, gilded view of the South before, during, and after the Civil War allowed Jim Crow and other depredations against blacks to continue long after they should have died a natural death. Just as Stowe brought a generation of Americans to realize the horrors of slavery, Mitchell made a whole new generation see the beauty of a society built upon slaves’ backs and to believe that this society was as good for the slaves as it was for their masters.

Your opinion?

UPDATE:  Patrick O’Hannigan offers a typically insightful and thoughtful challenge to my post, arguing that a much more powerful book, by a much greater American writer, helped offset any message she created.

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Gone With The Wind, GWTW, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jim Crow, Ken Burns, Scarlett O'Hara, Slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin

The Left is wrong about AZ’s proposed law, but religious freedom supporters might have to boycott the Super Bowl to make that point

February 26, 2014 by Bookworm 7 Comments

Gay marriage wedding cake photo by Giovanni Dall'Orto, 26-1-2008.I’ve mentioned gay marriage once already today as the latest non-issue to roil the left even as the world around us crumbles (a la the 1930s), the American military is reduced (a la the 1930s), and tyrannies are rattling their sabres (a la the 1930s).  Overnight, the same liberal who have been remarkably quiet about the Obamacare debacle, uprisings in Ukraine and Venezuela, the flat economy, etc., have found a new cause:  Arizona, they scream, is poised to enact the next generation of Jim Crow laws, in the form of Senate Bill 1062, an amendment to Arizona’s existing Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

This Jim Crow claim, which gained instant traction amongst America’s Progressive class, is flat-out wrong as a matter of law and fact.  Nevertheless, presumably in the foolish hope that it can appease the Left into backing off from its ongoing effort to destroy football, the Super Bowl committee is using economic blackmail against Gov. Jan Brewer, promising to pull the upcoming Super Bowl from Arizona if she signs the bill.  To the extent that the Left is using the Super Bowl as a cudgel against religious freedom, it may be time for supporters of traditional marriage to use their own economic pressure against the Super Bowl.

Better people than I have examined the proposed law, so I won’t rehash it.  Without addressing the proposed law’s specifics, though, it’s still possible to show the falsity of the Jim Crow comparison.

First, no mainstream American religion has ever had racial discrimination as a core religious doctrine.  All traditional religions, however, have heterosexual marriage as a central tenet of the faith.  To the extent Southern racists claimed Christianity as their justification for separating the races, all that they could point to was their own twisted interpretations of the Bible, a document that never concerned itself with racial discrimination.

Heterosexual marriage, however, is something quite different.  The Catholic Church elevates it to one of the seven sacraments, and all other traditional religions enshrine marriage between a man and a woman (or several women).  What this means is that the Southerners in times past who asserted their right to Jim Crow laws had no protected First Amendment right.  The contrary is true today:  Those people who will benefit from the proposed Arizona law have a strong First Amendment right that cannot simply be thrown aside.

Second, the Jim Crow laws were actual laws, relying on the state’s coercive power.  In other words, they represented government action discriminating against American citizens.  The Arizona law, however, does  not advocate any type of segregation or discrimination.  It simply says that Arizona’s government cannot use economic coercion, not to mention the threat of imprisonment, to force Arizona citizens to engage in religiously offensive activity.  There are also safeguards is the act:  The protesting citizen must show that he is acting consistently with his faith and that he has a track record of being faithful.

Jim Crow laws meant that the government was discriminatory and coercive in a matter that did not implicate religion.  By contrast, the proposed Arizona law narrows the range of situations in which the government can be discriminatory and coercive against people of faith.

Third, the Jim Crow laws mandated that Southern citizens refrain from providing goods, services, or jobs to blacks, or they mandated that those goods, services, or jobs, if provided, must be provided in the most limited, demeaning way possible.  The proposed Arizona law not only does not mandate any conduct, it’s also extremely narrow in scope.  It says only that genuinely religious people cannot be forced to participate actively in a specific event that clashes with their faith.  It’s worth keeping in mind here, as Eidolon so beautifully explained, that up until just a few years ago, every mainstream Democrat politician in America (including Obama and the Clintons) rejected gay marriage, a position consistent with all known human history.

Super Bowl ArizonaI have no doubt that Gov. Brewer is going to cave to Leftist pressure because of the economic risk that the Super Bowl will pull out of Arizona.  That seems to be the ultimate leverage, right?  But supporters of traditional marriage — or supporters of a religious individual’s right not to participate in a ceremony that mocks his beliefs — actually have an even bigger stick than the Super Bowl.  Just as the Super Bowl can boycott Arizona, believers in religious freedom can boycott the Super Bowl.  I mean, it’s a great game, but sometimes we have to subordinate pleasure to principle.

Filed Under: Marriage, Religion Tagged With: Arizona, Gay marriage, Jim Crow, Religious Freedom, Super Bowl

Obamacare: Come join the welfare state

October 13, 2013 by Bookworm 9 Comments

When I read John McWhorter’s superb Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, I learned something I hadn’t known before. Outside of the Jim Crow South, in the years leading up to the Civil Rights movement, black people were very slowly, but still steadily, moving into the middle class. They had stable nuclear families, with working fathers. The Civil Rights movement should have accelerated this trend by removing barriers to black employment.

But something happened at the same time as the Civil Rights movement, and that “something” was Johnson’s Great Society. Burdened by white guilt, and holding welfare checks, well-meaning whites fanned out through black communities and told black men to stop working. Black men had been slaves for too long, they said, and it was time for the government to pay them back. When the men spoke of pride, and manliness, and responsibility, they were told not to let their pride stand in the way of getting what was “owed” them.

The result was inevitable: black men quickly became useful only for sex and procreation. The government stepped in as the family breadwinner. Women with children didn’t have to rely on a man who might do everything from drinking and beating her to leaving the toilet seat up, and men were able to get sex without the burden of fatherhood. Blacks became the only minority group in America that was perpetually mired in the lowest societal echelons. This was not the case for other, equally reviled groups, such as Irish Catholics, Jews, Italians, Asians, or the first generation of Hispanics. (It is somewhat true for the current generation of Hispanics, who have also been seduced into believing that the state should be the pater familias.) Asians who immigrated after the 1960s probably avoided the welfare trap only because they came from Communist countries and had experienced a surfeit of government “largesse.”

If you want to see the end result of the hard-driving government effort to place blacks on welfare, you need only see this video (which I call “All attitude; no gratitude”):

Now that I’ve given you some background into the scourge of a government’s unconstrained push to get citizens onto welfare, you are ready to read Zombie’s article about the advice the San Francisco Comical, er, Chronicle, offers to people trying to figure out how to deal with Obamacare.  It’s time to be very, very afraid for America.

Filed Under: Welfare Tagged With: Civil Rights Movement, Great Society, Immigrants, Jim Crow, ObamaCare, Welfare

The Democrats’ “Taming of the Shrew” strategy for American blacks

September 21, 2013 by Bookworm 15 Comments

kkk-rally

It’s all good, guys.  I’ve finally figured out what’s been going on.  We’ve just been reading history dead wrong.  The operating historic premise is that the KKK and the Democrat party parted ways during the Civil Rights movement.  When the KKK guys realized that northern Democrats who supported civil rights now owned the Democrat party, they walked out en masse and became Republicans.  That way, they were free to indulge openly in their hateful racism.

What really happened is something much more subtle.  The KKK guys became sleepers in the Democrat party.  Instead of attacking blacks head on with burning crosses and lynchings, they decided to use a mainstream political party as the engine by which they destroyed blacks.  As Petruchio did in The Taming of the Shrew, they set out to kill the blacks with kindness.  The degradation of American blacks under fifty years of ostensibly well-meaning Democrat social and economic policies isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

(Bear with me here, ’cause I’m on a roll.)

Despite the horrors of the Jim Crow South, not to mention the pervasive racism across America, blacks in America were actually showing steady, albeit slow, upward mobility.  When the government left them alone, blacks started colleges, grew businesses, got married, and had families.  Although they were poorer than whites, had more out-of-wedlock children than whites, and had more run-ins with the law than whites, they were moving towards a middle class model.  Undoubtedly, this trend could have continued and even accelerated with the passage of civil rights laws that banned discrimination.  (And it’s worth remember that the Civil Rights Act didn’t require affirmative federal action; it only banned discrimination.)

Frederick Douglas Do Nothing With Us

Whenever they were left alone, blacks in America proved that Frederick Douglas was right all along when he insisted that the best thing that America could do for blacks would be to leave them alone.

Here’s the interesting thing, though.  The moment that the Civil Rights movement seemed to have defeated Jim Crow, the Democrat party swung into action — and refused to leave blacks alone.  It gave them affirmative action, which meant that, for fifty years, blacks have been placed in jobs and schools where they cannot perform at the same level as other people (both whites and minorities) who achieved those positions on merit.  This gave blacks an inferiority complex, and created in non-blacks the false belief that blacks cannot achieve without a sizable handicap.

The Democrat party also did everything it could to ensure that blacks got government handouts, whether or not they wanted them.  Instead of being free people, blacks became junkies dependent on ostensibly “free” money.  It sapped initiative and pride.

Worse, welfare made men unnecessary.  Black women got a better deal from Uncle Sam, especially if they had lots of children.  Black men were reduced to the status of sperm donors.  (For many women, men who don’t bring in money are burdensome creatures who leave dirty laundry on the floor and forget to put down the toilet seat.)

With the new welfare status quo, sex for black men was easy, but their entire sense of their manhood was reduced to a biological level dependent on a single organ in their bodies.  They were no longer judged by their accomplishments, their earning ability, their status as community role models, or as helpmates and companion.  Black men were denied the opportunity to develop honor, loyalty, and morality.  Instead, instead, in the hierarchical world of men (and all men are, to a greater or lesser extent, hierarchical in how they view the world), the only measurements by which to judge black men was to look for the biggest gun, whether the man carried it gun in a holster or tuck it into his Calvin Klein whitey-tighties.

So we have a generation of black men who have been cheated of an education and a well-fitting job, whose children and family no longer need them as support, and whose lives revolve around their firing power.  It was inevitable that these socially and economically disenfranchised — men disenfranchised by a Democrat-enacted policy — would create a culture centered on themselves and their instant gratification.  The engines for achieving these ends have been alcohol, sex, drugs, and violence.  These are manly pursuits untempered by the steadying influence of women and children or by a culture that values men.

And what did the Democrats do when black men, as a result of Democrat policies, devolved into a lowest-common denominator culture?  They “forgave” them.  Instead of exhorting them to rise up, to embrace morality, decency, family, stability, work, accomplishments, and education, the Democrats assured the black men that what they were doing was okay.  “Oh, black men,” said the Democrats, “you are not masters of your destiny and captains of your fate.  You are the helpless flotsam and jetsam floating about aimlessly on the great ocean of Republican racism.  You can’t do anything about your lives and therefore you are not responsible for the harm you do, whether to yourselves, your families, your children, your community, or your country.”

It is a terrible thing that Democrats have done to blacks — and all ostensibly in the name of love.

And that’s when I realized what’s really been going on for all these decades:  the Democrats have achieved what the KKK set out to do.  Just like Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, they have succeeded in killing American blacks by kindness:

Taming_of_the_shrew

That is, to watch her, as we watch these kites
That bate and beat and will not be obedient.
She ate no meat today, nor none shall eat.
Last night she slept not, nor tonight she shall not.
As with the meat, some undeservèd fault
I’ll find about the making of the bed,
And here I’ll fling the pillow, there the bolster,
This way the coverlet, another way the sheets.
Ay, and amid this hurly I intend
That all is done in reverend care of her.
And, in conclusion, she shall watch all night,
And if she chance to nod I’ll rail and brawl,
And with the clamor keep her still awake.
This is a way to kill a wife with kindness,
And thus I’ll curb her mad and headstrong humor.
He that knows better how to tame a shrew,
Now let him speak; ’tis charity to show.
The Taming of the Shrew is a delightful and witty comedy.  We know that Kate and Petruchio are two headstrong people who must inevitably love one another, and we know too that Kate has lost control of herself and must be brought to heel, not just for her family’s well-being, but for her own.  That’s why we forgive the way Petruchio browbeats her under the guise of love and solicitude.
American blacks, however, are not Kate:  They are not women in the 16th century who must marry to survive and who must therefore be tamed.  It is unforgivable that the Democrat party has sought to kill them by kindness, not to uplift them and bring them to full equality, but instead to degrade and demoralize them.  This is not the act of a political party that welcomes blacks to the brotherhood of man.  This is the act of people who loathe blacks and want to ensure their continued poverty and debasement — which was pretty much the KKK’s plan from the get-go.

 

Filed Under: African-Americans, Democrats Tagged With: African-Americans, Blacks, Civil Rights, Democrats, Frederick Douglas, Jim Crow, Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

Elbert Guillory explains why he is a Republican — and they are words that EVERY American should hear

June 18, 2013 by Bookworm 9 Comments

I’ve already admitted to my crush on Elbert Guillory, a crush that formed when he was still a Democrat, although he must already have been planning to leave that party.  My political crush has just deepened into a full-blown, out-and-out case of political passion.  If you haven’t yet watched this short video Guillory made to explain why he switched parties, you must.  I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it’s one of the most important videos I’ve ever seen.  The only thing that saddens me about it is that it won’t be run on MSNBC, or ABC, or CBS, or NBC, or NPR, or on any other major media outlet.  I think everyone should see this video, no matter their race, creed, country of national origin, or gender identity.  It’s that good:

I don’t know about you, but I’m still cheering.

Filed Under: African-Americans, Race Tagged With: African-Americans, Blacks, Democrats, Elbert Guillory, Jim Crow, Racism, Republicans

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