Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

Welcome To a World You Made, Democrats

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by

Steve Haner
in ,

Dear Democrats:  Welcome to our world.  Signed, Republicans

Now she’s a racist? Really?

I’m sorry, watching Democrats react in horror as the Leftist Outrage Machine seeks to destroy the Northams using the tactics all Republicans know so well, it’s just amusing as hell.  I hope Senator Chap Peterson remembers his defense of Mrs. Northam when the world returns to equilibrium and it is Republicans getting abused again.  I will give Blue Virginia credit for writing this, given it is part of the Leftist Outrage Machine.  

In 1985 I was reporting on the Wyatt Durrette gubernatorial campaign, traveling with a small group of other reporters.  The Republican had a series of appearances with former Governor Mills Godwin.  The Post reporter on the trip was desperate to hear Godwin say something racially politically incorrect and was poking him steadily with questions about the Democrats’ lieutenant governor nominee Douglas Wilder, seeking to bait Godwin.  It was a disgusting display of bias and an open attempt to make a story to fit his preconceived notions.

I keep thinking there is a chance to learn something here, to get our discourse to a better level, to take a national chill pill.  Won’t happen, probably, but one can hope.

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18 responses to “Welcome To a World You Made, Democrats”

  1. Reed Fawell 3rd Avatar
    Reed Fawell 3rd

    “Won’t happen, probably, but one can hope.”

    Precisely. But it won’t happen anytime soon. Leftists are famously consistent. Theirs is a social disease that never dies in society, just fades in and out. We’re in virulent phase, abet childish now, so it could get far worse before better. And even during its fade out phase, leftism lurks under the surface, waiting to rise when society gets sick and rotten enough. Problem goes back to the ancient Egyptians.

  2. djrippert Avatar
    djrippert

    Chap Petersen and Scott Surovell (who also came to Mrs. Northam’s defense) are rays of sunshine in Virginia politics. My understanding is that Mrs. Northam is a middle school teacher. She is also the wife of a governor who is under siege for past racist transgressions. Does anybody really think she singled out African-American children to give cotton balls and ask how they would have liked to be slaves? I don’t buy it. Nobody is that dumb.

  3. NorrhsideDude Avatar
    NorrhsideDude

    It is something for Democrats to ponder. Their issue is anyone not woke is automatically racist and that’s already out there so relatively little damage can be done to opponents. It is truly their own party members who will now be eaten as soon as they slightly move from the ever moving line of wokeness.
    Truly fascinating to watch.

  4. James A. Bacon Avatar
    James A. Bacon

    What a surprise, the WaPo blows an innocent action totally out of proportion. If Ms. Northam is guilty of anything, it’s historical ignorance. She handed out cotton bolls, presumably ignorant of the fact that Virginia farms and plantations didn’t raise cotton. They raised raised tobacco and wheat!

    What she did sounds like a typical middle-school exercise. Hold a cotton ball and imagine what it was like to be a slave. It’s pure silliness. How could holding a cotton ball help someone imagine what it was like to be a slave? It just as well could help someone imagine what it was like to be a slave owner…. or a cotton trader.

    The truly disturbing thing, though, is not Mrs. Northam’s silliness but the reaction to it. The kids who complained about it chose to be offended. In an alternate universe, they could have expressed appreciation for the governor’s wife trying to sensitize their white compatriots to the evils of slavery. But, no, every action now is viewed through the filter of racial oppression and viewed as a micro-aggression.

    What worries me is that white people will start saying, screw it, I’m not taking any chances of offending someone for some totally innocent remark. I’ll just keep my social interactions with black people to a minimum. I hope that day never comes, but if we don’t change our trajectory, it will.

  5. Reed Fawell 3rd Avatar
    Reed Fawell 3rd

    “I’ll just keep my social interactions with black people to a minimum. I hope that day never comes, but if we don’t change our trajectory, it will.”

    That day is already here, Jim. And has been for a long time. See Charlottesville. Plus now social interactions with women are fraught with danger too. Why risk trying to mentor of them?

    1. Reed Fawell 3rd Avatar
      Reed Fawell 3rd

      As to “social interactions within Charlotteville,” how many whites speak truth to blacks? How many blacks speak truth of whites? How many of either group know the difference? Apply same test to social interaction between sexes. And its spreading around the country like it has been for decades, but at a much faster pace now, given our instant communications that bombard us hourly.

      Like I’ve said before, we live in an Age of Babel.

  6. Steve Haner Avatar
    Steve Haner

    Certainly no cotton grown in the Governor’s Mansion kitchen garden. And certainly no shortage of white people who harvested cotton by hand before the process was mechanized.

    1. Reed Fawell 3rd Avatar
      Reed Fawell 3rd

      Great segments of our society, from top to bottom, is now crossing a vast sea of silliness. Significant parts of those groups of fools, within the US Congress, the upcoming US presidential race, and political and media class within America generally, are now tumbling over the edge of that silliness sea, into absurdity.

  7. Peter Galuszka Avatar
    Peter Galuszka

    “She handed out cotton bolls, presumably ignorant of the fact that Virginia farms and plantations didn’t raise cotton. They raised raised tobacco and wheat!”

    Reality and history check. Virginia plantations did grow some cotton although tobacco was more important. Plus, Richmond was the second largest slave trading market in the country, taking slaves from Tidewater plantations, selling them and sending them to rising cotton plantations int he Deep South.

    1. Reed Fawell 3rd Avatar
      Reed Fawell 3rd

      Yes, Peter – But without tobacco, the Virginia colony never would have gotten off the ground, most all of it harvested by white folks, most of them indentured servants, most of whom died young of disease and harsh life of servitude, well into the 18th century and beyond. Suffering on a vast scale was ubiquitous, everywhere. The Irish, the Catholics, the Quakers, the Jew, the Dutch, most anyone different in the New World, all suffered harsh oppression, well into the 20th century. Nobody has a patent of oppression, misery, suffering anywhere in this world, whether it be Asia, Middle East, New World, or Africa, all of it happening up to this very minute.

  8. Peter Galuszka Avatar
    Peter Galuszka

    Reed,
    With all due respect, none of these groups suffered the violent, systemic abuse as did African-Americans.
    Also, I am curious why you include “Catholics” in the group of sufferers. Sure they were discriminated against by the English, but Maryland was a Catholic. Louisiana was Catholic. What is now the U.S. Southwest and Latin America was Catholic. Are these not part of the “New World?” Or is the “New World” exclusively an English thing? Also, the first permanent European settlement in North America was actually Catholic St. Augustine, Fla., not Jamestown.
    Sorry, but I get really tired of exclusive Anglo-centric worldviews.

    1. Reed Fawell 3rd Avatar
      Reed Fawell 3rd

      The Catholics, always a minority in Maryland, suffered grievously at the hands of the Protestants, and Puritans, in Maryland from the start. One of my kin, William Stone, came within a hair of being executed, having his head chopped off, and that of even more of his men, at the Battle of the Severn, an unsuccessful effort to maintain some bare semblance of Calvert Rule in 1655.

      By and large the Catholics and Catholic Church were a persecuted minority, without the right to hold public office in Maryland for most of Colonial period, nor did they have the right to practice the right of public worship in many places. History is a highly complicated thing. For example, the Irish thought they would have better off as slaves in the 19th century. At least, in their their view, their masters took care of slaves. While, those masters instead worked the Irish to death. Never believe what you read lightly in history books. Most is false and always has been, but even more so than usual today. Today it’s mostly garbage, if taught at all.

  9. TooManyTaxes Avatar
    TooManyTaxes

    How does it work if some of the children involved had African ancestors who sold other Africans into slavery? Or for those of us who don’t have any African ancestry but had ancestors who fought for the North and ultimately enabled Lincoln to end slavery?

    Should the former be required to make amends? And the latter be exempt from making amends? I realize that this would sail over the heads of today’s journalists but they are legitimate questions in today’s world.

  10. djrippert Avatar
    djrippert

    The real issue is that the Post claimed Mrs. Northam singled out some children (presumably African-Americans) to give the cotton bolls and ask how they would have felt as slaves. Petersen and Surovell, citing eye witnesses, claims that no children were singled out. They have asked the Washington Post for a correction. Singling out African American children would certainly seem a lot worse than dealing with all the children in the group.

    Sounds like the Bezos Post was looking like The National Enquirer, again.

  11. LarrytheG Avatar
    LarrytheG

    Just some basic data for 1860:

    VIRGINIA
    total population = 1,596,318
    number of slaves = 490,865
    number of slave owners – 52,798

    to get a clear perspective – if we have 100 counties/localities in Va (actually 133) – it would mean about 4900 slaves per county …and 52 slave owners per county with an average of 94 slaves per slave owner.

    Children born to slaves became the property of the Slave owner who then could (and did) sell family members… that’s was one of the horrible things about slavery that was different from indentured servants.

    1. Reed Fawell 3rd Avatar
      Reed Fawell 3rd

      Larry, history and real life does not work simplistically like you suggest. Every time, every local, every family, ever person, and situation is different, always different. Likely many indentured servants of 1600s, orphans, free people, men and women alike, in Virginia lived far harsher and brutal lives in the 1600s then many slaves there in 1900s. Indeed, in many places and cases inheritance of slaves protected them from brutal alternatives. One needs to read history deeply, objectively, and long before one can understand all the nuance of people’s lives in any time. Simple numbers, assertions and political agendas don’t work, but they can always be dragged out, exaggerated, and ranted over, by those with ax to grind, or anger to vent. Of course this is very common, in fact the norm, no matter the color of one’s skin, race, or class, or time or place or whatever.

      Here is a study of live in early Virginia for typical colonial, and it went on and on and on:

      For example: Early Virginia (1607-24) was a nightmarish world of disease and death, perhaps unsurpassed in the annals of English colonization. Typhoid fever and dysentery visited James- town in recurrent epidemics killing 30 per cent or more of the colonists with each onslaught. Yet Jamestown endured because the leaders of the Virginia Company misapprehended the nexus between the estuarine environment and water-borne, non- immunizing diseases. Each summer, death stalked the town as invading salt water pushed up the estuary and concentrated pathogens in the town’s water supply. The prevention of disease and death required the abandonment of Jamestown and relocation into healthier niches, which occurred with the dissolution of the Virginia Company in 1624.”

      See
      https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2338/8c90e7219b6943f72723fb95403adb3edd13.pdf

    2. Acbar Avatar
      Acbar

      Slavery does not lend itself to averages, particularly in Virginia. As the agricultural economy of the State was concentrated in Tidewater and Southside, so were the slaves. Sure there were slaves in the Piedmont as well but not in the same concentration; even less so beyond the Blue Ridge. And that part of Virginia beyond the Alleghenies had so little popular sympathy for slave-owning that those counties broke away in 1863 to form West Virginia. So your numbers far understate the problem in some regions of Virginia and far overstate it in others.

      1. djrippert Avatar
        djrippert

        All points well taken. The landed gentry of Tidewater and the Southside have long sought to suppress not only slaves and, later, free African Americans but the white residents of the western parts of the state as well. Into the 1820s Virginia was one of only two states that limited voting to landowners. In fact, you had to be a rather substantial landowner as I recall. In addition, representation was by county rather than population. By 1840 the majority of white residents lived in the western part of the state. However, their political rights were squelched by the slave-holding planter class of the southside and Tidewater areas. Not only was voting suppressed based on land ownership but the more populous counties in the western area of the state only got one vote per county. It wasn’t until the Virginia Constitution of 1851 that western Virginians got full rights (the white males of voting age, at least).

        The self-proclaimed descendants of Pocahontas have a long and infamous history of running an anti-democratic feudal society in Virginia. From the requirement of land ownership for voting to the horrific 1902 Constitution (which was never put to popular vote) to the Byrd Machine and Massive Resistance to today’s Dillon’s Rule and pig trick of killing important legislation in sub-committee … Virginia’s elite control Virginians with anti-democratic practices.

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