The New York Times reports: President Trump’s personal lawyer on Wednesday forwarded an email to conservative journalists, government officials and friends that echoed secessionist Civil War propaganda and declared that the group Black Lives Matter “has been totally infiltrated by terrorist groups.”
The email forwarded by John Dowd, who is leading the president’s legal team, painted the Confederate general Robert E. Lee in glowing terms and equated the South’s rebellion to that of the American Revolution against England. Its subject line — “The Information that Validates President Trump on Charlottesville” — was a reference to comments Mr. Trump made earlier this week in the aftermath of protests in the Virginia college town.
“You cannot be against General Lee and be for General Washington,” the email reads, “there literally is no difference between the two men.”
The contents of the email are at the heart of a roiling controversy over race and history that turned deadly last weekend in Charlottesville, where white nationalist groups clashed with protesters over the planned removal of a statue of Lee. An Ohio man with ties to white nationalist groups drove his car through a crowd, killing one woman and injuring many others, authorities say.
In a fiery news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Trump blamed “both sides” for that violence. He said many of those who opposed the statue’s removal were good people protesting the loss of their culture, and he questioned whether taking down statues of Lee could lead to monuments of Washington also being removed.
His words were widely criticized in Washington but were praised by white supremacists, including a former Ku Klux Klan leader. [Continue reading…]
There is a small morsel of truth in his otherwise false rendition of history. The American colonials in 1760-1780 feared that the King of England might abolish slavery in the British colonies. That is why Jefferson used wild Trumpian language against that King in his Declaration of Independence. The British King was no saint but neither were the colonials.
The fear of the secessionists in 1861 was that the US might soon abolish chattel slavery. That prompted them to write Article I, section 9(4) into their constitution. The US constitution at that time did not contain the equivalent of that article. There was never any equivalence of USA and CSA.
The 13th amendment was the unintended consequence of the secession and the defeat of the CSA. That amendment is owed to persons like Lee and Jefferson Davis.
The legal abolition of slavery was by far the greatest revolution in our history. Trump et al have debased that revolution again with their language. There is no equivalence of Nazi and BLM. There is not even equivalence of actions by the two. All Nazi’s are in the privileged class of our nation. That cannot be said of African Americans.