Mississippi 1964? No, Missouri 2014

But, hey, don't worry, there's nothing racial going on here. Nothing at all.

Counter-protesters-in-Rosebud-Missouri-YouTube-800x430

A group of protesters marching from Ferguson, Missouri to Jefferson City were met with, well, they were met with this:

A group of Ferguson protesters were met Thursday afternoon with Confederate flags, racist symbols, and gunfire as they marched through a pair of rural Missouri towns.

Counter-protesters, including children, shouted racial slurs and carried signs urging the marchers to “go home,” reported the Columbia Missourian.

Residents of Gerald and Rosebud, where the marchers arrived about noon, set up a display of fried chicken, a melon, and a 40-ounce beer bottle in the street.

Some of the counter-protesters wore improvised Ku Klux Klan hoods, and they set up homemade signs supporting law enforcement and the grand jury’s decision not to charge Darren Wilson in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

“We’ve seen a few people who have used the N-word, who have asserted their First Amendment rights with obscenities, and that’s a part of our country and your rights under the Constitution,” said NAACP president and CEP Cornell William Brooks, who added that demonstrators have more frequently been met with support, including prayer and refreshments.’

Police are investigating a gunshot fired at the back of one of the buses traveling with the marchers, who have been walking 20 miles a day since Saturday to protest the grand jury decision.

“I support the police,” said former Rosebud mayor Clyde Zelch, who stood before a sign reading “Grand jury got it right! Justice was served.”

“We may have a system that needs to be improved on, but it’s a system our Founding Fathers gave us, and what the NAACP acts like is that we’re supposed to throw out everything that’s worked for 200 years, and the only version that they want is one in which they win every time,” Zelch said. “It should not be us against them. This is just simply criminal committing crimes and having to pay a price for that.”

He said about 175 counter-protesters had joined him, but news reports placed that number closer to 50.

Doug McQuery, who wore a T-shirt supporting the former Ferguson police officer, told the Missourian he thought it was fine if protesters wanted to burn down their own towns.

But the Bland resident said he wouldn’t stand for that anywhere else, and he expressed doubts that the Journey for Justice organized by the NAACP would be peaceful.

One of the marchers, Rhea Willis, said the hostile response reminded her of the attitudes her parents faced as civil rights activists in the 1960s.

“The comments that we saw are pure ignorance,” Willis said, adding that racism is learned, not innate.

More from the Columbia Missourian:

About 50 activists marching from Ferguson to Jefferson City encountered a hostile counter-protest Wednesday in Rosebud.

About 200 people met the marchers as they reached Rosebud around noon, activists said. A display of fried chicken, a melon and a 40-ounce beer bottle had been placed in the street. A Confederate flag flew. Counter-protestors shouted racial epithets. (Read more about the march on Thursday through Osage County, which was calmer.)

Rhea Willis of Velda City, Missouri, said she saw a boy she estimated to be 8 years old holding a sign that read, “Go home.”

Somebody shot the window out of the back of one of the buses traveling with the march, dubbed by the NAACP as the Journey for Justice. The outer pane of glass broke. The bullet landed in the windowsill, the driver said.

And here’s some video from a local television station:

Now, I am not going to claim that this bunch of yahoos represents most people in rural Missouri, or even a significant percentage of them. Like most Americans, I am sure that most of the people who live in this part part of the country are good, decent, honorable people who would never engage in nonsense like this. A good portion of them are also likely at least somewhat empathetic to the message that the people marching to the Jefferson City are trying to convey. At the same time, though, it’s important to recognize that people like this still exist, and that many of them are perfectly willing to act like this in public. They probably won’t even think they’ll be shamed in front of their neighbors either, and for the most part they’re probably correct about that. It’s worth noting, though, because there is quite obviously a racial undertone to what has been happening in Ferguson and elsewhere in response to events like the shooting of Michael Brown, the death at the hands of police of other mostly young African-American men such as Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley, and other cases that stretch back further than can reasonably be counted in the space of a short blog post. It is sufficient to say that there is clear evidence of racial disparities in the enforcement of laws and the use of force by police, clear evidence of unequal justice both in the sense that police are treated far more deferentially even when it is clearly inappropriate to do so and in the sense that someone who is poor is less likely to get an adequate defense at trial than someone who is not, and a clearly disparate impact in the use of deadly force by law enforcement.

Despite the evidence of all of this, there seem to be far too many people who either wish to dismiss these concerns entirely, or to deflect attention away from them by bringing up other issues. The most common response I have seen from some of the people who take this attitude has been to respond to points about police behavior by pointing out “problems” in the “black community.” Now, I don’t think many people will deny that there are social problems in many African-American communities that contribute to things like high crime rates, poverty, and other factors. Many of those are related directly to poverty, of course, but a good number of them are, for lack of a better word “cultural” problems that do need to be addressed. However, those problems are not the reason why police are treating young African-American men unfairly, nor are they the reason why even African-Americans who qualify as middle and upper class can report that they too have been singled out by police for disparate treatment for no conceivable reason. And it often doesn’t matter what the race of the police officer involved happens to be. Bringing up “the problems in the black community” in response to someone who points out these problems isn’t an argument, it’s a cop-out and an attempt at diversion by people unwilling to discuss a topic that, obviously, makes them uncomfortable.

And that brings us back to the people that the marchers from Ferguson encountered on their march to Jefferson City. Again, I am not going to suggest that they are representative of a majority of Missourians, or Americans, but they exist and I’m sure that they would readily agree that the problems in the United States don’t lie in an unequal justice system but in the “black community.” Why would anyone want to be associated with people like this?

FILED UNDER: Law and the Courts, Policing, Race and Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. Liberal Capitalist says:

    You know… If we could poll some of these counter-protesters a few months ago, I bet they would have been adamant about living in a post-racial society.

  2. Yolo Contendere says:

    Can somebody please send pics to John Roberts?

    kthxbai

  3. al-Ameda says:

    That picture – with that flag and those 2 guys – is evidence that once the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were passed in 1964 and 1965 respectively, that our race problems were officially in the past, that we had indeed moved on to a post-racial society.

    Also, I’m constantly reminded by relatives who live in Texas, Alabama, and Arkansas, that the Confederate Flag is not a symbol of race, rather a symbol of States Rights.

    White resentment is still a strong and powerful motivator when it comes to Republican politics, even 46 years after Nixon introduced and implemented a Southern Strategy that the GOP ran successfully for 4-plus decades.

  4. Gustopher says:

    Like most Americans, I am sure that most of the people who live in this part part of the country are good, decent, honorable people who would never engage in nonsense like this.

    You have a far kinder view of humanity than I do.

    I would expect that for each of the people demonstrating their racism this way, there are at least five more who didn’t have the nerve, and that for each of those there are ten who have deeply racist attitudes that they act on, but who don’t think of themselves as racist at all. They just say it like it is, call a spade a spade, etc.

    And the rest… Most of them have deeply racist attitudes that the occasionally find themselves acting on and are a bit disgusted with themselves when they notice it.

  5. michael reynolds says:

    I think there are four tranches of whites as regards race.

    1) People who are blatant, unapologetic, out-there racists. (See picture above.)
    2) People who are polite, well-behaved racists who know not to use the “N” word, but still see blacks as either genetically or culturally inferior.
    3) People who are not personally racist and deny that racism is important, or want to diminish it.
    4) People who can see what’s right in front of their eyes and acknowledge that race is an issue that has been and remains key to understanding this country.

    I actually think most Americans fall into categories 3 and 4. I think group 1 is pretty small and group 2 is quite a bit bigger, but not a majority.

    The problem for black Americans is that groups 1 and 2 don’t have to be the majority to define the playing field. If you’re job hunting and you are one of ten applicants and have, theoretically a 10% chance of winning the job, but just a quarter of employers fall into category 1 or 2, you are in a whole lot of trouble.

    Now you have a much higher chance of being unemployed, which means a much higher chance of poverty and all the pathologies of poverty. Then the white folks who refused to hire you lecture you on your “cultural” inferiority.

    Whites in category 3 want to believe race is all over. They’ve seen the light, therefore it’s not a problem anymore. They’ll say blacks need to stop playing victim, should pretend that there is no history here. Interestingly, those same folks seldom say that to Jews. And they never deny the importance of history as regards various white groups. An Italian-American will happily tell you how important his cultural history has been in forming his world views. Ditto an Irishman, a Scot, and like I said, my tribe, the Jews.

    But African-Americans are just supposed to shut up about the middle passage, slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, bombings, red-lining, a vast mechanism of white domination that dwarfs in its malignant effect anything any other group aside from Native-Americans can point to.

    For every other sub-species of American, history is a vital guide and source of inspiration; for African-Americans history is supposed to be a distant and irrelevant detail. Irish-American? Sure, tell us about the potato famine. Black American? Shut up about slavery and Jim Crow.

    Scots pride? Sure. Scottish resentment of the English? Sure. We have Braveheart for that. But African-Americans should just stop “playing the race card” and Indians should be happy they have casinos, and la di da, on with the show. African-Americans are supposed to a) Shut about the past, and, b) Ignore the daily discrimination that continues today, including police murders of black men, because, after all: Oprah and Obama.

    In fact, African-Americans have been the most tolerant and forgiving minority imaginable. Has there been a rash of black bombings of white institutions? No. Could there be? Yeah, and then what? “Playing the race card” is the most civilized and restrained reaction possible. Shut up and be happy that all that’s being played is the “race card.”

    Quick quiz: Was the white-black economic gap greater in apartheid South Africa or modern America? If you guessed apartheid SA, you’d be wrong.

    White Americans have a real problem with reality. We love our Founding Fathers stories. We don’t so much want to talk about the fact that the Colonial economy was built on ethnic cleansing of Native-Americans amounting to genocide in some cases, and on African slavery. Whites expelled and murdered Indians, enslaved, tortured, raped and murdered blacks, and in order to extend those heinous policies we attacked Mexico and stole half their land.

    The United States is built on military conquest and slavery. Yes, also on the lovely Declaration of Independence, that astoundingly hypocritical document, and on the Constitution – the Constitution that enshrined the inferiority of everyone not white and male. We live on land we stole and thrive in an economy that has always included a large element of ruthless exploitation of blacks and now, latinos.

    At the same time that we demand the Japanese acknowledge their past and steer away from myth and hagiography, we are still refusing to face the reality in our own country. Acknowledge Pearl Harbor and Nanking and the “comfort women,” you darned Japanese, but everyone shut the f— up about slavery and Jim Crow because that’s all the past.

    Here’s something to consider. Which group, motivated by a lust for power and greed, and self-justifying by recourse to distorted religion and tribalism, expanded quickly by brutalizing their opponents, raping, kidnapping, enslaving, expelling, torturing and murdering?

    a) ISIS
    b) White Americans.

    The answer is “C’, both of the above. (And yeah, a whole lot of others as well.)

    We didn’t just build a superpower out of Jefferson’s nice words, we built a superpower by wholesale crimes against humanity that would make a Serb or an Afrikaner blush. And while we have improved, we have not by any stretch come to acknowledge the truth, let alone do all we can or should to make our victims whole.

  6. JohnMcC says:

    It’s important to add a couple of related observations to the conviction that “most of the people who live in this part of the country are good, decent and honorable people who would never engage in nonsense like this.”

    One is that in my memory, ‘most’ people in many parts of the country would not have seen much conflict between being a “good, decent and honorable’ person and doing exactly what these folks did. The “bad, indecent and dishonorable” crowd would have attempted to lynch a marcher.

    Another thought is that ideas and behaviors like that shown in Rosebud are cultural artifacts that exist today because they succeeded in the past in keeping society pretty much like the “good, decent and honorable people” of the Mississippi River region wanted it. As long as overt racial aggressiveness ‘works’ for enough people it will continue.

    Poking around the google-world, I see that the US Senate formally apologized for blocking anti-lynching laws in — are you ready? — June of 2005. We are closer in time to Jim Crow than we like to think we are.

  7. Trumwill says:

    The south is just rotten to the core, as recent events in Missouri, Cleveland, and New York clearly demonstrate.

  8. PJ says:

    But, hey, don’t worry, there’s nothing racial going on here. Nothing at all.

    Well, there isn’t.

    Didn’t anyone notice the baby in the baby stroller to the right? That’s why the woman on the left (who could be mistaken as man) has her face covered with a napkin. She’s about to breastfeed the baby and this is a public space. She has also cut some holes in her face so that she can still admire the Confederate flag (which clearly only has to do with Southern pride and heritage) while breastfeeding.

    This is why people should also pay attention to international news, you might otherwise get things horribly wrong, and somehow think that this is about racism, when it actually about a breastfeeding woman being considerate.

  9. Tony W says:

    I’m tired of people pointing to Obama and Thomas and Winfrey and telling me that “blacks have come a long way.” As was pointed out in an excellent article over on Slate this week – it is Whites that have “come a long way”. Black people have been simply living their lives hoping to avoid lynching.

  10. JohnMcC says:

    @Tony W: “…it is Whites that have ‘come a long way’. Black people have been simply living their lives hoping to avoid lynching.”

    Well that certainly leaves me speechless! You are perhaps unaware of the history of African Americans who have risked their lives in something called the “civil rights struggle”?

    Perhaps I’m a victim of Poe’s law?

  11. Stonetools says:

    @Trumwill:

    Just means that the rest of America is more like the South than it would like to think. This doesn’t mean the South isn’t rotten- just means that the rot is in other parts of the country too, unfortunately.

  12. Pinky says:

    @JohnMcC: I think you’re misreading him. He’s not saying that blacks haven’t done anything to advance their cause; he’s saying that whites have finally stopped acting so much to inhibit the black cause.

  13. Dave Schuler says:

    Missouri is a pretty complicated state. North of the Missouri is basically South Iowa. St. Louis and Kansas City are both major metropolitan areas—a lot like other major metropolitan areas around the country at this point. Western Missouri south of the Missouri River is much like the adjoining areas of Oklahoma and Arkansas. Very rednecked. Eastern Missouri south of the Missouri, particularly the Bootheel, is the Deep South—agricultural, cotton (strawberries), sharecroppers, the whole nine yards.

    When I was a kid, the Ozarks were an isolated rural area, hardly touched by the 19th century let alone the 20th century. I suspect that the development of Branson and the area around Lake of the Ozarks has changed that and that it’s pretty cosmopolitan there now.

  14. Trumwill says:

    Well, I will grant you that in a week where South Carolina charged a killing cop and New York didn’t, it’s important to keep our eye on who the real villains are.

    I mean, look, I’m not denying that the South has a problem, or that it isn’t generally worse in the south than elsewhere. But recent events have demonstrated that it’s not a definition all southern problem, even granting that it extends elsewhere.

  15. John425 says:

    @al-Ameda: Republican politics? The foundation and structure were built by Democrats! For the legacy of “southern Democrats” to continue on over to today’s modern Republicans, the originals would be about 70-80 years old by now. Get real!

  16. John425 says:

    @michael reynolds: You are always welcome to seek your peace elsewhere, you know. Why not join Snowden in Russia or better yet, become a malcontent in China? Then too- you could preach atheism in Pakistan. That’ll be a hit. Perhaps you’d like to try being the average white guy in south Chicago say around 2AM? Or perhaps around 149th in Harlem also around 2AM. You are fool Reynolds, you only see what you’re told to see.

  17. Yolo Contendere says:

    @JohnMcC: I think he’s echoing Chris Rock, who in a recent interview commented that it diminishes to say black people have made progress, when it’s really white people that have made the progress. They’re nicer now than they’ve ever been, and progress is for America to keep producing nicer white people. I haven’t read the whole interview yet, but the clips I’ve seen are great.

  18. michael reynolds says:

    @John425:
    Your reaction to historical reality is to tell me to get out of my own country.

    Thanks for that. It’s sweet of you to prove my point.

  19. JohnMcC says:

    @Pinky: @Yolo Contendere:

    My instant and heartfelt apologies if I dashed off my reply without understanding Mr Tony W’s comment. I’m less likely to ‘go off at half-cock’ than I used to be and it’s a personal progress I wish to continue to improve.

    Thanx for pointing out that comment was not as I thought it was.

  20. But remember, the confederate flag only appears as a symbol of Southern Pride and should in no way be interpreted as advocating racism.

  21. al-Ameda says:

    @John425:

    Republican politics? The foundation and structure were built by Democrats! For the legacy of “southern Democrats” to continue on over to today’s modern Republicans, the originals would be about 70-80 years old by now. Get real!

    I’m sorry that you’ve somehow missed (or were not been informed of) the last 50 years of electoral politics. Since 1968, Republican politics have worked off a very successful Southern Strategy and it included a lot of White resentment. From 1968 to 2004 this strategy was triumphant: Republicans won 7 of 10 presidential elections. It is interesting that now Republicans get somewhat defensive when people point out that that strategy was successful. Why is that? You know why.

    By the way, it is telling that nearly 50% of Republicans still believe the Birther claim that Obama is not a legitimate president. I’m guessing that those people are not non-White.

    Race matters, it always has.

  22. grumpy realist says:

    We have pictures like this and then the Republicans don’t understand why African-Americans aren’t that interested in voting for them.

  23. Jenos Idanian #13 says:

    We have thousands of people on one side of an issue who are rioting and burning. We have one guy who was beaten to death with hammers over Ferguson.

    But the REAL danger is 50-odd idiots shouting and holding signs.

    It’s reminiscent of how the hard-core atheists and religion-haters gleefully go after Catholics or Mormons or fundamentalist Christians, but never say a word to Muslims. Apparently having a well-established reputation for violence is a good form of protection.

  24. al-Ameda says:

    @Jenos Idanian #13:
    So?:
    (1) police use of excessive and/or deadly force is a non-issue
    (2) when it comes to the use of excessive or deadly force, race is not an issue
    (3) it’s hard to understand why people rioted in Ferguson over a non-issue

  25. CET says:

    @michael reynolds: Irish-American? Sure, tell us about the potato famine. Black American? Shut up about slavery and Jim Crow.

    This might be a generational thing, but my memory of the school curriculum during the 90s and early 2000s is that these topics were covered relatively well. We knew perfectly well that the country was built on slave labor and the displacement and killing of American Indians.

    As far as cultural identity goes, groups 1 and 2 in your (very useful, btw) breakdown of white racial attitudes are going to have a problem with any black cultural identity for obvious reasons, and there’s not much that can be done about it, other than ignoring them while we wait for them to die off.

    For group 3, I don’t think there’s an issue with the idea of black cultural identity per se. What I think you do see is a rejection of the shared culpability that is either implicit or explicit in many aspects of the debate** (e.g. people in group 3 don’t like being blamed for something that they don’t think they are contributing to). The problem is that by trying to hold people in group 3 accountable for something that they don’t think they are contributing to, you set up a fair amount of cognitive dissonance and the easy ways to resolve that dissonance is to either deny that the issues exist, or slide into group 2 and become closet racists.

    **This is more a rhetorical issue than anything – the left really screwed up the sales pitch and the details of implementation for affirmative action, and things like the current absurdity with micro-aggressions don’t help.

  26. anjin-san says:

    @Jenos Idanian #13:

    Yes, because the real topic of this thread is not 400 years of oppression directed at black folks in America, and how it continues to manifest in the year 2014, but conservative fever dreams about a war on Christians.

  27. michael reynolds says:

    @CET:

    Thanks for giving me something intelligent to respond to, as opposed to John425 and Jenos’ inevitable cluelessness.

    I agree school now does cover issues of race much more completely than they did in my day. In my segregated Virginia schools they were still referring to the “War Between the States” as a case of southern resistance to northern aggression. Slaves? What slaves?

    In fact, as a guy with two teen-agers who writes for teens, I love this generation of kids. They’re better people than my generation.

    The “deniers” are clustered on the right, generally, and it’s their gurus – Sean Hannity comes to mind — who just want to pretend there is no race problem.

    The issue of collective guilt is serious one, both philosophically and practically. I don’t think guilt is generalizable from the individual to the group, or between generations. Responsibility is individual.

    I’m not looking for guilt. I’m looking for a simple acknowledgment that what’s happened, happened. But it’s hard not to slip into the language of guilt – it’s a sort of prejudice of the language itself, I don’t think we have any generally recognized terms to describe a sense that as white people we are given an advantage from birth. And that this advantage is a consequence of some very dark history. This advantage – white privilege – and the history behind it, place a moral obligation on white people as a matter of equity to undo the disadvantages faced by African-Americans.

    You could analogize it to kids’ sports. If you’re playing soccer and the opposing team is down two players, you switch jerseys on one of your players and loan her to the other team. At least that’s how it worked in my daughter’s soccer leagues. Basically you recognize that you have an unfair advantage, and to make the game fair, you compensate. The more numerous team didn’t cause the other team to be down two players, but taking advantage of that fact would be poor sportsmanship. Your victory would be hollow and false.

    We need to acknowledge the truth, something @John425 obviously refuses to do. We should not try to avoid the issue, as @Jenos is doing in attempting to divert the discussion. And we should find ways to level the playing field when we can do so without punishing individuals who bear no personal responsibility.

    The guilt is not collective, but the effect on black Americans is. They are being disadvantaged as a group, while whites who are advantaged as a group, hide behind, “It’s not my fault.” No, it’s not Jenos’ fault, but it becomes his fault if he refuses to admit the truth, refuses to discuss the truth, refuses even to consider the possibility that society has an obligation to level the playing field.

  28. ernieyeball says:

    I am not going to suggest that they are representative of a majority of Missourians, or Americans,..

    My experience of pounding the roads in 30+ of the States in this Union since 1973 tells me that such a suggestion is far closer to the truth than not.

  29. dennis says:

    @michael reynolds:

    And this is why I wanna sit down and have a drink with mr, one of these days.

  30. michael reynolds says:

    @dennis:
    I take that as a legally-binding promise to buy the first two rounds. I have witnesses.

  31. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Like most Americans, I am sure that most of the people who live in this part part of the country are good, decent, honorable people who would never engage in nonsense like this. A good portion of them are also likely at least somewhat empathetic to the message that the people marching to the Jefferson City are trying to convey.

    You would be wrong Doug. These are my neighbors and yeah, they are who they say they are. It is worse then you an imagine. 1858 was progressive.

  32. michael reynolds says:

    @John425:
    Look how extreme your reaction is:

    You are always welcome to seek your peace elsewhere, you know. Why not join Snowden in Russia or better yet, become a malcontent in China? Then too- you could preach atheism in Pakistan. That’ll be a hit. Perhaps you’d like to try being the average white guy in south Chicago say around 2AM? Or perhaps around 149th in Harlem also around 2AM. You are fool Reynolds, you only see what you’re told to see.

    Wow. All that venom because I recite well-known facts right out of history. You’re not angry because I’m criticizing America, I’ve heard you criticize aspects of this country many times. You’re mad because the truth challenges myths that are fundamental to your person. You need to believe something other than the truth, you literally require a lie. Because if you were to accept reality, you would lose what I imagine you call “white pride.’ You wouldn’t be special in a good way, you’d just be a Nth generation German living in a Jew’s house.

    The fact is, John, white people stole this house, the one we live in right now, this big country, and they killed everyone who got in their way, Now, that’s no better or worse than a Roman heading into Gaul, and considerably gentler than a Mongol heading anywhere, but it’s not heroic. It’s not even original.

    You want to jump ahead to 1776, and from there straight to 1942, not linger on all the dirty deeds done in between. But still and all, those other years existed. You can’t just invent the reality that fits your pre-conceptions. The facts are stubborn things.

    I’d still far prefer to think that you’re a good person. But you need to look long and hard at what you believe.

  33. Tony W says:

    @JohnMcC: We’re all friends here man – 🙂

  34. Tony W says:

    @michael reynolds:

    I take that as a legally-binding promise to buy the first two rounds. I have witnesses.

    I’ll buy for both of you. Take that to the bank.

  35. dennis says:

    @michael reynolds:

    Absolutely. And the good stuff. It’s worth what’s floating around in that head of yours.

  36. dennis says:

    @JohnMcC:

    Thanx for pointing out that comment was not as I thought it was.

    Considering that poison-filled harangue you launched at michael reynolds, there’s a whole lot that is not as you think it is.

  37. dennis says:

    @Jenos Idanian #13:

    We have thousands of people on one side of an issue who are rioting and burning. We have one guy who was beaten to death with hammers over Ferguson.

    But the REAL danger is 50-odd idiots shouting and holding signs.

    It’s reminiscent of how the hard-core atheists and religion-haters gleefully go after Catholics or Mormons or fundamentalist Christians, but never say a word to Muslims. Apparently having a well-established reputation for violence is a good form of protection.

    You know nothing, John Snow.

  38. Jenos Idanian #13 says:

    @anjin-san: Yes, because the real topic of this thread is not 400 years of oppression directed at black folks in America, and how it continues to manifest in the year 2014, but conservative fever dreams about a war on Christians.

    OK, here’s another comparison. The Occupy Movement vs. the Tea Party movement. The Occupiers’ events were infested with crimes. Vandalism was the least — there were several reported rapes, including at least one of a child.

    Tea Party events were peaceful. In many cases, the sites were left cleaner than they were before the Tea Partiers came along.

    But we were told, repeatedly, that the Occupy movement were noble and worthy, while the Tea Partiers were threats to Democracy.

    Or, that twit GOP staffer who said something mean about the Obama girls. This was such critical news that two networks sent satellite trucks to her parents’ home, while Time (I think) reassigned a foreign affairs correspondent to go through her columns for her college paper for more reasons to shellack her.

    Meanwhile, there’s apparently a war on Bosnians in and around Ferguson. One man was beaten to death with hammers, while a woman of Bosnian descent was pulled from her car and beaten. If only the press had the resources to cover both this and the group of idiots in Mississippi…

  39. Guarneri says:

    @Trumwill:

    Heh. Like that hillbilly backwater……….Boston.

  40. CB says:

    @michael reynolds:
    Saturday, December 6, 2014 at 21:52

    After that, I have the next two rounds.

  41. anjin-san says:

    @Jenos Idanian #13:

    I regret to inform you that your attempt at a threadjack has been denied. You are free to attempt another threadjack at a future date, but most sentient beings in the universe would prefer it if you did not.

    #########################

  42. Paul Hooson says:

    As a Jew, sights like this make me very uncomfortable. Elements like this have long been a common threat to both Jews and Blacks…

  43. Jenos Idanian #13 says:

    @anjin-san: Would you reconsider your decision if the Bosnian man had been beaten to death with a toy gun?

    There’s a saying that says “personnel is policy.” There should be another — “priorities reveal prejudices.”

  44. anjin-san says:

    @Jenos Idanian #13:

    Dude go out and see a movie or something. The desperation for attention is just embarrassing.

  45. EddieInCA says:

    @Jenos Idanian #13:

    I usually refrain from responding do you. However, can you point me to the story where a police man killed the Bosnian man, or the Bosnian woman, please?

    Oh, it wasn’t police?

    Then, what the “F**K” does it have to do with either the situation in Ferguson, or Staten Island?

  46. James Pearce says:

    @Jenos Idanian #13:

    The Occupy Movement vs. the Tea Party movement. The Occupiers’ events were infested with crimes. Vandalism was the least

    BWAHHAHAHAHAHA

    Occupy and the Ferguson protesters should take a page from the Tea Party protests: Show up at the rally with an AR-15 strapped to their back, see if anyone f@cks with them then.

    Come to think of it, if the marchers were carrying, I’m sure the fried chicken and watermelon displays would have disappeared real quick.

    @Trumwill:

    But recent events have demonstrated that it’s not a definition all southern problem, even granting that it extends elsewhere.

    If you’re talking police shootings, then yes: not just a southern problem.

    But if we’re talking about white people being so obnoxiously and stereotypically racist, then how is it not a southern problem? White people west of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon line just don’t act like that.

    This country is full of racists, and most of them know that if they’re too blatant about it, they risk being stigmatized. In the south, that dynamic is the opposite.

    Imagine the planning meeting. Someone suggests the fried chicken and watermelon diorama and another guy raises his hand, says, “You know, I don’t think that’s such a good idea….” In the South, that guy would be dismissed.

    Anywhere else, they’d dismiss the guy who suggested the diorama in the first place.

  47. James Pearce says:

    I substituted special characters for the curse words. Can I be liberated from moderation?

  48. Jenos Idanian #13 says:

    @EddieInCA: I usually refrain from responding do you. However, can you point me to the story where a police man killed the Bosnian man, or the Bosnian woman, please?

    Oh, it wasn’t police?

    Then, what the “F**K” does it have to do with either the situation in Ferguson, or Staten Island?

    The two attacks happened in St. Louis, of which Ferguson is a suburb. And the (non-fatal) attack on the woman is actually being treated as a hate crime. And there are indicators that the attackers were part of the riots protests there.

    Which makes them slightly more relevant to the Ferguson situation than a couple dozen a-holes close to 100 miles away.

  49. JKB says:

    @al-Ameda:

    This is an interesting fantasy I keep reading, that racist Southern Democrats moved in mass, in 1968, to support the Republican party that had voted by a wide margin for the Civil Rights act, just like the Northern Democrats. It is illogical.

    Far more likely is that having broken the paramilitary arm of the Southern Democratic party, i.e., the Klan, Southerns found themselves free to vote their conscience rather than to avoid having their house burned. Although, the Southern Democrats, now with hidden racism, did continue to dominate local, state and Congressional elections for a good while.

    But good news, the racist Democrats of the South have mostly died out. At least to the point that Republicans now hold almost all the offices.

    From the Democrat beloved New York Times:

    White supremacist Democrats seized control of the South after the end of Reconstruction, the period that followed the Civil War. They instituted so-called Jim Crow laws disenfranchising African-American voters, who favored Republicans, the party of Lincoln. The so-called Solid South all but unanimously supported Democrats for more than half a century, with states like South Carolina and Mississippi routinely offering Democrats more than 95 percent of the vote, even to losing presidential candidates.

    The timing of the demise of the Southern Democrat is not coincidental. It reflects a complete cycle of generational replacement in the post-Jim Crow era. Old loyalties to the Democratic Party have died along with the generation of white Southerners who came of age during the era of the Solid South, before Brown v. Board of Education, before the Civil Rights Act.

  50. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @James Pearce:

    But if we’re talking about white people being so obnoxiously and stereotypically racist, then how is it not a southern problem?

    Just came back from Baton Rouge. I saw less overt racism down there in LA than I see every day around me here. I am making no overly large conclusions** about that fact other than, “Things aren’t always as we think they are.”

    ** Baton Rouge is soooo very different than STL in so many ways both large and small that it is impossible to quantify here (much less BR and Washington Co MO), but one difference was the lack of “Southern Pride” ™. I saw 2 Confederate flags in my week down there and both were on trucks from Texas. I will see a minimum of 5 in the 13 miles between my homestead and St. Clair. Less common in STL but still far more common than I saw in LA.

  51. OzarkHillbilly says:

    John Stewart

    ‘Nuff said.

  52. CET says:

    @michael reynolds:
    You could analogize it to kids’ sports…

    My favorite analogy (though I disagree with some of the details) is this one: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/

    I think you’re right about the language difficulties – I’m sure 90% of the people who use the term ‘white privilege’ mean ‘things that are the case for white people and that should be the case for everyone,’ but the rhetoric often implies that it means ‘things that are the case for white people, and shouldn’t be.’ I don’t think that’s because the people discussing the issue really think that everyone should face systematic discrimination, but poorly chosen terms and language alienate people in the middle and make it easier for Fox News et al to talk about the ‘racial grievance industry.’

    The guilt is not collective, but the effect on black Americans is. They are being disadvantaged as a group…

    True, but one of the other things that I think gets lost here is that while racism sucks, it’s probably less of an issue than poverty. I know the first objection to that is going to be that those two are related, and they are, and the causality goes both ways. But consider the following thought experiment:

    – If racism disappeared overnight, black Americans would still be disproportionately poor, incarcerated, less educated, more likely to be victims of a violent crime, etc. Some of these issues might start to fade, but I would bet on it taking several generations before there were significant demographic shifts, especially given the current lack of economic mobility.

    – If black Americans woke up tomorrow with the same income/job distribution as white or asian Americans, I bet you that most of those problems would fade rapidly. And, as a bonus, I think you would also see a dramatic decreas in racism as the proximal issues that Fox et al bring up (crime, welfare, whatever an ‘obamaphone’ was) become non-issues.

    I guess that where I’m going with this is that I think the issue is more of an economic one – the problems that disproportionately affect black Americans aren’t that way because of racism, (or ‘black culture’), they are that way because people who live in poverty are disproportionately black. Based on this, I tend to think that energy is better spent working on (or supporting) policies that improve economic mobility and provide easier access to middle class jobs, particularly in areas with the trifecta of concentrated poverty/high crime/nonfunctional education systems.

  53. Jim R says:

    @michael reynolds: My in-laws would fall within your category #2. They’ve really opened my eyes to how many people who don’t appear outwardly racist and would probably never be hateful to a black (or Hispanic) person to their face may talk very differently in the privacy of their home…

  54. stonetools says:

    @JKB:

    I’m betting the ellipse is doing a lot of work in that quotation :-).
    Dude, everyone now understands that the reason the South turned solid Republican is that the white supremacists who voted Democratic pre-1964 are now voting Republican. Stop trying to push that Hot Air nonsense that the current Republican advantage in the South is unrelated to the Republican embrace of Southern racism. It’s just too well documented.

  55. stonetools says:

    @CET:

    I guess that where I’m going with this is that I think the issue is more of an economic one – the problems that disproportionately affect black Americans aren’t that way because of racism, (or ‘black culture’), they are that way because people who live in poverty are disproportionately black.

    You do understand that :

    1. There are historical reasons why things are that way.

    2. That there are still lots of people who want to keep it that way, right?

    Or do you think the people depicted in the article aren’t representative of lots of people, in the South and elsewhere?

  56. CET says:

    @stonetools:

    Yes. Point 1 is obviously true, and point 2 is technically true.* But my point is that it’s probably going to be more effective to ameliorate racism by solving chronic poverty than vice-versa.

    *There are undoubtedly many such people. Whether there are enough people who are that virulently racist to make it a significant overall effect in a country of ~300 million is debatable. FWIW, I’ve never lived south of the Mason-Dixon line, and am largely a creature of the West coast and northern rust belt, but I tend to be skeptical of personal experience as generalizable truth in any case. I’d be willing to tentatively grant that social psych experiments on prejudice indicate that small degrees of racism are relatively common, but if we’re talking about ‘people who want black Americans to stay in the ghetto’ I think that’s an order of magnitude or two beyond ‘people who are vaguely uncomfortable talking about race,’ and I’d want to see data indicating how common those views are.

  57. Chip says:

    The Southern Strategy relied as much on class as race resentment. It allows working class white people all over the country to be superior to their black neighbor, for no cost.

    Its just an enactment of that old saying about how people would rather live under a bridge roasting a sparrow so long as the black guy under the next bridge didn’t even get the sparrow.

    I think this explains the Palin voter- how they see the Koch brothers as just successful guys, but a black community college women’s studies professor is a member of the “elite”.

  58. stonetools says:

    @CET:

    There is a lot of data there that shows that racism is still a thing. Again, do some research. TBH, I no longer to post links on such issues because people who have their minds made up on these things aren’t going to convinced by references to data.
    You seem to be like one of those conservatives who aren’t personally and ideologically committed to white supremacy and would like to see conservatives focused purely on economic issues like “tax reform” and “limited government.”. You don’t want to think that you are playing on the same team as the folks depicted above. Unfortunately, those guys are the “storm troopers” of the conservative movement and without their votes, conservatives tend to lose. You may want to listen to this NPR report:

    But there’s something else that bothers him: The law is the signature achievement of a man Broussard never wanted to see become president.

    “I don’t vote for black people, lady,” he says. “No, ma’am. I don’t vote for black people. They got their place, I got my place. That’s the way I was raised.”

    Broussard says Landrieu votes too much in line with the president’s agenda -– he calls her “Obama Lady.”

    Focus just on the sentence: “The way I was raised” . You might not want to admit this, but there really is a culture of “white supremacy” out there in the South and in places where Southern migrants predominate (the “Confederacy and Cowboy States”) . Again , look for the evidence. It’s out there.

  59. JKB says:

    @stonetools:

    Interesting. NPR doesn’t run a picture of old Beau, but they do of who younger Landrieu voters?

    But we can take our cues as to Beau’s generation.

    The Cajuns in the neighborhood call the old tree “Chene au Cowan,” and nearly every day, from sun-up to sundown, a group of retired Cajun men sit on swings beneath the branches, talking about life and politics. They say they’ve been gathering there about 50 years.

    One of the men sitting under the tree one particular afternoon is Beau Broussard. He’s not Cajun, but they let him hang out here anyway. Broussard says for years, people running for political office have visited this oak tree.

    Let’s see it is a place for retired men where they found old Beau Broussard? And he can relate that candidates have been stopping by for years? He also has been accepted even though he is not Cajun.

    What might this tell us about Beau’s generational attribute? Might he be one of the dying-out racist Southern Democrats?

  60. Moosebreath says:

    @CET:

    The problem with “solving poverty to remove racism” (even though I think in the long run it’s the right course) is that many of the same people who explicitly or tacitly support racism oppose governmental efforts to fight poverty. They don’t oppose government spending per se — they just want the spending to not go to “those people”. They don’t define government spending on people like them as a problem. Or as it was most succinctly put, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”.

  61. JKB says:

    @stonetools:

    I notice you didn’t proved any links to this well-documented documentation.

  62. stonetools says:

    @JKB:

    I’m not bothering to do so because it will never convince such as you. I no longer bother to provide links to data showing that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old, either.
    You can’t convince by reason and data people who arrive at conclusions by ways other than by reason and data.

  63. JKB says:

    @stonetools:

    Well, here is a little reason and data for your edification. Kevin Williamson over at NRO has summarized the documentation.

    And what happened in the 1960s wasn’t the parties’ “changing places” on racism and civil rights; it was the Democrats’ — some of them, at least — joining the ranks of civilized human beings for the first time.

    It only took them a century.

    Ya’ll here might want to consider throwing off the historical Democrat segregation tendencies and enter the modern world. I doubt that will happen though given the Democrat increasing desperate efforts to drag the US back to pre-modernity, with individuals defined at birth by family, clan, tribe, caste and race. Come on, embrace individualism. Sure taking individual responsibility is scary, but try it, you’ll find it empowering.

  64. CET says:

    @Moosebreath:

    I agree . . . Identity politics are a serious problem. But that’s one of the areas where I think shifts in rhetoric and policy emphasis can help by building a case for ‘creating opportunity’ and ‘helping people become self sufficient’ (and other things that Americans pretty universally like) rather than being another clumsy attempt to legislatively micromanage equality.

    On a more encouraging note, my (admittedly anecdotal) sense is that some serious reforms of the war on drugs and the prison-industrial complex are coming down the pipeline as generations that are less comfortable with morality laws and unnecessarily retributive sentencing laws become a larger share of the electorate.

  65. stonetools says:

    @JKB:

    You’re the quoting the NRO? A magazine founded by William F Buckley, who was the time of founding an unabashed white white supremacist? Tell me more…
    Look the Southern strategy has been extensively documented. Start here:

    Although the phrase “Southern strategy” is often attributed to Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips, he did not originate it,[13] but merely popularized it.[14] In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, he touched on its essence:
    From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that…but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.[2]
    While Phillips sought to polarize ethnic voting in general, and not just to win the white South, the South was by far the biggest prize yielded by his approach. Its success began at the presidential level, gradually trickling down to statewide offices, the Senate, and the House, as some legacy segregationist Democrats retired or switched to the GOP. In addition, the Republican Party worked for years to develop grassroots political organizations across the South, supporting candidates for local school boards and offices, as one example

    More recent examples:

    THE SOUTHERN STRATEGY LIVES…. The chairman of the Virginia Beach Republican Party sent around an email this year, sharing a little “joke” he found amusing. His message was that his dog should be eligible for welfare because, as the “joke” goes, the dog is “black, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English and has no frigging clue who his Daddy is.”

    As racist displays go, this is unambiguously ugly, and the local GOP chairman was forced to resign this week. But it’s worth contextualizing the incident to appreciate the larger truth. Indeed, it’s hard not to notice the broader, more systemic Republican attempts this year to use identity politics to win votes.

    Rachel Maddow began her show last night with another powerful segment on the subject, noting the Republicans’ notorious “Southern Strategy,” and the ways in which it hasn’t fully gone away. The examples from just this cycle were too many to even feature, though Rachel took note of West Virginia’s John Raese’s attempts at ethnic “humor,” Nevada’s Sharron Angle’s racist TV ad followed by her telling Hispanic students they look Asian, New York’s Carl Paladino’s racist emails, Colorado’s Tom Tancredo’s call for a return to Jim Crow policies, Kentucky’s Rand Paul’s discomfort with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and a variety of Republican House candidates who’ve embraced elements of white supremacism.

    And on and on.
    Of course, conservatives have been busy trying to rewrite history, pretending there was never a “Southern strategy” but given that the guy who popularized it wrote a book about it, and given the other documentation about it, such rewrites are going to fail. And since the Republicans still practice it, people are still going to be reminded of it.

  66. JKB says:

    @stonetools:

    Let’s see, you offer not some data about actual voting patterns, but rather some idea a political hack had in 1970. Only Southern voting didn’t really go the way he predicted. And a couple anecdotes. One from an area dominated by transplants who remained after leaving the military and defense workers. The other, from a non-Southern state that did retain the Democrat Senator until his death a few years back who was a renowned member of the Klan leadership until it became unfashionable.

    And if you are concerned about a founder of an organization having been a segregationist (I have no idea if Buckley was or not), I think you should look at the Democratic party. If I’m not mistaken, they a)fought war to retain slavery, b)instituted segregation and Jim Crow as soon as they regained power after Reconstruction, c)fought for the next 90 years to stop desegregation of schools, the military, and anything else. Only finally when some Northern Democrats saw the opportunity to break the power of the Southern Democrats did a few join Republicans in passing the Civil Rights act. And let’s not forget the years of effort by Democrats in Congress to prevent the passage of an anti-lynching law. Because, lift any random hood at a lynching and you would have found a Democrat.

  67. HarvardLaw92 says:

    @JKB:

    Yes, that would explain the rash of segregation academies established all over the South in the 1950s and 1960s, a whole lot of which still exist today and a whole lot of which are still de facto segregated.

    It would explain George Wallace taking the electoral votes of 5 Southern states in 1968, and wining better than 30% of the vote in the rest of the Southern states? (you remember him, right? “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” – that ring any bells?)

    It somehow explains the tidal wave of segregationist Southern Democrats who switched parties to the Republicans in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I’m guessing you never got to hear any of Uncle Jesse’s “commentaries” from his early days on WRAL.

    All those good Southern folk just magically decided to become Republicans without even noticing that the Civil Rights Act existed, right?

    I’ll have to take your word that explains the fact that, even today in 2014, venturing into most any Southern town, you’ll be able to identify the “black” churches, funeral homes, etc. and their white counterparts.

    People like you seem to have made an industry out of trying to pretend that the South is something other than what it was, but then again, historical reinvention has always been a particularly Southern infatuation.

  68. HarvardLaw92 says:

    @JKB:

    Let’s see, you offer not some data about actual voting patterns,

    You mean like most of the South breaking for a segregationist in 1968? Those voting patterns? 😀

  69. ernieyeball says:

    @Jenos Idanian #13: Tea Party events were peaceful. In many cases, the sites were left cleaner than they were before the Tea Partiers came along.

    Peaceful in a nasty sort of way…
    https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-angry-face-of-the-tea-party/

  70. JohnMcC says:

    @JKB: Not being a southerner you probably don’t know the significance of the fact that Mr Reagan began his presidential campaign with an appearance in Philadelphia, MS. Given the map of the entire US, he made his initial appeal for votes there.

    Being a southerner, I will not provide any links to guide you in understanding what that means. I’m shamed and embarrassed by the entire chain of events.

  71. JKB says:

    @JohnMcC: Not being a southerner

    Well, I do live north of Interstate 10, but by less restrictive definitions, I’m a Southerner, born and bred. Although an area occupied during the Civil War due to being sympathetic to the Union.

  72. Grewgills says:

    @CET:
    Racism and classism form a positive feedback loop of sorts and prejudices often overlap, so determining which is the more onerous burden or which is the most easily tackled can be difficult or in some cases impossible. It is easier to sell alleviating poverty more broadly through the country than it is to sell ending systemic discrimination. Evidence of this is apparent in Southern voting patterns pre civil rights era. Southern whites embraced public works programs and social services up until the party supporting those also supported racial equality. Then those programs became inextricably tied to those people and their popularity faded quickly.

  73. JohnMcC says:

    @JKB: I’ll shamelessly trump you with my ‘born and raised up in: Montgomery AL. But the geography is only a proxy for culture. If you know squat about southern culture, you know who you talk to when you schedule a campaign appearance in August of ’80 in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

  74. An Interested Party says:

    And if you are concerned about a founder of an organization having been a segregationist (I have no idea if Buckley was or not), I think you should look at the Democratic party.

    Well, if we want to play that game…this country was founded by people who held other human beings as slaves…many of these same founders thought it was appropriate to count these slaves as 3/5 of a person…

    Only finally when some Northern Democrats saw the opportunity to break the power of the Southern Democrats did a few join Republicans in passing the Civil Rights act.

    Nice try, but the facts prove otherwise…

    The original House version:
    Southern Democrats: 7–87 (7–93%)
    Southern Republicans: 0–10 (0–100%)
    Northern Democrats: 145–9 (94–6%)
    Northern Republicans: 138–24 (85–15%)

    The Senate version:
    Southern Democrats: 1–20 (5–95%) (only Ralph Yarborough of Texas voted in favor)
    Southern Republicans: 0–1 (0–100%) (John Tower of Texas)
    Northern Democrats: 45–1 (98–2%) (only Robert Byrd of West Virginia voted against)
    Northern Republicans: 27–5 (84–16%)

    As you can clearly see, it wasn’t just “some” Northern Democrats…rather, it was almost all, which just proves that racism isn’t a Democratic problem as much as it is a Southern problem…

    Although an area occupied during the Civil War due to being sympathetic to the Union.

    You mean an area kept in the country rather than being run by some traitorous racists…

  75. al-Ameda says:

    @JKB:

    White supremacist Democrats seized control of the South after the end of Reconstruction, the period that followed the Civil War. They instituted so-called Jim Crow laws disenfranchising African-American voters, who favored Republicans, the party of Lincoln. The so-called Solid South all but unanimously supported Democrats for more than half a century, with states like South Carolina and Mississippi routinely offering Democrats more than 95 percent of the vote, even to losing presidential candidates.

    Yes, up to the modern Civil Rights movement post Reconstruction Southern Democrats were racists. No one disputes that. You however are content to ignore the las 46 years of electoral politics and voter registration trends. I cannot understand how you manage to ignore the obvious fact that after the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts were passed there began a massive migration of racist Southern whites to the Republican Party. This is not a mystery, it is not an unreported phenomenon.

  76. HarvardLaw92 says:

    @JohnMcC:

    Exactly, as if anybody in that lily white crowd at the Neshoba County Fair, less than 5 miles from where they dug up the bodies of Goodman, Chaney & Schwerner, missed what Reagan was referring to when he was up on their stage babbling about “states rights”.

  77. Jenos Idanian #13 says:

    @ernieyeball: Peaceful in a nasty sort of way…
    https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-angry-face-of-the-tea-party/

    I’m watching that clip now, and I feel like “live-blogging” it.

    1) MSNBC. There’s one strike against it right away.

    2) The politician victim? Bob Filner, the pervert who spent years sexually harassing women and being covered for by the California Democratic machine.

    3) The Tuscon shooter is name-dropped, the insane anarchist who had NOTHING to do with the Tea Party but is linked to them here anyway.

    That’s in the first 26 seconds.

    OK, now Filner’s being called a “scumbag.” A bit premature, as his predilections were still a closely-held secret among California Democrats, but essentially accurate.

    Oh, some nobody who supported Filner’s opponent screamed “JEW!” in a hateful tone at Filner. And, apparently, another couple of nobodies got violent.

    You got ONE incident from three years ago where the “victim” was a true scumbag and the host was pushing the pathetic lie that the Tea Party somehow inspired the Tuscon shooting.

    You owe me five minutes and 41 seconds of my life back.

  78. ernieyeball says:

    @Jenos Idanian #13:..You owe me five minutes and 41 seconds of my life back.

    Don’t owe you nothin’ hambone. I can’t imagine 5 minutes and 41 seconds of your life be worth gettin’ back anyway.
    You go ahead and try and come and get it.

  79. JohnMcC says:

    @HarvardLaw92: Yessir! Mr Reagan was promising those ‘good, decent and honorable’ people a return to 1876, when Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Act of 1871 were tossed in that famous ash heap that historians talk about all the time. The ‘Black Codes’ followed that enforced serf-like conditions on African-Americans across the old Confederate states. The cost to the nation was 90 years of Jim Crow. Reagan was promising to bring back the good ol’ days in Neshoba County. And he did.

  80. Jenos Idanian #13 says:

    Man, it’s astonishing how much love the “southern strategy” myth gets around here.

    Here’s the reality, courtesy of Moe Lane:

    It’s not demographics, and it’s certainly not gerrymandering, and shoot, it’s not even Barack Obama. It’s that the people who run the Democratic party [expletive deleted] hate the South.

    And Southerners have noticed.

    The region that gave the nation Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton has been the bete noire — or, more appropriately, the bete cou-rouge — of the American left. And that means the Democrats are essentially saying “GFY” to 100 million people (almost 1 in 3 Americans) and 154 electoral votes (over half needed to win the presidency). That’s also 22 Senators and 132 Representatives.

    (All numbers based on the original Confederacy states and 2010 census numbers)

    The GOP doesn’t have to embrace any kind of racist philosophy or even wink and nod at it to get those votes. All they have to do is simply point out “the Democrats hate you. We don’t.”

  81. An Interested Party says:

    …the Democrats hate you. We don’t.

    How’s that? What has the Democratic Party supposedly done to show the people of the South that they “hate” them…

  82. Grewgills says:

    @An Interested Party:
    It’s more hand waving nonsense. All that talk of states rights and putting up confederate flags on state houses etc was just coincidental, the real ™ story is about Democratic scorn (for states rights arguments and putting up confederate flags on state houses etc)

  83. Moosebreath says:

    @Jenos Idanian #13:

    “The region that gave the nation Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton”

    Kind of putting the lie to the idea that Democrats hate the South right there. I mean, they hate them so much that they elected 3 of them among their last 4 Presidents.

  84. Monala says:

    @michael reynolds: Thank you, thank you, thank you! I HATE it when folks say, “Well, my ancestors came from [European country] and were discriminated against, and they made it!” First, they came here willingly; second, their discrimination lasted no more than maybe 2-3 generations (not 400 years); and third, nothing done to European Americans on a widespread basis compares to what African Americans and Native Americans have been through on a widespread basis.

  85. Monala says:

    @Grewgills: I’m really skeptical that “It is easier to sell alleviating poverty more broadly through the country than it is to sell ending systemic discrimination.” I think a lot of people will say that they are more in support of the former than the latter. It “sounds” good. But I continue to hear the demonization of programs that have no racial criteria whatsoever (TANF, EITC, etc.), either for racial reasons (“welfare queens,” dog-whistled as black people), or simply to demonize the poor in general (“moochers and takers”).

  86. HarvardLaw92 says:

    @Jenos Idanian #13:

    154 electoral votes (over half needed to win the presidency).

    No, dear. 154 electoral votes is about 28% of all electoral votes, and as Obama made clear in 2012, Democrats no longer need the South to win the presidency. The South wants to be its own country, politically, socially and economically, so Democrats have more or less decided that pandering to Southerners isn’t worth it any longer. The culture clash being pushed onto the GOP via its decision to essentially cede policy making to Southern bombthrowers is useful for Dems – it helps us carry the rest of the country.

    The only Southern states that Obama carried were Florida and Virginia, and he’d still have won even if he’d lost both of them.

    What should be troubling you is the looming day when those cracks in the GOP result in the more libertarian Western Republicans and the more Chamber of Commerce business Republicans deciding that they have had enough and start throwing the Tea Party (which is essentially a proxy for Southern Republicans) under the bus.

    When that happens, and deals start getting done despite Tea Party (Southern) opposition, the South will finally have achieved its goal – it’ll be an isolated country unto itself.

    Be careful what you wish for.

  87. anjin-san says:

    @Jenos Idanian #13:

    154 electoral votes (over half needed to win the presidency)

    Recommend reading:

    Elections for Dummies

  88. Deserttrek says:

    when blacks and the government agitators stop their racist hate, the response will be equal

  89. al-Ameda says:

    @Jenos Idanian #13:

    You owe me five minutes and 41 seconds of my life back.

    What a coincidence – 5M 41S = the exact amount of time Cliven Bundy has been criticized by conservatives for confronting (with guns) the federal authorities who dared to ask him to pay the rent owed on his federally-owned and leased premises.