Will be presenting at the South Dallas Cultural Center about the white supremacy inherent in Fair Park

April 28th, 2-4 pm, Sat. at the South Dallas Cultural Center I will be giving two presentations on Fair Pair and I will be on one of the panels.

We expect to have a good crowd attend. What is happening is that more and more people are realizing that Ed Sebesta does fairly good research and he is likely to have the story on some item of the Dallas landscape and Ed Sebesta will have documentation that it is about white supremacy.

Also, I expect that with this presentation, and the others planned after it, a lot of people will know about my research into the neo-Confederates.

I am also developing methods which I think will serve as a model to other cities to get rid of their Confederate built landscapes.

Click on it to see the whole thing.

Kay Bailey Hutchison Confederate Convention Center

The City of Dallas thinks that since the Confederate War Memorial is in a section of the park that people generally don't visit that maybe they can just let it stay.

However, monuments live in the imagination. The physical monument is just there to place in your thoughts the monument in your imagination. You don't need to be there every day, the impact of a monument isn't proportional to the percentage of time you are in its proximity. In fact monument that require some pilgrimage or trek can be only seen once but have the greatest impact on the imagination since they require a special visit.

The Confederate War Memorial has some special elements which I think will give it a place in the imagination of the nation and the residents of Dallas, and not in a good way. It turns out that being downtown the monument can be photographed against a backdrop of skyscrapers.

The Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center is one of those designs of a large amount of glass windows and the Confederate War Memorial reflects very well both during the day and at night off those windows in the most interesting ways. I put some of the pictures on the following web page.

http://templeofdemocracy.com/dallas-convention-reflections.html

I am mailing all copies of all the pictures on the above webpage, except one, to Mayor Rawlings and the City Council. They have all the same little comments that I show associated with the images in the above web page.

As a method of getting your city to rid itself of a Confederate statue I don't think my method of photographing the reflected images off the convention center has much general applicability. This combination of architectural style and close proximity was rather fortuitous.

However, photographing images of the Confederate monument against local landmarks I think could be applied to varying extent in a lot of situations.

The other lesson is to really look at your local Confederate monument and its location. We had been at this monument multiple times, and no one noticed the reflected images until the last anti-monument mini-rally and then only myself. One pointed out people picked up on the symbolic meaning fairly quickly.

So ask yourself do you really see your Confederate monument? Have you looked early in the morning, noon, late afternoon, night. What does it look like in rain or fog? Is it always illuminated at night or never? Does it have ultraviolet fluorescence? Have you tried photographing it with polarized filters?

There must be a lot of ways to get the Confederate monument seen for the thing it is, and get others to really "see" it.

Secession and Gun Control, or "That was fast!"

In this earlier Feb. 2018  blog posting I concluded that I thought the ignition point to get secession movements going was likely to be the passage of gun control legislation.

https://newtknight.blogspot.com/2018/02/status-of-texas-secession-secessionists.html#.Wsigt4jBqiO

The comment about gun control was at the very end.  It is part of a lengthy assessment of the status of the Texas secessionists. To give a very brief assessment, the Texas secessionists aren't going to gain any traction as long as Trump is in office and the Republicans control the government.

I blogged about a news article about secession and gun control March 27, 2018.

https://newtknight.blogspot.com/2018/03/liberal-left-is-noticing-secession-and.html#.WsihuIjBqiM

A left/liberal website Think Progress reported on some fringe elements advocating secession to prevent gun control. This is the link to their article.

https://thinkprogress.org/why-do-these-patriots-hate-america-ec1a093a8df6/

So I saw a developing idea among fringe elements. Maybe some time some where this would have consequences. I was really surprised that the issue of gun control and secession would find its way into state legislatures this fast with the introduction of a bill into the South Carolina legislature calling for secession if there is federal gun control legislation.

http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/382003-south-carolina-house-republicans-introduce-bill-to-consider-secession

http://www.thestate.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/the-buzz/article208132169.html

It became an Associated Press story.

Reminds me of the statement by South Carolinian James L. Petigru that South Carolina in 1860 was too small to be a republic but too large to be an insane asylum.

From the AP article we learn the following:

A trio of state House Republicans on Thursday quietly introduced a bill that would allow lawmakers to debate seceding from the U.S. "if the federal government confiscates legally purchased firearms in this State."

 The chief sponsor is Rep. Mike Pitts who contradictorily also says:

Pitts, a longtime law officer and Army veteran, said his bill isn't a call for secession but merely a proposal to make the action possible if events warrant.

"I'm not promoting secession. I served this country, and I don't want to see it broken up."

I think this shows that Pitts thinks that secession is a little out there as an idea or perhaps he doesn't have coherent thinking.

However, this puts the idea in the news for both South Carolina and in North Carolina where the story was covered in the Charlotte Observer.  https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/south-carolina/article208132169.html  The story is identical to the article in The State.

It has gotten national coverage in the media and with the Internet the secession proposal in South Carolina can be accessed by a national audience.

Perhaps this is the next ultra position to show that you are really a strong supporter on gun control. Or maybe it isn't. It could be that the Republican leadership is ready to severely criticize the three Republican legislators. Or it could be that some other Republican legislators will join the effort to make sure they don't lose the next Republican primary. Or it could be both. I think I have covered all the possibilities there.

However, the fact that this is proposed at all is cause for concern. We don't hear calls for the resignation of these three Republicans by the Republican leadership.

It is another incremental step forward in the normalization of secession. A little here and a little there secession continues to be normalized.

The attitude of the media has been bemusement. The history of secession is that it seems comical or outlandish until it isn't.

Any political movement, anything new, starts first with imagining it. At this point we have secession being imagined. We don't have the imagining of the consequences, just some idealized fantasy of secession. I don't see any anti-secession movement getting people imagining the consequences. There is just bemusement.

There needs to be conceptualized some anti-secession strategies with some group having some ongoing focus on preventing secession. That way when a body of ideas is needed they will be developed and there will be something better than some slogan like, "Better Together." (Used in opposition to Scottish secession.)

The fundamental problem in getting people to take secession seriously is that people think that nations are composed of some solid material, maybe concrete, and indestructible. The reality is that nations are imagined and are composed of dreams. Once the dream is gone, the nations may have all the apparatuses of state power, but as imposing as they may seem, a nation dependent on them alone, and not the support of the general population is in a desperate situation.

The collapse of the Soviet Union should have taught the public that. It hasn't. The secessionists however, were quick learners regarding this. The neo-Confederate Kennedy twins discussed the Soviet Union in their second edition of "The South Was Right!" Other secessionists noticed.

Also, I fear that if secession starts getting some traction the opposition to it will be blunt and unthinking and act to enable secession. Opposition to secession needs to be grounded in the field of cultural geography and that field's understanding of nationalism. The reliance on force will be a losing strategy.

However, at this point secession has moved forward just an increment. Perhaps I can't really believe that this is going anywhere. Even to myself it seems outlandish. However, I think that it might turn out to be very real and a great danger.

Take 'Em Down NOLA Item # 5 - The end of the Confederacy in the built environment and place names

The importance of the Take 'Em Down NOLA national conference is that we are networked now. A loose network to be sure, but a network. There is the sense that there is a national movement being born.

The conference has been inspiration for other groups to form and work in their areas. Information is being exchanged. I gave out 80 copies of my book "Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction," to the attendees. To one individual from each city I gave a copy of the "Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader," and "Pernicious." I think they will be surprised how rabid the neo-Confederate movement is.

I also shared with the people for whom I got contact cards online resources including my website http://www.confederatepastpresent.org/ and my curriculum vitae with its sources. http://templeofdemocracy.com/curriculum-vitae.html

If some neo-Confederate group is defending Confederate statues some place I can have information to the local group fighting Confederate statues as soon as they contact me. Though now the network is aware of this article.

http://www.blackcommentator.com/526/526_confederacy_sebesta_guest_share.html

Being informed is always an asset and people will be bring the information I have shared to others.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans will no longer be able to pass themselves off as sentimentalists and neither will the United Daughters of the Confederacy be able to pass themselves as persons with historical nostalgia. The neo-Confederate agenda will be known.

I can get information documenting the neo-Confederate movements hostility to all sorts of groups in hours.

The other groups bring their own talents and resources into the effort with their experiences to organize and mobilize.

We haven't gotten involved about half of the groups across the nation which are involved so there is potential for expansion and as mentioned new groups will be forming.

Another national convention is planned to be in Jacksonville. Annual conventions will keep the sense of there being a national movement and continue the exchange of information. I think Jacksonville will be closer to groups in Virginia and the Carolina's and we will get more participation from that part of the nation. Also, being in Florida I think there will be people wanting to have a combined vacation/conference visit. The ocean will be close by.

Up until recently campaigns against Confederate statues have been done by temporary ad hoc groups or groups that are only temporarily focused on this. Also, one interesting feature of the attendees at the NOLA conference is that they understood how the built environment created a framework of values that shape society.

Whereas there had been groups in defense of Confederate statues that continued from year to year for generations, there hadn't been counter organizations against the Confederacy that were more than temporary efforts. That is now changed. Elected officials will have to understand that there will be groups holding them accountable if they support or aid neo-Confederates. There might be a protest group showing up at their next event.

The was the comparison of local efforts and learning that some of the obstacles and behaviors they observed were the same in their different cities and an exchange of tactics and counter-arguments that people had learned.

The Confederate built environment is losing popularity over time and I think it just needs some focused groups to keep pushing and in 20 years Confederate monuments will be few and the indicators of some really backward town.

The Confederacy is going down.

Police Harassment after ministers event.

About half the group had dispensed all ready and some people still hadn't left and were talking and the group was gradually leaving as people wrapped up their conversations.

However, the police showed up and told us we had to leave. This is a public park and people just told the police that they were going to be staying.

What was interesting is that the police did this with media people still there with TV cameras. The police backed off when they realize they were being filmed, not just by me, but by the media.

The video is unedited. People come up to talk to me not realizing that I am taking video of a developing situation.

WARNING: Some bad language.

https://youtu.be/vYQX5kuPVIY


Click on the image to see the whole video.

Confederate Monument a Bad REFLECTION on Dallas, Texas

This is the Confederate War Memorial reflection on the windows of the Dallas Convention Center in Dallas, Texas. Took it 3/29/2018.  What organization wants their event reflecting the Confederacy.

https://youtu.be/Klxrs0H_fVk

Click on video to see the whole thing.




https://youtu.be/NTOHsij2Dhc

Click on video to see whole thing.

Texas Secession at the 2016 Texas State Republican Party Convention

The debate over secession at the 2016 Texas State Republican Party Convention video has been released.

You can watch and listen at this link.

https://texasnationalist.com/news/video-released-of-republican-debate-on-texas-independence

The proposal was defeated by the platform committee 16 to 14.  Fairly close I think for a party that claims to be patriotic.

The relevance is that the Texas Nationalist Movement is planning to get some measure passed at the 2018 Texas State Republican Party convention.

https://texasnationalist.com/news/tnm-rpt-past-and-future-part-1


What is in this movements favor is there is no longer the presidential campaign of Ted Cruz to ferociously oppose it.

Against it is that Donald Trump did get elected president and to advocate secession would undermine him, and the potential base for secession is largely the same people who support Donald Trump.

The Republican Party state convention is June 14, 2018.

As I have explained before, the secession movement would only start up if its potential base lost hope in Trump or the Republican party's current ascendancy in national politics, or the federal government passing gun control legislation. None of these things is going to happen between now and the June 14, 2018 Republican Party state convention.

If, and I emphasize if, there is some "blue wave," in the 2018 Nov. elections, then the Texas secessionist movement will start gaining traction.

These page and video links are posted so people know what is surfacing in the Texas Republican Party.

This is the link for the Republican Party state convention.

https://www.texasgop.org/2018-convention/

Take 'Em Down NOLA. Rationalizations of statue defenders Item #4

After I left the Mitch Landrieu book signing I ran into a person outside the museum who as critical of Take 'Em Down NOLA (TEDN). Being an older white guy often people will make assumptions about my opinions.

This person's argument against TEDN was that the members of TEDN were "transplants."

I pointed out that in our legal system there weren't hereditary castes nor privileged voters, and that everyone living there in New Orleans was a citizen with rights.

Of course the person didn't accept this, he said how would I like it if people came to my place to change my culture or some such thing.  A little Xenophobia is the basis of his argument.

If I moved someplace and something there was really stupid I would speak out. If it was something like cottage cheese pie in West, Texas. (That is West, Texas not West Texas, on the way to Waco.) I am not going to be that critical. Local favorite, awful, but let it go, I don't have to eat it.  But I think, and I have opinions, and I can choose to express them. I will be sensitive to feelings where possible, but I don't think locality enables stupidity.

What you learn is that people with banal white nationalist views don't want to recognize that they are white nationalists and come up with all sorts of inane arguments.

The tactic of discussing whether they are transplants or not is to avoid discussing the issues involved with Confederate monuments. The person discusses these other topics to avoid discussing the Confederacy or realizing his or her white nationalist views.

We need to confront these various rationalizations by the following

1. Point out that they are means to avoid discussing the issue.

2. Call it banal white nationalism.