Nathan Bedford Forrest and Southern Folkways

 

There are many examples of heroism that illustrate spiritedness in America’s history. Indeed, the American Revolution was won because of the indomitable spirit of the Patriots and a growing unwillingness of the British to put down the campaign for independence. The same spirit was present a century later during the War between the States. It is routinely acknowledged that Confederate commanders such as Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson have achieved a significant place in American history for their military elan.

While Lee and Jackson immediately come to mind as exemplary leaders, perhaps the ultimate Southern military genius was an unschooled man of the Tennessee frontier. General Lee was to remark after the War that his greatest soldier was a man he had never met whose name was Forrest. And it was to this Achilles of the Confederacy that Andrew Lytle turned to begin his career as a writer. Certainly Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company appeals to the military historian, but additionally Lytle adds an important mythical dimension to Forrest’s career. Lytle sees in Forrest the heroic summation of nationalism and leadership; he shows both to be patriarchal and familial and, thus, reflective of the fundamental character of the Southern nation and the now obscure form of Confederate nationalism it represented.

More @ The Abbeville Institute

Devastation and Denial: Cambodia and the Academic Left

Via David

I Have Committed The Mistake Of Believing In Americans 

 The Tuol Sleng Museum, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Looking out across the yellow-washed angular buildings (French) that clutter the inner city of Phnom Penh in 2016, hindsight fills me with anxiety. Imagining myself here in 1975, I recall the jubilant and cheering crowds in the spring of that year who weren’t privy to that hindsight as they welcomed Khmer Rouge communists into Cambodia’s capital city after months of siege.

On the morning of 17 April, word had arrived that the Khmer Rouge had captured the government’s last beleaguered military stronghold on the outskirts of the city. Prime Minister Long Boret could hardly believe the news. He demanded to be driven to the riverside to see it with his own eyes. By the time he arrived, order had already collapsed in the streets and men wearing the black shirts of the Khmer Rouge surrounded his small entourage and demanded his guards put down their guns.

Managing to slip away in the chaos, Boret reported back to his cabinet at the Defence Ministry that the enemy was already in the streets. The rush then began to evacuate senior government members from the country on any government helicopters still available amidst the anarchy. Had he taken action, Boret might have escaped with his wife and children on a helicopter reserved for him, but he delayed, trying to find a helicopter with enough space for his extended family.

More @ Quillette

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Vientiane, Laos 1969

Phnom Penh 1994 - 1995

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Kerry And His Mystical Khmer Dau (Rouge)

Soldiers in Hiding - Documentary about US veterans

Via Anonymous

New Jersey Poll: Republican Bob Hugin Ties Democrat Bob Menendez amid Corruption Concerns

 

New Jersey’s senior Democrat Sen. Bob Menendez is seriously struggling in his re-election bid, as Republican Bob Hugin has pulled into a statistical tie with him this year, months ahead of the November election, a new survey conducted by Gravis Marketing and provided exclusively to Breitbart News shows.

Menendez, at 43 percent, only leads Hugin, at 41 percent, by two percentage points–inside the poll’s 4.1 percent margin of error. An unusually high 16 percent are undecided in the Senate race, meaning Hugin has a major opportunity to convince those voters to come his way should he be able to effectively get out his message. It also means Menendez has a lot of work to do between now and November to convince voters in New Jersey he is not corrupt, as they now overwhelmingly believe.
A majority of voters–56 percent in total, split 28 percent apiece–say Menendez’s corruption trial is either somewhat or heavily impacting their voting decision.

 

More @ Breitbart

New England’s Perpetuation of Slavery

 

There is little question that the origins of the American Revolution, and the later War Between the States, are rooted in New England’s illicit trade in slaves and molasses, and England’s efforts to stop the maritime competition with the mother country. By 1750, Rhode Island had become the center of the transatlantic slave trade, surpassing Liverpool for the dubious honor.

The author below writes: “nine-tenths of the colonial merchants and skippers had become smugglers as the break with England neared. Such men as John Hancock, a prince of contraband traders, on the eve of Paul Revere’s ride had for counsel before the Admiralty Court in Boston none other than John Adams, answering for him a half-million dollar suit in penalties as a smuggler.” He went on that “One-quarter of all the signers of the Declaration of Independence were bred to commerce, to the command of ships and to contraband trade.”
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org   The Great American Political Divide

New England’s Perpetuation of Slavery

“In accord with the spirit of the times the British Parliament passed a series of statutes in 1633 providing, among other things, that nothing could be brought into the colonies that wasn’t carried there in British ships, “whereof the master and three-fourths of the crew are English.”

[Concerned about the rise of illicit maritime trade of New England] the shipbuilders of the Thames district met in London in the winter of 1724-1725 and formally complained to the Lords of Trade:

“In the eight years ending in 1720 we are informed that seven hundred sail of ships were built in New England, and that in years since, as may if not more; and that the New England trade, by the tender of extraordinary inducements, has drawn over so many working shipwrights that there are not enough left to carry on the work [in England].”

Linked inseparably with the venture south to the [West] Indies the colonists’ brisk trade in rum and what they were in the habit of calling “Black Ivory.” For the Indies trade was a three-cornered affair hinging on rum, slaves and molasses. Together they comprised the foundation for more ships and hence more trouble than all the politicians ashore put together.

The New Englanders had Indian slaves as early as 1637 . . . and more or less formal business developed, with traders nabbing Indians along the banks of the Kennebec River in Maine and selling them into slavery up and down the coast. It was the black ivory from Africa, however, that turned the trick in the West Indies trade and established Southern slavery on a solid and enduring footing.

The mechanics of this all-important trade worked like this: molasses was brought to New England and made into rum; the rum, highly prized among Negroes on the west coast of Africa, brought its own price among the drinkers, a price that included any of their relatives or friends who might have the bad judgment to be lying about, and the resultant human cargoes were disposed of profitably in Boston, Newport [Rhode Island] and on south.

Not all the West Indies rum was drunk by Negroes. A flourishing local trade in fur was conducted with the Indians by the extremely profitable exchange of a few bottles of cheap rum or whiskey for the entire season’s catch of its drunken owner. The tribal chiefs . . . in 1726, begged without avail to have the sale of firewater to the young braves stopped.

It is hardly surprising, then, that among the first real troublemakers of all the British efforts to raise money [to support the colonies] was a new Molasses Act, for it was molasses brought in from the French West Indies from which New England rum was made. To put teeth into the effort Parliament authorized the use of writs of assistance, a sort of search warrant covering an entire community that gave British customs officials the right to search any ship, warehouse or even private home for smuggled goods.

When the harried Board of Trade and Plantations finally decided to act, its attempt to enforce the Navigation Acts [to restrict New England’s rum and slave triangle] was the spark in the touchhole that set the guns to booming.”

(Yankee Ships, an Informal History of the American Merchant Marine, Reese Wolfe, Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1953, excerpts pp. 39; 43-44; 49-51)

Donald Trump interview from 1980

Via Dan

Yankee Slave Trader Gordon

In late February 1862, Yankee slaver trader Nathaniel Gordon of Portland, Maine, was hung in the stone courtyard of the Tombs, in New York City, convicted of “piratically confining and detaining Negroes with the intent of making them slaves.” Ironically, New York’s own Declaration of Independence signer, Phillip Livingston, made his own vast fortune in the slave trade, as did many other New Englanders. A further irony is that soon Lincoln would be formulating a plan to foment race war in the American South, replicating the emancipation edicts of Royal Governor Lord Dunmore in 1775, and Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane in 1814. It was England and New England that brought shiploads of enslaved Africans to work Southern and South American plantations, and both would later demand liberty and the rights of man for those they had placed in bondage. See: Hanging Captain Gordon, Ron Soodalter, 2006 for deeper reading.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org   The Great American Political Divide

Yankee Slave Trader Gordon

“In November 1861 a Yankee slave trader was captured on the high seas with a boat load of slaves bound for the West Indies. Trading in slaves had been illegal for years, although the New England slave ships had been carrying on clandestine slave trading with considerable success for Cuba and Brazil but not the South, which was not interested.

It is commonly but erroneously assumed that slave trading was a Southern occupation, but in fact almost all slave trading, when it was legal and later illegal, was from ships of New England registry with Northern crews.

The Yankee slave trader Nathaniel Gordon, who was originally from Maine, was tried before a federal judge in New York and sentenced to be hanged on 7 February 1862. It was the first and only time such a sentence was handed down and carried out.

Realizing the undue harshness of the sentence, 25,000 New Yorkers petitioned Lincoln to commute Gordon’ sentence to one of life imprisonment. There was nothing to be lost by Lincoln doing this, but Lincoln refused to commute the sentence. (Later, when another slave trader was caught, Lincoln went to the other extreme and granted a pardon).

There were many vociferous abolitionists who called for the hanging to be carried out, and Lincoln yielded to their demands. He did, however, grant a cruel delay of thirteen days so that the execution would not take place until 20 February. Lincoln explained his course of action in these words: “In granting this respite [thirteen days] it becomes my painful duty to admonish the prisoner that relinquishing all expectation of pardon by human authority, he refer himself alone to the mercy of the common God and Father of all men.”

It would seem that mercy from God, to be realistic, would have to come through men, and in this case, Lincoln. Where was the “mercy of the common God” when Lincoln had him hanging from a rope until dead? What is the logic of this cruelty?”

(When in the Course of Human Events, Arguing the Case for Secession, Charles Adams, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000, excerpts pp. 209-210)

A Tradition of Anti-Southern Hatred

 

In a fit of anti-South hatred, the radical Parson Brownlow of Tennessee told his pro-Lincoln audience that “we will crowd the rebels into the Gulf of Mexico and drown the entire race, as the devil did the hogs in the Sea of Galilee.” Abolitionist Wendell Phillips received cheers from his audience when he called for the near-extermination of American Southerners “and no peace until 347,000 men of the South are either hanged or exiled.” The blue clad soldiers of Sherman and Sheridan practiced wanton destruction of towns, cities and farms where they marched, slaughtering livestock indiscriminately, and leaving little of nothing for women and children – black or white — to eat.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org   The Great American Political Divide

A Tradition of Anti-Southern Hatred

“Hatred of the South is not new, and examples of it are legion. Ralph Waldo Emerson declared, “If it costs ten years, and ten to twenty to recover the general prosperity, the destruction of the South is worth so much.” Prior to the War for Southern Independence, and Englishman stated that there was nothing Northerners “hate with so deep a hatred” as Southerners.

In 1862, Gen. Benjamin “Beast” Butler of Massachusetts added the lynch rope to the arsenal of weapons used against the South. A Southern youth made the mistake of removing the invaders flag from a building in occupied New Orleans. He paid dearly for his patriotic enthusiasm [as Butler] ordered the young Southerner hung by the neck until dead!

Such is the tradition of anti-Southern hatred, a tradition inherited and perpetuated by the liberal establishment. To perpetuate [the] liberal myth of history, the liberal establishment, like any other empire, requires a monopoly in the marketplace of ideas . . . [and] controls access to the media. The liberal propagandist rings the bell “slavery” and the masses respond with an outpouring of anti-Southern venom.

Imagine how embarrassing it would be for the liberal establishment if there were general knowledge that Massachusetts was the first colony to engage in the slave trade, that much of the capital used to build the industrial Northeast was amassed from profits of the New England slave trade, that it was primarily the Northern colonies which refused to allow a section in the US Constitution outlawing the slave trade, or that the thirteen stripes on the US flag represent thirteen slave-holding colonies, the majority of which were Northern colonies!”

(Driving Dixie Down – the Destruction of Southern Culture; Why Not Freedom! America’s Revolt Against Big Government, James & Ronald Kennedy, Pelican Publishing, 1995, excerpts pp. 367-369)

Chairman's Report / Loss of Heritage / Destruction of the People's Property / Legislative Breach of Trust

 

In my capacity as Chairman of the Board of Advisors, Emeritus of the Southern Legal Resource Center, I recently entertained the following discourse with the Chief Trial Counsel to be passed on to the Executive Body.

After the church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina by a one Dylan Roof; the then Governor Nikki Haley, in complicity with the South Carolina Legislature,  proceeded to put themselves in a state of War with the people of the State when they endeavored to destroy the integrity of the Confederate Soldier's Cenotaph on the Capitol grounds with the removal of the soldiers Colors from this outside exhibit (the People's property) breaching the trust the people put into their care that these Colors would remain there in a state of safety and security FOREVER.

More @ HK

INL specialists left plutonium in their car. In the morning, it was gone

Via Billy

Two security experts from the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory drove to San Antonio, Texas, in March 2017 with a sensitive mission: to retrieve dangerous nuclear materials from a nonprofit research lab there.

Their task was to ensure that the radioactive materials did not fall into the wrong hands on the way back to Idaho, where the government maintains a stockpile of nuclear explosive materials for the military and others

More @ Idaho Statesman

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Foreign Policy Expert Ted Malloch: Here Are the Two Realities from the Trump-Putin Talks

Via Billy

Just after high noon on July 16th in historic Helsinki, Finland, a meeting (not a summit) between the Presidents of the United States and Russia took place to repair what some have called the “worst relations” between the two countries ever. (Putin was an hour late; this is a diplomatic technique equivalent to icing the kicker in football!)

President Trump blamed the “foolishness” of past US administrations, particularly Obama’s, for the deplorable and dangerous state of current affairs with Russia. Down playing expectations in advance, Trump said, he had “low expectations” for the meeting, while the MSM media castigated him for even holding such a session at all, condemning Trump for his supposed collusion and failure to be “tougher” on Russia. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, Trump strode confidently into the Finnish Palace.

 The results of the leaders time revolved around five items that truthfully deserve more time and attention to detail and an on-going structured working dialogue.

More @ The Gateway Pundit

Putin: US Intelligence Helped Move $400,000,000 to Hillary Campaign

Vladimir Putin: Last year there was one extradition case by the United States… Mueller can use this treaty as an official request to us… in this case this kind of effort should be a reciprocal one… For instance we can bring up Mr. Browder… They sent a huge amount of money $400,000,000 to Hillary Clinton!

More @ The Gateway Pundit

Trump Is Right - NATO Is Obsolete, and if Europe Wants to Fight Imaginary Enemies, It Should Pay Its Own Way

Via Billy

 

Terrified by Trump, Eurocrats in Brussels over these past few days have conveyed to Asia Times fears about the end of NATO, the end of the World Trade Organization, even the end of the EU.

Hysteria is at fever pitch. After the NATO summit in Brussels, the definitive Decline of the West has been declared a done deal as President Trump gets ready to meet President Putin in Helsinki.

It was Trump himself who stipulated that he wants to talk to Putin behind closed doors, face-to-face, without any aides and, in theory, spontaneously, after the preparatory meeting between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was canceled. The summit will take place at the early 19^th century Presidential Palace in Helsinki, a former residence of Russian emperors.

More @ Russia Insider

Inland Manufacturing 30 M-1 Carbine

You can now buy a newly manufactured Inland M-1 30 Carbine–we’ll get to that in a minute but before we do some background is appropriate.

The .30 M-1 Carbine was used by the U.S. Military in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. The carbine was supplied to allied forces and hung around long after Vietnam. I encountered the M-1 carbine in service with the Bolivian UMOPAR counter-drug police in the 1990s. These fun guns remain popular and effective for civilians today.

More @ Guns America

Chicago Police Kill Suspect Reaching For Gun (video)

Chicago police released a snippet of video of a fatal police shooting less than a day after it sparked violent clashes between officers and protesters on the South Side. The footage, taken from an officer’s body worn camera, appears to show Harith Augustus, 37, a barber, break away from officers and attempt to pull a gun from a holster on his waist. He was shot dead in the street by police.

I read an article about Peter Strzok's father Peter Senior that made me think that Junior is a spy for Iran.

Via Iver

 

My theory--and IT'S ONLY A THEORY--is that Barack Obama was blackmailed by Iran.  

The article about Peter Senior is in the Leader-Telegram (Eau Claire, Wisconsin), February 21, 1979, Page 7.

More @ Thread Reader

Ex-Minister: Brexit Dept Is ‘Potemkin Structure’, ‘Establishment Elite Working to Overturn EU Referendum’

 

Steve Baker MP, who resigned from the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) after Secretary of State David Davis over Theresa May’s ultra-soft Brexit plan, has revealed that the whole department is a sham, and claimed the “establishment elite” are working to overturn the EU referendum.

Baker revealed that the Brexiteer-led department was a “Potemkin structure” devised in the wake of the referendum to provide a veneer of credibility to the Remain-supporting Prime Minister’s promise to deliver a clean Brexit from the European Union, its Single Market, and associated Free Movement regime — while the EU unit at May’s Cabinet Office, led by career bureaucrat and Soviet Union admirer Olly Robbins, undermined all of its work behind the scenes.

More @ Breitbart

The gravest internal threat to this country is not illegal aliens; it is leftist professors who are waging a war against America and teaching our young people to hate this country.

Thirty-three years ago, when I entered college, left-wing ideologies dominated American universities, and especially the humanities and social sciences. But one still could get a fair, balanced education by consulting traditional canonical texts that countered the dogma. Free speech was alive on college campuses. There were hisses and boos, of course, but for the most part, hearing perspectives different from your own was considered essential to your education. Few of us lived in our own curated silos.

More @ The Hill