The Sin of Tripp Lewis

Anybody even remotely aware of Southern heritage and its critics know of the animosity the latter exhibit for the Virginia Flaggers. I am speaking specifically of "civil war" bloggers Kevin Levin, Brooks D. Simpson and Andy Hall (and several other hangers on I'm aware of).

I call these folks "floggers" -- i.e.,, "flogging bloggers" -- because they frequently exhibit less interest in informing and educating their readers about the civil war, and more interest in verbally flogging people who see the war differently than they do, especially Confederate heritage advocates and most especially the flaggers.

Observers also know that these critics and their followers, with Andy Hall out front, have demonstrated extreme displeasure over the arrest of Flagger Tripp Lewis. Oh, they weren't particularly concerned that Lewis got arrested. They exhibited annoyance -- hostility, actually -- over what they believe was Tripp's deliberately provoking the arrest, and doing it in front of his children, who were traumatized by the event. (You can read about the "outrage" expressed on the "behalf" of Tripp's children here.)

The great gusts of super-heated harangue blasting Tripp's way from the floggers -- with Texas cowboy Andy riding the circuit of the other flogger blog comment threads -- are mystifying -- at least, on the surface. Why is Tripp -- why are the flaggers as a group -- any of their concern? Why even pay attention, much less regularly tantrumize about them on their blogs? I haven't conducted a deep study of the floggers' attitudes about it, but I have done some observing and drawn a few conclusions.

First of all, these folks think they own the civil war, and they are the sole authority for telling the great unwashed masses what to believe about it. As I have noted, they are self-appointed civil war thought cops. Apparently that job classification accompanies being a "historian."

As my friend Eddie Inman noted, "'I am a historian!!' Seems to be the claim of every South basher with a blog." Indeed, it does.

On Facebook, I linked to Andy's "coverage" of the Tripp arrest, and followed it with this observation,  

"What I don't understand is... if he thinks the Lexington's flag restriction is none of the Virginia Flagger's business, and not the SCV's business, and nobody's business but the Lexington City Council (and, presumably, some out-of-state student petition-signers at W&L U), why does he think it's any of HIS business to comment on it at his blog? These people exempt themselves from all sorts of restrictions and criticism they level at others...."

Which led to this exchange with Eddie:

Connie Chastain Wait! Eddie, I just figured it out. It's because he's a HISTORIAN!

Connie Chastain Bein' a HISTORIAN gives you all SORTS of privileges ordinary sods and suckers don't have!

Eddie Inman looks like there is not enough history for "historians" to occupy their time with. they must fulfill it with attention to current events.

Whereupon I directed Eddie to some earlier thoughts I had on this subject, here.

That Tripp, the flaggers and Southern heritage types in general don't bow and scrape before the floggers assumed authority -- their self-appointed exclusionary ownership of the civil war -- is an affront, no doubt. But the animosity for the flaggers goes deeper than that would explain. There's something more at work here.

You don't have to read flogger blogs for long -- even those posts that purportedly deal with history -- to see where they're coming from.

I have described the floggers as   politically correct, post-civil rights and race-obsessed. I believe they are highly motivated by the leftist meme that white people, especially white men, are responsible for most if not all the evils of human history and that they have an obligation to call forth white guilt in their Caucasian brothers ... an uncomfortable task, no doubt, since they are, well, white men. So they must find and/or fabricate certain exceptions.

Thus, the antebellum white north's armpit-deep immersion in slavery, even after abolishing it in their states, is glossed over, "forgiven" because, as Rob "Tu Quoque" Bakur noted, the north "shed its sins" of slavery and racism. Presumably the yanks did this by fighting to "free an entire race kept in bondage..." blah-blah-blah -- except, of course, we know that's not what the north was fighting for... But it can be claimed, and so it is, and thus the "white north" is relieved of the bulk of its white guilt.

I'm thoroughly convinced that escaping or downplaying their own culpability in the world's evil that their gender and the deficient melanin content of their skin bestows upon them plays no small part in the floggers' motivation. This takes the form of finding white folks who are so much worse than they are, they look noble and honorable by comparison. Thus the stench and filth of white guilt is maximumly minimized in their case -- maybe rendered totally unnoticeable.

There's no better white folks to illustrate this great gulf than antebellum Southern whites. And to increase the distance and highlight the distinctions, antebellum Southern whites must continually be demonized -- their billowing evil perpetually magnified, like watching a volcanic plume through a telephoto lens.

As I have noted before, for floggers, nothing illustrates Southern white evil better than repeatedly zeroing in on black slave misery because, you see, white evil exists in exact inverse proportion to black misery.  The more miserable the (black) slaves, the more evil the (white) slave owners.

Southern heritage folks not only have the effrontery to give black misery far less attention than floggers and other leftists think it deserves ...  they also to refuse to twist themselves up, pretzel-like, with white guilt.  They even note, sometimes, those instances where slaves were not as miserable as they're portrayed. But basically, their attention on slaves and slave owners is peripheral. They focus primarily on Southerners (the vast majority of whom were white) who fought for their independence from the United States government. And they not only give their ancestors attention, but honor for the unfathomable sacrifices Confederates made in fighting a brutal invader.

If that isn't insulting enough, Southern heritage folks reject the politically correct, post-civil rights, race-obsessed efforts of those out to remove all positive reminders (in some cases, all reminders at all) of the Confederacy from the American memory and consciousness ... and all artifacts of it from the Southern landscape.

Thus you have the evilization campaign not only on flogger blogs, but in the popular culture, which is pretty much owned by the left -- the recent Lincoln movies, Tarantino's Django Unchained, the left-wing media's history of presenting anti-white, anti-Southern judgments from the Southern Poverty Law Center as gospel-truth without the slightest independent verification, the History Channel's biased "civil war" documentaries and those showcasing the KKK, along with the talk-show media's near worship of anti-white, anti-Southern film propagandist Ken Burns, and the respect for anti-racist Tim Wise (who just happens to live in an upscale, virtually totally white section of majority-black Memphis -- what a surprise, huh).

This is just the tip of the iceberg of the leftist anti-white mentality that lies behind and beneath the evilization of antebellum Southern whites and their present-day defenders in Southern heritage. So the motive behind the smokin' hot breath on which ride the words of condemnation aimed at Tripp Lewis becomes a little clearer...

But where there's smoke, there's fire, and what ignited the fire in the throats of the floggers is Tripp's greatest sin.

He got himself arrested during a protest.

He got himself arrested during a protest.

Whether he planned it or instigated it, as the floggers claim, really matters little. Getting arrested for protesting or demonstrating is a hallowed leftist methodology. The left believes it owns it, the way floggers believe they own the civil war. Protesting with resulting arrests became a venerated leftist stratagem in the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the student anti-war movement, the gay movement, the environmental movement and, more recently, the Occupy movement.

When leftists do it, they're just exercising their constitutional rights on behalf of a worthy cause, don't you know, and nothing makes them madder than those on the right appropriating the method for their own causes. Thus, leftists shriek that Tea Partiers demonstrating for smaller government are not exercising their constitutional rights -- they are perpetrating violent, racist affairs for the purpose of re-instigating the oppression of helpless minorities and lining the pockets of rich, war-mongering vulture corporatists...

In the leftist flogger view, when Southern heritage folks protest, say, the removal of Confederate battle flags from Confederate graves, they're either (a) spouting hate or (b) wasting time. When they engage in political protests, such as in Lexington, Virginia, they're messing around where they have no business messing. And when they flag the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, very orderly civilized affairs (that include fun and fellowship) compared to their leftist counterparts in, say, Occupy protests (i.e., no deliberate trashing of the area, no public urination displays, no tents for long-term occupyin', no refusals to bathe for weeks on end, thus no stench of human B.O.wafting on the air for blocks in all directions, etc) -- well, they are behaving reprehensibly.

On Facebook, in a thread started by a purported Confederate supporter (with the handle Susie Confederate Clark, which I think is a ruse*), another purported Confederate supporter (with the handle ConfederateRebel Kashie, which I also think is a ruse*) posted a slobbering, heaving diatribe against Tripp in which she opined, "Breaking the law is breaking the law. He is now among the likes of the meth and drug dealers because what I saw on that video sounded the same." She went on to issue the disclaimer that this is just her opinion, which is her first amendment right, "...and these flaggers forget that, and you cant continue to harass people and not get arrested even if it is a publicity stunt."

I'm not sure how she knows that the flaggers forget her First Amendment rights, but I suspect they'd be far more aware, and respectful, of hers than she is of theirs. Except for likening Tripp to meth and drug dealers (when was the last time you saw meth and drug dealers publically demonstrating for their rights to make and sell drugs, and disfigure and kill people with them?), Kashie's hissing, spittirng tirade is just an unscholarly version of that with which "Cowboy Andy and the Floggers" have rock-and-rolled the "civil war" blogosphere.

For these folks, Tripp's sin is using a leftist methodology in a decidedly non-leftist cause. And that is more than merely unforgivable. It is boilingly, seethingly outrageous.

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*This is my opinion, my First Amendment right...

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