Jack Hunter the “Southern Avenger’ sometimes filled in for Mike Church, The Sothern Avenger site is down now, too.
I suppose Jack Hunter is being Paula Deen’ed. It isn’t as if Hunter went around saying n***** this and n***** that.
He never claimed blacks should still be slaves or that he hated blacks. Well, not to my knowledge.
All of this has to do with Hunter’s position on The Civil War and states rights.
There are some who do not believe that The Civil War was all about slavery and if somebody takes that position, it usually gets them declared racist.
How dare anyone question history or look at it differently than the declared historical meme. You must not stray from accepted group think.
Just bring up secession today and see what happens to you.
******************************
Mike: To the Dude Maker Hotline, a piece posted at the American Conservative magazine yesterday last by Daniel McCarthy, “The Right’s Civil War.”
Jack Hunter has resigned from Sen. Rand Paul’s office, in light of criticisms of his “Southern Avenger” background.
Mike: Then Daniel goes into some of the things about Jack’s resignation. Then he delves into this über deep and very complex and long-running conversation or internecine feud between factions inside the “conservative movement.” One side you have the Harry Jaffaites, descendants of Leo Strauss — I just call them Straussians — and those that believe in the Lincoln version of nationalism and American exceptionalism. Then on the other side, a smaller, crankier minority that are not Lincoln lovers, do not believe in the grandness and wonder of the almighty and ever-expanding centralized state and have been voicing that opinion since the 1950s. So this continues unabated to this day, and now it has embroiled, or ensnared at least, to some degree Senator Rand Paul from the great State of Kentucky. Dan McCarthy has written about it and we thought we should talk about it here on the program. Making another return appearance, editor of the American Conservative Magazine, Daniel McCarthy. Hello, Daniel, how are you?
Daniel McCarthy: Hi, Mike, thanks very much for having me on.
Mike: You’re very, very welcome. Good to hear from you today. Just flesh out a little bit of what “The Right’s Civil War” piece is about. Then we’ll go clause by clause, as they were supposed to go in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, and we’ll see if we can get to the bottom of this.
McCarthy: Well, you’re seeing a number of criticisms are being made in the media of Jack Hunter, which are pretty far off base. People have portrayed him as being some sort of a racist or what they call a neoconfederate. He certainly says a number of things that are very provocative, a number of things a radio host or columnist for a weekly newspaper tends to say in order to stir debate, in order to prompt people to think dramatically about questions that they may never have considered before, such as something like secession. What is the concept really about? You have a number of attacks on Jack Hunter which I think have not really gotten to the intellectual core of what he was trying to do.
My article spells out how there’s been a long tradition on the right, sort of two traditions that have been in conflict, one of them being the one you mentioned by Harry Jaffa in which an argument for centralization is made that references back to Abraham Lincoln and to a number of other things like that. On the other hand you have both libertarians and traditional literary conservatives who have been very critical of centralization today in the 20th or 21st century who often tie their arguments back to history as well, even though sometimes what they’re really talking about are more modern conflicts like the welfare state and not really so much trying to get a purely historical view of what was happening in the 1860s....
http://www.mikechurch.com/transcripts/a-belief-in-secession-and-self-government-and-rand-paul-are-dangerous-to-the-state/
Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – I would say to anyone that harbors this point of view, if you’re so convinced that it was the confederacy that was the antecedent for Hitler’s regime or for Lenin’s regime or for Mussolini’s regime and that’s what gave rise to it, then you might as well go across the next bridge and say it was Madison and Mason and Martin and Sherman and heaven forefend Washington who came up with the original idea. Check out today’s transcript for the rest…
Mike: Scott Galupo yesterday afternoon at American Conservative magazine posted this, “Parsing the Confederate Constitution.”
I appreciated Ben Domenech’s takedown of Michael Gerson’s recent efforts at policing the borders of the Republican mainstream, which, according to Gerson, cannot include Sen. Rand Paul.
In defending Paul against the smear that he’s some sort of neo-Confederate, Domenech points out that the actual Confederacy, however briefly it existed, was no friend of liberty, at least as today’s liberty movement defines it.
Mike: I’m going to read what this particular gentleman writes about this. If you’d like to see my written response to this, at least in partial as I dig into and delve into this issue — I try not to demagogue these things. I try to actually go back and find what is in the historical record and use that as opposed to what I would like to think happened. If you would like to read my partial, just a small beginning of some of the research and time I’m going to put into this task, it’s posted in today’s Pile of Prep. There will be much more later today and tomorrow. Here’s what this Ben Domenech individual posted about this. Are you ready? Ladies and gentlemen, you may want to gird your loins, as Joe Biden once famously said.
Gerson’s depiction of the libertarian view of the Confederacy is simply fraudulent. … Paleoconservatives may find much worthy of defense in the Confederate state, but consider . . .
Mike: By the way, I don’t know very many people that defend the Confederate State or the Confederate Government. I believe most of the defense is limited to whether or not there was a constitutional right to choose your own form of government and to secede. This is a very important question. I think it’s the most important question of all. If you answer it incorrectly, then you’re the Soviet Union. No, we’re not even the Soviet Union. If you answer it correctly, you actually are the land of the free and the mobile home of the brave. Do we have the right of self-determination or do we not? It’s a very simple question. Is the Constitution a compact between willing parties that voluntarily agree to cobble together a government and live under it for the sake of some peace and amity? Keywords are compact meaning contract, meaning agreement between or among parties, and then voluntary meaning you stay in it because you want to stay in it and you believe it to be to your advantage. Any other form or mode of government doesn’t sound very free to me. Some people take great offense to this. I always ask the question: Why? Why are you so offended by that? Give me your definition of what the right of self-determination is or the right of the people to reform, alter, or abolish their forms and mode of government....