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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
As CNN pointed out, the violence from the Left is mainstream Left, not Alt-Left.
Let me turn the question around: Why do it? What purpose does it serve, particularly at this sensitive time? It’s just throwing gasoline on the fire.
Sometimes it’s best for presidents to make a statement and then leave it at that. Trump should have done that after the “do-over.”
Speaking of statues that have to come down …
This is the Alma Mater Statue at the University of Illinois. Can you see the travesty? Alma Mater means “nurturing mother.” The Alma Mater is depicted as a woman, implying that only women can be mothers!
Brave Chambana SWJs: your duty is clear! Alma Mater delenda est!
Yawn…can we talk about terrorism now? Here’s another attack that didn’t happen in the US. Charlottesville was a riot that got out of hand. The solution is law and order.
Did you?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/white-nationalists-rally-on-uva-campus-chant-you-will-not-replace-us/2017/08/12/7f7e72f2-7f16-11e7-b2b1-aeba62854dfa_video.html?utm_term=.f7752b1c85f1
CNN’s own “political analyst” made this statement on television:
“The heart of the problem is the way many of us were taught American history. American history is not all glorious. I love John to death, I couldn’t disagree more about George Washington. George Washington was a slave owner. We need to call slave owners out for what they are. Whether we think they were protecting American freedom or not. He wasn’t protecting my freedom. I wasn’t someone – my ancestors weren’t deemed human beings to him. To me, I don’t care if it’s a George Washington statue or a Thomas Jefferson statue or a Robert E. Lee statue, they all need to come down…I’m calling out white supremacy for what it is. And sometimes, what it is, John, are blind spots. Sometimes what it is, is not acknowledging this country was built upon a very violent past that resulted in the death and the raping and the killing of my ancestors. I’m not going to allow us to say it’s okay for Robert E. Lee but not a George Washington. We need to call it what it is.”
So good plan here, use this as an opportunity to bash Trump and let the mob have it’s way. I’m suuuure they will stop with Confederate memorials since SJW’s and Antifa are such intellectually driven movements. Sheeeeze!!!
It serves the purpose of protecting what you concede to be beautiful statues from the barbarian mob.
Yeah, who saw that coming? If you give Antifa a cookie…
Option 1: Condemn only Antifa morons – He’s a NAZI!
Option 2: Condemn only the NAZI morons – See! Antifa is really just standing up to real NAZI’s! Like Trump…
Option 3: Condemn both for being 400-some-odd morons who want to replay the Leninists vs the Nazis in the Wiemar Republic – Oh my God, he’s a NAZI! (only this time, by both the left and the right)
Innocent little “counter-protesters” . . . aw, they’re just the cutest, ain’t they?
The video that you posted here is irrelevant. It has been established that at some point, the protestors chanted in unison “Jews will not replace us.” All you have posted is some video of some other chant at a different time during the same rally. It does not contradict in any way the video that I linked to, which is of much higher quality.
Now, I would like to know how you think the video that you linked to contradicts my video. It does not. Unless there is some video out there of the protestors chanting “We didn’t mean what we said about the Jews,” there is nothing that you can post that casts these barbarian Whites in a positive light.
Now, can you explain to me the thought process that was going through your mind when you posted the above link?
Just wait til AntiFa hijacks an airliner and crashes it into the RNC HQ. Anti-Trumper’s will express “concern” about out of control left-wing violence.
I wouldn’t give anti-Trumpers that much credit.
That is so well said. I agree with many of Trump’s positions, lower taxes, smaller government, judges, etc. The problem is Trump himself. He is destroying the Republican Party. I think that the only way for the Republican Party to save itself is to disavow Trump.
I haven’t been following this soap opera as closely as many others. But what I’ve read reported that the President first condemned all the detestable groups which went there for a fight — white supremacists, Alt- racists, Antifa, and BLM — and later condemned white supremacists specifically. Then he defended the few people who supposedly were there just to stop angry mobs from removing/destroying a memorial without having to debate the decision democratically. I see nothing wrong in any of that.
I don’t doubt that there were racist chants and plenty of other despicable behavior there. But considering how few news organizations can be bothered to show thousands upon thousands of peaceful protesters in the March For Life each year while wailing for weeks about some fringe racists — without a drop of ink spent on over a century of Democrat policies hurting black and hispanic communities — it stretches the imagination to believe the past week’s reports have not been selective. Is it unbelievable that a handful of good people would show up to defend a good cause despite the racist morons whom the cameras adore?
Claire Berlinski — no fan of Trump — shared a video on Ricochet years ago demonstrating how artificial many videos on protests and mobs are. News viewers would only see some young men throwing rocks at soldiers, not the Western reporters encouraging them to do so in staged performances while other locals calmly sat just yards away. That’s how much I trust a video in isolation. What we don’t see might also be part of the story.
More to the point, is it wrong for the President to point out that a cause can be just even when the defenders most amenable to yellow journalism and unscrupulous Democrats are scum?
Perhaps Trump was mistaken in that observation about non-racists also in attendance. Were his earlier statements disturbing to you before then? Escape the capitol bubble. I don’t like Trump, but this incessant hysteria and repeated smears of any who agree with anything he does is very tiresome.
George Washington wrote the following in his later years:
He also wrote:
Of course, there was another way to give at least some slaves their freedom, and that was through their owner’s providing for their emancipation in his will. This is what Washington did:
Was Washington always a compassionate slave owner? No. He did have disobedient slaves whipped. But this was at a time when white indentured servants were similarly mistreated.
It is ignorant, though, to say that Washington did not consider slaves to be human.
They’d probably say “That’s not the real AntiFa, but a perversion of a peaceful ideology.”
Statues on federal land? If not, then let the state and municipal leaders do the protecting.
What Nazis, KKK, white supremacists, and Bruce Jenner all have in common is that they claim to be part of the right. Someone needs to publicly correct the misconceptions that these people peddle.
Donald Trump was elected Preisdent as a Republican, which would make him the effectively highest profile leader of the right in America, and does little to nothing to correct those statements. Why doesn’t he solve this problem?
While I don’t have a part in this. From the outside, I don’t think either video means one of you doesn’t hate Nazis.
I note that Trump never won a state until his native New York, late in the process. Only due to a splintered field, and an antiquated rule of “plurality takes all” delegates did Trump win the nomination. At the risk of being indelicate, by analogy, does a home invader have title to the home that he or she invaded? No. Trump was nominated only because of our flawed nominating process, and because the leaders of the Republican Party would not stand up to him. He is the usurper, not the leader of the Republican Party, and the Republican Party is in the process of disavowing him.
That’s like a hooker telling you she’s saving herself for marriage.
I must comment on this: Of course the Guardian is not too be trusted all of the time. But if they have a video which clearly states that those bigots were crying that “Jews will not replace us”, it doesn’t matter who took the video. The supposed question should be answered: These bigots are swine, and should NEVER be defended. And I am not Jewish!
Sure. I don’t have a high degree of confidence in the accuracy of any videos from Vice. The link that I posted (from WaPo) asserts that Unite the Right had settled on “you will not replace us” as their official slogan. Perhaps some of them went off message and began to substitute “Jews” for “you”, but I find it doubtful that they would have aligned themselves with the anti-Jewish left in this manner. But all things are possible.
I disagree with you on so many issues, but, damn, you can turn a phrase!
What difference does it make?
If a group holds a public gathering to exclaim,” Look at us! We’re Nazi’s!” my opinion of them is pretty cemented right then. They could have chanted, “We love puppies!” and I still wouldn’t hold them in higher regard.
Huh. I though he won the Republican Party nomination because he got more delegates, won more primary contests, and received more popular votes than the others.
He got more delegates due to “plurality takes all” rules. He didn’t win any state until New York. If we had had proportionate voting, he would not have won.
Unfortunately, they don’t appear to have the equipment to do so.
If by “equipment” you mean “gonads”, I agree.
That’s what I meant.