Today, the airport. Tomorrow, the Rotunda.

Now, commission a statue of Ali to stand in the Capitol in Frankfort in place of the Traitor in Defense of Tyranny now despoiling the Rotunda.

From the Courier:

Muhammad Ali once said his "greatness came and started in Louisville."

Now his name will be among the first things visitors and travelers see when they fly into his beloved hometown. 

City officials announced Wednesday that Louisville International Airport will be renamed after the boxer and humanitarian often called "the Greatest."

The new name: Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport.

"Muhammad Ali belonged to the world, but he only had one hometown, and fortunately, that is our great city of Louisville," Mayor Greg Fischer said.

"Muhammad became one of the most well-known people to ever walk the Earth and has left a legacy of humanitarianism and athleticism that has inspired billions of people.

"It is important that we, as a city, further champion The Champ's legacy," Fischer continued. "And the airport renaming is a wonderful next step."

Your Tax Dollars Protecting Treason in Defense of Slavery

Defacing monuments to Treason in Defense of Slavery is patriotism. Protecting those monuments is defense of treason.

 

Think Progress:

President Donald Trump’s Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has “quietly” spent millions of dollars on private security for Confederate cemeteries since the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017.

The effort is “aimed at preventing the kind of damage that befell Confederate memorials across the U.S. in the aftermath of the Charlottesville violence,” according to a new report from the Associated Press, which reveals the VA has already spent almost $3 million on round-the-clock private security for at least eight Confederate cemeteries.

Records obtained by The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act show that the VA has spent nearly $3 million on the cemetery security since August 2017. Another $1.6 million is budgeted for fiscal 2019 to pay for security at all Confederate monuments, which could include other sites. The agency has not determined when the security will cease.

There have been no incidents of vandalism in the privately-guarded cemeteries since paint was added to a Confederate monument in Springfield, Missouri right before Trump visited the city in September 2017. A spokeswoman for the VA defended the spending in a statement.

Private security was needed “to ensure the safety of staff, property and visitors paying respect to those interred,” Jessica Schiefer, spokeswoman for the VA’s National Cemetery Administration, said in a statement. The agency “has a responsibility to protect the federal property it administers and will continue to monitor and assess the need for enhanced security going forward.”

Heather Heyer was killed in August 2017 when James Fields Jr., a white nationalist, drove his car into a crowd of protesters. Fields Jr. has pleaded not guilty to federal hate crimes.

Despite near-universal condemnation of the white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville to oppose the city’s plan to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, Trump instead said “many sides” were to blame for the violence in an infamous press conference. The president’s remarks were praised by white supremacists.

Numerous Confederate monuments have been torn down or vandalized since the violence in Charlottesville.

Trump has defended Confederate monuments and recently praised Lee at a rally in Ohio.

The New Confederacy

If even after the blatantly anti-constitutional decisions of the Gorsuch Supreme Court this June you still think elections don't matter, think again.

Scott LeMeiux at LGM:

This is a flatly neoconfederate Court, refusing to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments to stop racial discrimination but willing to use them to stop integration. 

 
One of the many things that’s at stake in presidential elections is whether the Constitution’s mist critical provisions will be meaningfully enforced. If you’re wondering when I’ll stop passionately arguing against people who see elections as fora for atomistic consumer expression, the answer is “never.”

And Brett Kavanagh is going to make it exponentially worse, and for generations to come.

VOTE on Nov. 6. Vote early, vote often.  Take your family, take your friends, take your neighbors, take your dogs.  Issue non-violent threats to every Democrat you know who is not planning to vote (i.e., no more sex for you, no more homegrown tomatoes, no more using the pool, no more sharing high-speed wifi - you get the idea.)

Mitch Landrieu, You Are Full of Shit.

And you owe me 25.00 for the copy of your book that I bought based on your interview with Trevor Noah on the Daily Show, in which you strongly indicated that the book was all about the fight to take down Confederate statues in New Orleans.

It is not.  It is all about why Trump voters who may, deep down, feel a little guilty about being motherfucking racists, should vote for Mitch Landrieu for president in 2020.

The very first page and the last chapter are about the statues, and even those are more about you and the statues, and you and the modern confederacy, and you and your internal struggle with your white privilege.

Chapter after chapter about you and your house in a mixed neighborhood, you and all your many black friends down the block and in school, you and the insults you took from racist whites for having black friends.

And the biggest section about Katrina - well, not so much about the actual flooding and massive damage to lives and property, but about how you personally brought the city back to life.  That is, if you can call a corporatized, disaster capitalismed, privatized sinkhole of for-profit destruction a "city." Or "life."

And jesusfuckingchocolatecoveredchristonapogostick, one story that should keep you from getting within 100 miles of the Democratic nomination for dog catcher, much less president: the time in a pickup basketball game with two black guys when one of them knocked you down and glared at you, saying "blond-haired, blue-eyed devil!"

You called it a revelation, and for a moment I thought you were going to realize how deeply embedded in the lives of black people is the understanding that white people are and always have been the enemy.

But no. Your "revelation", I swear to dog, was: "Black people are racist, too."

If the 2020 primary comes down to you and Andrew Cuomo, we'll know that Trumpism has triumphed.

Kill yourself now, Mitch, before every real Democratic voter in the country has to explain why we're not going to try to explain you, much less apologize for you.

And one more thing. Your book, which I have not named for obvious reasons, has Not. One. Fucking. Word. about Black Lives Matter, which fought the statue battle long before you came along (except for mentioning those three words on the back of a church sign, jesus.)

What Your Tax Dollars Support at Charter Schools

The garbage pits are not legal in Kentucky ... yet.  But Gov. I Got Mine Fuck You is slavering greedily for them even more than he slavers for forcing teachers to work for minimum wage and zero benefits.  Which is exactly what charter schools do.

From A Nice Lady at Wonkette:

Earlier this week, the parents of an 8th grade student attending a San Antonio, TX charter school took to Facebook to share the latest item to be filed under prevalent, dumbass institutionalized racism. A worksheet, assigned by an unidentified male history teacher currently placed on leave by Great Hearts Academy Monte Vista Charter School, that included the morally unsound activity of listing both the “Pros” and the “Cons” of slavery.

Yes of course the other parents wrote passionate defenses of "teaching the controversy."  Racist teaching is exactly why they put their kids in a charter school in the first place. Let's hope the tragically misled parents of the well-raised child who knew better than the teacher soon find a real school for their kid.

One that makes crystal clear that the white people fighting to keep black people slaves were nothing but Traitors in Defense of Slavery.
 

Just Dynamite the Thing

It's an incitement of right-wing violence.

Get that thing out of the capitol and out of the damn state.  Replace it with one of Muhammad Ali, who accomplished more and was more of a hero than Davis ever did or was.

From the Herald:

A white nationalist group claimed credit for hanging a "patriot, hero, statesman" sign to replace a plaque removed from the statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis in the Kentucky Capitol Rotunda.

People associated with Identity Evropa placed the placard on the statue Monday, the group said on Twitter Tuesday night. But the timing of the act was disputed by state officials.

State officials said they quickly removed the placard and are reviewing security measures.

A picture shared by the organization shows that its sign matched the original plaque's inscription of "Patriot - Hero - Statesman." The original plaque was removed March 11. The group's sign also said, "Our history will not be erased."

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article209764479.html#storylink=cpy

The original plaque was taken down after the Historic Properties Advisory Commission, which oversees state-owned statues, voted unanimously in October to have it taken down.

The group claiming credit has been monitored.

"Identity Evropa is at the forefront of the racist 'alt-right's' effort to recruit white, college-aged men and transform them into the fashionable new face of white nationalism," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. "Rather than denigrating people of color, the campus-based organization focuses on raising white racial consciousness, building community based on shared racial identity and intellectualizing white supremacist ideology."

Moving Statues Isn't Enough

Kentucky can take the next step by replacing jeff davis in the capitol with Muhammad Ali.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

The only way to fight against all of this is to make interpretations of the Civil War a central part of the left agenda. It’s not enough to say that we will move the Lee and Davis statues to cemeteries. They need to be eradicated entirely. We need monuments to John Brown, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass erected where they once stood. The bland statues of a typical Civil War soldier you see in towns through the South (and the North) should be replaced by monuments to slaves. We need to make sure that every textbook used by your children has a proper interpretation of the Civil War and when it doesn’t, to raise hell about it with the teachers and the school board. When conservative white male teachers tell your students that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, they need to face repercussions for that. Again, this is a battle that will never end and it’s part of the larger battle against racism and for genuine freedom and justice in this nation. This isn’t some sideshow of a bunch of historians. It is critical to the future we all share.

OK, But Not Nearly Good Enough

Unless they replace the plaque with one identifying Davis as a Traitor in Defense of Slavery, an Embarrassment to the Commonwealth and a Permanent Symbol of Racism, Slavery and Treason, the next step must be removing the motherfucker and installing Mohammad Ali in that place.

From the Herald:

A plaque proclaiming Jefferson Davis as a hero and a patriot will be removed from Kentucky's Capitol, the latest effort to alter Confederate monuments across the country following outbreaks of racially motivated violence.

The Historic Properties Advisory Commission voted to remove the plaque, which is attached to a 15-foot-tall (5-meter-tall) marble statue of Davis in the rotunda of the state Capitol. The plaque declares Davis is a "patriot, hero, statesman" and lists his accomplishments in both the United States and Confederate governments. Last month, a committee recommended the state remove the plaque because of its "subjective" language.

"There are people who don't think he was heroic. And so we just decided to remove it to eliminate that subjective word," commission chairman Steve Collins said.

Leslie Nigels, director of the Division of Historic Properties, said the plaque would be removed in a few days.

 The decision angered both supporters of the statue and those who want it removed because it honors someone who led the fight to preserve slavery. The statue was erected in 1936 with the help of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and $5,000 in taxpayer money approved by the state Legislature. Tuesday, a past president of the Kentucky division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy vowed to file a lawsuit to keep the plaque in place.

First: There's a fucking Kentucky division of the shameful females defending treason in defense of slavery? They're not just treasonous, they're stupid.  Kentucky never joined the confederacy.

Second: When you donate something, it belongs to the organization to which you donated it.  If you don't like what they do with your gift, tough shit.

Third:  Let's think of a way to not just remove Davis, but to destroy that statue in a publicly humiliating way that will put the traitors in defense of slavery in their place forever.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article180619981.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article180619981.html#storylink=cpyThe decision angered both supporters of the statue and those who want it removed because it honors someone who led the fight to preserve slavery. The statue was erected in 1936 with the help of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and $5,000 in taxpayer money approved by the state Legislature. Tuesday, a past president of the Kentucky division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy vowed to file a lawsuit to keep the plaque in place.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article180619981.html#storylink=cpyThe decision angered both supporters of the statue and those who want it removed because it honors someone who led the fight to preserve slavery. The statue was erected in 1936 with the help of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and $5,000 in taxpayer money approved by the state Legislature. Tuesday, a past president of the Kentucky division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy vowed to file a lawsuit to keep the plaque in place.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article180619981.html#storylink=cpy

Traitor Statues Removed in Lexington

No, the confederacy is not dead, treason in defense of slavery has not yet been defeated and Jim Crow still lives, but this is a victory.

Let us celebrate, then get to work removing Jefferson Fucking Davis from the People's House in Frankfort.

John Hunt Morgan: DOWN

John Breckinridge:  DOWN

Stop Talking Respectfully About Traitors

Steve M. writes that confederates are winning the public opinion war.

Racists want the monuments to stay up, of course, but for others, the "tearing down history" argument seems to settle the question, and opponents can't seem to refute it effectively. We can say that we don't put up monuments to the 9/11 hijackers, or to Hitler and Hirohito's soldiers, or even to British troops in the Revolutionary War, and no one says that we're "denying history." But that argument doesn't resonate.

SNIP

The backlash is strong. It's not going away. And Americans in the middle simply don't understand the reasons for opposition. 

But at the Smithsonian, Christopher Wilson writes that we're letting the traitors win by talking about them with respect:

Those artifacts are not the only way we legitimize and honor the deadly and racist 19th-century rebellion against the United States. Much of the language used in reference to the Civil War glorifies the rebel cause.

The language we turn to in describing the war, from speaking of compromise and plantations, to characterizing the struggle as the North versus the South, or referring to Robert E. Lee as a General, can lend legitimacy to the violent, hateful and treasonous southern rebellion that tore the nation apart from 1861 to 1865; and from which we still have not recovered. Why do we often describe the struggle as between two equal entities? Why have we shown acceptance of the military rank given by an illegitimate rebellion and unrecognized political entity? In recent years, historians in academia and in the public sphere have been considering these issues.

SNIP

Landis goes on to suggest that we call plantations what they really were—slave labor camps; and drop the use of the term, “the Union.” A common usage in the 19th century to be sure, but now one we only use “the Union” in reference to the Civil War and on the day of the State of the Union address. A better way to speak of the nation during the war, he argues, is to use its name, the United States.

In the same way, we could change the way we refer to secessionist states. When we talk of the Union versus the Confederacy, or especially when we present the strife as the North versus the South, we set up a parallel dichotomy in which the United States is cast as equal to the Confederate States of America. But was the Confederacy really a nation and should we refer to it as such?

When historian Steven Hahn participated in the 2015 History Film Forum at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, he noted that using these customary terms to tell the story of the Civil War —Hahn suggests we use “War of the Rebellion”—lends legitimacy to the Confederacy.

 

“If you think about it,” Hahn said, “nobody in the world recognized the Confederacy. The question is can you be a state if no one says you are a state?”

SNIP

In his writings, Lincoln referred to the group he was fighting as the “so-called Confederacy” and Jefferson Davis never as president, only as the “insurgent leader.”

 

And if the so-called Confederacy wasn’t a country, but rather what political scientists would call a proto-state, because not a single foreign government in the entire world recognized it as a nation-state, then could Jefferson Davis legitimately be a president? Could Robert E. Lee be a General?

The highest rank Lee achieved in the United States Army was colonel, so given his role as general in service to a failed revolution by a group of rebels, how should we now refer to him?

It would be just as accurate to refer to Lee, who led an armed group against national sovereignty, as an insurgent or a warlord, if not a terrorist. Imagine how different it would be for a school-age child to learn about the War of the Rebellion if we altered the language we use.

When news reports about the debate over monuments say “Today the City Council met to consider whether to remove a statue commemorating General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army,” what if they instead were written in this way: “Today the City Council debated removing a statue of slaveholder and former American army colonel Robert E. Lee, who took up arms in the rebellion against the United States by the so-called Confederacy?”

Douglass knew, day-by-day, after the shooting stopped, a history war was playing out. It is clearly not over yet. Words, though they do not stand as marble and bronze memorials in parks and in front of buildings or fly on flagpoles, are perhaps even more powerful and pernicious. The monuments we've built with language may, in fact, be even more difficult to tear down.

They are Traitors in Defense of Slavery (thank you, Erik Loomis), and so are their apologists and defenders today. 

Call them out and name them accurately: Traitors in Defense of Slavery.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

Read this piece on Wednesday's rally to demand Gov. "I Don't Know What History Means" Bevin remove the statue of Traitor in Defense of Slavery Jefferson Davis from the Capitol Rotunda.

If you had been there, you might have noticed something unusual about the Rotunda statues, meant to honor the great men of the Commonwealth.

Here is bigger-than-life Abraham Lincoln, in the exact center of the Rotunda.

His left boot toe is shiny because 7 million schoolkids a year visit the Rotunda and just have to rub it.

Yes, of course I did.

There's a sign asking people not to do that. It doesn't work.








Here is Senator Henry Clay:

Here is Senator and Vice-President Alben Barkley:

Here is Dr. Ephraim McDowell, who performed the first successful abdominal surgery in 1809.

 

All of them are cast in bronze, all of them dark brown from time and lack of rubbing.

Then there's this one, in the fourth corner. 

That blinding white motherfucker went up in 1936, 71 years after the Traitor in Defense of Slavery - who might have been born in Kentucky but who grew up and lived the rest of his life in Mississippi - surrendered.

He doesn't belong in the People's House, for more than aesthetic reasons.

But you don't want to hang from a rope until he's gone.






Who do I want in his place?  This guy:

Confederacy Protection Commission Forces Lexington to Jump Through Hoops

The Kentucky Military Heritage Commission met in secret and in secret apparently decided that they will definitely deny Mayor Jim Gray's request to move the Civil War Participation Trophies out of downtown Lexington. 

But first they're going to make Kentucky's first openly-gay mayor jump through a few hoops.

Because they are motherfuckers.

Beth Musgrave at the Herald:

Lexington Mayor Jim Gray has asked the Lexington Cemetery’s board to “help heal the soul of our city” by taking two controversial Confederate statues that have stood in downtown Lexington for more than 100 years. 

In an Aug. 24 letter, Gray asked the board if he could speak at its Sept. 11 meeting to discuss the cemetery as a possible new home for the statues of John C. Breckinridge, a former U.S. Vice President and the last Confederate Secretary of War, and John Hunt Morgan, a Confederate general. 

The 170-acre cemetery off West Main Street “is the one location that generates support from those with opposing views on this issue,” Gray wrote.

The Herald-Leader obtained the letter through an Open Records Act request.

SNIP

 “The Lexington Cemetery is a prestigious site, with beautifully landscaped grounds, that respectfully honors the Civil War soldiers who are buried there,” Gray wrote. “Notably, Fayette County’s two other Military Heritage Commission-designated Civil War monuments are located in the Lexington Cemetery.” 

SNIP

City officials have been told that the military commission won’t grant the city’s request to move the statues unless it can find a suitable home for them. The commission’s next regularly scheduled meeting is in November. 

Two companies, Prometheus Bronze Foundry and Duncan Machinery Movers, have said they will move the monuments at no cost to the city. The Blue Grass Foundation also has set up a fund to raise money for any additional costs associated with moving the statues.

Will this compromise satisfy the confederate-cock-sucking Nazis and the Confederacy Protection Commission?  Of course not.  Motherfuckers, remember?

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/counties/fayette-county/article170209382.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/counties/fayette-county/article170209382.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/counties/fayette-county/article170209382.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/counties/fayette-county/article170209382.html#storylink=cpy

Bevin Lies About Treason Statues; Gets Schooled by Girl

If you lived your life by one maxim, you could do worse than: Do I want Robyn Pennacchia of Wonkette to rip me a new one on this?

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin said he “absolutely” disagrees with removing Confederate symbols and monuments from government property, calling it the “sanitization of history.”

 

The actual sanitization, of course, is the statues themselves.  They were erected to erase the real history of Treason in Defense of Slavery, turn Slavery Promoters into heroes and reverse Emancipation with Jim Crow.

Bevin - and the Nazi-living apologists who pretend the Civil War Participation Tropies are historic landmarks - has it exactly backwards, as Wonkette explains.

There is a very big difference between the way people see Auschwitz and the way many White Southerners, at least, see Confederate Generals posed triumphantly on horses. Auschwitz serves as a reminder of those who suffered, while the Confederate statues glorify those who fought for continued suffering. You will notice that there are no triumphant looking statues of Hitler in Germany.

There is, however, a far more accurate analogy to be made here. Imagine if, in Germany, 50 years after WWII, groups of Holocaust deniers did put up statues of Adolph Hitler looking triumphant? And then got mad that people wanted to tear them down, because how dare they not remember history?

Well, that is exactly what happened in the United States after the Civil War. The Lost Cause of the Confederacy is revisionist history just like Holocaust Denial is. It is also about as accurate.
 
Germany, as you may know, bans people from promoting Holocaust Denialism. After the Civil War, America did the exact opposite. It allowed the Lost Cause bullshit to proliferate, believing that it would help the nation to heal. Lost Causers were allowed to pretend that not only was the war about more than just slavery (it was not), that t was noble in some way, but also that slavery wasn’t really all that bad anyway. This was taught in schools and even promoted in Hollywood, with movies like Gone With The Wind and The Birth of A Nation. My mother grew up living in Florida for half the year because of her father’s job, and she was taught in school that it was not the Civil War, but The War of Northern Aggression. That the real villains in this story were the carpetbaggers. If slavery was ever mentioned, she says she does not remember it.

To this day, many textbooks in the South teach that slavery was but a “side issue” to the Civil War, rather than the reason it was fought in the first place.
A fake history was created to make the South feel better about losing, to help us heal as a nation. That was a bad idea. It did not help, it hurt. Rather than dealing, as a nation, with the devastating horror of slavery and the evil that produced it, we allowed the South to whitewash the whole thing and still think of themselves and their generals as heroes. Who want to believe they were good, because they don’t want to confront a “heritage” that was wrong. We did the wrong thing.

Because now we have people who have been taught, and who truly believe in, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, freaking out because they can’t understand why anyone thinks they shouldn’t celebrate their glorious heritage. All of this should have been dealt with over 100 years ago, and it wasn’t, because America would rather ignore pain than deal with it. The Germans dealt with their atrocities responsibly, and we simply refused to. Because it was easier this way, because it preserved everyone’s idea that America is and was always basically good. Because if we lost that, then who would ever fight our wars for us?

These statues are not about remembering history, they are about misremembering history. And this war is being fought between those who want to remember history correctly, and those who want to protect their made-up history, because actually confronting the real history feels bad.

Auschwitz is ugly. It’s harrowing. It makes you sick to look at it. It makes you say “NEVER AGAIN.” Keeping it up is necessary for that reason. It is not there to provide comfort to Nazis. These statues, however, are meant to provide comfort to those who wish to celebrate the South and fondly misremember what it stood for. And they don’t deserve that.

Civil War Participation Trophies

Leave it to Dok Zoom at Wonkette to come up with an honest description.

Northam has called for the removal of Civil War Participation Trophies, since they honor actual traitors to the USA, and were mostly erected to reinforce the post-Reconstruction myth of the “Lost Cause” — historically, they have more to do with reinforcing white supremacy than anything else.

Sacred to the Memory

The fate of Lexington's Traitors In Defense of Slavery statues is now in the hands of the military "heritage" commission set up to prevent exactly the progressive removals the City Council is requesting.

Meanwhile, Political Animal reminds us of this:

* W.E.B. DuBois once wrote that Confederate monuments should contain this inscription: “Sacred to the memory of those who fought to perpetuate human slavery.” He also penned his thoughts about Robert E. Lee. You’re going to want to read all four paragraphs, but he ends with this lighting bolt:

It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral. That their leadership will be weak compliance with public opinion and never costly and unswerving revolt for justice and right. it is ridiculous to seek to excuse Robert Lee as the most formidable agency this nation ever raised to make 4 million human beings goods instead of men. Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel–not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God.

Who's Really Lazy? Or, Projection Is An Amazing Drug

It's always amazing and sickening to me to hear rich fucks condemn poor people - especially poor black people - for being "lazy."  Amazing and sickening because the rich fucks saying that have never worked a day in their lives.

No, sitting in front of a camera denouncing the people whose poverty supports your lazy rich ass is not work.  Sitting in front of a computer watching your money make more money is not work. Sitting at a desk ordering underlings to evict renters so you can sell their apartments as condos to other rich fucks is not work.

Work is cleaning the toilets in the buildings where the rich fucks pretend to work.  Work is serving food you can't afford to rich fucks who don't tip because that would be encouraging your "laziness."  Work is juggling three minimum-wage jobs to keep food on the table.

As Melissa Harris-Perry once exclaimed in a memorable television moment, being poor is hard work.  It always has been.  Keeping it that way is yet another legacy of the confederacy that needs to be swept away.

In a fascinating article on radical Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay, the Smithsonian captured this quote:

Enslaved men, Lay noted, would “Plow, sow, thresh, winnow, split Rails, cut Wood, clear Land, make Ditches and Fences, fodder Cattle, run and fetch up the Horses.” He saw enslaved women busy with “all the Drudgery in Dairy and Kitchen, within doors and without.” These grinding labors he contrasted with the idleness of the slave owners—the growling, empty bellies of the enslaved and the “lazy Ungodly bellies” of their masters. Worse, he explained with rising anger, slave keepers would perpetuate this inequality by leaving these workers as property to “proud, Dainty, Lazy, Scornful, Tyrannical and often beggarly Children for them to Domineer.”

Honoring With Beauty and Dignity

 Classless, trashy Trump is the oerfect leader for these morons.

Actual Nathan Bedford Forrest statue in Tennessee.

Who Mitch Really Is

This is what he says:

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell condemned white supremacists and racial hatred Wednesday, saying, “Their message of hate and bigotry are not welcome in Kentucky and should not be welcome anywhere in America.” 

This is who he is: He's a lying Traitor in Defense of Slavery, and always has been.

From LGM:

But this is the biggest lie of all.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/counties/fayette-county/article167487572.html#storylink=cpyHe's a Traitor in Defense of Slavery, and always has been.

From LGM:

They're Coming to Lexington

Kentucky's second-largest city is only slightly less un-welcoming to white supremacists than Louisville is. Our police are eager to avoid the national embarrassment that the Charlottesville cops earned. And our proudly non-violent Resistance can handle a bunch of redneck clowns without any help from armed and masked antifas, thank you very much.

So bring it on, motherfuckers.

From the Herald:

White nationalists are planning a rally in Lexington to oppose the planned removal of two Confederate statues from the lawn of the former Fayette County Courthouse, and they’re considering a lawsuit aimed at blocking the move, a leader in the movement said Tuesday.

Matthew Heimbach, chairman of the Traditionalist Worker Party, said his group is discussing plans for the rally with others allied under an umbrella organization called the Nationalist Front.

Heimbach said people in the Lexington area asked his group to get involved. The group has members in Kentucky and plans to try to recruit more, he said. 

No date has been chosen, but the goal is to have the event “sooner rather than later,” Heimbach said.

SNIP

Lexington Police Chief Mark Barnard said he has spoken with officials in Charlottesville to begin preparing for a white nationalist rally in Lexington. He said Kentucky State Police and Louisville Metro police have already pledged to help the city if needed.

“If they were to come to Lexington, we would plan to have an overwhelming amount of law enforcement to greet anyone and to ensure everyone was safe and had the right to free speech,” Barnard said.

The police department has successfully managed many large, public events — including sometimes rowdy celebrations after NCAA men’s basketball tournaments, said Brenna Angel, a spokeswoman for Lexington police. 

“That’s not just a credit to our police officers but to the people of Lexington,” she said. “We work closely with groups that organize protests here and have a good relationship with them.” 

Outside groups, though, are a concern, she said.

In Lexington, it is legal for groups to gather in public spaces without a permit as long as they do not block traffic. If traffic is blocked, a permit is required, she said.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has included Heimbach’s group and others allied under the Nationalist Front on a list of what it defines as hate groups.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/counties/fayette-county/article167276197.html#storylink=cpy

They're going to have to get their Traitors in Defense of Slavery gear and tchotchkes online; that shit is banned from the Kentucky State Fair.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/counties/fayette-county/article167276197.html#storylink=cpy

They're Not Historical. They're Avatars of Jim Crow.

Like most people from border states, I have ancestors who fought on both sides in the Civil War. The battles, the families torn apart, the dead: all are part of my family history.  Heritage, if you will.

But those confederate statues of Breckinridge and Morgan in Lexington, and Lee and Stonewall and Beauregard and the rest are not historical representations.  They were not raised in the aftermath of the war.

They were raised 40 years later, after Plessy v. Ferguson authorized Jim Crow.  They were raised not to honor those Traitors in Defense of Slavery.  They were raised to remind African-Americans that they were still not full citizens.  That they still had no right to the guarantees in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the constitution.  That they remain subjugated.

They are symbols of oppression, meant to intimidate and terrorize African-Americans. 

And to remind the rest of us that the slave power still rules.