Editor’s note: I wasn’t sure what to expect when interviewing Allen Armentrout, who launched to brief fame after the above image went viral late last summer. What I found was an intelligent, articulate, kind, and hopeful young man. A pure Southern gentleman, whose “Yes, ma’ams” delighted this ol’ dissident belle.
Raised right, educated in true history, and nourished in the God of the Bible, Armentrout’s also a fearless resistor to the Southern cultural genocide. To me, he serves as a much-needed light in these dark and dangerous times. I hope you will agree.
“So, my son, when in the conflict of life the cloud and the darkness come, stand unflinchingly by your post;
remain faithful to the discharge of your duty.”
— Robert E. Lee
August 15 marks the one-year anniversary of when Allen Armentrout did his duty: honoring General Lee. Defying his youthful 21 years of age, the North Carolina native and lover of Southern heritage stood his ground resolutely and quietly as a seething flash mob gathered around him, hurling the most hurtful and irrational rhetoric at the lone rebel.
The cloud & the darkness
“Terrorist go home!” the rabid crowd of about 30 shrieked with hysterical flair synonymous with today’s intolerant left. “Racist!” screamed one. “Get the fuck out of here!” screeched another. Obscenities, expletives, juvenile chants, and verbal snares filled the totalitarian-tainted air.
“She actually whispered in my ear,” Armentrout told me in my recent two-hour phone interview with him (click here for full audio). The “she” he’s referring to is the black woman seen in this video and the link above.
“It was kinda eerie. I can still hear it. She was like ‘We’re going to find you, chop your body up into tiny pieces, and people aren’t even going to know.'” That’d be peak social justice, I suppose.
The most well-known image from that Tuesday in Charlottesville, Virginia, is at top, a picture in which Lara Rogers, a middle-aged mother of three shoves double-birds in Armentrout’s face. To cultural Marxists, Rogers is considered a “middle-fingered hero,” who’s just resisting “white supremacy.”
But to we non-leftists, Rogers and others in the nihilistic throng are emblematic of exactly why Armentrout was in what I disrespectfully call “the Berkeley of the Blue Ridge.” It’s a place brimming with unhinged tyrants, who claim to defend their homes and values, while they seek to destroy the roots and history of what once made Charlottesville (and the South at large) so great.
They’re Jacobins who resort to vitriol and barbarous bully tactics while claiming the moral high ground against a young man who simply wants to defend his hearth and heritage against a fashionable and utterly dangerous cultural genocide. They claim unity, but seek to conquer. They claim victim status, but revel in schadenfreude.
Stand unflinchingly by your post
“I stood there two hours being mocked and brushed up against,” Armentrout explained in his warm Piedmont drawl. “I don’t think you could’ve gotten more verbally assaulting than those people did to me.”
“Can you imagine what they might have done if I didn’t have a gun, if that was how volatile they were with me having a gun?” continued Armentrout, who came to Charlottesville open-carrying an AR-15 on his left shoulder and a holstered .45 handgun on his right hip, wearing a Confederate kepi and jacket, and holding a large Battle Flag.
Simply exercising his God-given and legal right to self-defense threw some emotive apparatchiks into a tizzy, of course. Leftists simply cannot fathom the concept of self-defense because they childishly equate guns with murder.
It also tweaked some of Armentrout’s supporters, who thought the weaponry sent the wrong message, considering the violence that had unfolded in Charlottesville just three days prior. He admitted he almost left the rifle in the trunk of his car.
But with “all this hating on the ARs,” he opted to prove that the maligned gun can be used in a peaceful way and as a deterrent to harm and criminality. “Every time an AR-15’s been put on the news, it’s ‘Oh, it’s killed somebody.’ This time, it’s not going to be that way.”
“People nowadays do not value life,” he added. “How hard do you think it’d be to kill a kid with a Confederate flag at a controversial monument? It’d be nothin’.”
When in the conflict of life
Like a soldier preparing for battle, Armentrout played bagpipe military music through his Bluetooth headset when setting out for Lee Park, the now contentious site where the Confederate general’s monument has been standing since 1924. He geared up and started the trek from his car, which was positioned about a mile away for security measures.
En route, a man brandished a weapon and made veiled threats, and a few cops approached him. Undeterred, Armentrout steadfastly marched onward, weapons visible and flag flying high. Such are the battle lines in this 4th-generation war and Lee Park was the beachhead.
Back in June, the politically correct Charlottesville City Council had voted unanimously to change the park’s name to Emancipation Park, and in February, voted to remove Lee’s statue. (The statue still remains pending lawsuit, but is sometimes cloaked in a tarp.) But the progressives who’ve colonized this once charming mountain town have deemed the statue contemptuous and demand that it must go.
This kind of puritanical purge of all things Southern is one of the many reasons the Unite the Right (UTR) rally had even taken place in city the previous weekend. The 26-feet-high bronze sculpture simply came to represent resistance to the leftist status quo because the Charlottesville provocateurs made it so.
The horrific event, as described by my friend who attended the rally, didn’t occur because the city is a “place fractured by racial history and racial wounds,” assert the social-justice shills. The calamity was caused by these very hand-wringers who now cry foul and proved what dissidents of all stripes have been saying all along: we live under anarcho-tyranny.
And the cultural Marxists’ cleansing of Confederate symbols and subsequent celebration of evildoers only proliferated post-UTR, amplifying that ugly reality. In fact, it was the razing of the Confederate veteran statue in Durham by a legion of lunatics which inspired Armentrout to head to Virginia.
“There does come a point where morally what they believe in is completely wrong and threatens my way of life in some cases,” Armentrout said of the Reconstructed masses. “And that’s when you have to stand up for what you believe in.”
Charlottesville is a case study in peak democracy. It’s the bitter pill that there’s an outright state-enforced, media-pushed, corporate-collaborated war against freedom of conscience, civility, and federalism. And Dixie is its emblematic whipping boy.
“It is history that teaches us to hope.”
— Robert E. Lee
“You know why people hate us?” asked Armentrout, who likened the progressive agitators to the cruel ancient Roman emperor Nero. “Because we’re the last beam of hope. We’re the last group of people in the United States who stand up to tyranny” and the monuments are a reminder of that.
“There once was a group of people who said, ‘Enough’s enough,’ and took up arms against” central authority, he continued. “The federal government doesn’t want people to know about that.” He’s absolutely correct: that’s what this is about.
“They can tear down every monument. They can kill every Southerner. They can burn every history book. They can dig up every Confederate grave. It doesn’t change what happened. The truth cannot be destroyed, ever.”
And just like Nero-era Christians were tortured, unjustly punished, and castigated as scapegoats for every social ill but still somehow prevailed, the prayer is that Southerners too shall triumph. But they can only do so with God.
“With Christ, comes freedom, and with Christianity, comes free will,” affirmed Armentrout when critiquing America’s spiritual and social degradation. “We can fight. We can complain … but until we turn our hearts over to the Lord, it’s not going to change anything.”
Faithful to the discharge of your duty
Armentrout told me that he felt “spirit-led” to Charlottesville. “If the Lord has told you to do something – it doesn’t matter how hard it is or how much you’re going to suffer in doing or what you might have to sacrifice – in the end, the Lord is going to bless you.”
His maturity in faith and unwavering courage in his beliefs are the blessings of God, Armentrout said. How else could one remain so undaunted in the face of such vile chastisement?
This self-control he exhibited is what astounded people. “How could you be so calm? I would’ve knocked her upside the head,” Armentrout said were some of the most common comments regarding Rogers’ infantile aggression.
“Yeah, well, I wanted to, but that’s not the Christian thing to do … you can turn the other cheek when people are cussing you. Through just that one character trait alone, I showed Christ in me … (but) it does take some restraint from the Holy Spirit.”
“My chief concern is to try to be an honest, earnest Christian.”
— Robert E. Lee
The dichotomy between Armentrout’s stealthy demeanor and the alt-Marxists’ unbalanced behavior was palpable. It’s why he didn’t engage them in conversation. He did, however, have a polite dialog when he first arrived at the park. They agreed to disagree and ended the exchange with a handshake.
But when the maniacal mobsters ambushed him, he “clammed up.” Attempting to have a civil exchange with uncivil and miseducated people is “a lost cause,” he said.
“This is our town!” cried out a person, who was probably not even a native of the city, much less of Virginia. “Racist go home!” chanted the blood-thirsty gaggle.
The South is his home
Armentrout’s German ancestors came to Pennsylvania in the 1740s, but migrated to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley soon thereafter. From the settlement of Keezletown, his forebearers fought in the French and Indian War. One relative was a POW and slave to an adversarial Native American tribe, but escaped.
The Armentrouts constructed churches, grew their families, cultivated community, fostered freedom, and continued defending Virginia during both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Continuing the patriotic lineage, his fourth great-grandfather served in the Confederate Army in the Stonewall Brigade during the War Between the States.
“I’m just very proud … of the sacrifice they gave so that I can live in this country,” he said of his kin. I’m “thankful that even though we were defeated, that my ancestors stood up to the Yankees and the invaders and tried to fight for our independence there, too.”
“A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday does not know where it is today.”
— Robert E. Lee
When Armentrout was a junior in high school, he and his father made a pilgrimage to Keezletown – a link he discovered when doing ancestral research. It was the dirty grave markers in an unnamed cemetery there that started Armentrout on a path which led eventually to Charlottesville.
He decided to clean those neglected veteran gravestones “of men who died for our rights and our freedoms hundreds of miles away from their families.” Many of their “descendants probably don’t even know where they are. For all I know there might be an Armentrout in Missouri or Texas, somewhere far away from me that hopefully a fellow compatriot out there might clean.”
Armentrout’s budding appreciation for genealogy and honoring the dead built upon the lessons instilled in him by his father, Michael, who’s an independent fundamental Baptist preacher. Unlike the atrocious example Rogers set for her children, Armentrout’s dad taught him about virtue and godliness through the lens of history.
“I learned a lot from my dad and those two pictures.”
“Some of my best Christian role models growing up were Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson,” he explained.” As a boy, images of the Confederate generals in his father’s study always caught his eye.
“My dad taught me as a young man to revere those individuals and taught me what they believed, showed me what to stand for and what not to. I was taught that I have rights and freedoms. I was taught the truth and I was taught to care.”
“I think it better to do right, even if we suffer in doing so, than to incur the reproach of our consciences and posterity.”
— Robert E. Lee
His dad educated him about the War and the Southern cause “and made the information pertinent to the way we live and how what they fought for applies to today.” To me, it’s a very Orthodox perspective.
Just like we Orthodox look to the saints and use their stories to help grow us in faith, Armentrout looks to the enigmatic Lee and Jackson. Just like we Orthodox are called upon to pray for our dead Christian ancestors, Armentrout honors his.
Just like the traditional Orthodox fought against iconoclasm in the Byzantine Empire, Armentrout resists the destruction of his symbols and traditions. This all gives him a sense of purpose. Pride in a people.
“A man’s life is always trying to seek things to fill the void in his heart and respecting those who fought and died for you completes you in some way,” he said. It’s about time and place. Identity and meaning. Ties that bind. And being a grateful Southern son.
Be sure to check out part 2, “Take my stand.”
Comments
Excellent article about an excellent man who inspired me to keep standing and do right no matter what.Also,off topic,but could you write an article about the perils of the modern church and warnings against them?Thank you so much and please keep writing for us and for TRUTH! God bless!
Author
Laurie, so glad you liked the article and found Armentrout an inspiration, too! Please let me know what you think of parts 2 and 3 when you get a chance. They’re finally up and ready for your reading pleasure … and for sharing far and wide. 🙂
I have written quite a few blogs that tackle the cultural-Marxist takeover of the Church, but usually from a specific angle, like:
refugees > http://www.dissidentmama.net/refugees-part-1-the-good-samaritan-reinterpreted/
SBC nonsense > http://www.dissidentmama.net/white-christians-should-feel-guilty/
immigration > http://www.dissidentmama.net/the-de-facto-wall-of-separation/
double-standards > http://www.dissidentmama.net/white-christians-should-feel-guilty/
misunderstanding of real history/misappropriation of statist propaganda > http://www.dissidentmama.net/twisted-tongues-beacons-of-light/
See if those don’t wet your whistle for now. I’m sure they’ll be doing something ridiculous again soon – er, like doing the bidding of pedophiles (cover your ears Catholic bishops). It’s a sick world when the supposed salt and the light are so dead and dark. Keep that armor of God nice and snug, girl!
DM,
Do you know of any principled Catholic Priests or Christian Pastors out there willing to denounce foreign wars and domestic wealth transfers, and to defend free markets, free association, and our Southern heritage?
Author
Nope. Hence the sad state of Christianity in ‘Murica. Most go along to get along, thinking they’re going to win some kinda favor in taking the wide path of upholding socialism, statism, and the Southern cultural genocide. You know, it’s just easier to deny tyranny and despotism and mob rule than it is to be called “un-American” or a “racist” or a “white supremacist” or even a “capitalist” in 2018. They bend like reeds in the wind. Sigh. Some leaders may think it’s unseemly to discuss such worldly issues. But my guess is that for most, towing the line is just the path of least resistance (and may even bring in new congregants and more money and bigger churches), so they don’t speak up or take a stand. And then, of course, you have those who willfully participate in the evils which you spelled out. I’d say that’s the status quo among the lion’s share of leaders in American Protestantism, as well as in universal Catholicism – and even in some quarters of Orthodoxy (but only in the US). They’re sellouts to truth and collaborators in cultural Marxism. It’s one of the reasons so many conservative, traditional, non-leftist Christians want absolutely nothing to do with the modern Church. They don’t see it as a place of light and a refuge from the world, but actually an extension of the world and its utter darkness.
I recently became aware of Fr. Robert Sirico, who is president of the Acton Institute. He might be one, though I think he was a gay rights activist and may have performed a few gay weddings before he became a Catholic priest. It’s not what I’d consider a cultural foundation of strength, but the guy is good on free trade and the state and has defended the compatibility of libertarianism and Catholicism. Maybe you know more about him than I do though. I certainly don’t know enough to endorse him.
Author
I do know that he’s stellar on the issue of life. Just a stalwart for the unborn and their subsequent broken families.
Now, I have seen and read a few things in which he at least tacitly endorses the whole radical “equality” sham, which makes me think: if you get that wrong, how much of a leg do you have to stand on when it comes to freedom of association and decentralization? None, in my opinion.
“The 26-feet-high bronze sculpture simply came to represent resistance to the leftist status quo because the Charlottesville barbarians made it so.”
Hey whoa! Don’t call leftists barbarians! That’s a huge insult!
To barbarians! =)
Seriously though. We Anglo-Saxons are the descendants of the Germanic barbarians who took the best of their own traditions and individualistic spirit and melded it with the Christian faith and the crumbing remnants of the diseased Roman Empire to forge the European Middle Ages (often disparaged as the Dark Ages), the crucible of Western freedom, what Ralph Raico called the European Miracle.
https://mises.org/library/european-miracle-0
Here are some quotes from Lord Acton’s, “The History of Freedom in Christianity” on the topic.
“In the height of their power the Romans became aware of a race of men that had not abdicated freedom in the hands of a monarch; and the ablest writer of the empire pointed to them with a vague and bitter feeling that, to the institutions of these barbarians, not yet crushed by despotism, the future of the world belonged. Their kings, when they had kings, did not preside [at] their councils; they were sometimes elective; they were sometimes deposed; and they were bound by oath to act in obedience to the general wish. They enjoyed real authority only in war. ”
“Looking back over the space of 1,000 years, which we call the Middle Ages to get an estimate of the work they had done, if not towards perfection in their institutions, at least towards attaining the knowledge of political truth, this is what we find:—Representative government, which was unknown to the ancients, was almost universal. The methods of election were crude; but the principle that no tax was lawful that was not granted by the class that paid it; that is, that taxation was inseparable from representation, was recognized, not as the privilege of certain countries, but as the right of all. Not a prince in the world, said Philip de Commines, can levy a penny without the consent of the people. Slavery was almost everywhere extinct; and absolute power was deemed more intolerable and more criminal than slavery. The right of insurrection was not only admitted but defined, as a duty sanctified by religion. Even the principles of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the method of the Income Tax, were already known. The issue of ancient politics was an absolute state planted on slavery. The political produce of the middle ages was a system of states in which authority was restricted by the representation of powerful classes, by privileged associations, and by the acknowledgment of duties superior to those which are imposed by man.”
https://acton.org/research/history-freedom-christianity
I don’t know about you, but it is the ethos of the decentralized Christian barbarian West that I find value in, not the ancient centralized pagan Roman Empire.
Author
Great point on the barbarian angle and our kinship to them and their transcendence from invading hordes to keepers of tradition. The Charlottesville libtards wish they had that much chutzpah! 😉 And Lord Acton was such an incredible powerhouse politically, philosophically, intellectually, and spiritually. He had his finger right on the pulse of it all. “Absolute power was deemed more intolerable and more criminal than slavery … (and) the acknowledgment of duties superior to those which are imposed by man.” Wow. Seems those “brutes” of the Middle Ages were way smarter than the masses of today.
“He had his finger right on the pulse of it all.”
Acton’s two essays on the History of Freedom (in Antiquity and in Christianity) are a must read. Here is one of my favorite lines from either.
“That great political idea, sanctifying freedom and consecrating it to God, teaching men to treasure the liberties of others as their own, and to defend them for the love of justice and charity, more than as a claim of right, has been the soul of what is great and good in the progress of the last two hundred years.” – Acton
Lately I’ve been enjoying and participating in the discussion at Bionic Mosquito’s blog on whether liberty can be attained or maintained without the cultural and traditional foundations which gave birth to it (Christianity, nuclear family, traditional morality, law above man, etc.). The general consensus between him and me is that it cannot. Bionic is amassing quite a lot of evidence at his blog that backs up this contention. Liberty without its cultural moorings tends to be perverted by our inherent vices, though mainly pride and envy, (especially when we’ve in mass delusion become convinced mankind has none) and we end up with an unhealthy emphasis on rationality (anti-theism) and equality (egalitarianism), which yields those especially horrific results as seen during the French Revolution and all throughout the Soviet Union.
This is certainly something us Southern Conservatives need to consider, especially those of us who came to know liberty through the abstract ideal of libertarianism without much knowledge of the cultural heritage and history behind it. I’m a little envious of Armentrout for having his head screwed on so straight at such a young age. He must have had parents familiar with real Southern culture and history. I didn’t “right my ship” until I was about 30. Maybe I’m still in the process 5 years later!
Author
I talked with Allen’s dad for 45 minutes and can say that the Southern-without-apology apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I had some of that growing up, but not enough to sustain me for the anti-Southern propaganda foisted upon me in college. It’s like people who are taught about Jesus but aren’t forewarned and prepared for the anti-Christian bias they’ll face; those folks just get gobbled up by the echo chamber, as do many “normal” Southern who end up simply drinking too much of the Lincoln/white-guilt Kool-aid.
My ship got right slowly but surely over the course of the past 15+ years. It traveled through many phases to get me to this super-red-pilled point, so I would say it definitely is a learning process, which speaks to the mindset of folks like you and me. We may have had to wade through some mucky water to grow in our logic and capacity for embracing truth, but we are thinking, questioning, and open-minded people. We might not know all the answers, but we’re constantly searching and inquiring and becoming familiar with great writers and thinkers, both from the past and present – people who challenge us to think fresh, or to return to the old-time way, or to simply question the status quo. Anarcho-tyrants are just missing out. Not only are they filled with hate and envy, but it’s like they’re brain dead, just wasting that gray matter on bumper stickers and conformity and virtue-signaling and destroying statues and punching Nazis. Really quite sad when you think about it.
Lastly, Bionic Mosquito is right on. There has to be a foundation of something solid and good and unchanging to build upon for liberty to flourish. Now, you can be “free” to abort a baby or stick things in your butt or marry a horse, but those will only lead to death, which is the opposite of life-flourishing liberty. Even “live and let live” has to have some common agreement upon which that statement manifests itself. It is obviously going to have vastly different connotations when citizens do not share a culture and traditions – or at the very least, have one of them assimilate to the other’s worldview.
“but aren’t forewarned and prepared for the anti-Christian bias they’ll face;”
I went through an atheist phase in my late teenage years, because I thought you couldn’t be a Christian and an intelligent person familiar with modern science. I wonder where I got that notion? My small town Episcopal church just didn’t prepare me for the arguments against the faith. It wasn’t until later that I read people like C.S. Lewis, Chesterton, Tolkien, and others that the objective part of my brain allowed me to give in to the faith again. I think in the end it was humility that won out. It takes humility to believe that a man can be the Son of God, rise from death, and ascend to Heaven. It sounds silly and absurd on its face. You have to suspend your disbelief based on all the evidence you’ve seen in your life of how the world works. Humility is also what most intelligent atheists lack to their dark and empty cores.
At the end of the day, whether or not Jesus was the Son of God, I’ll throw my lot in with Him and His people and His word anyway. History has certainly proven Him wise and necessary for promoting the good in humanity.
“The deeper reason for everything now happening [rise of the state and mass conflict in early 20th century] lies in the circumstance that enormous cavernous hollows were formed in the European part of mankind by the vanishing Christian belief, and into these everything is tumbling.” – Vassili Rozanov
“we’re constantly searching and inquiring… ”
That’s in our conservative nature. In order to conserve what is good, we must first find what the good is! Rather than start from a scratch or simply go with what feels good (as most leftists are apt to do), the intelligent (and humble) thing to do is to profit from the works of those who spent their lives thinking on this subject before us.
“Conservative refers to someone who recognizes the old and natural through the “noise” of anomalies and accidents and who defends, supports, and helps to preserve it against the temporary and anomalous.” – Hans Hoppe, ‘Democracy’
and
“The true rightist is not a man who wants to go back to this or that institution for the sake of a return; he wants first to find out what is eternally true, eternally valid, and then either to restore or reinstall it, regardless of whether it seems obsolete, whether it is ancient, contemporary, or even without precedent, brand new, “ultramodern.”” – Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, ‘Leftism’
“or stick things in your butt or marry a horse”
I had to spit out my coffee laughing at this one! So true though. Glad to hear about Allen’s dad being a good ole’ boy. =)
Very well written ma’am. Tell this excellent young man, if you ever cross paths again, he will always be shown quarter in Mississippi. Excellent read. And an even better STORY.
DEO VINDICE
Author
Thanks for your positive comments, Jason. Keep on fightin’ the good fight, my Southern brother. Indeed, God is our vindicator!
Fruits of the Spirit, he has!!!!!!! What a hope he inspires! AND I just taught about iconoclasm in Ch II today……we had an excellent discussion on whether the kids thought art depicting religion was idolotry or “sermons in pictures” for the mostly illiterate masses. Then, I told them they would automatically fail if they forgot to put Gutenburg’s printing press on their timelines. Tehehehe.
Author
My fruits are being tested today with all the state-colluded idiocy happening Chapel Hill. Indeed, Allen’s faith is an inspiration to us all!