#politics #history #civilwar #equality #Racism #confederacy #alt #whitesupremecy
Heather Cox Richardson 4/9/2025
A Terrible Mistake According to Southern Land Owners
#politics #history #civilwar #equality #Racism #confederacy #alt #whitesupremecy
Heather Cox Richardson 4/9/2025
A Terrible Mistake According to Southern Land Owners
#civilwar #history #racism #whitesupremecy #republicans
Excellent read on how we got here since the civil war. A government for the people vs exclusion
Heather Cox Richardson 4/9/2025
“But their conviction that generosity would bring white southerners to accepting the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence backfired. Andrew Johnson of TN took over the presidency and worked hard to restore white supremacy without the old legal structure of enslavement, “
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/april-9-2025-wednesday?r=ymxmu&utm_medium=ios
It's important to understand that even in the regime's pettiest acts of rewriting history, we can find clear evidence of their authoritarian, Christian nationalist intentions. When they attack trans history, it's because they're trying to erase the existence of trans ppl; whether you believe that ends in denying medical care and driving trans folks out of public life or genocide is largely irrelevant (I believe one leads to the other, and history agrees with me) - the intention is clear. When they erase the achievements of women in our national record, they're trying to craft a future where a woman's role in society doesn't include things like scientific discovery, political activism, or breaking gender barriers in new fields of achievement. This ultimately is why no erasure, no reconstruction of our collective history along white nationalist principles, is too small, or too petty for these fascists to undertake. Every action has a reason - even if that reasoning seems far-fetched to you, a relatively normal person who is not a nazi that obsesses daily about how to force everyone else to adopt their worldview to justify and sustain a permanent Christian Nationalist dictatorship.
Given that, the administration's decision to erase or minimize the involvement of Harriet Tubman, deny the struggles of enslaved Black people to liberate themselves from a society organized to keep them in racialized bondage, and stress the idea that emancipation was the result of white ppl GRANTING liberation to Black ppl in America, has to be understood as something beyond cruelty or a desire to protect white feelings. This assault on Black history and in particular, the shameful history surrounding racialized chattel slavery in America, is clearly part of a larger project to restore and entrench a white nationalist order.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/06/us/national-parks-underground-railroad-harriet-tubman/index.html
"The National Parks Service webpage for the “Underground Railroad” used to lead with a quote from Tubman, the railroad’s most famous “conductor”, a comparison on the Wayback Machine between the webpage on January 21 and March 19 shows. Both the quote and an image of Tubman have since been removed, along with several references to “enslaved” people and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
The Washington Post first reported on the changes. The webpage now leads with commemorative stamps of various civil rights leaders with text including the phrase “Black/White Cooperation.” Whereas previously, the article started with a description of enslaved peoples’ efforts to free themselves and the organization of the Underground Railroad after the Fugitive Slave Act, the article now starts with two paragraphs that emphasize the “American ideals of liberty and freedom” and do not specifically mention slavery."
I don't think it's a secret that crackers in America hate the symbol of Black liberation that Harriet Tubman represents; we are after all talking about a woman who escaped slavery, lead dozens of other enslaved people to freedom, and helped John Brown plan and recruit for his raid on Harper's Ferry that some (myself included) would argue ultimately made the Civil War inevitable (which was a good thing.) Afterwards, she served as a scout in the Union army during the Civil War where she is credited with helping to liberate hundreds more enslaved people. After the war, Tubman's struggles to get recognized or compensated for her services to the government made it very clear how serious of a threat the white ruling class order of the day considered her. Towards the end of her life, she was also actively involved in the struggle for women's suffrage. So when modern day cracker fascists toss their spaghetti over Tubman potentially appearing on currency, or try to erase her from the story of abolition and emancipation, you have to understand that this has not only been a longstanding, important ideological goal for white nationalists, but also a question of destroying a symbol whose life encapsulates multiple aspects of the struggle against white supremacy and patriarchy; and Tubman didn't just struggle, she often won - that's not the kind of example a Christian Nationalist order wants to highlight as it imposes its will to fully restore sanctioned white supremacy as the official history and policy of the USA.
Speaking more broadly, the modern study of Critical Race Theory and thus the ongoing struggle for equality in the face of white supremacy by African Americans, rises out of the historical study of institutional slavery, discrimination, and exploitation of Black ppl by a white supremacist ruling order in America. If you change the story of slavery to credit white ppl for granting African Americans liberty, you knock out the evidentiary supporting plank and origin for the MODERN study of white supremacy, discrimination, and exploitation of Black ppl in America too.
Krugman:
Look, what they would like is self-deportation,
and they can certainly try to do that.
I do think that that’s going to be harder.
Among other things, where are people going to go?
The idea that Latin American countries are going to cheerfully accept millions of people flooding back across the border is probably going to be a lot harder than they think.
We aren’t the only people with agency here.
Also, the anti-immigrant stuff,
it’s not really about legality.
It’s just about people who are non-Anglo.
And a lot of the people have roots here.
It’s not that they can just pick up and go back to their old life in Central America.
They’ve been here for years. -- They have families.
So this is going to be much, much harder to make happen than they think.
And maybe they back off, but ...
I’ve been looking a little bit of a dress rehearsal for some of this in DeSantis Florida,
where he’s done a crackdown.
The results for Florida agriculture have already been disastrous.
You might’ve thought that the business backlash would cause him to back off,
but he hasn’t.
So I would take all of this stuff very, very seriously
#MassDeportation #WhiteSupremecy #MagaMilitia
Krugman:
Yeah. Just bear in mind that a lot of what may happen,
beyond the deportations,
may not require government actions.
If you want to intimidate people, you don’t necessarily have to send in the military,
which might refuse to obey orders.
You can just do ...
January 6 was basically tacit permission for MAGA extremists to go and do stuff.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see quite a lot of that happening as well
Krugman:
What is this thing you call legal obstacles?
It’s not clear to me that rule of law is going to apply at all in the years ahead.
It’s very likely that they’ll just find ways to do it.
Of course, the costs are ...
If you try to do these draconian policies in any remotely humane way,
they’re very expensive.
Well, the obvious next sentence follows, right?
If you’re really prepared to be quite brutal,
and basically build tent cities in the desert,
maybe not so expensive.
Krugman:
This has happened before, right?
Not so extreme as this one,
but Obama laid the foundations for a pretty strong economy during Trump’s first term.
Bill Clinton basically balanced the budget, preparing the ground for George W. Bush to blow it on tax cuts.
It’s a recurring theme.
Although, I have to say, maybe I’m being too cynical or insufficiently cynical, the idea of really deporting immigrants
—not just claiming, "We have built a wall", but actually doing the thing
—seems to be something that is really close to Trump’s heart.
That seems to be something he really, really wants to do.
I think about Stephen Miller;
he doesn’t just want to go after low-wage migrants from Latin America.
He wants to go after high-skilled executives in Silicon Valley
because this idea is that there are these jobs and they should be going to Americans.
I would be surprised if they actually back off on this.
They’ll go quite a ways, and business community will scream.
A lot of people in business believe that this is all going to be a Potemkin deportation,
that it’s not really going to happen,
but they’re probably wrong about that.
To be honest, I still miss Twitter. I miss the community we had over there. I miss the connections and wide variety of folks I followed - Kinky folks and thoughtful folks and creative folks and funny folks (often in the same account). But it sounds like things are getting even worse over there now. I just feel sad about it. The Twitter that I loved is very much gone, and has been for a while.
I'd love your help to:
Make Punching Nazis Cool Again
#MPNCA #Fascists #ChistianNationalism is just #WhiteSupremecy in drag.