Here’s a revelation: that melody, my favorite of the Easter hymns, is the work of Sir Arthur Sullivan. Yes, that Sullivan.
1. Oh, no! Not the National Review too! We are indeed surrounded by idiots…in this story about how Hispanic activists are pushing to keep former President Barack Obama’s name off a school building in Waukegan, Illinois because, you see, he enforced the law by deporting illegal immigrants—can’t have THAT!—the National Review writes, “The Waukegan Board of Education looks to rename two of its schools, Thomas Jefferson Middle School and Daniel Webster Middle School. The board formed renaming committees for the schools named after Jefferson, who owned slaves, and Webster, who supported slavery.”
This is how the American public gets stupid. Of course it’s beyond idiotic not to name a school after the man whose vision of a new nation and whose brilliant mission statement made our existence possible, not to mention the fact that his words planted the seeds that resulted in slavery’s eventual end in North America. Letting that pass for the nonce, however, Daniel Webster, the New England lawyer, U.S. Senator and member of multiple cabinets in the 19th Century did not “support slavery,” and saying he did is historical libel.
To the contrary, Webster was a lifetime opponent of slavery. In an 1837 speech he called slavery a “great moral, social, and political evil,” adding that he would vote against “any thing that shall extend the slavery of the African race on this continent, or add other slaveholding states to the Union.”
Webster, however, also did not want to see a civil war, or to have the Southern states leave the union over the slavery question. His most famous quote, “Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!” expressed his priorities. Webster was one of many patriots and brilliant figures of the time desperately seeking a way to keep the nation together while slavery was stressing its bonds. He supported several compromises to that end, including the much-criticized Compromise of 1850, which included the reviled Fugitive Slave Act. Those who condemn Webster now for his best efforts to avert war and mass secession are engaging in the worst kind of hindsight bias. What would be their brilliant solution to the situation faced by Senators in the 30 years before the Civil War?
My analysis has always been that Webster, Henry Clay and others successfully delayed the inevitable schism over slavery until, by good fortune or, as Abe liked to say, “providence,” got a President in office who had the guts and the skill to deal with the dilemma boldly and successfully. If the South had seceded under any of the Presidents after Jackson and before Lincoln, we would have two Americas on this continent today—or maybe just one, enslaved by Nazi Germany.
Daniel Webster did NOT “support slavery.” Show some damn respect.
2. Remembering one of those chance shifts that changed everything, probably for the worse...On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. He was on his way to dinner when a bullet severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead upon arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old.
3. More on the “Asian hate” media hype, a dubious and contrived narrative if there ever was one. Here is how the New York Times began a report yesterday:
Over the last year, in an unrelenting series of episodes with clear racial animus, people of Asian descent have been pushed, beaten, kicked, spit on and called slurs. Homes and businesses have been vandalized. The violence has known no boundaries, spanning generations, income brackets and regions. The New York Times attempted to capture a sense of the rising tide of anti-Asian bias nationwide.
Unrelenting! Racial animus! No boundaries! Spanning generations! Rising tide!
Here’s the next sentence: “Using media reports from across the country, The Times found more than ____ episodes since March 2020 in which there was clear evidence of race-based hate.
Guess the number. 100,000? 10,000. No, the missing number is…110. One hundred and ten.
In 12 months. That’s less than ten a month, nationwide. WOW!
How could the Times publish that without feeling ridiculous?
Meanwhile, CBS News recently ran a report titled “Asian Americans Battling Bias: Continuing Crisis” in which it stated, “Nearly 4000 crimes against Asian-Americans have been reported since the start of the pandemic, an increase of about 150 percent in major U.S. cities.” Then it showed videos of former President Trump calling coronavirus the “Kung Flu.”
CBS wasn’t using the Times figures. In order to inflate the numbers, ratchet up hysteria and attack Trump, it used numbers from Stop AAPI Hate, led by Arizona State University Professor Aggie Yellow Horse and San Francisco State University Professor Russell Jeung, an “incident” tracker launched in March 2020, the same month the Times figures dated from. The “tracker” counted anonymously reported incidents, which of course could not be checked or verified. The latest report showed nearly 4,000 of them, most consisting of “verbal harassment” and “shunning.”
Those are not “hate crimes.”
I
Ethics Alarms 
Read the post.
Just not much too say.
People seem to want to revel in perceived hatred.
Kind of sad when the MLK assassination is the least depressing story in the line-up.
-Jut
1. They don’t care about facts because the narrative is that the United States has been evil since its inception. It never should have existed since it was founded by rich white men who owned slaves.
Compromise is capitulation in their mind. The union didn’t deserve to be saved if it meant allowing the South to keep slaves. The North was complicit in the preservation of the peculiar institution. Nothing should have been a bigger priority than ending slavery, regardless of what the country looked like when it was done.
Besides, we would have socialized medicine and common sense gun laws if we’d stayed British.
As for the Nazis, the current narrative is that the Soviet Union defeated them single-handedly.
1. National Review should know better. That said, most of the folks who have drunk the BLM Koolaid don’t do nuance. If you didn’t oppose slavery from the get-go, you’re cancelled, end of discussion. Believe me, I remember the “rope of sand” speech and the spirit of Hail Columbia (“While the lamps of heaven shall burn, while the ocean tides return, ever may the circling sun, find the Many still are One”). It’s just not enough for those who push cancel culture, and the writer probably thought it didn’t matter that much. I think it does matter, though, as those of us who haven’t drunk the Koolaid try to defend the truth. Oh, and I’ve floated your question about alternatives to a few libs. The answer was usually something along the lines of they would have abolished slavery with the writing of the Constitution. When I point out that would probably have led to the collapse of the Constitutional Convention, they say then so be it, the Northern states should have told the Southern states to come back when they were ready to do away with slavery, and not before.
2. Yup, a bullet fired by James Earl Ray, a crazy loser with no reason to kill MLK. I wonder, though, would MLK have continued to be the bridge-builder he was had the assassination not happened? Would he have either turned to violence, or might he have met the same fate as Malcolm X, shot dead by the Amiri Baraka/Kareem Muhammad militant wing of black radicals?
3. I wonder if this is an attempt to pull Asians into the victim camp and leave white people as the lone bad race.
1)If their only criteria for joining the Union in 1787 was those states that had outlawed slavery, the United States would have basically been comprised of New England. New York and New Jersey both had over 10k slaves in the 1790 census, with smaller numbers for Connecticut, Pennsylvania (which had passed a gradual emancipation act in 1780), and Rhode Island. Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri — all Union states during the war didn’t abolish slavery until the Civil War era, possibly not until the 13th Amendment. Over 10% of the total number of slaves in the United States in 1860 lived in Union states.
The Revolution definitely played a part in the rise of emancipation and abolition in the North. Part of that was that both sides in the war — British and American — at various points enticed blacks into their military with the promise of freedom for those who enlisted.
After the Civil War, Republicans continued to fight for the rights of blacks in the South, but I think after that enormous struggle and the gigantic human losses of the war, there was just not the will to fight the equally enormous struggle it would have taken to suppress the resurgent Southern societies. For one thing, Democrats were still a potent force in the North. There was never unanimity on these issues.
In his novel ‘Double Star’, Robert Heinlein has one of his characters say essentially that human society always experiences ebbs and flows — you make progress in an area of human rights and there is generally a backlash. But hopefully you don’t slide back to where you started. Perhaps Jim Crow was an inevitable backlash to abolition. It has taken time, but we have continued to make progress — much more so than many other countries, I do believe.
The Left is pretty desperate to convince Asians that they should fear white Republicans more than the black Democrats who beat them up in the street, or the white Democrats who block their kids’ college admissions.
History stripped of context becomes the mortar which demagogues use to build monuments to their willful ignorance. At the rate that this is “progressing,” I have little hope that my grandchildren’s generation will have any knowledge or true sense of the people who brought forth the nation they live in.
“The Waukegan Board of Education looks to rename two of its schools, Thomas Jefferson Middle School and Daniel Webster Middle School. The board formed renaming committees for the schools named after Jefferson, who owned slaves, and Webster, who supported slavery.”
Has anyone challenged the Waukegan BOE’s statements or are we just going to bitch about them. Credible historians must speak up NOW or these false narratives will become gospel.
Why are we not getting dozens if not hundreds of historians who know the truth to sign a letter stating that their mischaracterizations of Jefferson, Webster, et al demonstrates that they lack sufficient understanding of history to make such judgements and, through which, are exacerbating the level of historical and civic literacy in their school system.
“Credible historians” This is where your proposal breaks down. The field of history sold out to the politically correct crowd in the 1980’s and 1990’s along with the psychologists, the education departments, the sociology departments… All the credible historians are retired or dead.
When people spoke up about this in the 80’s and 90’s, they were called alarmists and shunned for making a stink. They were right, but no one wanted to deal with the fact that a large number of the faculty needed to be fired for teaching communist indoctrination instead of educating the students. Now, there is no one left.
At an American Psychology Association meeting, a professor gave a talk suggesting that psychology has a slanted view of conservatives because there are no conservative psychology professors. He got a lot of backlash for it, so he asked the audience of about 400 psychology professors how many were Republicans. Not a single one was. He then got pushback for suggesting that Republicans should be allowed to become psychology professor much less that this was a problem.
How would the US be enslaved by Nazi Germany? Just because British Intelligence made up a map showing Germany’s plans to conquer the Western Hemisphere and gave it to Roosevelt so he could lie the nation into war? War Propaganda, it never goes away! I noticed a commenter yesterday regurgitating a couple of the classics.
If the US doesn’t enter the war, and a strong US, not one or two regional pygmies along the lines of the South American nations, the Axis wins the war. Germany develops the A-bomb first, and the US is either toast or Finland. Of course, there are other possibilities, but that’s a genuine one.
How did FDR “lie the nation into war”? He didn’t make up Pearl Harbor, and Germany declared war on us. Is this an April Fools joke?
The eastern seaboard is littered with the carnage of German Wolfpacks that were sinking American shipping bound long before we had any troops in Europe. I consider that an act of war.
I have seen and touched the U352 as it lies dead on the bottom of the Atlantic in a 110 feet of water off North Carolina. FDR did not put that U Boat there.
You don’t even need to go that far (shudder). I know the history of the USS Reuben James, and FDR didn’t sink it.
How timely… Let’s see… wonder what this new narrative about “Asian Hate” could be preparing us for? hmmm let’s see… think…
The MSM and whomever is controlling Biden are becoming so obvious it’s sad, however most don’t pay attention.
So… we’re gonna be hearing about how bad Asian hate is… (even though whatever it’s been has been that way for a long time) and guess what that will do when we start having more issues with China…. you guessed it!
Once again, we’re being set up for something coming down the pike… and another group is being used to accomplish an agenda by people who don’t care about Asians OR us… oh How I hope more wake up to how we have been and are continually being played.
The great thing is many are. Jack, something historic happened March 30th where very influential people from all over the country gathered in a city and istead of us “waiting” for “someone” to “do something” – these people have officially started something after realizing they could be the ones to change things.
And, fighting doesn’t work as history shows us. We need to build something new that will attract so masses who feel lost in this corrupt 2 party system.
I can’t wait to send you some stuff!! I think you will be relieved, excited and I think you and your tribe will play a part. I’m not sure what you read outside of the stuff you talk about, But there’s a very large group of people who aren’t on the left or right who are tired of fighting, (which only makes the other side fight back harder) and who are feeling like joining together to be the changes they want to see.
Anyway, thank you for the work you do.
At this point I think a lot of the long-time leftys and the young woke folks want, essentially, a historical do-over of the United States. They have read the history of this country and found it wanting, so they want to go back and redo it, or at least put a bunch of big red check marks where the history of this country went wrong. They want a history where the Confederate leaders, from Jeff Davis on down, were executed as traitors and Reconstruction continued WELL into the 20th century, with Southerners only receiving the franchise back in about 1910, and even then all candidates for public office subject to approval by Northern administrators before they could run. They want a history where slavery was abolished when the Constitution was written and the Bill of Rights was much more circumscribed, with the Second Amendment nonexistent and the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth greatly limited, with the priority being the maintenance of civility equity, and order, not individual liberty. Ultimately, what they want is a history where Christopher Columbus immediately turned around and sailed back to Europe and Vasco da Gama never sailed at all, where the European rulers, having already decided that no European expeditions into Africa or the Middle East could be undertaken (and made HANDSOME compensation to the Arab world for the Crusades) decided that no European ship would be allowed to sail west out of sight of Gibraltar.
Well, that’s not possible at this point, so they’re going to do the next best thing. They are going to heap hatred on the memory of all these things, just like the Stuarts exhuming and desecrating the body of Oliver Cromwell after the Restoration, and try to undo them as best they can. They can’t execute the Southern leaders for treason now, but they’re going to smear them and destroy whatever was good in their reputations instead. They can’t take away the franchise from the South, so they’re going to bully the Southern states economically and socially until they fall in line. They can’t go back and rewrite the Constitution top to bottom now, and they can’t change it except with great difficulty, so they’ll work around things like the Electoral College and punish those they don’t agree with financially and socially. They may not be able to arrest you for saying something they disagree with…yet, but they can make you lose your job and turn you into a social outcast, which is almost as good. They may not be able to silence you directly, but they can have their friends in Big Tech deplatform you so no one will hear what you have to say. They may not be able to bar weapons entirely, but they can pass all kinds of restrictions to the point where you say the hell with it, this is too much of a bother. They may not be able to strip you of your right to a jury trial, but they can poison the jury pool by plastering videos all over the net and making sure you can’t possibly get a fair trial. They can’t go back and send Columbus home, but they can declare him a murderer, rapist, and the source of all evil in the Americas. By doing that, they can declare everything that came after evil, and declare every achievement since tainted. That’s right, everything, from the Declaration of Independence, to Edison lighting the world, to the submarine, to Ford’s Model T, to the lunar landings to social media, it’s all tainted, and no white person, especially no white male, is allowed to feel any pride as a result, nor atone for what happened, nor claim he was not involved, so he does not share this guilt. Eternal shame and ignominy is the only remedy possible.