The year in review: The Abbeville Institute

Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina told a friend in 1980 that, "I'm bound to confess that President Carter has instilled some foreboding in prospect to the outcome of the election....As I interpret his campaign sermon, President Carter said states' rights had become as obscene as any four-letter word, and Ronald Reagan had proved his unfitness for the presidency by telling a Mississippi audience in a recent speech that he believed in states' rights. While Jimmy Carter is going to get my vote, I fear that his campaign sermon may have lost him the absentee votes of my three granduncles and their Confederate comrades who died in the Civil War fighting with General Robert E. Lee for states' rights."

While little has changed in the political class in 36 years, "states' rights" may be the political movement of the 21st century. It certainly has legs.

Donald Trump shocked the political establishment by winning more states than people. This led to a renewed called to abolish the Electoral College and drove some west coast pinkos to seek out...gasp...secession! In both cases, the people of the states, the heart of the American political system, are making their views known. Those in "fly over country" decided the election while their leftist counterparts in California and New York are rethinking their commitment to national politics. It probably won't last for that group, but at least for now federalism is gaining more traction in the American polity than at any point in the last 150 years.

That is a good thing, and we at the Abbeville Institute would like to think we have had a role in that process. Our mission to explore what is true and valuable in the Southern tradition has lent to the growing interest in American decentralization. We have helped provide the intellectual underpinning for the various "Tenth Amendment" resolutions and the renewed interest in real American federalism on both the left and the right.

In the last year alone, we added nearly two hundred articles on Southern history, culture, and politics to our website, produced two fine conferences on the real meaning of the PC-attack on the South and the importance of state interposition, and hosted a rousing Summer School on how the Southern tradition can renew America. "The South is America" has become one of our strongest messages. The "Occupy Wall Street" folks don't realize it, but John Taylor of Caroline and the Southern agrarians were pushing that message in a more meaningful way long before they set up their tents in New York City. California secessionists would not have the philosophical mettle without the Southern men who crafted the Jeffersonian tradition and took it to its logical conclusion in 1861. It did not have to end in war. Lincoln chose that path. So many parts of the "American" cultural tradition are in fact Southern.

And this is only scratching the surface. As we continue to grow, to attract new scholars and other folks who are interested in what the Southern tradition can provide for Americans of all backgrounds and interests--for the Southern tradition offers much to emulate--we hope you will support our efforts.

The future of the Southern tradition is bright. It is our job to rekindle the Jeffersonian political tradition and the Southern cultural tradition and make them once again the bedrock of the American experiment.

That would be real hope and change.

http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/support/memberships/

Please Pass the Planned Poverty

Via Billy

How many folks chanced to drive through parts of the South in the 1950s, 60s and even in the early 70s and noted how poor the country seemed to be compared with other areas of the United States?

Many probably wondered why the South couldn’t seem t do better that it was doing. To say that the South, in our lifetime, was and is the poorest part of the country, with the possible exception of Indian reservations, is no exaggeration. And yet, knowing some of the reasons for that and the history behind it, my wife and I, now living in Louisiana, would not willingly go back north to live. The South is home, and we have been more content here than just about any other place we’ve lived, for several reasons.

There are reasons for the poverty in much of the South and for the poor whites and blacks that live in it, and in many cases the poverty is not their fault. It was intended for them to live that way by those that sought to conquer them during and after the War of Northern Aggression and by the descendants of those conquerors who, even today, enjoy rubbing their faces in the planned poverty that is supposed to be their due because their ancestors had the temerity to stand up and “dare defend their rights.” Such is not to be tolerated in the cultural Marxist milieu.

More @ Revised History

Shaping Northern Opinion Against the South

 

As the Northern armies spread across the Confederacy, newspaper reporters following them sent observations and stories northward. The result was predictable as they wrote of an evil land and emphasized any unfavorable aspects of Southern civilization. In the last year of war, the United States government refused prisoner exchanges while Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee pleaded in vain for the starving men in blue held in Southern prisoner of war camps to be saved by their own leaders.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

 Shaping Northern Opinion Against the South

“[The] years from 1865 to 1880 were dreary years in which there was no peace. The war had only ended on the battlefield. In the minds of men it still persisted. Memories of the past and issues living in the present combined to perpetuate and perhaps enlarge the antagonism that victory and defeat created. One observer made the comment that “it was useless to preach forgiveness and good will to men still burning with the memory of their wrongs.”

Deeply [engraved] on the Northern heart was the conviction that the Confederacy had deliberately mistreated the prisoners of war captured by its armies. The Southern prisons . . . were at best what one Confederate surgeon described as a “gigantic mass of human misery.”

A war-crazed [Northern] public could not dissociate this suffering from deliberate intent of the enemy. Rather it fitted the purposes of propaganda to attribute the barest motives to the Confederates [that] “there was a fixed determination on the part of the rebels to kill the Union soldiers who fell into their hands.” The great non-governmental agencies of relief and propaganda contributed to the spread of similar impressions.

Northern opinion was thus rigidly shaped in the belief that “tens of thousands of national soldiers . . . were deliberately shot to death, as at Fort Pillow, or frozen to death as at Belle Island, or starved to death as at Andersonville, or sickened to death by swamp malaria, as in South Carolina.”

Horror passed into fury and fury into a demand for revenge. And the arch-fiend of iniquity, for so the North regarded him, Major Henry Wirz, was hanged as a murderer [in November 1865] . . . he was the scapegoat upon whom centered the full force of Northern wrath.

Meanwhile the South had no effective way of meeting these charges of brutality [though] it is not difficult to find, however, material in these years that the South received the Northern charge with sullen hatred.

Typical is an article contributed to the Southern Review in January 1867:

“The impartial times to come will hardly understand how a nation, which not only permitted but encouraged its government to declare medicines and surgical instruments contraband of war, and to destroy by fire and sword the habitations and food of noncombatants, as well as the fruits of the earth and the implements of tillage, should afterwards have clamored for the blood of captive enemies, because they did not feed their prisoners out of their own starvation and heal them in their succorless hospitals.

And when a final and accurate development shall have been made of the facts connected with the exchange of prisoners between the belligerents, and it shall have been demonstrated . . . that all the nameless horrors [of both sides] were the result of a deliberate and inexorable policy of non-exchange on the part of the United States, founded on an equally deliberate calculation of their ability to furnish a greater mass of humanity than the Confederacy could afford for starvation and the shambles, men will wonder how it was that a people, passing for civilized and Christian, should have consigned Jefferson Davis to a cell, while they tolerated Edwin M. Stanton as a cabinet minister.”

(The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900, Paul H. Buck, Little, Brown and Company, 1937, excerpts, pp. 45-48)

State Government Solutions to Hard Times

 

Prior to federal intervention into State domestic affairs, governors saw their people as mostly self-reliant and able to carry themselves through hard times. Governor Max Gardner of North Carolina used State agencies and church charities to help his citizens through an economic depression and discourage dependency on government subsidies.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com  The Great American Political Divide

Prior to federal intervention into State domestic affairs, governors saw their people as mostly self-reliant and able to carry themselves through hard times. Governor Max Gardner of North Carolina used State agencies and church charities to help his citizens through an economic depression and discourage dependency on government subsidies.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com  The Great American Political Divide

State Government Solutions to Hard Times

“The cries of these suffering people reached the highest government offices in Raleigh, and State leaders planned how to aid them. Governor Gardner and other leaders did not believe that State government should provide relief. They believed that relief was the responsibility of private agencies and local governments because they were closest to the people. Also, State leaders believed that able-bodied people should work for what relief they received. They thought that a dole would destroy character and turn people into beggars.

Governor Gardner did believe that the State should encourage people to help themselves. His first concern was for farmers because the prices of cotton and tobacco dropped sharply in 1929, greatly reducing farmers’ income. In December 1929, Gardner proposed his Live-at-Home program to help the farmers.

This program encouraged farmers to grow part of the $150 million of feed and foodstuffs that they normally imported from out of State for consumption on the farm. Gardner expected the program to improve the State economy and to make the farmers self-sufficient in home food production so that they could ward of starvation.

To start the program, Governor Gardner used existing State agencies. He persuaded President Eugene Clyde Brooks of NC State College to send demonstration agents among farm families to encourage gardens, canning and growing livestock feed. The governor also prevailed upon the State Department of Public Instruction to publicize Live-at-Home among schoolchildren.

For one week each year students learned about the importance of nutrition, of the cow, of the poultry, of the hog, and of the garden. Some 800,000 schoolchildren participated in a Live-at-Home essay contest. The governor presented silver loving cups to the winners, Ophelia Holley, a black girl from Bertie County, and Leroy Sossamon, a white boy from Cabarrus County. Supporting the State efforts, some eastern bankers and merchants refused credit to farmers who would not grow less cotton and tobacco, and more food.

To help establish [county] relief committees, Governor Gardner appointed a Council on Unemployment Relief in November 1930. The council created a separate relief organization for blacks. Lt. Lawrence A. Oxley, a pioneer black social worker in North Carolina provided the leadership to help blacks organize county committees, and a Statewide committee for advising the governor.

The raising of relief funds and dispensing of aid thus fell on public and private local agencies, which cooperated in their work. The most important private organization was the Community Chest, which raised money and distributed it to charitable agencies. The associated charities gave needy families food, clothing, fuel, and medical care.

The Salvation Army mainly gave vagrants hot meals and free lodging in exchange for a few chores, but it also aided needy families. The Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem treated 2650 patients in 1930, 1500 of them as charity cases. In 1932, the new Duke University Hospital reserved 250 of its 406 beds for the needy.”

(Hard Times, Beginnings of the Great Depression in North Carolina, 1929-1933, John L. Bell, NC Dept. of Cultural Resources, 1982, excerpts, pp. 43-45)

“The cries of these suffering people reached the highest government offices in Raleigh, and State leaders planned how to aid them. Governor Gardner and other leaders did not believe that State government should provide relief. They believed that relief was the responsibility of private agencies and local governments because they were closest to the people. Also, State leaders believed that able-bodied people should work for what relief they received. They thought that a dole would destroy character and turn people into beggars.

Governor Gardner did believe that the State should encourage people to help themselves. His first concern was for farmers because the prices of cotton and tobacco dropped sharply in 1929, greatly reducing farmers’ income. In December 1929, Gardner proposed his Live-at-Home program to help the farmers.

This program encouraged farmers to grow part of the $150 million of feed and foodstuffs that they normally imported from out of State for consumption on the farm. Gardner expected the program to improve the State economy and to make the farmers self-sufficient in home food production so that they could ward of starvation.

To start the program, Governor Gardner used existing State agencies. He persuaded President Eugene Clyde Brooks of NC State College to send demonstration agents among farm families to encourage gardens, canning and growing livestock feed. The governor also prevailed upon the State Department of Public Instruction to publicize Live-at-Home among schoolchildren.

For one week each year students learned about the importance of nutrition, of the cow, of the poultry, of the hog, and of the garden. Some 800,000 schoolchildren participated in a Live-at-Home essay contest. The governor presented silver loving cups to the winners, Ophelia Holley, a black girl from Bertie County, and Leroy Sossamon, a white boy from Cabarrus County. Supporting the State efforts, some eastern bankers and merchants refused credit to farmers who would not grow less cotton and tobacco, and more food.

To help establish [county] relief committees, Governor Gardner appointed a Council on Unemployment Relief in November 1930. The council created a separate relief organization for blacks. Lt. Lawrence A. Oxley, a pioneer black social worker in North Carolina provided the leadership to help blacks organize county committees, and a Statewide committee for advising the governor.

The raising of relief funds and dispensing of aid thus fell on public and private local agencies, which cooperated in their work. The most important private organization was the Community Chest, which raised money and distributed it to charitable agencies. The associated charities gave needy families food, clothing, fuel, and medical care.

The Salvation Army mainly gave vagrants hot meals and free lodging in exchange for a few chores, but it also aided needy families. The Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem treated 2650 patients in 1930, 1500 of them as charity cases. In 1932, the new Duke University Hospital reserved 250 of its 406 beds for the needy.”

(Hard Times, Beginnings of the Great Depression in North Carolina, 1929-1933, John L. Bell, NC Dept. of Cultural Resources, 1982, excerpts, pp. 43-45)

Quick-Thinking Uber Driver Saves Teen Girl From Sex Trafficking

Via Billy

The Sisterhood and a Profound Weariness: Unbiased Analysis

 

Having for decades been exposed to the hostility of radical feminists, to the enormous harm they have done the schools and universities and the military, to relations between men and women, to their ashen tediousness and endless fury, their  victimhood,  I finally began to yell, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” At least, not quietly. Some thoughts, expressed with the gentility characteristic of this worthy column:

To begin with, there is  problem of forged credentials. Radical feminists do not represent women. They represent radical feminists. Other women typically say that they are feminists, meaning in favor or equality of pay and opportunity, but explicitly reject the ideological baggage of the radicals.

More @ Fred On Everything

John McAfee: 'I Can Guarantee You, It Was Not the Russians'

Via Frank

In case some of you were duped into believing this was evidence that proved Russia hacked the US elections, John McAfee would like to remind you that you're probably a high tier retard and would believe virtually anything your government told you.
 
Crazy, but brilliant, John said “if it looks like the Russians did it, then I can guarantee you it was not the Russians.”

The Joint Analysis Report from the FBI contains an appendix that lists hundreds of IP addresses that were supposedly “used by Russian civilian and military intelligence services.” While some of those IP addresses are from Russia, the majority are from all over the world, which means that the hackers constantly faked their location.

McAfee argues that the report is a “fallacy,” explaining that hackers can fake their location, their language, and any markers that could lead back to them. Any hacker who had the skills to hack into the DNC would also be able to hide their tracks, he said

“If I was the Chinese and I wanted to make it look like the Russians did it, I would use Russian language within the code, I would use Russian techniques of breaking into the organization,” McAfee said, adding that, in the end, “there simply is no way to assign a source for any attack.”

More @ Zero Hedge

'We will watch you': Bilderberg website hacked

Via Billy

 

Hackers have taken down the website of the Bilderberg Club, replacing the shadowy organization's page with a warning that the Atlanticist elites have a year to work for the benefit of humanity or their assets will be hacked next.

"Dear Bilderberg members, from now on, each one of you have 1 year (365 days) to truly work in favor of humans and not your private interests,” the hackers, who identified themselves as the "HackBack movement and Anonymous,” said in a message posted at bilderbergmeetings.org.

“Otherwise, we will find you and we will hack you,” they threatened the “Wealthy Elitico-Political 1 percent.”

“Mind the current situation: We control your expensive connected cars, we control your connected house security devices, we control your daughter’s laptop, we control your wife's mobile. We tape your secret meetings, we read your emails, we control your favorite escort girl’s smartwatch, we are inside your beloved banks and we are reading your assets. You won’t be safe anywhere near electricity anymore,” the hackers said.

More @ RT

Istanbul nightclub attack: 15 foreigners among 39 killed as police hunt gunman

Via Billy

Turkish interior minister says gunman is still on loose despite earlier reports attacker had been killed by police

More @ The Guardian