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
Ah, but you see that Basil Faulty seems to think that they were innocents merely trying to preserve history from evil.
So if we are trying to have arguments in good faith, then it does make a difference. If this is all just posturing to protect a bunch of anti-semites, then I agree with you that it does not matter.
Everybody gave me crap in 2012 when I pointed out that Romney was a feckless loser without the strength of character and that any Romney administration would end tears. I ended voting for him anyway.
Hold on while I run a victory lap.
Guru always wins…. eventually.
Racism has been eradicated from all of our institutions. Our laws could not be any more anti-racist than they are. And yet only now it occurs to us to remove Comfederate statues? This bizarre inconsistency bespeaks an ulterior motive to the objective observer. It just doesn’t compute. There’s something else going on, and most people with common sense know it. Most likely, it’s a cynical power play. So when someone writes something like this piece by Mona, it’s natural to ask, Did you feel this strongly about the issue many years ago? Or are you just jumping on the bandwagon to give yourself cover?
Here is an official poster of the event from one of its main speakers, Richard Spencer. You can clearly see the Nazi eagles, or you can pretend that they are mystery eagles.
Now, it is also clear that the rally is called “Unite the Right.” It is not called “Unite the Left”, nor is it called “Make Common Cause with the Anti-Semitic Left.” Of course, these people have a rich tradition of anti-semitism to draw upon from the right. They can draw upon the writings of David Irving and a man that many people on this site revere, Pat Buchanan. Even John Derbyshire seems to buy into the assumptions of the Wandering Jew when he was interviewed for a podcast on this site a few years ago.
To destroy a country you must destroy its history. Like all leftist plans, you pick off things here and there around the edges until it becomes downright easy to knock over what’s left. I had a number of ancestors who fought in the war (one who died at Cedar Creek) and they were all Yankees. I have no love for the Confederacy, other than an interest in it as a period in our history. That said, the people pulling down statues today to appease a small minority are not going to stop until all of our history is gone. Then achieving power will be easy.
And sorry, Mona. They are not going to be grateful for your help.
It speaks well of you, Gary, that you have a good sense of humor. I, too, recognize good writing, and a good turn-of-phrase. I just hope that this is how we can look back at this dreary time in our party’s history!
Agreed. The tiki-carriers want their contagion-stain to mainstream, and reading whataboutistic rebuttals and how bad Antifa (of freaking course they are bad) is discouraging, to put it mildly. I’ve given Trump plenty of room, but if supporting him is to wind and nod at these losers, forget it.
I’ve called out how creepy that poster is when @skip posted about AirBnB banning the alt-right.
Al Sharpton is an insult to his family.
I would not be surprised if some members of Ricochet made the claim that the white nationalist protestors were really shouting “Juice will not replace us!”
They’re saying “You will not replace us!”
That was the first time I actually listened to it carefully. What a fraud has been perpetrated on us by the media.
“Jews will not replace us!” doesn’t even make any sense. Jews don’t exactly exercise outsized influence over the University of Virginia. We should have learned by now that if it doesn’t make sense, it’s because it is not true.
See comment #40. Click my link and watch the video. It is completely true.
Only then can you truly pretend that the protestors didn’t chant “Jews will not replace us!”
What Republicans fail to understand is that it doesn’t matter whether you denounce Nazis or not. Democrats will still consider you to be racists. They will not think “These are good Republicans denouncing the Nazis!” Rather, they will think “These are tamed Nazis!”
Which members of Ricochet, specifically?
Since these “Nazi’s” are basically just trolls, instead of chanting, they should have sung “We Shall Overcome.”
I honestly haven’t a clue what you guys are talking about. While Trump’s Saturday comments were underwhelming, (and I hammered him for it here on Ricochet) since then he’s done pretty darn good. He denounced the Nazi’s is no uncertain terms. He correctly pointed out that Antifa is the evil twin of the neo Nazis. Both sides showed up in VA armed and armored and spoiling for a fight. He also correctly pointed out that there are other – non nut job – people on both sides of the issue whose positions should not be lumped in with the craziest among us.
Just what about this needs to be renounced en masse? Someone has to ‘splain it to me.
The ones who are pretending that the protestors did not shout “Jews will not replace us!”, along with the members who love Pat Buchanan. I admit that there is a great amount of overlap in these two groups to the point that these groups might be one and the same.
Would you like to join them?
I haven’t even mentioned Trump’s response. I’m just trying to get members of this site to admit to certain basic facts about the protestors.
It’s freaking semantics. The argument is silly in my opinion, no one is asserting Nazis are not antisemitic. There was that whole holocaust thing that proves that point more than a chant on video. I don’t care at all what they were chanting, they are Nazis for God’s sake. The only thing anyone is arguing about is the words used and it doesn’t matter one bit. Nazis hate Jews by definition
But it does matter. If they were not shouting “Jews will not replace us!”, then it gives cover to those who would claim that there were some decent people in the crowd. Any crowd that shouts such a thing contains zero decent people.
I haven’t seen either video, but does saying “you will not replace us” or “Jews will not replace us” change the fact that they’re Neo Nazis? I haven’t run into anyone here that’s saying “Yeah! You/Jews will not replace us is right!”
It makes it harder for people to pretend that there were decent people protesting the removal of the statue.
I don’t think there’s much disagreement there.
I’m kind of partial to Robert E. Lee myself. He was a good man, better than most, then and now.
No, I’d like you to name them. If you’re going to insult people, don’t be passive-aggressive about it.
If Trump wins re-election in 2020 (God willing), will you be okay? You won’t harm yourself or anything like that, will you?
You think I care what people whom hold abortion as sacramental think? There’s is a low bar. We used to have a higher bar. I still hold a standard without regards to their standard.
At this point, I only have evidence that @basilfawlty is pretending that the protestors did not shout “Jews will not replace us!”
This is not an insult. This is a fact.
I just don’t see how. Decent people don’t march with self proclaimed Nazis, kind of a rule I have. Decent people don’t align themselves with Nazis whether they agree on a specific thing or not.
If not, then what’s the point of all these Republicans demanding public denunciations? If they didn’t care what Democrats think, then why bother?
And yet Trump said that there were “very fine people” in the crowd. Are you saying that he was being, to put it very charitably, illogical?