Bruce Levine, Fall of the House of Dixie

I wrote about this two summers ago, during my Civil War jag, "House of Dixie."

At Amazon, Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South.

Carol Swain on the Inconvenient Truth About the Democratic Party

She's a good lady!

For Prager University:

A Glimpse Into the Life of a Slave Sold to Save Georgetown

Pretty fascinating.

At NYT:

A glimpse into the life of a slave sold to save Georgetown https://t.co/da5k7LVSbj pic.twitter.com/v2nPgViW9X

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 13, 2017

He was an enslaved teenager on a Jesuit plantation in Maryland on the night that the stars fell. It was November 1833, and meteor showers set the sky ablaze.

His name was Frank Campbell. He would hold tight to that memory for decades, even when he was an old man living hundreds of miles away from his birthplace. In 1838, he was shipped to a sugar plantation in Louisiana with dozens of other slaves from Maryland. They had been sold by the nation’s most prominent Jesuit priests to raise money to help save the Jesuit college now known as Georgetown University.

Mr. Campbell would survive slavery and the Civil War. He would live to see freedom and the dawning of the 20th century. Like many of his contemporaries from Maryland, he would marry and have children and grandchildren. But in one respect, he was singular: His image has survived, offering us the first look at one of the 272 slaves sold to help keep Georgetown afloat.

These rare, century-old photographs of Mr. Campbell help illustrate the story of those enslaved men, women and children. We shared that story with you back in April, starting a conversation about American institutions and their historical ties to slavery that has engaged many readers.

The photos had been stored in the archives of the Ellender Memorial Library at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, La., not far from where Mr. Campbell was enslaved.

Clifton Theriot, the library’s archivist and interim director, made the connection late last year after stumbling across an article in a genealogical quarterly about the Jesuit slaves who had been shipped to Louisiana. He was startled to see Mr. Campbell’s name listed among them.

“I thought, ‘I know this name,’” Mr. Theriot recalled.

He went into the archives and pulled out a small, black photo album from the early 1900s. Mr. Theriot went through the album, page by page, photo by photo, until he found them: three photographs of a bearded, elderly black man with pearly white hair.

Underneath was a handwritten notation. It described the man as having been born in “Moreland” or “Mereland,” probably referring to Maryland, Mr. Theriot said.

And it identified him as “Frank Cambell our old servant 19 when the stars fell.” The fiery meteor shower of 1833 was so memorable that many people used it to date important moments in their lives.

Mr. Theriot knew he was on to something: “I was like, ‘This is the guy.’”

He reached out to Judy Riffel, the author of the article that had inspired his search through the archives. She is the lead genealogist for the Georgetown Memory Project, a group founded by Richard J. Cellini, a Georgetown alumnus, to identify the 272 slaves and their descendants...

Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy

Following-up from earlier today, "Harvard Confronts Academe's Ties to Slavery."

It turns out there's a nifty book on universities and their slave past, especially those "progressive" Ivy League universities. (I just get a kick out this.)

At Amazon, Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities.

Harvard Confronts Academe's Ties to Slavery

At NYT, "Harvard Confronts the Deep Ties to Slavery in Academia."

Harvard Confronts the Deep Ties to Slavery in Academia.
by @jennyschuessler via @nytimes https://t.co/S71XPsrxt5

— Michiko Kakutani (@michikokakutani) March 6, 2017

Today's Deals

Thanks for your support.

At Amazon, Today's Deals.

And, Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life.

Plus, Kenneth M. Stampp, Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South.

Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves.

More, Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860.

Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made.

BONUS: Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America.

Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet

At Amazon, Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration.

Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton

The blurb for Sven Beckert, at Amazon, Empire of Cotton: A Global History.

The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Sven Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today.

In a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful politicians recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to make and remake global capitalism. The result is a book as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist.

Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams

The blurb for Walter Johnson's book, at Amazon, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom.

When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an “empire for liberty” populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves. River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reaccounting dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War.

Walter Johnson deftly traces the connections between the planters’ pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendency. Using slave narratives, popular literature, legal records, and personal correspondence, he recreates the harrowing details of daily life under cotton’s dark dominion. We meet the confidence men and gamblers who made the Valley shimmer with promise, the slave dealers, steamboat captains, and merchants who supplied the markets, the planters who wrung their civilization out of the minds and bodies of their human property, and the true believers who threatened the Union by trying to expand the Cotton Kingdom on a global scale.

But at the center of the story Johnson tells are the enslaved people who pulled down the forests, planted the fields, picked the cotton—who labored, suffered, and resisted on the dark underside of the American dream.

Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh

Out January 24, 2017, at Amazon, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation.

And see her op-ed at the New York Times, "Nat Turner’s Skull and My Student’s Purse of Skin."

House of Dixie

Blogging's been light.

My sister was hospitalized on Sunday with a hideous MSRA infection. I drove up to L.A. yesterday to visit. She's going to be fine, and in fact she went home last night. Had me worried there for a minute, though, especially since she went to the ER straight from the airport, after just landing from attending a wedding in Ohio.

In any case, on the way home I stopped by Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena. The only thing I don't like about Vroman's is that it's too far away, heh.

Their current events section is spectacular. I could spend hundreds of dollars in one outing if I lost all restraint.

As it is I picked up just one book, Bruce Levine's The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South.

I've been reading up on the Civil Wall pretty much all summer now. And I've been shopping for books, both new and used, to augment my collection of Civil War history.

This Levine volume is fantastic, certainly one of the most exciting tomes yet. Chapter One, "The House of Dixie," is a tour de force of the antebellum South. Slavery is without a doubt the central institution in the region's politics, culture, economy, and history. Levine weaves his account with a deep social analysis backed by data to indicate the brutal financial hegemony of the Southern plantation elite.

A small percentage of the Confederacy's population, the planter elite was propped up by an ideology of anti-black racism that was almost universally endorsed among Southerners. Indeed, landless whites, and those who never owned slaves, were nevertheless some of the most vital human elements sustaining slave society. A great many, if not the majority, acutely identified with planter economic interests, and were encouraged by Southern aristocrats to strive toward joining their ranks in slave ownership. Even those who never owned slaves reinforced the system by serving as the Southern regime's Praetorian guard, the "rural patrols" who captured slaves wandering off the plantations without travel passes. These "common whites" held aspirations to "someday cross into" the "charmed circle" of the slaveholding masters. Slavery was the very core of the region's identity. Moreover, the nearly three-quarters of the non-slaveholding population had gained the suffrage by the mid-19th century, and they voted their interests in keeping the planter aristocracy in political power.

To deny the centrality of slavery to the South's identity is willful blindness. And to deny the core importance of slavery to the origins and outbreak of the war is outright dishonesty and debauchery.

The slave system was perpetuated by totalitarian politics and the reign of political violence. It was not uncommon for cotton-picking slaves to pick 500-600 pounds a day. Such a huge cornucopia would be impossible with wage laborers alone, who would simply walk off the job rather than be driven to the length of their endurance to pick so much. How was it possible to reap so much product? Well, through violence. Political violence at the end of a bullwhip. Frederick Law Olmsted, a landscape architect, journalist, and social critic back in the day, toured the region on horseback, and here's Levine's account of the role of violence Olmstead witnessed firsthand:

The northern traveler Frederick Law Olmsted witnessed this form of what masters called "slave management" in action one day. He was touring a plantation on horseback in the company of its overseer. As the two men rode along, they saw a black girl apparently trying to avoid her assigned tasks. The overseer promptly dismounted and "struck her thirty or forty blows across the shoulder with his tough, flexible, "raw-hide" whip, Olmstead recorded. "At every stroke the girl cringed and exclaimed, 'Yes sir!' or 'Ah sir!' or "Please sir!'" Unsatisfied that the young woman had yet learned her lesson, the overseer made her pull up her dress and lie down on the ground facing skyward. He then "continue to flog her with the raw-hide, across her naked loins and thighs, with as much strength as before." As he beat her, she lay "writhing, groveling, and screaming, 'Oh don't, sir! Oh, please stop master! Please sir! Please sir! Oh, that's enough, master! Oh, Lord! Oh master! Oh, God, master do stop! Oh God master! Oh God master!'"

It's no mystery that murderous violence, backed by state laws, kept the slave power afloat. Slavery wasn't incidental to the system. It was the key institution and it became the basis for the country's sectional crisis.

Of this there should be no dispute. But there is. There's dispute among Marxists and radical libertarians who attack Abraham Lincoln and the Union North as invaders and imperialists.

I've been over this many times. Neither North nor South elevated blacks to the status of whites in 19th century America. The key difference is white Northerners despised slavery. It upset their system of free labor, and owning humans demeaned those who proclaimed cosmological universal natural rights. As sectionalism heated up Northerners were right to fear the South's slave power efforts to expand slavery to the territories and eventually to the Northern states themselves.

This is why Northerners stood firm against the expansion of slavery. And President Lincoln refused to allow secession seeing it as a bid to make permanent a hegemonic, expansionist slaveholding power across the Southern territory of United States.

Stogie hates these facts, and if you push too hard on slavery and Southern white supremacy, he'll threaten you.

Indeed, he considers anyone who disagrees with his slave-backing views an "enemy." He attacked me as an enemy a while ago, and now he's at it again in a blog post, See, "Enemies: Max Boot and Jeff Jacoby Vomit Hatred Towards the South; Time to Ditch the GOP?"

Yeah, so everyone is an enemy who's not down with the totalitarian violence of the Southern plantation slave regime. It's not about "heritage." The debate's about basic human values. And supporters of the Confederacy who refuse to acknowledge the totality of the system, the violence and anti-black hatred, have none.

Here's the full link to Levine's book, which is a must-read: The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South.

Abraham Lincoln 'Plotted' to 'Force the South' to Fire the First Shot at Fort Sumter?

Oh boy.

Stogie at Saberpoint might as well be a 9/11 truther, considering these outlandish blood libels he's spewing against Abraham Lincoln.

Now this is just downright bizarre, from the comments at Mediaite, "Memphis Mayor Wants to Literally Dig Up Confederate General and Move Him":

jim  rmiers1 • an hour ago

Very few people joined up to fight for the union to end slavery. They fought to restore the honor of a nation that had their flag torn town at Ft. Sumter and they weren't going to quit until the flag and their honor were restored. Now to many in the 21st century this sounds ridiculous and archaic but this was the mentality in the mid 19th century.

Stogie Chomper  jim • 28 minutes ago

That's why Lincoln and his staff plotted to force the South to fire the first shot -- by refusing to negotiate the peaceful return of the fort to South Carolina, by refusing to leave, and by attempting to resupply the fort with Yankee warships. People today still mistakenly believe the South started the war by firing the first shot -- but it was started by Lincoln, purposely for its propaganda value, by forcing the issue.

The truth is Lincoln pledged not to fight to reclaim Fort Sumter for the North. Indeed, he nearly let the U.S. Army forces of Major Robert Anderson run out of provisions, and then only sent supply ships to re-provision the troops there with the permission of South Carolina Governor Francis Pickens. But Pickens was an extremist who refused Lincoln's attempt to peaceably re-provision the fort. Confederate President Jefferson Davis piled on the belligerency, ultimately ordering Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard to bombard the Union forces at the fort. The North so refused to fire the first shot that Major Anderson responded to General Beauregard's demands to surrender by saying he'd rather run out of food before initiating hostilities.

These are just facts. Don't let old Stogie get away with his conspiracy bullshit. Man, this is really getting interesting. Get your tinfoil hats ready!

And check back for further iterations of the Stogie-Donald debates!

Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, Honored with Hundreds of Miles of Roads in Former Secessionist States

At the New York Times, "Honors for Confederates, for Thousands of Miles":

Past Meets Present: Honors for Confederates, for Thousands of Miles - http://t.co/0l4FNifaNT pic.twitter.com/JyW8vGzqdI

— Media Vybz (@OneMediaVybz) June 26, 2015

How many miles of roads in the South are named for Confederates? http://t.co/J300yu77yr pic.twitter.com/NZvXApGwHj

— The Upshot (@UpshotNYT) June 27, 2015

A plaque on the exterior of the Hotel Monaco in Alexandria, Va., honors “the first martyr to the cause of Southern independence.”

It commemorates James W. Jackson, ardent secessionist and proprietor of the hotel that was at that site during the Civil War. But he was not the first man killed in the Civil War. Among those who died earlier was a Union officer, Col. Elmer E. Ellsworth, who removed the Confederate flag flying from the hotel. He was confronted and shot to death by Mr. Jackson, who was quickly killed by Colonel Ellsworth’s men.

There is no memorial for Colonel Ellsworth in Alexandria. But there are many memorials for Confederates. Elsewhere in Alexandria, a city right across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital, are streets named Lee, Beauregard, Pickett, Bragg and Longstreet, all Confederate generals. A highway is named for Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy.

In the wake of the mass murder at a black church in Charleston, S.C., Jon Stewart noted in his “Daily Show” monologue, “In South Carolina, the roads that black people drive on are named for Confederate generals who fought to keep black people from being able to drive freely on that road.”

It isn’t just in South Carolina or Virginia. Cities throughout the South have streets, schools and parks named for other Confederate generals like J. E. B. Stuart, Jubal Early and Stonewall Jackson.

At least 10 United States military bases are named for Confederate leaders. A suburb of Houston, Missouri City, has a subdivision with the street names of Pickett, Bedford Forrest (Court and Drive), Beauregard, Breckinridge and Confederate. And on the other side of its Vicksburg Boulevard is, strangely, Yankee Court.

We set out to see just how often Confederate leaders are honored in the 11 former Confederate states by sifting data on street names collected by the Census Bureau.

Davis had the longest length of roadways bearing his full name, 468 miles, followed by Stuart with 106 miles. Robert E. Lee, considered the greatest Confederate general, was third with nearly 60 miles.

It is quite possible that more streets were named for Lee, as we searched for the full name only. Similarly with Stonewall Jackson, who has 40 miles named after him. Using only a last name would also have pulled in any streets, roads and highways named for Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, Maynard Jackson, the former Atlanta mayor — or Bob Jackson, a real estate developer.

Across the entire United States, the most common names honored are Presidents Washington, Lincoln and Jackson. In the 11 former Confederate states, Jackson, with 3,430 miles, and Washington, with 1,701 miles, have the most roadway. Third is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with 1,183 miles, then Lincoln, with 683 miles.

These calculations are based on a Census Bureau data set of all roads in the country...

Keep reading.

Meanwhile, Stogie keeps the discussion going at Saberpoint, "More Butt-Hurt for Donald Douglas: The Top Six Racist Quotes of Abraham Lincoln." A key point Stogie notes there, "By today's standards, Abraham Lincoln was a virulent white supremacist and racist."

Ah, by "today's standards."

The problem for Stogie, and those like Professor Livingston who make arguments about how "racist" the Northerners were, is that in the 1850s most everyone except the most radical abolitionists adopted "racist" views on the relations between whites and blacks. And I've asked Stogie repeatedly, "Who claims Northerners weren't racist? Who denies the North was racist?" None of the scholars I've blogged or cited denies that racism was rife in the North. Stogie's argument is a classic straw man, arguing against a point that no one makes.

Further, the key to this debate, on why the South seceded, is the relative positions on slavery of the antagonists, of North and South. Lincoln opposed slavery. He opposed it consistently. And he particularly opposed the extension of slavery to the territories, and by implication --- considering the South's ideological aggression in its belief in property rights in slaves --- to the North as well. Furthermore, after the North's defeat of the South in the Civil War, the old ideology of the Southern nation, and especially Southern beliefs in the subordination of the "darkies," continued for at least a century, into the decade of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The Republican Party was the party of emancipation and civil rights. The Democrats, who carried forth the legacy of the "lost cause" and Jim Crow in the mid-20th century, were the party of segregation and white supremacy.

These are just facts. Stogie never addresses these facts other than to further prevaricate with more accusations of Northern racism, or to react with shocked blabbering, "Are you calling me a racist?!!"

No, I am not nor have I ever called Stogie a racist. I just disagree with him on the origins of the Civil War, and he's having a devil of a time winning this debate, especially with his reliance on fringe personalities like Professor Livingston and this economic illiterate Gene Kizer.

In any case, since this post is on how the South names roads to honor the memory of Jefferson Davis, lots of miles of roads, here's Professor Ilya Somin, at the Volokh Conspiracy, with a long entry on why Southern secession was indeed about the preservation of slavery. See, "Slavery as the Motive for Southern Secession in 1861":

Some commenters on my posts on secession (here and here) doubt my claim that the southern states seceded in 1861 for the purpose of preserving slavery. After all, they point out, Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans had promised not to abolish slavery in the states where it existed. This is a common point advanced by those want to claim that slavery was not the main cause of the Civil War. Indeed, it was first advanced by apologists for the Confederate cause in the immediate aftermath of the War in order to paint the Confederacy in a more positive light by demonstrating that it was fighting for "states' rights" rather than slavery. But the claim doesn't withstand scrutiny.

Confederate leaders repeatedly stated in 1861 that the threat Lincoln's election posed to slavery was the main reason for secession. In January 1861, soon-to-be Confederate President Jefferson Davis said that his state had seceded because "She has heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions; and the sacred Declaration of Independence has been invoked to maintain the position of the equality of the races." Davis was referring to well-known speeches by Lincoln and other Republicans citing the Declaration in criticism of slavery. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens similarly said that "slavery . . . was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution" and that protecting it was the "cornerstone" of the new Confederate government. Many other Confederate leaders made similar statements.

Why did Lincoln's election cause them to fear for the future of slavery? It is true that the Republicans did not plan to abolish slavery in the near future. But white southerners still saw Lincoln's election on an antislavery platform as a serious threat to the "peculiar institution." Whatever their position on slavery where it already existed, the Republicans were firm in their commitment to preventing its spread to the vast new territories acquired by the US in the Mexican War. That, in fact, was the main point of the Republican platform. Slaveowners believed that an end to the expansion of slavery threatened their economic interests. In addition, the creation of numerous new free states without the admission of any new countervailing slave states would erode slaveowners' influence in congressional and presidential elections and potentially pave the way for abolition in the future.

Perhaps even more important, most white southerners didn't trust Lincoln's assurances that he wouldn't move against slavery in the South. After all, this was the same man who had famously said that "this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free," and that "the opponents of slavery" should "arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction." He meant that blocking the expansion of slavery would eventually put pressure on southern states to abolish it "voluntarily." But slaveowners suspected that he and other Republicans would attack the Peculiar Institution directly if they got the chance. Within the Republican Party, Lincoln was a relative moderate. More radical Republicans wanted stronger, more immediate action against slavery. And their influence within the party might grow over time.

Finally, slaveowners feared that Lincoln's election would undermine slavery in border states such as Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee and even Virginia, which already had many fewer slaves than the Deep South. By using patronage to promote the growth of Republican parties in these states and relaxing enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, a Republican-controlled federal government could eventually force these states to abolish slavery. Without strong federal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, slaves from border states adjacent to slave states could more easily escape to the North and border state slaveowners would have incentives to sell their slaves to the deep south, where slaves couldn't run away as easily; this, of course, would undermine the institution of slavery in the border states. If the Republicans could turn the border states into free states and do the same with all the new states to be established in the West, they could create a large enough majority of free states to enact a constitutional amendment banning slavery throughout the country.

It was to head off these various threats to slavery that the southern states chose to secede in 1861. For documentation of all these points, including quotes from Confederate leaders, see historian William Freehling's excellent book, The South vs. the South.

Ultimately, slavery would probably have lasted longer if the South hadn't seceded in 1861. The Confederates clearly underestimated the North's will to fight (just as northerners underestimated that of the Confederates). Nonetheless, they did have reason to see Lincoln's election as a serious longterm threat to slavery. And that fear underlay the decision to secede.

Okay, thank's for reading.

And check back for the next iteration of the Donald-Stogie debates!

Saberpoint on Gene Kizer's, Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States — the Irrefutable Argument

Man, this book must be really bad.

See Stogie at Saberpoint, "Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States -- the Irrefutable Argument."

Kizer's book is here.

And here's my response to Stogie:

"The North's economy was based mostly on manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton around the world."

Yes, and cotton was an extremely low-value added commodity, of which the U.S. economy would increasingly marginalize had not the South attempted to export its ideology of property in slaves into the territories, in essence attempting to nationalize the ideology of slaveholder's rights to own blacks.

The fact is, the South had a pre-industrial economy that failed to attract capital, and was already headed for a falling rate of productivity and further economic backwardness. Ironically, what investment that was sent to the South was overwhelming invested in planting, since that's all Southerners really knew how to do -- own black slaves, beat them into vicious submission, to eek out increasingly marginalized returns.

Moreover, insular agrarianism isolated the South, cutting it off from the influx of new people and ideas (people obviously hostile to chattel slavery and much more morally enlightened). Today, the Confederacy, if it had continued to exist, would be a poor primary exporter like the peripheral Latin American economies. Cutting edge industries, back then rail, steel, manufacturing, shipbuilding, and now high-technology information systems, robotics, and nano-technology, would be found nearly exclusively in the North. Folks might as well move to Mexico for all the Southern economy would be cracked up to be.

But again, Stogie, all this stuff you're spouting about the North being the aggressor against the South is more of the mythic national ideology of the South, the same ideology that claimed to favor liberty and states' rights, but in fact pursued tyrannical policies, nationalized economics, used murderous Gestapo-style police force to keep the system in place, and advanced racial ideologies to keep alive a social hierarchy of American apartheid.

Kizer's book is economically illiterate. Yes, the South dominated cotton exports, but economic history shows that "King Cotton" is no longer king. The South was bound to backwardness one way or the other. But by bringing on the Civil War, Southerners guaranteed their experiment from 1961-1865 would wind up on the scrapheap of history, not unlike the Soviet Union (or the Nazis, if you prefer), with which the South's methods of tyranny had so much in common.

As always, check back for future iterations on the discussion of the Confederacy.

North Charleston Police Sergeant Fired for Wearing Confederate Flag Boxer Shorts

Wow, man.

This is getting totally hardcore. It's a freakin' crackdown!

At the Charleston Post & Courier, "North Charleston officer fired for posing in rebel flag underwear":

A North Charleston police officer has been fired because he posted a photo of himself wearing Confederate flag boxer shorts.

Shannon Dildine, who was a sergeant and with the force since 1996, was sent a letter Wednesday from Police Chief Eddie Driggers detailing why the department let him go.

He was terminated because it was determined that the posting would make him incapable of effectively serving as a North Charleston officer.

“On Tuesday ... the City learned that you posted on Facebook a photograph in which you were wearing only a pair of boxer shorts emblazoned with the image of the Confederate flag,” Driggers wrote. “Your posting in this manner led to you being publicly identified as a North Charleston Police officer and associated both you and the Department with an image that symbolizes hate and oppression to a significant portion of the citizens we are sworn to serve.”

Further, Driggers said, Dildine could compromise any criminal cases involving minorities because a defense attorney could use the photo call to into question his motivation in making an arrest.

Well, the dude posted it to Facebook --- not sure if that was the best idea, considering.

Confederate Flags Pulled from Shelves at the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center

Boy, that's a whole lotta history getting erased.

Leftist's are having a real run with this, man. I can guarantee you that they'll overreach and foment a backlash. Folks don't always tell pollsters everything, especially on questions of race.

At the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, "Stand-alone Confederate flags pulled from Gettysburg Visitor Center store."

Confederate flags no more at Gettysburg Visitor Center: http://t.co/4ZpKht0LWc pic.twitter.com/ScR13nCHU7

— Donald Gilliland (@drgilliland) June 25, 2015

Apple Pulls Civil War Games from App Store Because of Confederate Flag

At Truth Revolt, "BREAKING: Apple Pulls All Civil War Games Over Confederate Flag Controversy."

And at Touch Arcade, "Apple Removes All American Civil War Games From the App Store Because of the Confederate Flag."

UPDATE: It's looking like Apple has pulled everything from the App Store that features a Confederate flag, regardless of context. The reasoning Apple is sending developers is "...because it includes images of the confederate flag used in offensive and mean-spirited ways." We just spoke with Andrew from HexWar Games, who have released many historical strategy games. He insists, "We're in no way sympathetic to the use of the flag in an offensive way, we used it purely because historically that was the flag that was used at the time."

HexWar Games plans on attempting to re-submit their games using the lesser-known 1861 version of the Confederate flag. But, who knows if that will even be approved. No one is sure yet if Apple is banning all mention of the Confederacy, or just the specific image of the flag which has since become such a hot button issue in the USA...

Lots more at the link.

The reason this is a huge story is because of Apple's near-monopoly on structuring the popular culture, and debates about the popular culture. I like Apple products. My family uses Apple products and we're not tech geeks by any means. It's a good company. They're just a leftist company and they tremendous market power, and hence cultural influence.

America Demonized as 'Racist Nation', Enabled by Compliant and Hateful Left-Wing Media

It's not just "white privilege" now, it's white supremacy, spewed wall-to-wall by leftists and Democrats, and distributed all over the world by a despicable, biased, and hateful far-left media establishment.

From the O'Reilly Factor. And stay with this until the end. O'Reilly gets pissed off and literally declares war on the radical left. He's going to hold these people "to account." Freakin' rights.

After Charleston Shootings, Poll Highlights Race Dilemma for Republicans

This is interesting, at Reuters.

How Confederate Flag Controversy Shows We've Gone Nuts as a Culture

From John Ziegler, at Mediaite.