Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Is the Party of Lincoln Now the Party of Lee?
This year will mark my 30th anniversary as a syndicated columnist. During these years, I have written more words than I would have preferred about race. But race is America’s great moral stain and unending challenge. I’ve tackled school choice, affirmative action, transracial adoption, crime, police conduct, family structure, poverty, free enterprise zones, and more.
Some of those columns took the Left to task for maliciously accusing Republicans of racism. An email from the list serve “Journolist” for example, an online forum of left-leaning journalists started in 2007, plotted strategy for how to defend Barack Obama from the taint of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Spencer Ackerman advised “If the right forces us to either defend Wright or tear him down . . . we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them – Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares – and call them racists.”
A chapter in one of my books, Do-Gooders, detailed the shameless calumnies deployed against, among others, George W. Bush. Bush was tarred as sympathetic to the Klan because a vicious lynching happened while he was governor of Texas – though he signed the death warrant for one of the killers and demonstrated great sensitivity on racial issues throughout his career. Examples of such cynical and libelous tactics are unfortunately abundant.
That said, in the era of Trump, I stand slack-jawed as some on the right live down to the worst calumnies conjured from the Left’s febrile imagination. That the entire Republican Party has not risen up, en masse, to renounce Donald Trump’s comments about Charlottesville is a disgrace. Nancy Pelosi’s response to the attack on Steve Scalise showed far more decency than did Trump’s to Charlottesville. She denounced the would-be assassin and proclaimed that Republicans and Democrats were members of one American family.
Contra Donald Trump, the Hitler Youth wannabees who paraded through Charlottesville last Friday night are not sincere Republicans falsely accused of being Nazis. They are the real thing. It should have been the most basic act of American civic hygiene to condemn and anathematize them. (Some Republicans did.) But since it seems we must state the obvious: The “Unite The Right” organizers, including alt-right leaders Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler, advertised their demonstration with Nazi-style imagery, carried torches reminiscent of Nuremberg and Klan rallies, and chanted “Blood and soil” and “The Jews will not replace us.” The next day, they clashed with counter-protesters and one of them committed a savage act of ISIS-style terrorism, crashing his car into a crowd. He murdered one person and wounded 19 others, five critically.
Yet Trump’s Monday condemnation, if you can call it that, was tardy, stilted, and almost immediately withdrawn by his fiery Tuesday press conference. True to his pattern of peddling “alternative facts,” Trump insisted that “not all of those people were supremacists by any stretch . . . you take a look . . . the night before, they were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.” I’ve taken a look. How does “the Jews will not replace us” convey benevolence? Sorry, but people of goodwill who oppose removing the statue of Lee were not in attendance last weekend. Any honorable opponent of iconoclasm would have been repelled by the fascist flags, the slogans, the military gear, and the murderous violence.
I am unsentimental about statues of Robert E. Lee myself. He made war on this country to preserve one of the worst forms of abuse known to man. During the Civil War, when he captured black Union soldiers, he re-enslaved them. When it came time for prisoner exchanges, Lee refused to exchange African American Union soldiers for Confederate prisoners. General Ulysses Grant responded that in that case, there would be no further prisoner exchanges.
President Trump’s lawyer has circulated an apologia for the Confederate general, arguing that there was no difference between Lee and George Washington. “Both saved America,” he wrote. Here’s what Grant concluded about Lee 130 years ago: “ . . . He fought long and valiantly and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people have ever fought, and for which there was the least excuse.” Those who oppose toppling statues should at least bear the burden of suggesting alternatives – such as erecting monuments to Frederick Douglass (“who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more”).
The Republican Party under Donald Trump has regressed from the party of Lincoln to the party of Lee (who, as a historical matter, is actually a skeleton in the Democrats’ closet). Hanging racism around Republican necks is the fulfillment of the dearest wish of the Left, and unless powerfully rebutted by however many decent Republicans still exist, will discredit the party for years to come.
Published in Politics
I agree 100%. What an excellent post.
No. Any other questions?
Then why are you helping them?
The decision whether the statues should remain or be removed should be left up to the communities the statues are located in, not to people from elsewhere judging complicated historical figures by today’s worldview and deciding its a huge problem right this minute.
We all agree Nazis are scum…….what about the politicians and officials in Va that allowed the two groups to interact in Charlottesville, directly causing the fight and deaths? They should be condemned as well.
The Party of Lincoln should continue to embrace ” …with malice toward none, and charity for all …”
Or is that now unfashionable among the elite? Or just too hard?
On a positive note for you, you’ll never see another republican in the white house if you get your way.
BTW, Nazis are the worst, m’kay.
You got there before me, Gary. One of her best. Congrats to Ms. Charen for thirty years of excellence!
Must we become the American Taliban?
I’m curious why, in the entire piece above, this brief sentence fragment is the only mention of the leftist fascists who came armed with baseball bats and clubs and injured several people on Saturday. You call them merely “counter-protesters,” as if they were just nice people who objected to Nazis. As if they were just ancillary to the incident.
While you tut-tut Trump for not forcefully calling out Nazis by name, you cover for the fascists by neglecting to call them out for what they are: violent fascist thugs who oppose one of the founding principles of our nation, the freedom of speech, and are well-known for and have a long history of doing serious injury to people who say things they don’t like. “Counter-protesters” is what our pro-fascist media and pro-fascist Democrat Party has been calling them. Once again, you are helping the left.
It’s not her party and she’ll cry if she wants to.
Winston Churchill (you know, the nazi?) said Lee was “one of the noblest Americans who ever lived.” Charles Francis Adams (you may have heard of his grandfather John Quincy) who was a Union officer eulogized Lee as “one of our sacred men” whom we “wish to resemble”. So stop it with the Lee bashing. He was a man with contradictions yes but also a great man. Even if you don’t think so, a lot of people do and aren’t racist or nazis for thinking so. It’s complicated.
They would rather embrace the Alt-Left.
“Ctrl-Left,” please.
Because there is no blood libel libelous enough when trump is involved.
Are you unable to defend yourself from charges of racism that you must engage in destruction of history to prove your bona fides?
wasn’t a lincoln memorial defaced in Chicago yesterday?
Maybe the people defending the Lee statue saw it coming…
Don’t worry Mona.
Congressman Steve Cohen from Tennessee states that he will introduce articles of impeachment against President Trump based on Charlottesville stating, “President Trump has failed the presidential test of moral leadership.”
This congressman previously compared Mike Pence to Goebbels stating, “They say (Obamacare is) a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels. You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie and eventually, people believe it. Like blood libel. That’s the same kind of thing. The Germans said enough about the Jews and the people believed it and you had the Holocaust. You tell a lie over and over again. And we’ve heard on this floor, government takeover of health care.”
He also said, “…we take an oath to support the country against all enemies foreign and domestic, and these are the domestic enemies (Tea Party Republicans).”
In 2008, when black ministers passed out fliers that read, “Steve Cohen and the JEWS HATE Jesus.” Cohen’s Democrat Party opponent refused to denounce the fliers. Some black ministers caused a stir against Cohen because he supported federal hate crimes legislation that included gay rights. His opponent stated that the all-white Tennessee congressional delegation needs “diversity.” His opponent received support from many of the same members of Congress who denied Congressman Cohen membership in the Congressional Black Caucus.
In this congressional contest involving early Obama-supporter Steve Cohen, Obama shamefully remained silent against anti-semitism, racism, and blatant sexism. Should Obama have been impeached for this?
When you always use race as a weapon, then race really isn’t much of a weapon anymore.
Yeehaw!
That is quite a calumny.
The Republican Party is not the party of racist identity politics; that would be the Democrat Party, taken to a new level by Barack Hussein Obama and continued to this day.
The Nazis, and KKK, and white supremacists have no conservative bones in their bodies. Why do you and others on the right continue to insist that they are part of the right. They are as much a part of the right as Bruce Jenner is a woman. As some in the South like to say of ridiculous arguments: that dog don’t hunt.
How many Republicans have publicly shouted out to the racists and said you guys tell it like it is and you are what we stand for?
It was burned…..and VICE news published a piece calling for Mount Rushmore to be blown up. Al Sharpton said on Charlie Rose that the Jefferson Memorial is an “insult to his family”. So yeah, let’s give them what they want on the Confederate memorials and I’m sure that will satisfy the mob.
It would help to explain who Spencer Ackerman is.
He wrote the words Mona quotes when, as a writer for the Washington Independent and Wired, he posted on the infamous “Journolist.”
As James Taranto wrote in 2010:
Indeed, Ackerman should have been run out of the profession. According to Wikipedia, “A spokesman for Wired said that Ackerman would keep his job, saying ‘We hired Spencer Ackerman for his well-informed national security reporting and fully support it. Anyone with access to Google can discover his political leanings.'”
But of course, his political leanings were not the issue. The issue was…well, see the sentences I highlighted in bold, above. Ackerman’s proposal would have been unethical even for an opinion journalist, but he was supposed to be a straight news reporter.
As of April 2017, Ackerman was still working in journalism – as the national security editor for the Guardian. The Journolist remains one of the most interesting views into the world of the left-leaning, fake-news MSM. The Journolist affair and Climategate should have been bigger scandals. It’s amazing that the left can get away with the exposure of their collusion, lies, and unethical behavior, with virtually no consequences.
After all the Confederate statues are down, it will be time to take down all the Union statues as well. None of those people believed in same sex marriage, after all, or transgendered freedom to use the facilities of their choice, or unfettered availability of abortion. Some of them smoked. In public! All writings and records will need to be gone over with a fine-tooth comb to detect the slightest deviation from current orthodoxy. And there’s no point in preserving one-half of a battlefield: since no mention can ever be made of one side, monuments to the other will only serve to confuse future generations. There are books and plays to be burned, works of art to be destroyed … we are going to be busy for quite some time!
If there were some magic incantation that would banish Richard Spenser to the hottest corner of Hell — or his mother’s basement, whichever is further — I’d be standing on a street corner bellowing it at the top of my lungs. There isn’t though. The pronouncements of our leaders (who can scarcely be believed when they are talking about things that do matter) aren’t going to be able to fix this by turning a phrase.
You are so wrong-not on facts, but motives. Lee was a great man, and he is revered here in the South. There were blacks that fought on our side, and to deny their voice in history is to deny the incredible complication slavery forced on us.
The Confederacy used black spies to infiltrate the North and report on activities useful to the War (or Wah-ah as we say it Down He-yah). When these spies were caught, they received significantly harsher treatment because of their race-executions more brutal than reserved for “normal” spies. They were the original “traitors to their race”, but I digress . . .
Lee could not trust Union black soldiers because they took sides (the wrong one, in his opinion), so it’s no surprise he would set the policy and Grant responded predictably. We should acknowledge that both sides treated their POWs with contempt, but Grant’s magnanimous gesture at Lee’s surrender was worthy of a gentleman. It was Lincoln’s assassination that precipitated the animosity that exists to this day.
The brutal treatment by the occupying forces (this is how the South viewed it) created (IMHO) the bigotry that exists to this day-now almost exclusively on the left. The neo-Nazis and white supremacists are such a minority of what we think and believe down here, that we wish we could stop them from using our heritage (Confederate battle flag, statues to our warriors) to keep their hate alive.
Trump is right. When we start to destroy our past (like it or not), we leave a gap in history for the revisionists to fill. We also create an atmosphere where these groups that had almost vanished from our nation can flourish.
In no way do I condone their violence, but Trump was right. There is equal violence from the left, and it is their rent-a-mob that keeps the peaceful folks on both sides from getting together for a dialogue.
By the way, it is starting to look like the mayor of Charlottesville (betcha he’s a Dem) is the perp who told the police to stand down. The police are trained to keep opposing protest groups apart.
Was it “Jews will not take our place” or “you will not take our place”? I’ve seen both versions reported. Or were the nazis all from New York and chanting “youse will not take our place”? It’s an interesting question since most of the anti-Jewish sentiment today comes from the left.
A quote from Orwell’s 1984 keeps coming to mind this past week.
The video here settles it once and for all. They chanted “Jews will not replace us.”
I am a Jew, and if I had the the power they think I have I would replace those protestors with Hispanics, Asians, and Arabs.
Last night in Chicago, this happened.
Maybe being the party of Lincoln won’t be good enough.
The Guardian? I’d rather go with WaPo and “you”. Although it is a close call which one to believe.
The main reason I did not vote for Trump (I didn’t vote for Rodham, either) is that I feared he would cause irreparable damage to conservatism. I feared that he would provide so much with which the left could tar the right. These fears had more to do with his sub-par intellect, his lack of discipline, his questionable morals, his abusive tendencies, and his lack of a filter between his brain and mouth.
Despite the warnings that Trump was playing footsie with white nationalists, I never suspected that he would be circumspect when it came to denouncing a disturbing, violent rally of racists, nor that he would call Confederate statues “beautiful.” Of course, many of them are, from an artistic perspective, but that is just not something a president in 2017 should say – especially after an incident like the one in Charlottesville.
I do approve of some of what Trump has done and advocated. But at what point does it become more harm than good? He’s like a contractor who is doing a great job updating your terribly outdated kitchen on one side of the house, and on the other, he’s damaging the foundation such that the house is in danger of falling down.
Why not?
Did you watch the video?