Trump Comes Down Firmly On Side of KKK.
Trump’s tweets will have an impact. They will further embolden the White Supremacists, KKK and Nazis who brought terroristic murder and mayhem to Charlottesville Virginia. But our President already knew that.
Trump attacked the removal of Confederate statues at a fiery news conference where he expressed sympathy for the “blood and soil” chanting “fine people” who wanted to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statute and compared Lee to George Washington. You know, these “fine people.”
Even as the backlash resonated across the country, Trump took to Twitter to double down on the side of the White Supremacists.
Folks that’s stuff ripped out of the KKK’s official Manual for Romanticizing the Confederate Cause.
Let’s talk about that “history and culture” the President refers to. The “history and culture” is the history and culture of slavery, insurrection, treason and racial oppression.
The South engaged in an armed insurrection against the United States over the slavery issue and only the slavery issue. Just read the reasons the South gave for doing so in their Articles of Secession. Just read Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens’ Cornerstone Speech where he made it all quite clear:
Our new government is founded upon exactly [this] idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.
No real ambiguity there. He also said African slavery was “the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution” in case anyone wants to argue the point further.
Upon this cornerstone the South engaged in an insurrection and waged war against the United States, which is the Constitution’s definition of treason. Unsurprisingly the Supreme Court said exactly this in White v. Hart shortly after the Civil War stating:
The doctrine of secession is a doctrine of treason, and practical secession is practical treason, seeking to give itself triumph by revolutionary violence. The late rebellion was without any element of right or sanction of law.
Seems pretty clear to me. Of course after the Civil War the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were supposed to end the oppression of blacks. They did not. Through Jim Crow laws, segregation into inferior schools and neighborhoods, the oppression was sustained for nearly a century more. Whites seeking symbols to represent that oppression, and remind blacks who is in charge, erected the statutes. The emplacement of them coincided with other backlashes against racial equality.
That graph should tell you all you need to know about the “history and culture” Trump is talking about, and defending. Of course the President’s positions does have its fans. KKK Maester David Duke tweeted “Thank You Mr. President & God Bless You for setting the record straight for ALL AMERICANS.”
Trump’s tweets will have an impact. They will further embolden the White Supremacists, KKK and Nazis who brought terroristic murder and mayhem to Charlottesville Virginia. But I suspect our President already knew that. His campaign brought these scumbags out of the woodwork to begin with. Now our President is egging them on to further terrorize this country.
