“Keep Asheville weird” has been the unofficial motto for this Western North Carolina city for as long as I can recall. But the once-quaint Blue Ridge town has become wearied. It’s tired and worn out in its progressive predictability.
This is really nothing new to Dixians who have been paying attention.
“Asheville is a tumour on the face of North Carolina.”
“I call it Trasheville.”
“A town full of fudge packers, smelly hippies, and dip shits.”
“Asheville is the western version of the People’s Republic of Chapel Hill.”
These comments come from a social-media post of mine after Asheville “apologized for its role in slavery and voted in favor of providing reparations to its African-American community” this past July. My friend William Estes’ family has been calling home that part of Southern Appalachia since the 1790s and his great-uncle designed the Buncombe County seal.
Below, he explains his theory as to why “The home of Zebulon Vance, Thomas Clingman, Thomas Wolfe, and Richard Weaver has been turned into a free-range lunatic asylum.”
But Asheville has amped up its lunacy, building off last spring and summer’s BLM-Antifa terrorism and its institutional enabling and systemic sponsorship. So on Monday, the city began disassembling the 75-foot obelisk honoring Zebulon B. Vance, who was born in nearby Weaverville. “The process could take from 10 days to a month,” a city spokesperson said. “The contractor will take possession of all the materials, including the blocks.”
You heard that right. Asheville City Council members didn’t vote 6-1 in March to simply remove the statue honoring this NC legislator, US congressman, US senator, and two-time governor of North Carolina that has been a downtown centerpiece since 1897. They’re disassembling it, as in taking it apart granite block by granite block, and giving it to some government-approved grifter.
Other materials the contractor will “take possession of” include the scaffolding, which was erected around the monument in July in order to hold up the “shroud” masking the statue from the sensitive but unseeing eyes of Asheville automatons. A strong wind, however, tore the opaque covering in September and the city never replaced the malevolent mantle.
“We’re all in this together,” parroted a banal borg to the local TV station. But are we? After all, “temporary site restoration” will will include “a $25,535 landscaping contract to MS Lean Landscaping, an Asheville African American-owned business.” Whipty-damn-do!
That ain’t “love” or “equality,” and ain’t even Marxist economic theory. It’s what ya call woke mercantilism. But really it’s the same ol’ crony-capitalist looting the South’s been subjected to by its conquerors since April 1865. Free at last, my ass.
Notice another gem of unity in this article from the Asheville Citizen Times, in which the word “white” is not capitalized, but “Black” is. For good cultural-Marxist measure, “African American” is also used, but never is “European American.” Maybe it’s precisely because this White reporter’s degrees are in political science and anthropology that he so willingly spoon-feeds racialist agitprop to the masses. Creepy.
Here, my mother in-law and William discuss what it’s like to live among the hubristic hegemons and shallow charlatans who’ve invaded much of their ancestral homeland.
Even some Western NC natives, like Oralene Simmons, will sell out home for fame as a “racial justice activist.” Bending like a Bolshevik reed in the globohomo wind, she proclaimed that “with other cities and states taking down monuments and statues, I just felt that we were in line to go that way.” All hail the mob!
Simmons, “who is Black” (reminded the Citizen Times‘ critical-race-theory correspondent just in case you couldn’t tell by her photo), co-chaired the Asheville-Buncombe County Vance Monument Task Force, which was formed after the 2020 riots and the local anarcho-tyrants’ attempted “autonomous zone.” Way to fight for the civil rights of non-leftist residents, the city’s true minority, Oralene.
Southern-without-apology folk won’t take a knee? Well, we’ll just take their history and try to erase it from memory. Conservatives don’t want to “dismantle racism”? Hell, we’ll dismantle their heroes, denigrate their heritage, and spit on their ancestors. Kumbaya, comrades!
This purge has nothing to do with “a national reckoning on race,” as the corporate media is wont to recite, but everything to do with power. Funny thing is the leftists depend on the civil, governmental, and social systems created by White men for their continued shakedown.
They rely upon do-gooders white-knighting for their forever-oppressed and always-morphing intersectional minorities. Dare I say this altruism smacks of chivalry, which is an outgrowth of the “whiteness” and tradition the lefties hate so much.
They twist the Gospel that radicals say is borne of white supremacy, yet still use Christianity’s precepts as a means to coerce the clueless and punish dissenters. I say it’s time to turn the tables.
And by that, I don’t mean to abuse faith or roots. But let’s simply take the puritanical-progressives at their own words.
“Let’s take this as a new time,” babbled the borg. Yes, let’s.
If these pompous presentists are either unwilling or unable to grasp the nuances and complexities of history, and they refuse to live and let live, let them have none of the benevolent benefits of the heritage they so loathe. Like I wrote in 2019, “Ingrates should get nothing.”
Ron Swanson, Vance’s TV character lookalike, handmade a city permit that read, “I can do what I want. -Ron.” Likewise, Vance was an ardent proponent of individual rights and his rallying cry, like that of all Confederates, was “Let us alone!”
For instance, we could pretend to play along with clown world and force the left’s hand by encouraging them to change the name of Asheville and Buncombe County, since both Samuel Ashe and Edward Buncombe were slave owners. Maybe it could come to be known as city “Xe/Xer” in county “They/Them.” Then again, those words are comprised of the alphabet of the Latins, an “old dead white men” culture if there ever was one, so maybe Asheville should be a grunt.
One cheeky lawyer admitted the anti-whiteness inconsistency with the city’s moniker, so he proposed keeping “Asheville,” but changing the namesake to that of black tennis legend, Arthur Ashe. You can’t make this stuff up.
Thinking this would help with the retarded rebranding, he even suggested repurposing the Vance Monument into a giant tennis racket. However, this too would’ve brought about a few progressive pitfalls.
First, tennis was an invention of the French and was codified by the Brits, both of which are known in post-modern parlance as “white colonial oppressors,” so that’s a no go. (This reminds me of when some Richmonders were oohing and ahhing over blacktivist ballerinas in their tutus and pointe shoes raising black-power fists while standing on the base of the vandalized and disgraced Lee Monument in Virginia’s capital.)
(“How symbolic,” they preened! Well, what it really symbolizes is legit cultural appropriation. After all, ballet was invented by the Italians and flourished under the French and Russians, all of whom fall under the “whiteness is cancer” umbrella, and they’re icky Europeans no less. So you bes’ give up tennis and ballet, POC allies!)
Second, if Arthur Ashe had really cared about “racial justice,” he would’ve used his fame to Africanize his name like black militants did during his day. Better peg Asheville “Muhammed-Ali-ville” or “Mumia-Abu-Jamal-boro.” Or better yet, let’s play it super-safe and call the city “George-Floyd-istan.” Now we’re talking.
If left-wingers “wish Western Civilization gone, then it should ALL be gone,” William commented. “They deserve nothing, not even its bones to squat and benefit from. You want a new civilization, build one from scratch. Destroying is easy, building is another thing entirely.”
According to the aforementioned Citizen Times story, Simmons said that “repurposing the monument was not appropriate … because if it continued to stand, people would continue to reflect on Vance and his views.” Oh, the horror!
So, who was Vance, and why do the totalitarians want to cancel him so badly? In short, he was an “evil Confederate,” serving as NC’s wartime governor, company commander in the “Rough and Ready Guards,” and as colonel in the 26th NC infantry.
Oh, did I mention that the Vance family owned slaves? Yep, that guy had “traitor” written all over him.
But what Vance was really a “traitor” to was invasion and coercion, and selling out his kith and kin. He “objected strenuously to the Confederate conscription and impressment of property laws, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, discrimination against North Carolinians in the appointment and promotion of commissioned officers, and the use of Virginia officers in the state.”
Vance was even a “staunch Unionist” but became a “diehard secessionist” when his beloved home state was asked to supply troops to fight against neighboring South Carolina. It was 160 years ago today that he and all the other representatives at the NC Convention voted unanimously to secede from These United States. The date was May 20, 1861.
Post-bellum, Vance “opposed the protective tariff, the internal-revenue system, civil-service reform, and the repeal of the Sherman Silver Act” as a four-time elected US senator, although the “Radical Republicans refused to let him take his seat” during what would’ve been his first term in the early years of Reconstruction and all the disenfranchisement and occupation it entailed. “His name is not associated with any constructive legislation.” That’s my favorite kinda fed!
This is why Vance is so despised. His views are a reminder of resistance to centralization and his life a reflection on the resilience of Southern folk. Vance and his fellow Dixians’ cause was “the biggest and most authentic people’s movement in American history,” explains historian Clyde Wilson, and Tar Heels (the lion’s share of my paternal Confederate ancestors) were as central to the struggle as were any other brave and determined Rebs.
Political philosopher Richard Weaver, a native of Western NC and a descendant of the founders of Weaverville (where Vance was born), opined that “all questions resolve themselves ultimately into metaphysical problems.” Indeed, the Southern cultural genocide and its monument destruction isn’t about the rock or the obelisks themselves. It’s about ideas, and Asheville is void of any good ones. It’s about smashing beauty, and Asheville is ugly inside. It’s about elevating emptiness, and Asheville has that in spades.
Professor David Middleton wrote, “Weaver noted, the South — which once had been ‘in the curious position of having been right without realizing the grounds for its rightness’ but which nonetheless by this same unarticulated instinct for the permanent things had functioned as America’s ‘flywheel’ to check or urge on the country as a whole as it deviated from or approached traditional values.”
So, let the reprobates in Asheville and in other colonized cities littering the South be slaves to self, to the temporary and pedantic. Let them be not transcendent. Not interesting. Not enduring. Not deep. Let them be weary and wallow knee-deep in it.
But the rebel remnant must become that flywheel again. We are the weird ones, who are “of strange or extraordinary character, odd, fantastic.” We Dixians are in opposition to all that is fashionable, and thank the Good Lord for that inherited piss-and-vinegar spirit. We builders of lasting things have “weird” and God-honoring work to do. Let’s get to it.
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Amen and AMEN!!!
Well done, Miss Rebecca, and thanks!
Blessings,
David Smith
Author
Thanks for commenting, Dave. Sometimes when I’m this “mean,” as this kind of polemics has been called before by one of my Southern compatriots, I’m sometimes skeptical that readers will miss the point. But I should know better: my readers are brilliant and to heck with naysayers who don’t get that we’re in a cultural, physical, and spiritual war.
I forwarded the link to several friends, and extended with some of my own venting, quoting the esteemed Dr. Clyde Wilson:
“Yankees are the only people who think you should be grateful when they invade your country.”
Hard to top that, eh?
I want to ask many of our fellow Southerners, “If you’re not angry, what does it take to get you there? Heck, do you even have a pulse?!!?”
Dearest Rebecca once again you have made a thought provoking article to which I hope that this “woke” culture will crumble to.
Prayers for you my daughter!
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I’m so pleased that you, my favorite Hillbilly Granny, are pleased with the essay! Prayers for you and your native mountain folk up there in Appalachia. And remember, just stay as far away from Asheville as possible. Then again, I think it was you who taught me that. 😉
A very hard-hitting commentary ! Yet,all the content is factual and relevant. The “woke” and their allies are obsessed with attaining even more of – White culture , White Civilization , White Creativity , White Achievement . What would they ever want with automobiles , telephones , TV , computers , printed materials in the English language [ or,come to think of it,any European language ] , etc. ? What in this World would a multi-millionaire basketball player ever want with a Bentley car – a British brand-name,founded in the country that transported more African slaves than all other slaver-states combined ? Some “taggers” might conclude that it’s time for – Operation White – Out .
[ A modest monetary gesture of support will be on its way to you today. ] .
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Joseph,
I appreciate your insights and, of course, am thrilled with your generous donation. Being that I was up till past sunrise trying to get this essay in the bag (because I wanted it to correspond with NC’s Secession anniversary), your thoughtful comments and patronage are especially appreciated.
Stay tough, brother. We need all the weirdos we can get! ✊
It’s long past time we seceded again. These lunatics can’t be allowed to tear down everything our forefathers built.
Author
Agree 100%, good sir or ma’am. It’s time for a divorce!
However, it’s going to be much messier than even before since rural folk are going to want to separate from city folk. Suburbians from urban. Working, family-raising folk from college towns. We could turn Greensboro, Asheville, Chapel Hill, and Charlotte, for example, into little Lesothos, while the rest of us surrounding those leftist enclaves get on with living free.
But then again, we country folk may just want to retake those cities that, like you said, “our forefathers built.” Plus, the cultural Marxists will eventually want to leave their utopias for reasons of business or whatever. Would we let them pass? Would we buy, sell, and trade with them if it was mutually beneficial? Etc.
Any way you look it, it’s going to be wild, but the good thing is, nobody is happy under the “one nation, indivisible” ideology, but the progressives just gotta learn to live without our blood, sweat, and tears, and we rebs gotta learn to live without crony-capitalist wares, or we have to build our own competitive systems and parallel institutions. That’s what we need to start doing NOW!
Here’s a secession essay I wrote last year. Check it out and let me know what you think. 🙂
http://www.dissidentmama.net/were-all-secessionists-now/
Author
P.S. Here’s a short essay by Al Benson which talks about some of the “out of the box” thinking when it comes to secession, such as parts of Oregon wanting to secede from Oregon and join with Idaho. Fascinating! https://revisedhistory.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/how-about-secession-from-oregon-to-idaho/
I have read the article already and liked it quite a bit. Restoring free markets and purging crony capitalism is going to be an exceedingly difficult task.
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Thanks! Difficult, but necessary. Stay tough, Anony Mous. Deo vindice!!
Good stuff! Keep the skeer on, DM!
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Pauly G,
Any time you think I’ve struck the “skeered” chord, it makes this mama smile. Thanks, bruthah!
Maybe next time we’re hangin’ out, we can get Vance tattoos … or at least do a toast to ol’ Zeb.
Seriously, I’m to the point where I want to get a Battle Flag emblazoned on my forehead and just take the lumps as they come, but the rational spouse in my marriage (hint: it’s not me!) says “Aw, hell no.” A belle can always dream … 😉
Excellent piece. I mourn for this city. It was once an interesting little Southern city with a rich cultural and artistic history. I mentioned the ‘Last of the Mohicans’ and it is certainly true that movie opened the gates, but I could have just as easily mentioned the great migration of the new age crystal people, or the gay and lesbian gentrification squads that flooded into the city, or the impact of the microbrew beer industry….in reality, it is the 14th Amendment. States really no longer are allowed to grant citizenship. People can go anywhere, squat and they are given “residency” under which they have equal political status of folks who have lived in an area for generations.
Author
Ah, my muse, William! 😉 So glad you commented. I never thought about the 14th Amendment in that way, but you are so right. And squatters is such the perfect word to use, too. I’m going to check out this vid by Dr. Don Livingston to learn even more about how this amendment in particular codified centralization and smashed the sovereignty of the states. https://youtu.be/M1UxApKaTRY
Gentrification is also the perfect word, for it is the natives whose culture is cleansed so that the squatters can feel more at “home.” I could never imagine moving to a place and pushing to have the local customs done away with or their history eradicated. It’s mind-boggling that these people are deemed as the “love and peace” crowd while we’re the “haters.” But so it goes in the Yankee Empire and, of course, it’s all by design.
I have kept my promise not to visit A-ville, but I did go to Fletcher to visit the ROCOR parish for Pascha and stayed in Saluda. The conservative parish is filled with cool Southerners and non-Southerners who seem to love and respect their adoptive home. Saluda, on the other hand, was brimming with Biden/Harris yard signs and bumper stickers and all sorts of lefty virtue signals, but the vibe was friendly enough (maybe because they assumed I was a liberal). The house we rented, though, was very evidently owned by a communist who was possibly even some type of radical activist. Very strange.
Next time I’m in that neck of the woods, we should hang out! Stay tough in wackadoodle land, bruthah.
William and DM it’s truly sad that all our large Southorn cities have fallen to the communist. Now they are taking over our smaller cities until they have it all. Here in north Alabama it’s following the same path, since this Chinese communist virus has landed we have been over run by yankees running from what they voted for, and now will start the process here that they are running from. Enough already with all this foreign crap moving here, I’d like to say trying to change things, but they start right off changing our land to what they are running from. I for one am not backing up NO MORE for these communist bastards.
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Wayne,
That’s fascinating. Are you saying that anti-lockdown/pro-mask people moved to your neck of the woods from outside of the South, but have now joined the covid cult? Or are you saying they’re just Yankee in every other way (meddlesome, big-govt, puritanical in their progressivism) but happen to be pro-reopen?
I ask because I see those who don’t follow along with the wu-flu hysteria as typically people who share a worldview (wanna go to church unencumbered, live and let live, vaccines are a personal choice, traditional family values and the like). As Dr. Don Livingston would say, “That’s what you’d call a Northerner, darlin’. That’s not a Yankee.”
Either way, I wish you luck and God speed in repelling further colonization of your homeland, and what a beautiful part of the glorious state of ‘Bama it is.
P.S. My last name is Dillingham, so I think it’s pretty cool I’ve now “met” a Willingham. Do stay in touch. 🙂
An excellent article, and one that makes me want to cry. I had often thought of retiring to that area. I love the Southern highlands, and have always relished the beauty and security of the mountains. The cool weather in the summer is such a relief from the urban South on the Piedmont. I have loved my visits, although I had to overlook all the bad aspects of Asheville you mention here. After a while, I just stayed out of the city altogether. I just wanted to find a quiet retreat up in the region and embrace the life of the mountain folk, and Zeb Vance was a big part of the reason why.
I had not realized they were taking down the Zeb obelisk. I sort of “discovered” Zeb Vance in the last few years, and he is indeed a very appealing character. A smart man who seems like he would have been good front porch and bourbon company. I thought living among people who had made Vance a hero and had elected him to office time and again would be a good fit. Such an appealing man who loved the highlands and drew his strength from there. And now I find Zeb has been dispossessed of his own land, evicted the the evil usurpers of the woke. May as well find a senior highrise in Atlanta now.
But I appreciate your heart and spirit, Rebecca. Thanks for writing this. It’s good at least to know the truth. Such a paradise we might have had up there.
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Kenny,
I so appreciate the way you describe Vance as “A smart man who seems like he would have been good front porch and bourbon company.” Indeed! That’s one of the many reasons I love the South, her people, and her heritage. Although they share in much (customs, traditions, etc), they aren’t carbon copies of each other either. They’re free thinkers and deep thinkers at that. Never a dull moment hangin’ out with an authentic Dixian.
Yes, what’s happening in A-ville is sad. BUT … we can built back better, as the lefties like to say, each in his own way. Small, close-to-home changes and projects that bring us closer to Christ and foster relationships and loyalty with like-minded folk. Sure, we’re a minority of a minority of a minority, but that just makes it easier to spot a compatriot, in my opinion. Please don’t give up because our cause – the cause of sanity and true peace – requires the heart and spirit of ALL good people, each in his own unique way. It won’t be easy, but important work never is.
Thanks so much for your kind words. And please, tell Atlanta it can sit and spin. It doesn’t deserve salt-of-the-earth folks like you.
Romans vs the Celts, Christians vs Druids, English vs the Scotch Irish, English vs Colonialist , Jeffersonians vs Federalist, South vs the North, Southerners vs Northerners, Confederacy vs Federalist, Blue vs Grey, Republicans vs Democrats, Conservatives vs Liberals, Red vs Blue, Christians vs athiest, we have always been separate and distinct groups of people. We do not belong together, we waste valuable time trying to convince each other that our side is better. American Democrats say we must all be tolerant of every individuals sincerely held beliefs, chosen lifestyle and history = that is unless you are a Southerner in that case all you are and all you hold dear will be destroyed, crushed, burned with the very ground to be desecrated and salted. No tolerance for Southerners and their incredible history will be allowed. We will soon disintegrate into waring factions, a true Civil War is in our future all because Southerners were denied the right of self governance and Liberty promised in our founding document = The Declaration of Independence. Those who do not learn the lessons of their past are destined to relive it. Sic Semper Tyranis
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Glenn, you said it so well: “we waste valuable time trying to convince each other that our side is better.” But that is one huge silver lining of the insanity that was 2020 and is still continuing into 2021 – that some people are simply unreachable and it is now so abundantly obvious who are “our people” that we can now get down to business … to be spending our precious time allying with those like-minded folks, supporting their efforts, building alternative systems and parallel institutions, and being loyal to each other and those who are putting themselves out there to fight the fight to be left the hell alone.
Indeed, forced integration has been death knell of Murica and it all began when “Southerners were denied the right of self-governance.” And if some smart “conservatives” or libertarians or American Firsters don’t get that, well, they are part of the problem.
Having lived in Asheville for over 20 years its only in the past 2 that anyone has cared about our wartime governor. Or anything else to do with that period. Asheville was and still is an extremely white place. It has its small, relatively stable minority population that keeps to their parts of town. However, the Yankee, “I’m from California”, “We just moved here from Austin” crown can’t virtue signal hard enough. They have to out do one another for most woke and sadly, a classical monument needle had to pay the price.
If you ever had a desire to visit the once fair city, you should have done so 10 years ago or 20 years from now. Its rapidly on its way to collapse due to the mentioned inept leadership. Homeless camps grow like mushrooms in any available spot. The panhandlers have made downtown un-walkable. Needles litter the streets. All of this is watched over by women reeking of stale box wine and cat litter wringing their hands about systemic racism.
Weird was fun. Third World Hellhole isn’t.
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Thank you for your insights. You tease out the problem oh so perfectly, especially the “women reeking of stale box wine and cat litter wringing their hands about systemic racism.” Feminism was, is, and forever shall be a cancer. Indeed, the collapse of so much of our “society,” which is strung together with gaslit bubble gum and progressive popsicle sticks (ie egalitarian globohomo), I agree is imminent. It’s gonna suck, but it is necessary, and way better than living in this fake and gay joke of a “culture” that thrives upon elevating the worst and destroying the best … or as you describe it, a Third-world hellhole.
I lived there for a few years. At the community college in the 90s the English classes were demanding ‘he/she’ be used for pronouns, in that form…kinda weird. I don’t agree with the motives for removing the monument. and I guess it wouldn’t be so bad if it was moved to make the downtown more modern looking or for better traffic flow or something. I don’t know how many monuments (not necessarily confederate ones) get moved for other municipal-themed reasons. I generally enjoyed living there then. it was reasonable and I liked some of the neighborhoods. I saw some decent Shakespeare at UNCA. But a prostitute was operating out of my apartment building, and a guy behind on his drug money was assaulted with a hammer down the hall. And this was in Kennilworth.