I once read a travel writer describe Ireland as “mystical and modern, beautiful yet bleak, proud and vulnerable, peaceful yet divided, rich in talent but poor in resources, foreign and friendly.” I think Richmond, Virginia, is such a paradox.
I’m a native Richmonder and have a love-hate relationship with my home of 24 years. Richmond molded me, yet I didn’t even go to my 30th high school reunion in the fall because I find its current state so damned depressing. Brimming with progressive zealots, apathetic Boomers, invaders both foreign and domestic, and quislings as far as the eye can see, it’s a case study in the effects of 100+ years of “New South” reconstruction. As Leslie Alexander succinctly describes my emotion, I feel like a “stranger in a strange land.”
Take Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam, who’s not only a gun-grabbing turncoat, but also a self-loathing Southerner seeking to replace the Robert E. Lee statue in the US Capitol with a Virginian who “would better represent our Commonwealth.” As one option, he suggested Booker T. Washington, who actually is worthy of a monument since the famous orator wasn’t a revenge-filled ingrate. Washington actually sought true peace and reconciliation, just like Robert E. Lee, and unlike Northam and his regime of ancestral ruination.
“Confederate statue critics increasingly argue that the monuments should be torn down because they honor traitors,” explains Philip Leigh. Okay, seems about on par with cultural-Marxist histrionics. But what is mind-blowing is that “Among such advocates is Christy Coleman, CEO of Richmond’s American Civil War Museum.” This is the level of racial-retribution insanity that seems to permeate the Old Dominion capital, from its hipster brew pubs to its cobblestone streets.
Richmond’s Virginia Museum of Fine Arts now displays the social-justice sculpture “Rumors of War” – a comical and “intersectional” version of the exquisite J.E.B. Stuart statue, which was erected on the city’s famous Monument Avenue back in 1907. Talk about cultural appropriation.
In line with the ceaseless penance for and self-flagellation of white folks, Richmond City Council renamed The Boulevard (the historic street that has long been home to a stunning Stonewall Jackson statue at its crossroad with Monument Avenue) Arthur Ashe Boulevard. Richmonders seem to revere the black tennis star as much as they do Saint MLK. But at least Ashe wasn’t a heretic and a commie, like King, so there’s always that.
I could go on. And on. And on.
This is one of the reasons my husband and I went back and forth all weekend as to whether we should attend VCDL Lobby Day. Our plans literally changed from minute to minute. We both wanted to go. Then neither of us. Then one of us. Then not. Then the other. Then neither one again.
We thought, “Why should we stick our necks out for Richmond, whose people have let the city and state go to hell? We don’t even live in Virginia.”
Ultimately, my husband did decide to attend the event without me, but with my sister, who is a lifelong Richmonder and a VCDL member. He wanted me to stay back in NC with our sons, just in case something bad happened at the event. No sense in upping the chances of losing two parents to leftist violence.
We kept coming back to the idea that the rally represented a much-needed and long-overdue testing point. Turns out it’s not gay marriage. Or endless wars. Or hate-speech laws and censorship. Or corporate capitalism. Or environmental religiosity. Or high taxes. Or assaults on parental rights a la vaccines or homeschooling.
It’s not illegal and legal immigration. Or abortion. Or LGBT coercion or Drag Queen Story Hour or the normalization of pedophilia. It’s not even satanism. The line in the sand is guns.
We thought that maybe, just maybe the normies who’ve been sleepwalking through the last two years, or two decades, or two centuries will arouse from their liberal slumber. Will the Pledge-reciting, thin-blue-line-cheerleading, military-worshiping, rule-following, Medicare-loving masses wake up?
Will they come to understand that they are as much the archetype as is David Duke? I mean, just being a straight white man is considered violence in 2020. If he tries to assert his rights, it’s intimidation. If he acts masculine, it’s toxic. If he builds coalitions, it’s white nationalism. If he breaks the chains of his master, it’s hate. How dare he challenge the “progress” of dismantling his own culture, his own belief system, and everything he holds dear. Bigot. Now throw some guns and Christianity on top of that, and well, you have the makings of a domestic terrorist.
Will they see that being painfully silent or incessantly disavowing “white supremacists” does no good. It doesn’t matter if you think those people are scoundrels, “racist rioters” who deserve to rot in jail. Or that you are an anti-racist who’s defending everyone’s constitutional rights, a patriot who may even have mixed-race grandchildren and know a gay person or two. No one cares. To the globalists and the malevolent mobs who do their bidding, you’re the same as Richard Spencer.
Will they grasp that in 2020, not practicing identity politics is a suicide pact? Tribalism is applauded for “diverse” peoples, so why not you? Notice that the very same people who are at risk of losing the most – Southern-without-apology folks, traditionalists, conservative Christians, nuclear families, straight white men, law-abiding gun owners, etc. – are typically the only ones who adhere to the “live and let live” mantra. It’s a deep-seated altruism that flows through us normal Americans, but it will also be the death of us if we don’t get real real fast.
Will people see that this is bigger than “muh Constitution” or “USA” chants? After all, my family doesn’t even live in Virginia, but neither does the progressive California professor who federal courts allowed to redraw the Commonwealth’s electoral maps, ensuring permanent Dem domination. Why should elite-appointed “experts” get to have all the fun, and we plebs have to follow all the old rules that leftists smashed to bits in 1865? (Or if that’s too much truth for you to handle, let’s just say 1965 then.)
Take the Sanctuary County movement spreading across Virginia. Philosophically, it’s nullification. “Whensoever the General government assumes undelegated powers … a nullification of the act is the rightful remedy,” wrote Jefferson.
However, 2A-sanctuary is not technically in line with Jeffersonian republicanism. Legally, counties are a creation of the state, and therefore cannot nullify bad law. Constitutionally, states have the right to pass any kind of gun control they want if done through the legislative process. The 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution only applies to the federal government. “Congress shall make no law.” Brion McClanahan explains it well.
But in my opinion, this isn’t about the law; it’s about realpolitik. US 2A or VA Article I, Section 13, it doesn’t matter to me. You’re not getting my guns! Resisting the imperial status quo is the conservative approach.
Plus, when was the last time progressives upheld their oaths of office? When was the last time Congress voted for a war? When was the last time oligarchs had to live by the same laws as the rest of us? When was the last time “the people” told the courts to stick it where the sun don’t shine when the judicial branch legislates? When was the last time the states said, “Hey, feds. All your alphabet-soup agencies are illegal, so we’re not going to play the law game with a bunch of lying law-breakers. No more money for you, Leviathan!”
Don’t like a state law? Nullify the legislation. Don’t like a good guy being railroaded in the courts? Practice jury nullification. Don’t like a federal regulation, act, or executive order? Don’t capitulate. Nullify! Don’t like the corporate media trying to pass fake news as fact? Nullify the leftist narrative! Don’t like the globohomo smut on TV? Nullify Netflix!
We conservatives so often play under the elastic rules of the faulty incorporation doctrine. It’s a like a loose-fitting but still-too-snug noose. When progressives want federal edicts, they rally around the 14th and 15th Amendments with the US Supreme Court always giving aid and comfort. When they want to start the cultural-Marxist ball rolling closer to home, they all of a sudden become ardent states-rights advocates.
As imperial nation-statist Chief Justice John Marshall wrote, “The great object of an incorporation is to bestow the character and properties of individuality on a collective and changing body of men.” Translation: progress as defined by the kritarchy. I say, it’s well past high time to cut the rope.
This is precisely what VCDL did. They went “on the offensive” against the draconian anti-gun bills that affected not only their right of self-defense, but also extended the web of oppression to free speech and corporate censorship. That’s how you attack tyranny of law: never be on the defensive. Never apologize. Never play by the left’s rules. Know your enemy.
This 2A sanctuary movement is growing, even in my neck of the woods, so let’s not get complacent. Don’t listen to the normies who fall back asleep because the rally seemed to be an overwhelmingly peaceful event. Ignore the libertarians who wouldn’t know solidarity if it smacked them upside their objectivist heads. Laugh at social-justice bullies when they call you nasty names. Get teflon about it and empathize when you hear someone maligned as a “white supremacist,” now that you’ve been castigated as one. (Perhaps there aren’t as many “Nazis” running around as the narrative would have you think.) Build networks. Ally with like-minded people. And stay focused. This could be the beginning of something big, y’all.
I agree with Pat Buchanan: Virginia is the front lines of the culture war. It represents secession from leftist degeneracy and destruction, secession from progressive reform and reconstruction, secession from nihilism and identity-less-ness. Richmond was just one battle, but it did put a tiny chink in the globalists’ armor.
Southerners and their conservative compatriots need to continue being a lot more tribalistic and a lot less hospitable to hostile ideas that threaten their hearth and home, the way Italian-Americans do, advises Paul Gottfried. Don’t be afraid. Keep tapping into your rebel roots, like you did today.
Richmond. The place where Patrick Henry gave his revolutionary “Liberty or Death” speech. The site where Henry and other anti-federalists like George Mason railed against the culture-crushing, liberty-usurping potential of the US Constitution, with Mason demanding a Bill of Rights at this Virginia Ratifying Convention which took place a stone’s throw from the Capitol. The city where Thomas Ritchie and Spencer Roane disseminated those same Jeffersonian principles through the Richmond Junto. And the final resting place of Southern heroes, from Jefferson Davis and John Tyler, to James Monroe and George Pickett, to J.E.B. Stuart and my kin A.P. Hill.
Today, VCDL members, Virginians like my sister, and their courageous allies like my husband raised the black flag. Stonewall would be proud. Keep it flying high.
As paleocon stalwart Russell Kirk once opined, Dixie has become “homogeneous with all the rest of the nation,” thus, “its peculiar role as conservator of norm and convention [has been] terminated.” If the South’s “permanence … will have ceased to exist: it will have lost its genius.” After today’s fine stand, maybe Richmond hasn’t lost its genius after all. The paradox still persists, but permanence clings to life. Lord willing, it will grow healthy and strong. Thus always to tyrants.
Comments
Brilliant. Great read. Love your stuff. I’ve been researching and advocating secession for at least the last 10 years. Wrote about it in my “A Patriot;s Call to Action: Resisting Progressive Tyranny & Restoring Constitutional Order”. (I know. A cheap plug on my part.) That said, the foundational damage to the republic and the chasmic cultural/ideological divisions are now so irremediable as to justify nothing less than secession. If we can’t enjoy constitutional order throughout this voluntary union of States–and, objectively, we no longer can–than division, most likely peaceful, is THE screamingly obvious remedy. Sure beats civil war, which would actually be our first by the way. The war which occurred 1861, the beginning of our misnamed “civil war’, was, objectively, a War for Southern Independence. In my humble view, the only way secession or civil war can be prevented is if States, which have become mirror images of DC, miraculously exercise the nullification option. But, alas, our thoroughly vassalized States no longer have the stomach for or sufficient principle to cross Leviathan, the source of their endless bribes and handouts. Keep those posts coming!!!!!
Wow, thanks so much, Jim. I’ve never heard of your book, but I’ll have to pick one up and give it a read some time. By all means, plug the book > “A Patriot’s Call to Action: Resisting Progressive Tyranny & Restoring Constitutional Order” by Jim Delaney, available on Amazon!
I too am a secessionist, but I honestly don’t think most “patriots” have the stomach for that. They like the Union, they like the Pledge, they like the empire. As Dr. Don Livingston says, they are comfortable with Lincolnian Nationalism, but what they don’t realize (or at least won’t admit to themselves), that that lesser liberty is not even the reality anymore. As bad as LN was, those were freer times than what we have today: nihilistic, post-Christian, anarchic globalism. So yes, I am in 100% agreement with you, that secession is the remedy to the progressive poison, but I do think that nullification and localist resistance to bad law (weather state or local) is a start on the right path. Once their beloved Murica turns on them full bore, once the gloves are off, once they realize they’re living a velvet prison of their own creation, then, and maybe then, they’ll be ready to take a REAL stand.
I appreciate you reading and commenting, good sir, and look forward to hearing again from you soon. Onward and show them the bayonet!!
I’m in total agreement with your pragmatism, DM! The founding principles, while still valid, are of little to no real force in today’s America. Further, those mechanisms in the Constitution that put those principles into practice have been so corrupted and damaged over the years, as to be virtually unrecognizable by the Founders.
As an Army officer on a time, I took an oath to “. . . support and defend the Constitution . . .” But which Constitution are we talking about? The one that actually assumed the sovereignty of the people of the states, and true federalism? Or do we mean the one that makes a joke out of the Bill of Rights, recognizing the “right” to murder the unborn?
That Constitution be damned . . . literally!
So let’s move forward, but, please, not on the basis of today’s Constitution!
As always, you nailed it, DD! We must not play by the old rules while our enemies have busted the game wide open. We must be realistic and smart, and not rely upon sentimental notions that truly no longer exist. What the hell is it going to take to wake up patriots and traditionalists and other altruistic but naive people to the fact that the paradigm has changed, and it is our duty to move that damn Overton Window?! Or maybe just smash it altogether. Keep speaking truth, my friend. Sic semper tyrannis!!
Even the Constitution many of us point back to as the road to good governance was in it’s day a coup d’etat over the Articles of Confederation and a ‘progressive’ victory for the Federalists (actually nationalists) over the Anti-federalists (genuine federalists) which above all things awarded the power to tax to the national government. Don’t get me wrong, it is certainly on the way back to good governance, but it is important to keep in mind that even back then these sort of ‘designing’ or ‘planning’ people (Hamilton, Madison, and Jay) were winning the political battles.
Agreed! I wish they’d heeded Patrick Henry and the other Anti-Federalists!
And don’t forget a philanderer and a plagiarist. But he does fit right in with the rest of the shabby pantheon of liberal gods (Lincoln, Gandhi, Mandela, Lennon (not Lenin, but the Beatle), Che, etc.).
All great advice!
I love what’s happening in Virginia in response to Northam’s gun grabbing agenda. This Texan is taking careful notes. Great write up.
I’m writing a couple Richmond follow-ups and will definitely be diving a bit more into the MLK worship. That’s always a good way to get on the SPLC hate list, so why not? 😉
Thanks for reading and commenting, TL, and be sure to keep your powder dry down their in the Lone Star State!
“As paleocon stalwart Russell Kirk once opined, Dixie has become “homogeneous with all the rest of the nation,” thus, “its peculiar role as conservator of norm and convention [has been] terminated.” If the South’s “permanence … will have ceased to exist: it will have lost its genius.” After today’s fine stand, maybe Richmond hasn’t lost its genius after all. ”
I wouldn’t consider Russell Kirk, though I generally like him, an authority on the condition of the South. He couldn’t even bring himself to criticize Lincoln in his “Conservative Mind”. Though to be fair, he did not extol him either. I regard Kirk as existing in a confused middle ground between Southern conservatism (M.E. Bradford) and Neoconservatism (William Buckley), a sort of Yankee conservatism which doesn’t perceive Yankeehood itself as the biggest enemy of conservatism.
Also, as a small note I think Kirk meant ‘genius’ not in the way of brilliance, but rather in the way of “a peculiar, distinctive, or identifying character or spirit“. It’s an older usage of the term. By what you wrote, I could not tell if you perceived that or not, but I thought I would mention it, because it was something that tripped me up when I began running into this particular usage when reading older authors like Kirk.
This Kirk citation comes from an entire issue of Modern Age (published in ’58, so quite a few years after the Conservative Mind) dedicated to the South and its import in American history, society, and traditional perpetuation. In his article entitled “Norms, Conventions, & the South,” the subhead is “the South as the citadel of tradition and prescription.” It’s a stirring defense of the South, with him saying, “My argument is this. Without an apprehension of norms, there is no living in society or out of it. Without sound conventions, the civil social order dissolves. Without the South to act as its Permanence, the American Republic would be perilously out of joint. And the South need feel no shame for its defense of beliefs that were not concocted yesterday.” It’s a stunning read that you may not agree with 100% for reasons you cited, but it’s a pretty darn good defense of Dixie, which puts me in the camp of thinking Kirk did mean “genius” in the way of not just brilliant, but also very, very necessary. Moreover, Kirk certainly evolved over time, and wrote prolifically, so one can find many changing perspectives over his years of work. He may have lauded Alexander Hamilton and even dirty ol’ Lincoln in 1954, but he was a product of the Lincolnian nationalism that Dr. Don Livingston explains so well; it was a blip in American history in which people could laud both Lincoln and Lee and somehow square them as both “conservative.” Sure, it seems strange to us now in hindsight, but that was the lens through which many people, even extremely smart people, viewed history. Considering that Kirk came to disavow the neocons by the end of life (seeing how inconsistent, unprincipled, and deceitful they were) and Lincolnian nationalism paved the way for cultural Marxism, I think if Kirk were alive today he might just be waving a Battle Flag, or at least not caring if I do.
https://youtu.be/oC5vlcjWzpk
Thanks for the link! I have not read that one before. I’ll see if I can tackle it this weekend.
I think I went through a few week period (about a year or two ago), where I just consumed every video lecture by Don Livingston I could find on YouTube. The man is simply brilliant and courageous. He’s the pillar of my Southern conservatism. I’ve seen the video you posted. It’s fantastic.
Kirk has some good things to say about Southern Conservatism as well in his iconic book. He speaks very highly of John Randolph of Roanoke and John C. Calhoun. He saw Thomas Jefferson, however, as primarily a liberal radical, with some conservative leanings (which I think is a bit uncharitable). Hamilton is actually used by Kirk to distinguish between the true and prophetic conservatism of Burke and John Adams and the urban, mercantilistic, centralizing conservatism of Hamilton and his ilk. Hamilton actually suffers some abuse by Kirk’s hand, which I think is well deserved. I only wish Lincoln had been subjected to the same critique.
By and large I do really like Kirk. He’s right up there with Nisbet and Weaver in my opinion. Perhaps I was a bit uncharitable to call his position a middle ground between Buckley and Bradford. He’s much closer to the latter than the former. I concede defeat!
Ha ha, thanks for keeping me on my toes, TL! 🙂
Problem is people shouting “We will not comply” and then complying to disarm at checkpoints. Govt wins.
Good point, but there’s some nuance, IMO. I’ll be discussing this in the blog post I’m currently working on. Hope to hear your thoughts on the flip side. 🙂