With most if not all signs of the confederates being torn down or removed it is pissing a lot of southerners off and causing more of a rift than ever.

Do you think that this will result in a Secession debate from any lower States or even worse trigger a civil war ???

 

I think you will see some vandalism and lots of hate speech. I really hope we dont see anymore violence. You won't see anything organized these pecker woods dont have any real resources. and remember most of these fuck heads couldn't tell the difference between Robert E Lee and colonel Sanders. So thier action span can't be that long. They will get distracted by a monster truck show or something and stop their passing and moaning soon. Or so I hope

 

The United States has a stagnant economy and a population of growing diversity. The Republican Party is the party of whites of all income groups. The Democrat Party is the party of non whites, Jews - who the alt right does not think are whites - and folks like me - who the alt right derides as race traitors.

What this means is that economic disputes have become zero sum games between groups of Americans who dislike each other.

I think the division of the United States is a real possibility. I hope it will not result in a civil war. There is no moral issue as significant as slavery to justify using violence to retain states who want to leave.

I can foresee a Restored Confederacy. This would include most of the South, most of the mid west, many mountain states, and Alaska. What would remain of the United States would be Hawaii, the west coast, Nevada, Virginia to Maine, and a few states in between.

What remained of the United States would have most of the best universities and most of the most sucessful corporations. There would be a brain drain as the most intelligent young people born in the Restored Confederacy travel to the United States for university training. After getting degrees at universities like Berkeley, they would get jobs with corporations like Microsoft.

They would return to the Restored Confederacy for high school and family reunions, stay long enough to remember why they left, and go back to the United States.

Lower income whites in fly over country would learn the hard way that the economic policies of the 1920's do not bring back the well paying factory and mine jobs of the 1950's (which were paid well because of the economic policies of the 1930's).

 

I caught the tail end of a news report that a Governor imposed a ban on protesting at a Robert E Lee statue somewhere today until they are able to figure out what to do legally. I will google it and post more.

I also saw a report from Spokane or somewhere in Washington State where they removed a confederate water fountain today so this is hitting every corner of the USA.

 

I think a civil war is coming eventually.

These liberals are pretty fucking stupid, if you don't preserve history it will be repeated.

Next they'll be calling for the removal of Arlington national cemetery not realising it was a slave owners plantation President Lincoln made into a memorial for dead Union soldiers.

 

And maybe their sisters will give them come hither looks.

I'm sorry. That was mean of me.

And completely out of character.

 

The animosity between people is at dangerous levels and innocent people are going to get caught in the growing violence and that worries me for both sides. If it were just a couple groups of radicals killing each other that would be one thing but some aren't strong enough to think for themselves and will suffer for their ignorance ... there will be no winners here !!!

 

Are there really that many stupid Americans ?

 

I stand corrected, it was Montana not Washington.

Helena, Montana, removes Confederate memorial

HELENA, Mont. -- Montana's capital city on Friday removed a memorial to Confederate soldiers that has been in a public park since 1916 after officials deemed it a threat to public safety in light of last weekend's violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

A small group of people opposing the fountain's removal in Helena had stood watch through the night. About 20 people gathered to protest Friday, CBS affiliate KXLH reports.

Police said two people were arrested, but later released, after defying orders to leave the site while crews began dismantling the granite fountain donated to the city more than a century ago by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. One of the women arrested told KXLH the fountain is a "beautiful piece of art."

• Analysis: History of racial inequality still haunts us, public interest lawyer says

"It was not given to the city, it was given to the citizens of the city," Patricia Sorenson told KXLH.

"We're just trying to preserve this monument," said Tony Crew, 28, who stood by with a huge American flag as city crews fenced off the fountain. "It's part of our history, and we don't need to follow the precedent of the rest of the country."

Calls for removing the fountain in Helena's Hill Park - and other Confederacy-related monuments across the country - increased after last weekend's deadly confrontations at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.


Bobby Caina Calvan / AP
Earlier this week, Native American lawmakers in Montana sent a letter to the city requesting that it remove the fountain, which they said stood for segregation, secession and slavery. The memorial is thought to be the only Confederate monument in the upper Rockies.

The Helena City Commission agreed on Wednesday and acted swiftly to uproot the fountain from the park just two blocks from City Hall. Crews arrived shortly after 9 a.m. Friday. By early afternoon, it was lifted by crane onto a flatbed truck.

City Parks and Recreation Director Amy Teegarden said the fountain initially will be stored in a city warehouse.

"Our intention is to remove it in such a way that the fountain, and its pieces, can remain intact and be reassembled at a future date," Teegarden said.

About 50 people, not all of them protesting the removal, gathered at the scene as a handful of police officers stood watch.

Angela Smith was visiting with her husband from Spokane, Washington and said she was a descendent of Union soldiers. Smith said it was time for such monuments across the country to come down.

"Do we have statues of Hitler? Do we need things like that to remember our history?" she asked.

One man, who declined to give his name, said the fountain was not a symbol of racism or hate but is part of American history that should not be forgotten.

"Somebody has to make a stand," he shouted as city crews erected two rings of orange plastic fencing.

Tiffany Ivers, who was born in Texas but has lived most of her life in Helena, arrived with a Confederate flag.

"Taking down a monument that has nothing to do with what's going on is not OK," Ivers said.

 

Stupid is a little extreme in some cases, ignorant/uninformed may be a better choice of words.

Unless we are talking about Texas, then yes there are. I couldn't wait to move the fuck away from there even though I could have made an extra 10-20% on my Condo had I waited until now. Still made a few 100% on it though.

 

Well , I suppose you could expunge all of your history ,
if you tried really hard.
Eliminate everything English , French and Spanish , all reminders of slavery ,
and everything else in your past.
Pull down places like New Orleans , or at least the French quarter , and other such places.

But what language could you use ?

I mean places like
Louisiana , and Los Angeles , Baton Rouge and San Antonio ,
New England , New Hampshire , New York, Norfolk , St Louis , Portsmouth , Bristol , Las Veges , Des Moines , Santa Barbara , San Diego , Santa Ana , Santa Maria , Santa
Oh you get the idea.

Demolish the lot.

Here's a good idea.
If you get rid of English ,
you could go really international
and adopt Chinese

 

The loudmouth extremists will not be able to continue to monopolize the public discourse for much longer.

That wide swath of beer drinking, gun toting, truck driving, genetically ambiguous Americans won't put up with much more. And look what they did when the last Presidential campaign crawled far enough into the gutter. Imagine what will happen when some extremist demands that Democrats (or Republicans) are a superior people and henceforth the inferior ones will be required to wear an orange star on their collar.

 

And you really think that the history of the confederacy is worth persevering?

Why?

 

It is interesting how both sides manage to manipulate the media into giving them coverage knowing full well "if it bleeds, it leads" ...

Funny how a carjacking in Compton doesn't even make the news because it is a normal occurrence but take it to a nice neighborhood or university and bump up the shock value to get exposure.

 

The blue states would lose in 6 months. No one has any guns and almost no refineries to make gasoline and mo gas. They don't support the military or join. The big companies will do lip service but sell to anyone with the money. The succession issue was decided in 1865. Once it a state can't leave.

 

If everyone wants to get technical then all you MF's got to go unless you are blood Native American. Leave and don't come back

 

Let us do this in a few posts so it doesn't take a whole page to scroll down ...

The battle over Confederate statues, explained
America’s latest conflict about race began with a mass shooting, a flag, and some statues.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacist protesters descended onto the city over the weekend to protest the city’s plan to take down Confederate monuments, particularly the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. In Lexington, Kentucky, Mayor Jim Gray responded to the Charlottesville protests by speeding up his own city’s plans to tear down Confederate monuments. In Durham, North Carolina, protesters on Monday pulled down a statue dedicated to Confederate soldiers. Baltimore took down its Confederate monuments literally overnight this week.

Why does America suddenly care so much about these old pieces of metal and stone?

The current battle actually goes back to a mass shooting in 2015, when self-described white supremacist Dylann Roof shot and killed nine people in a predominantly black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof drew a lot of attention for posing with the Confederate flag in images that came out after the shooting — and that helped spur a fight within South Carolina about whether it should take down a Confederate flag that had flown at the state capitol for years. The state eventually agreed to officially take down the flag (after it was unofficially taken down by activist Bree Newsome).

Since then, many cities and states, particularly in the South, have been questioning their own Confederate symbols. The argument is simple: The Confederacy fought to maintain slavery and white supremacy in the United States, and that isn’t something that the country should honor or commemorate in any way.

Critics argue, however, that these monuments are really about Southern pride, not commemorating a pro-slavery rebellion movement. They argue that trying to take down the Confederate symbols works to erase part of American history.

President Donald Trump invoked such an argument on Tuesday: “This week, it is Robert E. Lee and, this week, Stonewall Jackson. Is it George Washington next? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop?” He later reiterated these arguments on Twitter, calling it “foolish” to take down Confederate monuments.

This is where the debate gets complicated, raising important questions about the US and its history: What exactly did the Confederacy stand for? And if it stood for slavery, does honoring it in effect commemorate white supremacy?

The historical record is actually pretty clear: The Confederacy was always about white supremacy, and so are the monuments dedicated to it. Much of America is now coming to terms with that — but not without a passionate, sometimes violent reaction from those who argue the statues are necessary symbols of white heritage and culture.

 

Cities and states have been working to take down their Confederate monuments
Since South Carolina took down its Confederate flag, several cities and states around the country have been considering similar moves — not just for flags, but also for the statues and other monuments all over the South honoring the Confederacy and its soldiers. There are a lot of these monuments out there: The Southern Poverty Law Center’s study found at least 1,500 “Confederate place names and other symbols in public spaces,” and it acknowledged that its count was “far from comprehensive.”

Before Charlottesville, the most high-profile move came earlier this year, when New Orleans finished tearing down four Confederate monuments. One of the statues was erected in 1891 to celebrate a deadly insurgency in 1874 — led by the white supremacist Crescent City White League — against an integrated police force and state militia. The others honored Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard, all of whom betrayed the US and fought against the union during the Civil War to preserve slavery.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu passionately defended the move in a speech. “They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for,” he said. “They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots.”

This drew a huge backlash. Mississippi state Rep. Karl Oliver, a Republican, wrote in a now-deleted Facebook post that people tearing down Confederate monuments “should be LYNCHED” — invoking language that’s obviously attached to the oppression of black Americans:

The destruction of these monuments, erected in the loving memory of our family and fellow Southern Americans, is both heinous and horrific. If the, and I use this term extremely loosely, "leadership" of Louisiana wishes to, in a Nazi-ish fashion, burn books or destroy historical monuments of OUR HISTORY, they should be LYNCHED! Let it be known, I will do all in my power to prevent this from happening in our State.

Oliver later apologized for the horrible choice of words, but he stood by his intent to preserve “all historical monuments.”

Similarly, Charlottesville has been working to remove two Confederate statues — one dedicated to Robert E. Lee, and another dedicated to Stonewall Jackson. Already, the city renamed the parks where these statues were located — Jackson Park is now Justice Park and Lee Park is now Emancipation Park. And the city council voted to tear down the Robert E. Lee statue, although those plans are currently on hold as a court reviews whether the city can do so without the state’s permission.

The plan to tear down the Robert E. Lee statue led to the white supremacist protests. Their protest mainly took place at Emancipation Park, where they rallied around the statue for much of their demonstrations. As they see it, attempts to take down the statue are erasing white history; one of their slogans — “you will not replace us” — is meant to suggest that lawmakers can’t do this and get away with it.

Of course, many people disagree that this is about erasing white history. They argue that these monuments were built originally to honor the Confederacy and the racism and white supremacy that it stood for. One of the statues in New Orleans, for example, literally celebrated a white supremacist insurgency in the city against a racially integrated police force and state militia.

In fact, most of these Confederate monuments were built during the Jim Crow era and in response to the civil rights movement — a sign that they were meant to explicitly represent white supremacy in the South:

Given that America is now trying to make amends for the racist policies of its past, it seems natural that the monuments that celebrated this horrific past come down.

It’s also not the case that this history is being erased, since the statues, flags, and other monuments aren’t necessarily being destroyed. They’re often, as was the case in South Carolina and potentially New Orleans, moved to museums or, as is the plan in Charlottesville, sold to someone else to take care of them.

 

The Confederacy was a bastion of white supremacy and slavery
At the center of this debate is what the Civil War was really about. The people who defend these Confederate monuments frequently argue it was really about states’ rights, while those on the other side argue that the Civil War was about slavery.

But the historical record makes it very clear that the Civil War was about slavery. And to the extent it was about states’ rights at all, it was about a state’s right to maintain slavery.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates noted in the Atlantic, South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union, said in its official statement that it saw any attempts to abolish slavery and grant rights to black Americans as “hostile to the South” and “destructive of its beliefs and safety”:

A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

In a letter encouraging Texas to secede and join the Confederate States, Louisiana Commissioner George Williamson was even more explicit. He argued that the Confederacy was needed “to preserve the blessings of African slavery” and that the Confederate states “are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery.”

Many other states made similar arguments, consistently pointing to slavery and white supremacy, in their cases for secession.

These statements leave no doubt that the South fought in the Civil War to protect the institutions of white supremacy and, in particular, slavery.

In fact, Confederate symbolism, particularly the flag, only reemerged in US culture as a backlash to the rise of the civil rights movement.

As historian John Coski wrote in The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem and Libby Nelson explained for Vox, use of the flag surged after Southern universities, stock car racers, and social groups embraced it in the 1950s as a symbol of white and Southern culture.

It was no coincidence that this happened as the civil rights movement rose — and, in particular, after President Harry Truman vowed to do more to promote civil rights by, for example, integrating the military and telling the NAACP that civil rights could not wait. The Ku Klux Klan, for one, grew in response, and it embraced the Confederate flag as a potent symbol.

Southerners were clear at the time about what they were doing and what the Confederate flag stood for: “It means the Southern cause,” Roy Harris, the legendary Georgia politician, said in 1951, according to Coski. “It is becoming … the symbol of the white race and the cause of the white people.”

Since then, the Confederacy’s purpose has been obfuscated in attempts to whitewash an ugly period of US history, framing the Confederate flag and monuments more as symbols of white heritage and states’ rights rather than explicit symbols of racism. And the flag has in some ways become a dog whistle — another example of the sneaky language public officials use to wink to the public about racism while claiming its use as a point of heritage.

But the fact that white supremacists, including literal neo-Nazis, are marching onto cities like Charlottesville to defend Confederate monuments shows that this isn’t just some innocent quest to preserve history; there’s a clear racist interest behind much of this too.

 

America is going through a “whitelash”
Underlying the battle over Confederate statues is really a bigger debate about race in America. Over the past few years, we have seen a greater push for racial justice. That’s led to pushback from the other side — what some commentators have described as a “whitelash.”

Black Lives Matter in particular gave a lot of attention to these issues. Although the movement gained national fame through its efforts to call attention to racial disparities in police use of force (particularly in the Ferguson, Missouri, protests over the police shooting of Michael Brown), it’s fostered a bigger conversation, especially among the left side of the political spectrum, about the many ways in which minority Americans are systemically disadvantaged. As America becomes more and more racially diverse, this discussion will likely become an even bigger issue.

Meanwhile, the election of President Donald Trump arguably symbolizes the backlash to much of this conversation. Trump, who constantly deployed racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim rhetoric on the campaign trail, gave a voice to white Americans who have long felt that the rise of civil rights and diversity has left them behind.

Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist and author of Strangers in Their Own Land, provided an apt analogy for many white Americans’ feeling of neglect: As they see it, they are all in this line toward a hill with prosperity at the top. But over the past few years, globalization and income stagnation have caused the line to stop moving. And from their perspective, other groups — black and brown Americans, women — are now cutting in the line, because they’re getting new (and more equal) opportunities through new anti-discrimination laws and policies like affirmative action.

Another way of understanding this is a sociological concept called “white fragility.” Robin DiAngelo, who studies race at Westfield State University, described the phenomenon in a 2011 paper:

White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.

DiAngelo’s paper explained that white Americans have a range of “triggers” that can make them defensive about race, from suggestions that a person’s viewpoint is racialized to the rise of people of color into prominent leadership positions. All the triggers she listed were present in the past year — through the presidency of Barack Obama, Trump’s racist rhetoric, and Black Lives Matter protests against the dominance of white privilege.

Consider how often throughout the 2016 election people would respond to even the slightest suggestion of racism, whether in media or everyday life, with immediate vitriol, disdain, or dismissal. This, DiAngelo argued, is a defense mechanism to confronting questions about privilege. And it makes it difficult to have a reasonable conversation about race, effectively perpetuating a status quo favorable to white Americans by averting discussions about how to change the existing circumstances.

DiAngelo offered a telling example, from an anti-racism training session she facilitated:

One of the white participants left the session and went back to her desk, upset at receiving (what appeared to the training team as) sensitive and diplomatic feedback on how some of her statements had impacted several people of color in the room. At break, several other white participants approached us (the trainers) and reported that they had talked to the woman at her desk, and she was very upset that her statements had been challenged. They wanted to alert us to the fact that she literally “might be having a heart-attack.” Upon questioning from us, they clarified that they meant this literally. These co-workers were sincere in their fear that the young woman might actually physically die as a result of the feedback. Of course, when news of the woman’s potentially fatal condition reached the rest of the participant group, all attention was immediately focused back onto her and away from the impact she had had on the people of color.

This illustrates just how defensive people can get in the face of accusations of racism: Not only did the woman who faced the criticisms genuinely feel like she was having a heart attack, but the white people around her believed it was totally possible she was. This is the reality of trying to have a conversation that challenges white privilege in America.

You can apply this concept to what we saw the past weekend in Charlottesville. Many of the people involved have likely led advantaged lives — just because they’re white men in a society that has historically given them more rights than everyone else.

But they’ve seen their racial security challenged. They saw the first black president with Barack Obama. They see demographic statistics that show white Americans will no longer be the majority in the coming decades. They see all of this talk about Black Lives Matter and the importance of diversity, including through policies like affirmative action. They see recent moves to tear down Confederate monuments in the South. And they themselves have likely been accused of racism at some point in their lives, making them defensive and angry.

These are the forces behind the current discussion about Confederate monuments and race in America. Many white Americans feel like they’ve been neglected, and now their history is being erased as Confederate monuments come down and the country becomes more diverse. So some have taken up radical measures, causing violence and chaos in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest plans to tear down a statue.