Things I Do Not Like

 Hiding history, putting people down to make one's self look bigger rather than rising to compete, people taking credit for the work of their betters.

The Side That Won the Civil War is Now Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought (Literary Hub)

In the days before the Civil War, the South worked hard to censor any literature that cast slavery in a negative light. Officials in Charleston, S.C. went through mailbags for abolitionist newspapers. Legislatures passed laws banning any publication that may show “a tendency to make our slaves discontented.” In Maryland, the Rev. Jacob Gruber was prosecuted for daring to preach a sermon that hinted that slavery might be sinful. Anyone found with a copy of the explosive novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was subject to arrest.

***

The order to whitewash America’s historic sites of anything less than rosy about the nation’s past has led to some predictable embarrassments. Visitors to Independence Hall in Philadelphia won’t learn much about the enslaved people owned by the founding fathers. The internment camp at Manzanar won’t have anything “negative” about the detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II. Fort Moultrie National Monument  no longer has information related to rising sea levels that threaten Charleston Harbor. The order extends to books and materials on sale at the gift stores. Books related to Malcolm X and other Black leaders have been reportedly removed.

My own book details the consequential events at a place called Fort Monroe in Virginia that led directly to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the end of American slavery. Yet it is not for sale in the bookstore of the Fort Monroe National Monument. Because the book tells a hopeful story about how enslaved people ran toward the American flag during the Civil War, sought their own freedom and helped tip the military balance against the Confederacy, I would have thought it would have been in alignment with even the narrowest conservative definition of patriotic content. But the cover depicts seven members of the U.S. Colored Troops standing at attention. The jacket copy makes it clear that it is about slavery. It is not hard to imagine it setting off minor alarms on the part of the National Park Service or Eastern National, the concessionaire with the exclusive contract to supply the bookstore.

***

The irony was that the South’s preferred message about “happy and contented slaves” was all a lie. Instead of being proved on the ground of open debate and inquiry, it had to be proved in the Civil War when the enslaved people bolted toward the Union Army at the first possible opportunity, to the astonishment of the slaveholding class which had believed its own cheerful propaganda

How easily scared and manipulated are Americans! Has it always been this way? I never read Richard Hofstadter's book on American paranoia, so all I can see is from my own perspective. There was the Red Scare after WWI, and that continued through HUAC and then started rising under Nixon and Dies until the fever of McCarthyism broke out. Has the time come for America to go under? That Lincoln's last best hope was all just an illusion?

 How doubt became a weapon against constitutional rights 

 But this obscures the asymmetry doing the real work. To approve access to medication abortion the FDA required drug companies to meet normal evidentiary standards demonstrating that the potential harm to patients taking mifepristone is marginal. The court, however, intervened, stating that this normal process was insufficient. Why? Because there could be some uncertainty about the applicability of these findings, given there was no longer an in-person requirement.

Doubt, in other words, undermined the conclusions of the FDA’s own rulemaking processes. In contrast, doubt played no role in undercutting Louisiana’s unfounded claims of risk and potential for “sovereign injury” — that is, the potential the state itself would suffer a kind of harm to its power as a state.

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Nothing scares those unworthy of power like its loss.  

 The sheer depravity of spoiled boys injuring others without concern for the damage done: Online Trolls Harassed Her Six-Year-Old. That Was Only the Beginning.

People who blame others for their failings, the kind of men who suck their thumbs and whine until they get attention. The traditional family, what they call the nuclear family, is a fiction, These kinds of people needing to put down others only show off their inadequacies.

The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet 

Douglas Wilson has a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system, “we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church structure,” he told me recently. “And that is, we vote by household.”

Wilson is a co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, based in Moscow, Idaho. Over the past five decades, he has built a small empire there, dedicated to disseminating his theocratic vision for the United States: a publishing house, a school, a liberal-arts college, and a video-streaming service. His denomination, which has about 170 affiliated churches, counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a member, and Wilson was invited to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon in February. So when the pastor casually suggests disenfranchising half of America, people listen.

 ***

The MAGA movement is often framed as a reaction to the first Black president, and to a growing Latino population. But the multiracial appeal of the manosphere and Trump’s 2024 inroads with young minority men point in a different direction. “People ask me what the New Right is furious about,” the author Laura Field, whose book, Furious Minds, describes the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism, told me. “And I think a good shorthand for that is they’re furious about their own loss of status in society over the last few years and the elites who made that happen, and I think that the pithiest short version of that is that it’s the women. It’s the women who took their status.”

Maybe I have spent too much time reading from 1850 with no little disgust at the racism of our ancestors.

So much for improving the species.

sch 6/8