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Ronald Reagan on Charlottesville
pic.twitter.com/p5CDsnzZHp
— The Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) August 14, 2017
Thirty-some years ago, the fortieth president delivered 50 seconds of remarks from which the forty-fifth could learn something. (As best I can recall, this was an ad-lib, not part of the President’s prepared text that day. He is speaking from the heart.)
Published in General
What were the abuses that justified the Southern Secession?
You can’t possibly believe that’s what I suggested.
The personal objections of some to slavery may be a source of historical consolation if one wants to say the details of the Peculiar Institution were nuanced and full of shades of grey, but when the institution is legal and has the force of law, the personal objections irrelevant – until the point when they gain sufficient traction to evolve the culture. If I was a black man in the 1870s living in a victorious South I might not have been content to wait.
Local governments removing statues share blame, mayors who allow demonstrations about them share it, people who use the demonstrations to create media events and the media itself share most of the blame as do police who stand by. Now of all of these which are actual threats to our freedom and freedoms, or freedom of speech, or freedom of association? These tiny deranged minorities or the organized forces backed by powerful wealthy interests, a major party and most of the media? I don’t know what if anything the President should have done or said, when he should have said it or what he knew when? He’s not Reagan and he wasn’t speaking to the NAACP, he’d not be invited by the radicals who run that place now, and if he were he’d probably make an appropriate comment as well. My view is that the President should focus on the big stuff, but obviously that doesn’t work either. The country is unhinged so he has to really game out everything he says and try to avoid off the cuff remarks. That isn’t going to happen.
I agree with Condi. The movement to remove Confederate monuments across the country is wrongheaded. It is why it is such a divisive issue. And the City Council’s around the South would not be taking this issue up on their own. It is forced upon them by racist agitators looking for a fight.
The only thing that I would quibble with Condi about, would be her differentiation of history and heritage. She said it is our history, but not our heritage. Collectively I agree with that statement. However, for many Southerners, it is their heritage as well. And they don’t cotton too much to the neo Yankee carpetbaggers coming down into their birthplace wreaking havoc once again.
You know, one could even suggest that the monument removers should just … stop being offended!
It is physics. To each and every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. They only become rallying points for ‘neo-nazis’ after the Left’s gestapo forces bully and intimidate local city councils into spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of public funds to remove statuary that has been in place for almost 100 years.
Compare and contrast this response … “they probably have to go” … (that Rich Lowry also posits at NRO today) with that of Neville Chamberlain. Or negotiating with a terrorist like Kim Jong Un.
Laura Ingraham made a chilling observation on mobs gathering and pulling down and destroying statues of Confederate generals – essentially how long before mobs show up to Monticello or Mount Vernon? I would add the Jefferson Memorial or the Washington Monument in D.C. How long before Leftists attempt to change the name of the nation’s capital or the State of Washington? What about Mark Twain’s home since he used that awful word in Huckleberry Finn? Where does this end?
I don’t care where one is on the politics of whether statues or other memorials to certain historical figures need to stay or be removed, there has to be police presence to preserve this heritage before mobs gather to tear them down. What happened in North Carolina was lawless, despicable and does not bode well for other historical sites.
Trumps’s initial remarks were appropriate in the context of violent leftist riots in the recent months as well as the behavior of the antifa elements in Charlottesville.
I rest my case: (see this article in the Daily Wire):
Peter, President Trump’s initial comments were much stronger than President Reagan’s and it simply was not enough. I am not surprised that it was not enough for the left, but i was very discouraged when it was not enough for the journalists on the right.
Further, when President Trump came out specifically called out the KKK and other far right groups, that was still not enough. Some people will never accept this president.
I mean, you might as well tear down anything with Washington on it. He was a slave owner, and ran a plantation in the south, after all.
That is the overall grand plan.
That’s kind of like saying Japan had to attack Pearl Harbor to prevent getting Nuked.
I think you have Yeti’s gist. And, of course, if banks incite bank robbery, we must abolish them as well. I’m more of a “put them in jail for a long, long time” kind of guy. A dozen or so from each belligerent faction. How many antifa and blm have managed to spend real time locked up?
This is an oversimplification, to say the least. Our founders put together a document specfically designed to tell the world the reason for the separation. The sucessionishs did not do this. Furthermore, Jefferson wanted to abolish slavery in our Declaration. He had to give that up because of the South. And it was those Southern States, wanting to hang on to slavery, that brought on the Civil War.