Kevin Levin paper published

I wrote it in 2017 when Kevin Levin was attacking David A. Love so Love could have it as a refernece and I thought that it was time to write up all of Levin's actions into one paper.

All the CWMemory web pages referenced in this article are printed out as well as others that might be needed to defend the paper or for a future rewrite.

http://templeofdemocracy.com/kevin-levin.html

The next time he snipes at a journalist they will have this essay available for their perusal.

With enemies like this you don't need friends. "Citizens Matter" campaigning for the Confederacy and against police accountability

This is the website for Citizens Matter, a local group.

http://www.citizensmatter.us/index.php

This group is mobilized to defend the Confederacy and abolish the Police Review Board for the City of Dallas.

They have raging maniacs with paranoid fears of Muslims.

The Dallas Observer has a recent article about them.

https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/real-question-in-police-review-board-debate-is-race-11523932

I couldn't design a better group to be the supporters of the Confederacy to give neo-Confederacy a bad name.

Crazed groups like this is the natural evolution of neo-Confederacy as more and more people decide to give up the Confederacy the residual of supporters will be people such as Citizens Matter.

The head of Heritage Defense is Walter Donald Kennedy of the Kennedy twins. This is again a sign that neo-Confederate groups are shifting to ever more overt radicalism.

2020 Sons of Confederate Veterans Reunion is in St. Augustine, Florida.

The  2020 Sons of Confederate Veterans Reunion is in St. Augustine, Florida.

http://scv2020reunion.com/


We are going to be having a counter presence at each of their events. The momentum built by the counter efforts in Mobile, Alabama will lead to St. Augustine in 2020.

This is the Mobile(ize) Resistance Against Neo-Confederacy for Mobile, Alabama.

https://mobileanticonfederate.blogspot.com/

Mobile(ize) Resistance Against Neo-Confederacy has both a Facebook page and a Google blog

The effort to have a counter event in Mobile, Alabama at the 2019 reunion of the Sons of Confederate Veterans has been started.

This is the blog for the counter activity. Sign up for the email updates. We have it as a backup for the Facebook page.

https://mobileanticonfederate.blogspot.com/

This is the first posting with all the information.

https://mobileanticonfederate.blogspot.com/2019/01/

I am going to include a copy of this posting at the end of this posting to share all the information.

This is the Facebook group for the Mobile(ize) against Neo-Conffederacy event.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/295303354512827/

What you can do. Let as many people know about this event and have them like the Facebook Page and IMPORTANTLY sign up for the emails from this blog. You can see on the right side of this page where you can sign up.

More details will be forthcoming.

Additionally this web page will have postings of updates of this effort and other information.

The posting of Jan. 16, 2019 at the blog Mobile(ize) Resistance Against Neo-Confederacy. 

The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) are having their 2019 Reunion in Mobile, Alabama, July 10-13, 2019.

They have a web page for the reunion here:

https://www.scvsemmes.org/2019-scv-reunion.html

Very likely local government entities provided incentives to bring the Sons of Confederate Veterans to Mobile, Alabama. Local camps of the SCV do bidding to host the SCV national reunion. The hotel may have also given incentives to get the SCV to have the convention at their hotel.

In this case it is the Renaissance Riverview Hotel and the convention itself will be at the Mobile Convention Center located on Water Street at the Mobile River.

Our plan is to have peaceful protests, counter-events of an educational nature which will inform the public and people in Mobile, Alabama what the Sons of Confederate Veterans is really about.

This blog will be updated with information about our efforts and we will provide some information about Alabama and Mobile, Alabama neo-Confederacy.

Incidentally you can read about the SCV at Black Commentator.

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

This was written in 2013. There is a lot more stuff since then and updated information will be provided.

Additionally, we will be writing the local churches asking them not to host the SCV. Last time the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception let the cathedral for a Confederate event in 2007.

You can see photos of Confederate flags flying in the cathedral at these links.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140601142935/http://www.scvsemmes.org/uploads/3/1/7/8/3178401/229119_orig.jpg

and

https://web.archive.org/web/20140601142935/http://www.scvsemmes.org/uploads/3/1/7/8/3178401/6386330_orig.jpg

Whoever took these pictures pulled them off the internet and only these Archive.org pictures remain.

There will be a Facebook Page for the counter effort as well as a Facebook Event. However, make sure you book mark this page incase Facebook takes down our pages. They have so far pulled down one anti-Confederate event page and refused to give an explanation.

FACEBOOK PAGE: https://www.facebook.com/groups/295303354512827/

Who is Ed Sebesta? My curriculum vitae is here:

http://templeofdemocracy.com/curriculum-vitae.html

I am the co-editor of two university press books, author of peer-reviewed academic articles, last one at a journal published at Cambridge Univ. I have had several articles published at Black Commentator.

I was awarded the Spirit of Freedom medal by the African American Civil War Museum in Washington, D.C.

For useful information to combate neo-Confederate mythology I suggest my curriculum vitae for information and the following web page. It is the material that couldn't fit into the book, "The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader," which documents how it is about white supremacy.

http://confederateneoconfederatereader.com/

I am back. Ready to start activism. Both for Dallas and nationally. The Confederacy is going to start coming down.

Start coming down more than it has I suppose I should say.

I have been pouring a lot of time into researching the built landscape of the city of Dallas. Also, helping the people in Austin a little on their stuff. They took my material on the Children of the Confederacy to the right people and the plaque is down.

I have also done a lot of thinking about how the landscape is imagined. How the build landscape is named.

Yesterday was my last planned visit to an archive. It will be a few days to organize the materials I collected last week. And I expect as I start writing and producing I will find gaps and will be visiting a library or archive again.

But sometime next week activism starts and research as an activity will be a minor component of my time.

I am going to be writing up my Dallas research findings, then creating powerpoints, which will be story boards for the production of videos. I am excited to get into video production.

Being retired I have been able to spend 40 hours a week doing research, digging in archives. I have made amazing discoveries. Also, my research has been assisted by the digitization of resources. I am able to do searches and find things that previously I would have only found if I had been doing research over decades and was luck.

Who would expect that former Dallas Morning News columnist Lynn Landrum would reference Van Evrie as a legitimate source to understand African Americans in an article? I would have never looked for this, and even if I thought it might have existed, it would takes months of research to find it. With digitized data and searching I found it.

So I hope not only to reshape how the Dallas built environment is understood, but also show how modern technology can enable comprehending a build environment of a locality.

This blog will be more general anti-Confederate stuff. For Dallas follow my other blog.

https://dallaslandscape.blogspot.com/

Kevin Levin is afraid that the narrative will escape the League of Distinguished Civil War Historians UPDATE Kevin Levin paper published

Kevin Levin is back at it again.

Paul Duggan dis an indepth article, Nov. 28, 2018, in the Washington Post about Frank Earnest who heads up "heritage defense" for the Virginia Sons of Confederate Veterans.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2018/11/28/feature/the-confederacy-was-built-on-slavery-how-can-so-many-southern-whites-still-believe-otherwise/

It is a good indepth article about neo-Confederate view polnts and how neo-Confederate think.

Well Kevin Levin was not happy over this.

http://cwmemory.com/2018/12/07/relegating-frank-earnest-and-the-lost-cause-to-the-trash-bin-of-history/

Levin wants to shut down discussion of neo-Confederates.

We need to stop taking these people seriously. Their views have been discredited and whether they acknowledge it or not, their attachment to this particular memory of the war is wrapped in nostalgia and racial animus. But what troubles me the most is that the attention granted given to individuals like Earnest and the SCV obscures a much richer landscape of cultural identification with the past. In short, what other profiles could be written that tell us something about where we are in 2018 re: Civil War memory and where we might be headed?

In the end, Earnest is part of a rear guard action that is growing weaker and weaker owing to age. It’s time to move on.

The issue though is that Earnest and others like him have influence with legislators and there are states in which State law forbids the local governments. There is a neo-Confederate movement whose members write some of the books with the very popular conservative Politically Incorrect Guide series. There are neo-Confederates in positions of influence in the conservative movement in the United States. Thomas Wood's "Politically Incorrect Guide to American History" is a New York Times bestseller.

People like Earnest get high positions in the Federal government. This article in CNN is about one of them.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/07/politics/va-secretary-confederate-president/index.html

If more people knew about the existence of the neo-Confederate movement, people like Robert Wilkie would not get appointed to important government positions, in this case Wilkie was appointed the Secretary of Veterans Affairs by Donald Trump.

Levin uses some false opposites. Reporting on Earnest doesn't mean we can't report on other things regarding the Civil War and historical memory. I don't think the Washington Post has a quota of profiles either.

What Levin wants is the whole issue of neo-Confederates swept under the rug and the narrative of the Civil War and its remembrance to remain in the cloistered confines of the self-appointed League of Distinguished Civil War Historians like himself, to remain within the establishment.

The problem is that the influence of neo-Confederates in shaping the built landscape has been obcured. It is now coming to light.

Paul Duggan called Levin.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/a-civil-war-expert-objected-to-my-profile-of-a-neo-confederate-i-called-him-to-discuss-his-critique/2019/01/08/fb89917c-02d4-11e9-b5df-5d3874f1ac36_story.html?utm_term=.314df442ce88

This is Levin's reporting on this article.

http://cwmemory.com/2019/01/09/a-conversation-with-the-washington-post/

Kevin Levin's concerned to keep  discussion of Civil War memory confined to establishment Civil War historians works to enable the neo-Confederate movement.

I have decided to publish my paper on Kevin Levin. I will be doing a separate posting of the link and will update this blog post also with a link to it.

I have the paper I wrote about Kevin Levin online at the following link.

http://templeofdemocracy.com/kevin-levin.html

I took the time to printout and archive all of the pages relevant to this essay and others that might be needed to support this essay and file them.

Sons of Confederate Veterans going down the drain of madness. Make Dixie Great Again website.

Some time ago in a blog posting on former Sons of Confederate Veterans Commander-in-Chief Ron Wilson going to jail for running a ponzi scheme I made the following observation:

Along with some other things I have observed, which I am not going to go into here, I wonder if the SCV hasn't reached a certain stage in its history. 

This would be a stage in which normal people tend to avoid the SCV and the SCV instead more and more attracts persons who are extremists or mentally a little off or both. As the SCV becomes more explicit in its agenda SCV members who are Confederate enthusiasts but not wanting to secede or support the neo-Confederate agenda feel uncomfortable belonging, but this more explicit agenda tends to at the same time attract more extremist elements. This further shifts the SCV to a more extremist agenda and the process repeats. Perhaps this process is already underway in the SCV. 

Also, the SCV has a fair quantity of assets in terms of money and real estate. Some scammer might even now be planning to be Commander-in-Chief to get at the assets of the SCV.

Again this is a speculative thought. However, if you organized a flat earth society what type of members do you think you would attract?

https://newtknight.blogspot.com/2014/12/convicted-former-sons-of-confederate.html#.XDoB-Vw2qiM

I don't think that the idea that the SCV is going down the well of madness is that speculative anymore. The Sons of Confederate Veterans has appointed as the head of its Heritage defense Walter Donald Kennedy.

They have also started this website titled "Make Dixie Great Again."

https://www.makedixiegreatagain.com/

Nothing like mimicking Donald Trump to alienate young people. If I had to dream up a website name to help bring down the Confederacy I couldn't do better than this.

Before I discuss this further, I want to say that I couldn't be more delighted that Walter Donald Kennedy was selected to head up this effort. I couldn't ask for anything better to help bring down the Confederacy.

So who is Walter Donald Kennedy? These are the bios of the neo-Confederate Kennedy twins.

http://kennedytwins.com/bio.htm

These are their books. http://kennedytwins.com/books.htm

There is this book defending slavery and attacking the Southern Baptist Conference for apologizing for slavery.

This book sees some type of communist conspiracy during the Civil War. It is for sale by the SCV. https://scv-online-store.myshopify.com/products/books-myths-of-american-slavery-213

It has been republished with a new cover.  They offered it for sale on their website.

A lot of books seem to have disappeared from their website after I started reporting on the contents. It might be they are getting out of the book business and are selling out their inventory.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170402004358/https://scv-online-store.myshopify.com/products/books-lincolns-marxists-997

Walter Donald Kennedy has in the Confederate Veteran, official publication of the SCV, Nov./Dec. 2012, an article where Lincoln and Hitler are somehow connected. The title is "Lincoln's Band of Tyrants."

The Kennedy  twins have the perfect biographical background to bring down the Confederacy. Michael Hill, president of the League of the South, did a biographical article on them for Chronicles Magazine. They "Rolled with Ross." This doesn't mean much to modern readers, but this means they were part of a campaign in which the objective was to defect civil rights.

It might be asked by the Sons of Confederate Veterans would select such a person to be their front person in defending the Confederacy and monument to them.  You would think they would select someone without such a background who would mumble vague statements relying heavily on the words "heritage" "preservation" "political correctness" etc.

They actually believe that the public will accept their undrerstanding of history if they just have the opportunity to bring their message to the public.  They believe that the public will believe and support their understanding of history, but don't because of the media and others who have misled them. In short they are inside their delusions.

Popular culture continues to reject the Confederacy: Gary Clark Jr has video and musical piece which among other things attacks the Lost Cause

Texas Monthly has this articcle about musician Gary Clark Jr. and his piece, "This Land."

What strikes me is that Gary Clark Jr. may not be an academic cultural geographer but he sees things like a cultural geographer. He imagines the landscape.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/gary-clark-jr-this-land-music-video/

This is the link to the video.  https://youtu.be/9KgNaRQ_J-c

CLICK ON THE VIDEO TO SEE THE WHOLE THING.



What is also interesting is that popular culture is decisively moving against the Confederacy. Also, interesting is that Texas Monthly gave Gary Clark Jr. a big billing. People aren't worried about that one member of the editorial board who hasn't let go of the Confederacy and would be whining about this article.

This video will lead to some more Confederate monuments coming down and likely support a broader agenda of deracializing the landscape.

Texas Republicans along with Democrats take down Confederate plaque in Austin

A Children of the Confederacy plaque with its neo-Confederate propaganda has been taken down from the Capitol building in Austin, Texas. The following is a photo of the plaque that I took.

CLICK ON THE PHOTO TO SEE THE FULL THING.

These are some news stories about it being voted to be taken down.

https://www.texastribune.org/2019/01/11/texas-confederate-plaque-vote-greg-abbott-dan-patrick/

https://www.statesman.com/news/20190111/preservation-board-votes-to-remove-confederate-plaque-at-capitol

I had sent elected officials background information, but I don't know if they paid it any attention.

https://newtknight.blogspot.com/2017/10/letter-to-texas-rep-eric-johnson-about.html#.XDnugFw2qiM

I told them about the Children of the Confederacy essay published a few months later after the plaques installation in the United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine gleefully describing the massacre of African American soldiers in Reconstruction Florida.

What is important in this story is that both the Republicans and Democrats decided it had to go and among the leadership of both parties they decided it had to go.

It wasn't the story where an African American Democrat was wanting to get rid of the plaque but white Democrats representing whiter districts were making up excuses.

It wasn't the story in which the Democrats wanted to take down the plaque but the Republicans were defending it.

Both Democrats and Republicans wanted the plaque gone, and it didn't take a big campaign to convince them.  Granted that the plaque was in the Capitol building and the plaque had inanitites that were particularly offensive, but still it is a major change in the politics of deConfederating the landscape.

This sends out a message to all of Texas that glorification of the Confederacy is much less acceptable than it was. That doesn't mean that the battle is over,or that all glorification of the Confederacy is going to be rejected.

What it means is that if your town wants to keep its Confederate monument it will be seen as backward and out of touch and aberrant. Industries wanting to locate there will see your Confederate monument and think twice. People thinking of accepting a job offer there will have second thoughts.

As I have pointed out before one removal leads to another.