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After Reconstruction ended, the Southern
Republican Party began to dwindle. By the beginning
of the twentieth century, no one was elected on
the Republican ticket to anything in the Deep South,
so everybody with any ambition left it.
In fact, there was only one reason to be a Southern
Republican by 1900. Every state had a minimum number
of delegates to the national Republican Convention
every four years. So each four years a tiny group
in each state would get together, call themselves
Republicans and send some people to sell their convention
votes to the highest bidder.
This was not a secret. At the 1912 convention, a
reporter asked a drunk Southern delegate how the
South would be voting. The delegate replied, "Some
of us are for Taft, some of us are for Roosevelt,
and ALL of us are for SALE!"
The majority of South Carolina's Republicans in
the state senate voted to pull down the Confederate
flag that 76% of Republicans in their primary had
voted to keep flying over the state house. Their
openly stated reason? They said that standing on
principle might cost money, estimated at a maximum
of a dollar or two per South Carolinian per year.
Principle is nice, they agreed, but money is nicer.
So the only difference between the majority of Republican
state senators today and Republican delegates in
1912 is that in 1912 they held out for a better
price.
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Leftists, with the help of respectable
conservatives, are now trying to limit access to
"Hate" on the Internet. They are also
trying to get the power to decide what "hate"
is, and the right to ban it everywhere.
How much power should we give liberals and respectable
conservatives to decide what kind of speech should
be banned? The left and its conservative allies
say that free speech should be permitted, but hate
speech should be banned.
So one regularly runs into a question that is debated
in the media these days: "When does free speech
become hate speech?
The answer is: "From the word 'Go.'" All
MEANINGFUL free speech is somebody's Hate Speech.
You don't have freedom of speech if you are only
allowed to say things that don't offend anybody.
Real freedom of speech means precisely the opposite.
Your freedom of expression doesn't need any protection
if you only say things that everybody approves of.
So the first amendment right to free expression
is only necessary to protect you when you say something
that offends somebody. In other words, every word
of real free speech is what somebody would call
hate speech.
Both Hitler and Stalin could have readily agreed
with the present liberal-respectable conservative
definition of free speech. Both Hitler and Stalin
thought that anybody should be allowed to say anything
they wanted to, so long as it didn't offend their
deeply held beliefs.
For example, Hitler would agree that you could say
anything you want to, so long as it didn't offend
a dedicated Aryan like himself. Stalin would allow
you free speech except where he felt that your words
were offensive or harmful to his ideas of what was
good for the working class.
In other words, all dictators take the same position
our American censors do. The dictators agree that
people can say anything that isn't "offensive"
to important opinions. They just have a little different
answer as to what is "offensive."
But Stalin, Hitler, liberals and respectable conservatives
all start from the same place: Some OPINIONS must
be outlawed as Hate Speech.
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On April 8, in "Respectable
Conservatives Line Up Against Flag," I showed
how respectable conservatives earn their "respectable"
title by knifing other rightists in the back. My specific
example was NATIONAL REVIEW, which is answering liberal
cries to help them against our Confederate flag in South
Carolina.
William Buckley, who owns NATIONAL REVIEW, might be called
the founder of modern respectable conservatism.
The publisher of NATIONAL REVIEW, William Rusher, did
the Foreword to my first book, A Plague on Both Your Houses.
In that Foreword he had to separate himself from my nasty
remarks about Buckley. Since then, Buckley has continued
to earn my attacks and liberal applause.
Buckley's latest offering was one of his daily columns
reprinted in the April 3 edition of his magazine. In it
he says that Chile's Pinochet should have been arrested
while in England and sent for trial to Spain (Please see
November 13, 1999, "Another European Government Kidnaps a Foreign Rightist"
for background).
Buckley freely admits that no leftist, specifically no
Castro or Gorbachev or the like would ever be tried in
this way for any crimes, no matter how extreme.
Buckley freely admits that the only reason Pinochet was
singled out was because he was a rightist who pushed the
Communist government out of Chile. If it had been the
other way around, Buckley admits, there would be no question
of a trial, much less of extradition. To her credit, Margaret
Thatcher backed Pinochet while he was in Britain and raised
Cain about the British government's attempt to extradite
him to Spain, saying it was "an act worthy of a totalitarian
state."
But Buckley, as a respectable conservative, says Spanish
leftists should have been allowed to try Pinochet. Buckley
is right in there with the leftists demanding that rightists
they don't approve of should be tried.
This is a typical respectable conservative performance.
He states that the left is doing this, and that they would
never do it to a leftist. So far, so good, he sounds like
a conservative. But in the end, he comes down on the side
of the leftist, with the knife stuck firmly in the back
of the rightist. That is what respectable conservatives
routinely do. Their bottom line is what the leftists want.
When you need them most, they're on the other side.
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I told people in the 1960s that the Confederate flag would
eventually be banned. Like every other correct prediction
I have made through the decades -- and Lake High will
testify to how many there were -- I was laughed at for
saying this.
I saw Germany outlawing the Nazis, but allowing the Communists
free reign. The same thing happened in other countries.
With respectable conservatives as our spokesmen, we could
not demand rights for right-wing haters. But the left
demanded all the rights for left wing haters any mainline
political party had, and they never apologized for it.
When an American Nazi was lured to Denmark and seized
there and taken to Germany for trial, the left cheered.
They said he had been "hiding behind the first amendment"
in America and putting Hate Speech on the web. Everybody
agreed Germany was right to arrest someone got putting
"Hate" on his Internet page, though it was legal
in America.
But no liberal or respectable conservative will ever say
a Communist who puts his hate on a web page is "hiding
behind the first
amendment." He is "exercising his constitutional
rights."
In other words, through our respectable conservative spokesmen,
we agreed that the right could be jailed for Hate, but
the left was always innocent of it.
Now here is the point: In real world power politics, if
you give someone the first step, they will take the second.
That is how people who deal in power ALL do things.
The left had no intention of STOPPING with Nazis. They
used Nazis to get our agreement that the left had freedom,
but the right didn't. Next, they got Britain to agree
that Pinochet, who was not a Nazi, could be seized, but
no leftist could be. The right became a happy hunting
ground for leftists out to crush anything they decide
to call a hate crime.
So now the Boston Housing Authority has declared the SHAMROCK
to be an official hate symbol! So the Confederate flag
is now a sign of Hate, and respectable conservatives shout
their agreement. I saw that coming as soon as I saw that
the Buckleys of the world are the liberals' official wimps
on call.
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