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Federal Government Operatives And Soros Money Behind Plot To Keep Trump Off Ballot

The public-private model used for censorship is now being used to undermine democracy

by @galexybrane

Noah Bookbinder, advisor to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and president of… pic.twitter.com/EukGNa6Lqd

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) December 29, 2023

Resurfaced footage shows secretaries of states (who all happen to look the exact same) conspiring together about future elections.

Middle-aged, liberal white women are the biggest threat to democracy in America.

The Zoom call took place in October of 2021 and included Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows.

The women specifically discussed the biggest threats to democracy.

Ironically, they themselves were the biggest threats to democracy.

Resurfaced footage shows secretaries of states (who all happen to look the exact same) conspiring together about future elections.

Middle-aged, liberal white women are the biggest threat to democracy in America.

The Zoom call took place in October of 2021 and included Colorado… pic.twitter.com/u3rDK2jdz4

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 29, 2023

By now, everyone, including its proponents, knows that DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) means nothing of the sort.  It isn’t diverse, it isn’t equitable, and it certainly isn’t inclusive. In fact, DEI is nothing but exclusionary revenge against non-racists by racists, and all to address nonexistent “systemic racism” and long-defunct slavery. There is no slavery in America except that slavery of Democrats to the party of their own destruction.

Today, DEI stands for Degradation, Exclusion, and Intolerance. It has shown itself to be:

DEGRADING:  The pool of employees, officials, and hirees across the employable fruited plain has been degraded. Talent and skill and competence have taken a back seat to skin color. Merit is no longer the criterion by which the best are chosen. Color is the only thing that matters to DEI proponents. As a result, incompetence soars when you select for elevation not the best but the mediocre or worse, the untalented.

EXCLUSION: Meritorious Whites, Asians, Jews, and Christians are routinely excluded from the pool of hirees in many companies. Siphoning off those whose ethnic groups have historically scored higher than others guarantees that the only ones left are the less equipped, the less talented, and the less competent. That is what we see today; a working pool of the mediocre.

INTOLERANCE:  DEI proponents do not even consider hiring non-minorities. They tolerate no exceptions. As a result, those hired comprise those chosen only for their ethnic background and not for their competence, talent, and exceptionalism. When you skim off the cream and discard it, you are left with an insipid pool of mediocrity. When you eliminate the best, you get the worst.

DEI, while in full vogue in much of corporate America and in the university system, is a toxin in the bloodstream of American excellence, favoring color over competence. We are left with the kind of mushy mediocrity that contributes to decisions like open borders, a thoroughly corrupt judicial system and universities that graduate those who cannot read, think, or strategize.

DEI is poison in our cultural bloodstream. “Diversity is our strength” is a damnable lie. It is not our strength. It is our weakness. Merit is our strength because merit allows talent to rise while the sludgy sediment of mediocrity sinks to the bottom.

We are in a world of trouble unless cooler and wiser heads dump DEI and make achievement great again. America cannot survive an insipid, often hostile work force, especially in the fields of medicine, engineering, piloting, mathematics, computer science, and education. Our entire system needs to be jettisoned in favor of merit-based hiring once again.

If we do not raise the bar, we will find ourselves strangled under it. (read more)

     You may have noticed that our country, formerly a republic of sovereign individuals, has become one great big racketeering operation run by a mafia-like cabal with Marxist characteristics — or, at least, Marxist pretenses. That is, it seeks to profit by every avenue of dishonesty and coercion, under the guise of rescuing the “oppressed and marginalized” from their alleged tormentors. Apparently, half the country likes it that way.

     Much of the on-the-ground action in this degenerate enterprise is produced by various hustles. A hustle is a particularly low-grade, insultingly obvious racket, such as Black Lives Matter, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and “trans women” (i.e., men) in women’s sports. Some of the profit in any hustle is plain moneygrubbing, of course. But there’s also an emotional payoff.  Hustlers and racketeers are often sadists, so the gratification derived from snookering the credulous (feelings of power) gets amplified by the extra thrill of seeing the credulous suffer pain, humiliation, and personal ruin. (That’s what actual “oppressors” actually do.)

     Categorically, anyone who operates a racket or a hustle is some sort of psychopath, a person with no moral or ethical guard-rails. Hustles are based on the belief that it is possible to get something for nothing, a notion at odds with everything known about the unforgiving laws of physics and also the principles of human relations in this universe. Even the unconditional love of a mother for her child is based on something: the amazing, generative act of creating new life, achieved through the travail of birth. Have you noticed, by the way, that the birth of human children is lately among the most denigrated acts on the American social landscape?

     The flap over Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, is an instructive case in the governing psychopathies of the day. I wish I’d been a cockroach on the tray of petit fours and biscotti brought into the Harvard Overseers’ board-room when they met to consider the blowback from Ms. Gay’s unfortunate remarks in Congress, followed by revelations of her career-long plagiarisms. The acrid odor of self-conscious corruption in the room must have overwhelmed even the bouquet of Tanzanian Peaberry coffee a’brew, and not a few of the board members must have reached for the sherry decanter as their shame mounted, and the ancient radiators hissed, and their lame rationalizations started bouncing off the wainscoted walls.

      Apparently, Ms. Gay did not miss an opportunity to cut-and-paste somebody else’s compositions into everything she published going back to her own student years in the 1990s. She even poached another writer’s acknowledgment page. This is apart from the self-reinforcing substance of her published “research” justifying the necessity for DEI activism, for which she has become first an avatar and now a goat. The dirty secret of this perturbation — and the whole Harvard Board knows it — is that Claudine Gay’s career has been about nothing but careerism, and that this is also true of so many on the faculty and administration at Harvard, and surely at every other self-styled elite school from the Charles River to Palo Alto that had joined in the DEI mind-fuck.

       It’s all one big status-acquisition hustle, the seeking of hierarchical privilege by any means necessary, including especially deceit, the politics of middle-school girls. Thus, you see on display both the juvenility of elite higher ed and its use of the worst impulses that prevail in social media, stoking envy, hatred, avarice and vengeance as the currency for career advancement. Claudine Gay was notorious earlier, as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, for wrecking the careers of faculty members (Ronald Sullivan, Stephanie Robinson, and Roland G. Fryer, Jr.) who refused to play the game like middle-school girls. She had no mercy.

      The mental pain endured by the Harvard bigwigs must be excruciating, and of course they have themselves to blame because they walked right into the Woke hustle with their eyes wide shut. They bargained away their dignity, and the university’s honor, for mere brownie points in a fool’s game called Win big prizes pretending to care about your fellow man. The cognitive dissonance must be like little nuclear reactor meltdowns burning through the lobes of their brains. They’ve run out of a safe space to play “victim” in. The world sees them for the coddled, malicious fakes they are.

     Cutting Claudine Gay loose is the unavoidable play now or Harvard will be stung by so many lawsuits from students previously punished for academic mischief that all the alumni lawfare attorneys in the cosmos standing snout to tail will not be able to staunch the hemorrhaging of the school’s endowment and then the fire sale of its chattels to satisfy the aggrieved plaintiffs’ pain and suffering. The Harvard board is just trying to ride out the holidays. Their prized participation trophy is coming off the mantle piece. There really is no other way. Now, stand by and watch the rats rat each other out. And so ends the era of pretending about everything. (read more)

The problem with this gussied up tribalism is that people start identifying with their tribe, especially if their tribe is at the bottom rung of the power structure. White men are no longer being judged based on the content of their character or the merit of what they produce. They’re judged based on their skin color and gonads and they are de facto being deprived of college placement and job promotions. They’re being pushed out of polite society and have become the butt of every joke. 

Many say, “well, it’s about damn time” as they perceive white men as privileged people — people, who through no qualifications other than being white and male, sat at the top of the power structure. If white men endure a couple of generations of persecution, it’s no more than they deserve for all the colonization, destruction, and unearned benefits they’ve enjoyed.

The only problem with this equation is that these people being shoved, forcefully, to the bottom rung still make up the majority. That is, if they choose to fight back, numbers are on their side.

To this point, white men and white women haven’t viewed themselves through a critical theory lens. They’ve been inculcated with the idea of a color-blind society, a melting pot. Fairness meant seeing people as individuals and to not judge a whole group based on one person. That idea was called racism. It was considered racist to demonize a whole racial group. Racism was anathema to most white people, save a few racist stragglers. The worst epithet that could be hurled at a white person was “racist!”

Further, in critical theory, “people of color” (not colored people, mind you) could not be considered racist because to be racist, one has to have power. The question now: Who has the power?

Judging by the recent Congressional hearings interviewing the women heading the various ivory towers, it’s not white men.

Racism against white people is now the norm. From government Christmas parties excluding white employees to “safe spaces” on campus, discrimination against white people isn’t just allowed, it’s encouraged.

What happens when systemic suppression happens to the majority? America is about to find out. White kids have been drinking in the critical theory while simultaneously de-Christianizing, and since they, too, now view the world through this lens, they’re coming to the obvious conclusion: Being white is bad (some, mostly daft girls, think being bad is good) and white people are at the bottom. Being at the bottom is no fun especially when previously one didn’t believe in a top or bottom at all.

The woke didn’t reckon that a white majority might also seek victim status once the boot to the face jammed the whites down the ladder of status, simply for being white. They thought their racism would have no consequences; they still seem to think that.

Left out of these leftist will to power calculations is that the white majority is increasingly secular. Previously, their Christianity served as a limit to behavior. Christians submit to God, have faith in Him, and God, in the Christian worldview, views each person as an individual, “Neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.” God, in the Christian worldview, sees each soul and Christians are told to view people that way, too. Christians are told, “Judge not, lest you be judged.” Jesus is the ultimate judge and jury and so on an individual level, vengeance is God’s, not the Christian’s.

Christianity isn’t tribal. It’s universal. It’s the whole body of Christ — each person has a role in the body and none of it has to do with one’s skin color or intersectional status. What is made clear is, “the last shall be made first.” The Bible is filled with warnings about persecuting the poor and abusing those deemed as lesser in society. Jesus was also clear about loving one’s enemies and blessing those who persecute you.

America’s unifying themes were Christian. The Founders had this understanding as a foundation for the nation they were creating.

As the United States secularizes, a reality that makes the woke rejoice, the majority, once governed by limiting principles in the use of power due to Christian ideals, will no longer be limited.

Some historically marginalized groups, primarily Asians and Jews, are chafing at the label of “white.” The same leftist Jewish professors and university funders who taught or believed in this intersectional clap-trap are alarmed to see the virulent anti-semitism that sat beneath the surface, and worse, that no one is fighting against it because Jewish people have been lumped in with white people as “colonizers.” Jews, in this critical analysis, deserve abuse because they are white, have positions of power, and are oppressors against the brown people. It doesn’t matter that Hamas attacked Israel. It doesn’t matter what is just or right. What matters is that in the critical theory hierarchy, Jews are perceived as white.

While some Jewish liberals such as Bill Ackman and Alan Dershowitz have recently spoken out against campus DEI efforts, it is interesting that Jewish leftists are not scrambling, as they should be, to dismantle the critical theory concepts that led to this evil place. Rather, they’re desirous of being viewed as a victimized class deserving of special considerations. Jewish leaders opposed California’s adoption of a new Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, according to David Bernstein, author of Woke Antisemitism, because of “its implicit omission of Jews as an oppressed group.”

Critical theory and intersectionality inevitably lead to a fractured society where all members identify with a group based on superficial characteristics so that they can have power. Or, when things go really badly, protection.

Unfortunately, Jewish people in America and the world are a small group of people, proportionally. They’re always at the mercy of the majority. In this case, the majority is white and nominally Christian. Up to this point, Jewish people self-identified as a persecuted class. They’ve been overruled by other persecuted classes who have decided to label them white and privileged.

To the chagrin of many leftist Jewish people, America is standing alone as the major power defending Israel. Why is that? What is it about the older generations of American people that defends Israel and the Jewish people? Well, they remember the Holocaust, for one. For two, a Protestant nation believes that Jews are God’s blessed people and to receive blessings, Israel and the Jewish people should be blessed.

The younger generations, the ones soaked in critical theory, do not believe this. They believe in protected classes and power and they view Jewish people as white and powerful.

Marry this trend with white people secularizing and starting to see themselves not as Americans but as white Americans, well … This new belief system is catastrophic for social cohesion.

It ends in violence.

The solution to this cultural disaster is not placing the Jewish people back into a protected class. The solution is to demolish the pernicious ideas of critical theory completely. DEI needs to be obliterated from every institution. It’s an evil.

What should replace this nonsense? Merit. Objective standards level the playing field and remove this garbage.

In addition, America needs a Christian revival. Love, not revenge, is the solution to this bleak cultural nonsense. Tearing down statues, creating “safe spaces,” and excluding people based on skin color will not right the wrongs of the past. It’s only more evil that foments more anger and that’s especially dangerous when those being made angry are the majority.

In the critical theory calculation, one that is entirely tribal, might makes right. Have those pushing these ideas considered what that means for them? White identitarianism may be the only recompense the hated majority have to achieve respect and fair-play, but it will come at great cost. The woke haven’t considered the price they might pay. (read more)

In the penultimate show of the year, I decided to go with a Trump theme, since the orange shadow of death is slowly creepy across the lands. The debate the other night took place in the orange shadow, as the only reason the event took place is the looming disqualification of Trump by the regime. The regime toadies can feel it coming and they are getting ready for the madness that lies ahead.

As I pointed out after the debate, a big reason why things are getting so squirrely is the people in charge are shockingly stupid. Within living memory, the party rulers would have made sure a dunce like Nikki Haley remained down on the farm. She probably never would have made it past state rep. In the land of two-digit simpletons, a lantern-jawed Karen rises to the top of the political heap.

It is the declining competence that is the primary cause of the unrest. Savvy rulers would understand that they always have two primary challenges. One is the palace coup, and the other is the peasant revolt. The former is an internal matter, but the latter is the one that keeps them in power. Always appear to be on the right side of the majority and the peasants will tolerate just about anything.

This crew has everything backwards. They have made their intrigues the focus of our politics and they fight one another to see who is the most spiteful and nasty to the common people. War Karen exists because the Mortimer and Randolph sponsoring her think it is hilarious that she makes the rubes vomit in their mouths. Imagine what they have planned for the coming election. (read more)

While it’s far too late for the judicial worm to turn on illegalities in the 2020 election in a way that would overturn the election of President Biden, maybe there are other consequences to be had for the people who engineered what may be the most consequential criminal collaboration or conspiracy in history. 

To quote the daily X post of @lsferguson:

"Who gave the order to stop counting votes” in unprecedented lockstep, sending home election monitors, and increasing the opportunities for voter fraud is a prima facie basis to believe there was a criminal conspiracy in the 2020 election. But there is much more to create reasonable or probable cause for real investigations.

At that critical time following the election and preceding the events of January 6, 2021, the Trump campaign and others, including voters and state officials, were filing lawsuits in the respective states where voting illegalities, material irregularities, unconstitutional acts involving ballot distribution, and outright voter fraud occurred. 

Those emergency lawsuits were hampered by the lack of opportunity to gather evidence through formal discovery. 

One of the most publicized of the lawsuits was filed by Texas attorney general Ken Paxton challenging certification of electors in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. 

His Motion for Expedited Consideration filed on December 7, 2020 before the U.S. Supreme Court bit off an awful lot considering the lack of opportunity for discovery. Paxton nevertheless cited incidents in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that had the cumulative effect of stealing the election nationally, but his case never reached the argument stage because the Supreme Court said he lacked standing. 

Paxton’s case was based on Texans’ being “entitled to a presidential election in which the votes from each of the states are counted only if the ballots are cast and counted in a manner that complies with the pre-existing laws of each state,” citing the 1983 Supreme Court decision in Anderson v. Celebrezze. 

The court in Celebrezze said, “the impact of the votes cast in each State is affected by the votes cast for the various candidates in other States.” So, naturally, well-targeted illegalities and fraud, instead of merely widespread voter fraud, can be the measure of the constitutional issue to be litigated, William Barr’s excuse for inaction notwithstanding.  

Democrats didn’t need to be geniuses to know that well-targeted illegalities in key states or even certain Democrat-controlled localities diluted the impact of votes in states that followed constitutional election law.

“Who gave the order to stop counting votes” in unprecedented lockstep, sending home election monitors, and increasing the opportunities for voter fraud is a prima facie basis to believe there was a criminal conspiracy in the 2020 election. But there is much more to create reasonable or probable cause for real investigations. 

The voting illegalities, material irregularities, and outright voter fraud in locations such as Philadelphia, Detroit, and other Democrat-controlled areas may not be evidence of “widespread” voter fraud in all states, but because of the constitutional process to elect the President, the impact of that focused illegality was widespread.

(1) use of unauthorized drop boxes,
(2) avoidance of voter ID requirements through abuse of statutory “indefinite confinement” requirements,
(3) illegal ballot curing,
(4) violations of Wisconsin’s election law involving residential care facilities,
(5) ultra vires extensions of the deadlines for mail-in ballots,
(6) chain-of-custody issues involving absentee ballots,
(7) weakening of signature verification requirements,
(8) counterfeit ballots,
(9) unavailable ballot images,
(10) evidence of Vote Flipping,
(11) double-counted ballots,
(12) duplicate reported ballots in the Fulton County post-election recount,
(13) ineligible voters casting votes, and
(14) evidence of security vulnerabilities involving voting equipment. 

What must not be forgotten nor excused is that because of unconstitutional acts of non-legislative officials during the period of COVID preceding the 2020 election, the legality and integrity of the electoral process was contaminated and compromised before the vote by mailing unsolicited mail-in ballots. 

This gave mail-in voters the unprecedented opportunity for fraud, and the Heartland/Rasmussen poll tells us 20 percent took advantage. 

And, with his banana republic California bar trial concluding, I expect Eastman will feel unleashed to further expose the civil, constitutional, and criminal illegalities that should have led to the conclusion that Joe Biden did not lawfully win the 2020 election. 

So, how might all this lead to criminal remedies against those who acted in combination to violate laws in ways that affected the outcome of the 2020 election? 

Some 49 years ago U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall writing in Anderson v. United States said that the federal criminal statute 18 U.S.C. § 241 applied in voter fraud cases. The civil rights “injury” under § 241 is the dilution of votes. Justice Marshall wrote: 

It has long been settled that § 241 embraces a conspiracy to stuff the ballot box at an election for federal officers, and thereby to dilute the value of votes of qualified voters…. 

That petitioners may have had no purpose to change the outcome of the federal election is irrelevant. The specific intent required under § 241 is not the intent to change the outcome of a federal election, but rather the intent to have false votes cast and thereby to injure the right of all voters in a federal election to express their choice of a candidate and to have their expressions of choice given full value and effect, without being diluted or distorted by the casting of fraudulent ballots…. 

The deposit of forged ballots in the ballot boxes, no matter how small or great their number, dilutes the influence of honest votes in an election, and whether in greater or less degree is immaterial. The right to an honest [count] is a right possessed by each voting elector, and to the extent that the importance of his vote is nullified, wholly or in part, he has been injured in the free exercise of a right or privilege secured to him by the laws and Constitution of the United States. 

Not all the illegalities in the 2020 election involved criminal fraud, nor were all of them part of a criminal conspiracy. However, the votes of over 73 million Americans were illegally and unconstitutionally diluted in a widespread manner by the voting illegalities, material irregularities, and outright voter fraud in key Democrat-run localities. 

It's not merely that “we wuz robbed.” Justice demands a reckoning. Americans are entitled to know, “who gave the order to stop counting votes in the swing states on the night of November 3/4, 2020.” (read more)

Politics makes me sad sometimes.

Oh, not just because politicians are doing dumb things.  Not even because politicians are corrupt.  Politicians have always been dumb and corrupt, as any study of history will demonstrate. 

And it doesn’t matter if they hold office by election, inheritance, or swords distributed by strange women lying in ponds.  Stupidity and corruption are human characteristics, and politicians are very, very human.  (Though recent history is such that strange women [EDITOR'S NOTE: Elaine, the Lady of the Lake, was NOT strange.] lying in ponds distributing swords look better as the basis for a system of government . . . .)

Sometimes their stupidity and corruption make me angry, and sometimes they make me laugh.  But, given my low expectations, it takes a special kind of stupidity and corruption to actually make me sad.

What makes me sad now is the ongoing game of Civilizational Jenga that our ruling class is playing.  One by one, they’re withdrawing the supports of civil society, in a process that will inevitably lead to a collapse.  They’re taking what was a very robust society, and consuming all the safety margins, bit by bit.

What really makes me sad is that while some of the people involved – let’s call them “the morons” for convenience’s sake – are doing this out of shortsightedness, cupidity, or sheer partisan bloodthirstiness, I’m increasingly convinced that there’s a contingent at the top that knows exactly what it’s doing, and is fine with it.

Roger Kimball gets at it in a recent piece:

“This is the same old trick,” Trump said when he got the news that the Colorado Supreme Court voted 4-3 to keep him off the primary ballot for the 2024 presidential election.

Oops. Sorry. I got my papers mixed up. That was actually Abraham Lincoln in 1860 when he got the news that some Southern states had voted to keep him off the ballot. Eventually 10 states did so.

So here we are again. It’s a bit like that Army Major in the Vietnam war who explained that they had to destroy a village in order to save it. Just so, the virtuous people of Colorado have decided that in order to save democracy they need to destroy it.

In fact, what they have just voted to preserve is not democracy but “Our Democracy™.” Here’s the difference. In a democracy, people get to vote for the candidate they prefer. In “Our Democracy™,” only approved candidates get to compete.

Donald Trump is the opposite of an approved candidate. The untrammeled hermeneutical ingenuity of the American legal profession had [to] be let loose against Trump. As I write, he faces huge legal battle in four states. . . .

Trump is guilty not because of anything he has done but because of who he is. He is an enemy, not of the state, exactly, but of the state of mind that constitutes “Our Democracy™.” When he unexpectedly won the presidency in 2016, the beautiful people, beginning with his opponent Hillary Clinton, couldn’t believe it. They denounced the election as fraudulent. “Our Democracy™,” you see,  means “rule by Democrats.”

Now they are warning that, should Trump be reelected, he would be a “dictator,” a new Hitler, etc. He would weaponise the Department of Justice against his enemies, they claim, and use the FBI to harass his opponents. Stay tuned for the seminar on what the Freudians call “projection”: it meets this afternoon in a democratic redoubt near you.

In a more civilized version of America – one that existed just a few decades ago – the notion of waging this sort of unrestricted lawfare against a leading presidential candidate, much less a former president – would have been considered ridiculous, and had it been taken seriously, would have been seen as enormously risky.

When considering any political tactic, after all, one question is what happens if it doesn’t work.  But sometimes an equally important question is, what happens if it does?

Say the various Democratic flacks, special prosecutors, and state attorneys general somehow manage to eliminate Trump.  What happens?

Half the country – maybe more – will conclude that the whole system is rigged, that the establishment doesn’t follow the rules, and that it will gang up on anyone it sees is a threat.  They will conclude, in short, that the government, and indeed the entire system, is illegitimate.

And they will be right.  And the politicians of even a generation ago recognized that as enormously dangerous.

What bothers me the most is that the powers that be today  don’t seem to care.  Perhaps they feel so secure in their grip on power that they expect never to be held accountable.  (They seem very smug about their mastery of slipperiness and complex rules, but you know, the Gordian Knot was solved through a different approach. )

Maybe they don’t think they need legitimacy as long as they control the sword, the purse, and the press.  But even dictatorships do their best to promote legitimacy, and think twice before going out of their way to convince half the population of their lack thereof.

Perhaps, as some say, the Never-Trump crowd is actually gearing up for a second Civil War.  Certainly there seem to be some idiots on X (formerly Twitter – do we still need to say that, and why?) who are all in for it.  Larry Correia has a minor hobby in batting them down.

You’d have to be a moron – or China -- to want an American Civil War.  But then again, the Biden Administration is removing the Reconciliation Monument – a post Civil War memorial marking a return to American unity – as part of the post-George Floyd revisiting of the Civil War.  As David Strom writes: “Speaking practically, history has shown that even though the Southern states rose against the federal government, over the past century, our most patriotic and self-sacrificial defenders of our country have come from citizens of the South. Tearing down the reconciliation monument is spitting in the face of the memory of these citizens’ ancestors and a rejection of recognizing the complications in America’s history. It is, in other words, both offensive and stupid. I say this as an admirer of Lincoln’s cause and a strong opponent of the Southern ideology.”

Not far from my office is a memorial, erected by veterans of the Union and Confederate Armies, dedicated to a similar post-war reconciliation.  Will it go next?

This picture accompanied a blog post I wrote over 20 years ago.  And while I have been unsympathetic to the rather tiny and pathetic fringe of actual neo-Confederates, I’ve always felt that we need to admire the post-Civil War reconciliation.  As I wrote then:  “The monument shown above illustrates that; it sits about a block from my office. . . .  As late as the Spanish-American War, there was considerable doubt about whether southerners would turn out to fight for the United States. They did. (My great-grandfather was one of them).  There are a lot of reasons for that, but the American experience of reconciliation after one of the world’s bloodier and more divisive conflicts is one that perhaps ought to get more attention.”

Instead, it is being erased.  There’s little enough of reconciliation in today’s politics, and Roger Kimball is not the only one comparing the present to the pre-Civil War period.

The thing about Civil Wars is, they don’t come from the bottom up.  They come from the top.

And looking at who’s on top today, and what they seem to want, makes me sad. (read more)