The Present Moment: Southern Nationalism In The Age of Trump or Clinton

In my speech “Blood and Soil: How Southerners Became a Separate and Distinct People,” I took a deep dive into Southern history. I explained how what we recognize as the South came to exist. Toward the end of that speech, I briefly noted how the Old South has disintegrated since the 1960s.

Make no mistake about it, the South entered a new era of our history in 1965 after Selma when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The Jim Crow South crumbled overnight. “Racism” became taboo. White racial consciousness was proscribed. Blacks began to vote in large numbers. The Southern economy began to be radically transformed by Cold War military spending. The great cities of the Sun Belt South – Atlanta, Houston, Charlotte, Tampa – began to blossom. Women began to enter the workforce. Agriculture ceased to employ millions of our people. Our politics was radically upended as disaffected White Southerners began to abandon the Democratic Party.

It has taken fifty years, but it is getting clearer every day that we are approaching the end of that era. By that I mean what we would recognize as “normalcy” is about to be over. A period of chaos lies ahead. There are many causes of this. Millions of immigrants have come here from Third World countries. The political class has lost touch with the common people. The mainstream media has lost all its credibility. I just saw a poll which shows a staggering 84% of the White working class in this country believes the government represent does not their views. Revolutionary times are ahead, my friends.

Anyway, if you look at the broad span of American history, you can see that moments of crisis and rapid cultural change tend to coincide with election cycles. Immediately, we would recognize Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828 as the first such pivotal moment. Lincoln’s election in 1861 and the War Between the States that followed was another such moment. The election of 1896 at the height of Populism was such a moment. FDR’s election in 1933 was such a moment. LBJ’s victory in the 1964 election was such a moment. Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 was similarly transformational.

I can tell you one thing with certainty: this election we are about to go through in November is going to be the most bitter, polarizing election of our lifetimes. It doesn’t matter who wins. The winner will have won with less than 50 percent of the vote and will be perceived as illegitimate by the losing side. Given the nature of these two candidates, the inevitable result will be destabilization. For all the happy talk about how we are all “Americans,” this election is going to expose an America sharply divided along racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, sex, class and ideological lines.

I’m not going to give you a winding tour of history this afternoon. Instead, we are going to walkthrough the implications of a Trump or Clinton victory. I’m not going to take sides here. I just want to game out what we can reasonably expect to happen if either wins in November and give you a preview of our short term future.

On November 9th, one of these scenarios will begin to play itself out:

Donald Trump Wins: America Is Taken Back

It is November 9th and Donald Trump has won the presidency.

– In the short term, a shockwave of terror courses through the Illegal-Alien American community. The left-leaning Northeast and West Coast is horrified and alienated from Middle America. Black America is outraged by the election of a candidate who they are convinced is a racist, Alt-Right white supremacist. The Left begins to freakout. For the next four years, we hear that the White House is adorned by a Deplorable-in-Chief backed by Neo-Nazis, Christian zealots, racists, white supremacists, and what have you.

– Mainstream Conservatism is crippled by Donald Trump’s election and loses its traditional power to police the Right. Without Mainstream Conservatism as a false opposition to guard its right flank, any number of “extremist ideas” begin to infiltrate the “mainstream” with Donald Trump’s every utterance.

– In the South, populism and nationalism will have triumphed, and you will see many more people self-identifying as such. These people won’t be ethnonationalists, but they will be much more persuadable than before. We will have more common ground with them and it will be easier to communicate and relate to each other.

– The media will say that the “Alt-Right” has triumphed. The Alt-Right will be framed as the new leftwing boogeyman … the real opposition on the Right. A great, self righteous crusade against Deplorable white supremacists and their white privilege will be begin with Donald Trump as its big fat target. Racial polarization will ensue.

– The Far Right as a whole, the Alt-Right or non-Mainstream Right, whatever you want to call it, will be much more visible than it was in the past. If Donald Trump wins the presidency, he will have won in spite of the reigning taboos, and all the various -isms and -phobias will be weakened by his victory. Undoubtedly, there will be less pressure from above and it will be easier for our sort to organize.

– If Trump wins, you will see key issues shift in our direction – our views will be much closer to the mainstream on immigration, free-trade, energy, political correctness, campaign finance, multiculturalism, refugee resettlement, black crime and a number of other things. Correspondingly, it will be easier to talk about these issues without the fear of punishment or social ostracism. It will be easier for people you know who are sympathetic to us to join and come out of the closet as activists.

– If Trump wins, the election will play out like a bigger version of the BREXIT vote in Europe. It is safe to say that it will galvanize the European nationalist and populist parties.

– If Trump wins, I predict he will follow through on his vow to “knock the crap out of ISIS,” but I can’t say what exactly the outcome will be.

– If Trump wins, it is safe to say there will be no humanitarian interventions in Europe along the lines of Bill Clinton bombing Serbia in the 1990s.

– Since 96 percent of Jewish donors, big donors in 9 out of 10 sectors of the American economy, a unified Wall Street and a nearly united donor class failed to stop Trump, who will have defeated them all with his Twitter account, it is safe to say that money will have much less influence over our politics.

– I’m not sure what will be the fate of the Trump Wall. It would have to go through Congress which in this scenario will likely be under Republican control. I do think there would be a mass exodus of illegal aliens. I do think millions of illegal aliens would be deported and fewer would come because immigration enforcement is largely at the discretion of the president.

– If Trump wins, it is safe to say there won’t be any action on gun control. It would never get through a presidential veto and the NRA is too important of an ally to alienate.

– If Trump wins, he has said he wants a national stop-and-frisk policy, which would set up an explosive confrontation with the radicals in the Black Lives Matter movement.

– A Trump victory would be a huge defeat for the SPLC, the Mainstream Media, and the conservative pundits who have led the charge against him. All three would be delegitimized and would likely to continue to lose legitimacy over the next four years as they amplify their hysterical, hypocritical attacks on the president.

– Given the feelings of Mexicans about The Orange One, I believe there could be a major confrontation with Mexico over the status of the illegal alien population.

– If Trump wins, I am not expecting any major changes to the Supreme Court. He would nominate someone acceptable to the Senate which would likely be controlled by Republicans.

– It is safe to say that a Trump victory will be interpreted by Middle America as the moment they succeeded in “Taking America Back.” By promising the world to his followers, Trump will have raised expectations like never before. They will soon find out that not even Donald Trump can “Make America Great Again.” The disillusionment and radicalization that will follow will be something to behold.

– If Trump wins, you are going to see a lot of talk among liberals about secession. Nothing will come of it, but support for secession is bound to rise no matter who wins.

– If Trump wins, the neocons will have been driven from power. It is a safe bet that our foreign policy will radically change as a result. There will be more realpolitik and much less tension with Russia. There will be no crusades to spread liberal democracy in the Middle East. I expect Trump will get along fine with the world’s dictators.

– If Trump wins, he will be seen as an illegitimate president – a racist elected with less than 50 percent of the vote. The fact that he won less than 50 percent of the vote will be used as a democratic rubber stamp to sanction the sort of chaos we have seen in Milwaukee and Charlotte. The country will inevitably become more polarized.

– If Trump wins, it will be a huge blow to political correctness, and I think you will see a rapid erosion of the dominant taboos. It seems that Trump finds a new way to roil the news cycle every day. There will be so much feigned outrage from the media that outrage itself will be a fatality of a Trump presidency.

– I think it safe to say that we can expect more mini-Trumps like Paul Nehlen to run for Congress. I think these mini-Trumps will have more success in the South. If nothing else happens, I expect our politics will become more colorful.

– If Trump wins, the Trans-Pacific Partnership will be DOA. I’ve read that Trump might even have the power to unilaterally change our trade laws through executive actions under existing federal law.

– Immediately, we know a Trump presidency will have a positive impact on the coal industry and resource extraction industries in general due to an EPA that has been brought under control. Republicans won’t oppose him on this.

– If Trump wins, it will mean that a critical mass of Yankees have come to their senses, or at least decided that economics is temporarily more important to them than haranguing the South about racial issues. It has happened before at the end of Reconstruction. Yankee idealism has waxed and waned through history.

– If Trump wins, I expect he will have to face down some major fights with Paul Ryan in the House and Ted Cruz in the Senate, who will assuredly engage in virtue signaling against him as the champions of “True Conservatism.”

– Just by winning the presidency, we can expect that the American Empire would start to crumble overseas because Trump has made it clear he isn’t interested in preserving it. Many of our allies like Japan and Saudi Arabia start to go their own way.

– It is safe to say that a Trump victory will unleash a big polarizing fight on the Left. The progressives will say that Hillary couldn’t win because a centrist liberal was uninspiring to the Democratic base and to young voters in particular. The centrist liberals will blame the progressives for failing to unify behind Hillary. A carnival of liberals fighting leftists will ensue, but without Hillary at the top, I expect a much more radical, militant, anti-White version of the Left to emerge under a Trump presidency.

– If Trump wins, I predict there will be less fear and apathy on the Right, but fewer people will be as angry and alienated as they are now.

The typical American president keeps around 76 percent of his campaign promises. That’s what I am expecting from Donald Trump. Unlike many people, I do think he will try to enact his agenda and he will have the most success in areas where he doesn’t have to work with Congress. He won’t succeed in Making America Great Again because the cultural disintegration is far too advanced for any president to solve.

Without Hillary as his opponent, I think Trump will have a hard time getting reelected. It is easy to imagine an ascendant Left that has radicalized under Trump sweeping to victory in the 2020 election with a more popular champion. In such a scenario, secession would be far more likely than it is today when the would be secessionists are disgruntled leftists.

Hillary Clinton Wins: America Is Lost

It is November 9th and Hillary Clinton has won the presidency.

– A shockwave of relief courses through the Illegal-Alien American community. Middle America is horrified and alienated from the Northeast and West Coast. White America is shocked by Hillary’s victory and swathes of the South and West conclude America is lost. The Right begins to freakout and devolves into a civil war. For the next four years, the country sours on Hillary Clinton who it never liked.

– In the short term, there is a huge spike in secessionist sentiment, and Texas is predictably the epicenter of it, but like in 2012 and the assaults against the Confederate flag after the Charleston shooting, it tapers off by the time Hillary is inaugurated. No one is surprised when Texas makes a lot of noise about seceding, but fails to do so.

– Hillary’s Department of Homeland Security will likely increase harassment of groups it has labeled “rightwing domestic extremists” while turning a blind eye to the rampaging black mobs – that’s social justice – and routine Islamic terrorist attacks – that’s diversity. This will become a feature of American life like it has in Europe.

– If Hillary wins, it is a safe bet that the War Against the South will escalate. There will be more attacks and monuments and flags like we are seeing in Alexandria, VA. It is also a safe bet that there will be more attacks in the media on White males who will be demonized on racial grounds. Whiteness will become an accusation.

If Hillary wins, then once again it will be because Yankees were incapable of setting aside their commitment to “anti-racism” to address other pressing issues. Key Northern states will have decided that taking a stand against “bigotry” is more important than anything else.

– If Hillary wins, Christianity will come under an organized attack from the Left, most likely in the name of LGBTQ rights. Churches will lose their tax exempt status and Christianity will fade further from public life.

– If Hillary wins, she will be an unloved, illegitimate minority president who won with less than 50 percent of the vote. Unlike Obama, she was never loved by the Left and will remain unpopular with her own base. The entire Right will despise Hillary Clinton, but will be embroiled in their own civil war and unable to resist her agenda.

– We can expect a new social justice crusade to, say, legalize some type of sexual deviancy whether it is polygamy, pedophilia, prostitution, or something that hasn’t occurred to us. America will make more “progress” toward Sodom and Gomorrah. What comes after Caitlyn Jenner being declared the “Woman of the Year”?

– We know Hillary Clinton will make good on her promise to import a deluge of refugees from Third World countries and that they will be settled in homogeneous, rightwing conservative places like Idaho or the Ozarks. Boise already has more Syrian refugees than New York City or Los Angeles.

– There will be no Trump Wall, but there will be a huge influx of illegal aliens across the Mexican border who will try to get here in time for amnesty for illegal aliens which will be Hillary’s top legislative priority.

– Hillary will work with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to pass “comprehensive immigration reform.” Congressional Republicans will use Trump’s defeat to justify their surrender to open borders. 2016 will be the last competitive presidential election for Republicans.

– Hillary’s victory will be interpreted as a victory for political correctness. We can also expect Hillary Clinton will be the most politically correct president in history. Meanwhile, SJWs will push political correctness into new corners of American life like college and professional sports which are already becoming politicized.

– Black Lives Matter will be emboldened by a Hillary victory. The riots we have seen in Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee and Charlotte are a taste of what is to come. House Speaker Paul Ryan has already made it clear that he wants to pass criminal justice reform in the lame duck session of Congress. Hardened criminals will be released from prisons and will be emboldened to attack the police under Hillary Clinton.

– If Hillary wins, then law-and-order will have been defeated in the 2016 election when it became a partisan issue. Every American city will become a Baltimore as the police pullback to avoid the fate of Darren Wilson.

– If Hillary wins, America will have its own Angela Merkel, and we know that means open borders and routine terrorist attacks. The media will tell us that terrorism is something we have to live with like hurricanes and we can’t do anything about it because “that’s now who we are.”

– If Hillary wins, the Supreme Court will be lost to the Left, and with the Senate in their hands a bunch of new Ruth Bader Ginsbergs will be nominated and confirmed.

– If Hillary wins, we can say for certain that gun control will also be at the top of her agenda and she will have a friendly Supreme Court to work with.

– There will be an inevitable tsunami of anger and alienation which will culminate in a White backlash against all of the above, but it will simultaneously be crippled by fear and apathy. Whites will be more afraid than ever of losing their jobs. Many will conclude that all is lost while others will radicalize.

– It is safe to say that many Whites will be driven over the edge and will go out like Glenn Miller in Kansas City or Dylann Roof in Charleston. This will used to justify further harassment and crackdowns on “rightwing domestic extremists” by the Clinton administration. It will be harder to join groups. See the aftermath of Oklahoma City for a preview of what we can expect from Hillary Clinton.

– The South won’t secede. There won’t be any RAHOWA or White Revolution. There won’t be any IRA-style guerrilla campaign. Instead, the country will muddle on as it has for the last eight years, albeit more estranged from each other than ever before, but likely with gun control and amnesty for illegal aliens.

– We can expect the ongoing suicide and prescription drug epidemic in White America to get much worse.

– We can expect the Alt-Right will be blamed for Trump’s loss. Mainstream Conservatism will be given a new lease on life. Conservative pundits will say the Alt-Right alienated non-Whites and Millennials and must be driven into exile. There will be an attempt to purge the Alt-Right, but it will be unsuccessful. Trump-style populism and nationalism will remain the largest faction on the Right. The most likely scenario is a divided Right in which no one faction is dominant in the Republican Party.

– Congress will pass and Hillary Clinton will sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

– Republicans will win the 2018 midterm elections, prove incapable of doing anything with their midterm election victory, and will lose in a landslide when Hillary is reelected in 2020. Amnesty will make Texas and Arizona into Blue States.

– There will be a surge of online activism until SJWs are victorious in censoring Twitter and Facebook of all rightwing opinions. Social media platforms will eventually recognize the right of militant SJWs not to be offended by opinions they disagree with.

– Under Hillary Clinton, I imagine we will continue to muddle on in Syria and Iraq. We will likely get a humanitarian war or two somewhere else. Maybe Africa?

– Under Hillary Clinton, I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility of getting dragged into a shooting war with Russia over Ukraine’s border.

– There will be no free college tuition as long as House Speaker Paul Ryan can block entitlements in Congress. Republicans are also likely to pad their House majorities in 2020.

– Coal miners and other White working class people who work in resource extraction industries will be driven out of their jobs by environmental regulations. If fracking is successfully banned, we could see a huge surge in gas prices.

President Hillary Clinton will have nothing but contempt for the “Deplorables” in office. She too will likely keep around 76 percent of her campaign promises. I believe she will sign and expedite amnesty for illegal aliens to order to replace White voters on her demoralized left flank. She too will be a disappointment to her supporters, but since she was never loved she will need a quick fix like a Blue Texas to get reelected in 2020.

The Republicans will try to mount a comeback in 2020. They will nominate someone new and make another run at Hillary Clinton. By this point, demographics and their own internal divisions will make victory impossible though. After 4 or 5 consecutive defeats in presidential elections, that’s when secession will start to gain real traction. If peaceful secession is blocked, the anger and resentment will begin to find an outlet in outbreaks of political violence around 2024.

A Cautionary Note For Radicals

An opportunity for our movement is approaching no matter who wins in November.

Either Trump wins and our ideas become more mainstream or Hillary wins and generates a large White backlash. There are opportunities to exploit in either scenario. There are also great perils in either scenario.

The greatest peril that I think we are facing is that a historic opportunity is coming along, but we are poorly positioned to capitalize on it. Specifically, I am worried about a descent into vanguardism. By that I mean it is becoming easier than ever before for the average White Southerner to see our point of view. And yet, I see many of our activists racing in the opposite direction, away from the people who are waking up.

We should be trying to capitalize on the present national angst to connect with our target audience. Instead, I see tendency among radicals to seal themselves off from the mainstream and erect new barriers to communication. I see many of our own people engaged in constant infighting on social media, saber-rattling with violent rhetoric, playing the I’m-more-radical-than-you-are game, getting into heated arguments over religion, and magnifying small points of disagreement to the point of driving away new recruits. Millions of our people are waking up and looking at the world with new eyes, but they aren’t looking to join a survivalist/militia group waiting for the apocalypse.

Whites are under attack. The South is under attack. Christianity is under attack. We need to keeping hammering home that message in a measured tone. We need to build relationships with the people who agree with us on these issues. We need to gain their trust. We don’t need to dress anyone down who agrees with our core beliefs. Instead, we should be looking for points of agreement to bring them into the fold.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we should water down our beliefs in order to appear “mainstream.” I am saying that we need to be in the mix as radicals. We should roll with the waves of the news cycle and look for creative ways to force our point of view into the “national conversation.” If we are unsuccessful in doing that, other groups will, and they will reap the advantages of being in the public eye in the midst of a backlash.

Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is going to be the next president. The question is whether we want to a part of that conversation and gain something from it or continue to be bypassed in our little internet ghettos. Thank you.

About Hunter Wallace 12392 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

51 Comments

      • Right! Don’t hate anybody. Let them live with their own. Blacks have said they want to do this, demanded separate dorms at colleges, separate clubs, professional organizations, schools, and countless over arrangements. They want to self-segregate! Amen. Hallelujah!!!! Encourage them, reinforce the benefits, and then WE Whites make the same demands!! Can ya dig it?

  1. Hunter I will disagree in one small point. I don’t think things can muddle on along now because we have come too far. EVENTUALLY the explosion will come, albeit how and when I don’t know. The cities already cannot enforce the laws on the books and eventually when you are no longer able to enforce your own laws, things begin to collapse.

    Can Hillary put us under a military dictatorship? Sure and she could also release the TERMINATOR ROBOTS from Area 51 and those places to kill everyone I dont know what the witch is capable of. My personal perspective I don’t believe with the ALT Right that there is any going back. RaHoWa or Helter Skelter if you will has already started its just Whites dont seem to get it yet. Obviously the Nigs do.

    The other thing in this that we must make everyone understand is that this election is both Trump vs Clinton and also it is Trump vs Kaine. Hillary, unless they have a set of spare body parts waiting for her will not live four years, maybe not even two. Tim Kaine is a cuck to the extreme and very vulnerable. We must play all the cards.

    I dont see the White resistence ending, I see it only strengthening Irregardless of the outcome. Police and Soldiers will mutiny the recent killings of Black Cops have proved BLM is a terrorist organization. Eventually city after city will be abandoned as cops quit their jobs. Will Robots fill the void? Maybe the Robot Apocalypse is where things get real. Who Knows?

      • Thats how I see it as well but eventually there will be a gamebreaker. Whether that gamebreaker is Terminator robots, nuclear war or what there is guaranteed at some point to be a gamebreaker. The South muddled on for 30 yrs before the gamebreaker came and it will again. This is a basic trend of history. Eventually the crash will come.

        • And this is why every White at this point must ignore Hunter’s one critical mistake in this essay, “Millions of our people are waking up and looking at the world with new eyes, but they aren’t looking to join a survivalist/militia group waiting for the apocalypse.”
          The crash IS coming and the better prepared & networked you are for it, the better. Millennials may be more interested in lots of other things besides self-sufficiency and survival currently, but that mentality will change on a dime when the other shoe drops. At that point it’ll be too late to learn how our great-grandparents thrived in the Old South. Some of us already know & practice these skills are are networking while passing them on to future generations of WHITE Southern children. Please don’t marginalize our efforts Hunter.

          • The Jewish Illuminati and their cult of MODERNITY have done quite a bit to divorce us from who we are through the cult of BEING MODERN. When my Dad was born in Eastern Kentucky in 1945 Kentucky wasn’t outside the towns much different than it had been in 1845, people using the same old time work techniques and fewer still having electricity. Everyone had multiple children and an entire network of 1st, 2nd 3rd cousins all around to help you out.

          • By 1955 this was largely ending. The coal mines mechanized sending thousands North to OH, IN, MI to escape starvation, as most of the mine workers who lived in mine camps or mine towns had barely enough ground to grow anything. The young men began following suit and of course when they showed up DOWN HOME in a brand new car and a new store bought suit everyone wanted that.

    • The progs rely on the system for their power, but they are undercutting and destroying it as fast as they can. The average prog would be happy to see people like us and our children killed or tortured, as long as they can order it done and not get their hands dirty, or have to see it. My own sense is that we are in the early stages of system failure right now.

      At the same time, there are damned few tough whipcord thin young men willing and able to take up arms, and even fewer fit to lead them, and that’s true everywhere in Amerika. There are a fair number of adult men who enjoy playing dressup.

      I can’t believe that reality won’t win in the end, but the process may well be long and squalid.

      .

      • I pray Trump wins but if Hillary wins we will go on with the rest of the plan there can be no turning back now for the WHITE RIGHT not ALT RIGHT. The die is cast and Helter Skelter was declared by the Jewish Elite against us. Hillary wont stop the inevitible and that is total destruction. Its coming regardless. Only reason I support Trump is the total destruction may be less harsh under Trump while under Clinton it will be the lowest level of Hell for all of us

  2. Fine article

    The answer you are looking for in the end is the rhetorical phrase “Freedom” you we or whomever wants our freedom from them, they want to enslave or genocide us but the word “freedom” short circuits all the lame arguments of theirs and takes us off being defensive over our usual arguments

    • Hunter you nailed it I been telling people this election is Trump vs Kaine as much as Trump vs Hillary because Hillary will not make it 4 years even if elected. I doubt she makes it a year unless her body double is killed and give her the needed body parts

  3. Not too shabby, but in either scenario we are off for difficult times. Short-term with Trump yet bigger and worse consequences long-term with Clinton. I think it is wise to choose the former.

  4. What happens if Trump gets 50% of the vote? I know it is unlikely but Hillary is unlikable and Johnson is making a fool of himself at every turn. Stein is irrelevant though she takes votes from Hillary.

  5. Secession cant and needn’t happen overnight, but should Trump fall short it is imperative that the alt right go into full secession mode. Anyone trying to Take Back America in that scenario is not a fellow traveler.

    Should Trump win, then we Build The Wall and Deport Illegal Immigrants using any means necessary, including executive fiat and ignoring the courts. We provoke the anti white hordes to further outbursts, and leverage that to Deport Them All.

  6. The Federal Empire needs to break up into around half a dozen or so smaller revolutionary White republics. I think that is going to eventually happen.

  7. Maybe not entirely off-topic …

    On the map below, the yellow dots mark the hometowns, so to speak, of the three members of Pistol Annies, the female country-music group. Though only two of those places are even somewhat near each other, each of the three, as you see, is in the red-colored territory that is “the South,” as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau.

    For the record, the locations are:

    Beauty, Kentucky, which is near Hatfield and McCoy territory and was the hometown of Angaleena Presley.

    Knoxville, Tennessee, which was the hometown of Ashley Monroe.

    Lindale, Texas, which was the hometown of Miranda Lambert (who was born in Longview, Texas, about forty-five miles east of Lindale).

    The image below the map is Dixie meets Sex and the City. It’s the cover of the Pistol Annies debut album, “Hell on Heels,” which was released in 2011.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f07f2fb530120782896db17338c349090bb8e99a871af650907aa5b4ec22cff9.jpg

      • Oh, yes–maybe you’ve brought that to my attention before, James. With my very-limited knowledge of U.S. history, I have no real sense of the geography of North and South. From comments I’ve encountered at this website, over the years, I do have a sense that there’s a kind of informal dispute over Missouri’s status–North or South, that is–but that fact, as you see, doesn’t lodge in my mind. Anyway, I thought it interesting that these girls from locales that are not adjacent had something in common, something that let them come together as that trio. It just seems to fit with the idea that there is something we could call Southern-ness, something that is common to the persons who live throughout “the South” (including, I’m prepared to grant, Missouri).

        • I see your cultural point Mr B. Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee are the seed states that provided the settlers to the part of Texas in which Lindale is located. To Missouri, too. For instance, Dennis Weaver is from Missouri. His accent in Gunsmoke is not fake. Listen to Harry S. Truman’s accent, too. Another Missouri man.

          • Below, James, is an image that seems to me to touch, somewhat indirectly, on this same subject, of a widespread “Southern-ness.” Coming from the heart of the hippie days, as well as the heart of my high-school years (1967-71), it’s the cover of “Home,” a 1969 album by the duo Delaney & Bonnie. Recently, when that duo came back into my mind, I encountered that cover, which I’m pretty sure I didn’t see at the time the album was released.

            Just as the Pistol Annies seem to have met in Nashville, Delaney and Bonnie, it turns out, met in Los Angeles. Their hometowns turn out to have been …

            Pontotoc, Mississippi, which lies between Oxford and Tupelo in that state.

            Alton, Illinois.

            Technically, as you see, Bonnie–who was the one from Alton–was a Northerner, but I wonder whether she had some Southern-ness that led her and the Southern-born Delaney to get married just a week after they met. Located on the Mississippi River, across from St. Louis, Alton is not unconnected to the South, historically. Besides having been the site of the final Lincoln-Douglas debate; it was a haunt of abolitionists and slave-catchers, all of whom were alert to the presence there of slaves who would escape from, yes, Missouri. The abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy was killed by a mob there, in the 1830s.

            Coincidentally, I recently saved, to my internet-browser’s “Favorites,” the page with the “Little Dixie” map you linked. That, I’m pretty sure, was the home turf of Jesse James, whose banditry seems to have been an extension of the Civil War. Missouri’s most-significant figure of the middle nineteenth-century must be Mark Twain, who seems to have been uniquely poised, mentally, with an understanding of both North and South.

            After I read your comments about Dennis Weaver and Harry Truman, I went to YouTube, to check their voices. As I listened to Truman’s atom-bomb speech, I thought he did have something like a Southern accent, though I’m not sure I would have thought of it as such if you hadn’t mentioned it to me. In a later-life interview, at YouTube, Dennis Weaver seemed to have almost no trace of the accent he’d had on “Gunsmoke.” Though I happen never to have watched that show, I was familiar with Weaver’s twangy cry of “Mr. Dillon.” Never did I consider whether his accent was genuine.

            Within the past few weeks, as I heard rock-and-roll referred to as “real country music that just drives along,” I was reminded of our recent exchange about the impact of Southern music. The reference is in “Move It,” a record that was released in 1958 by the English group Cliff Richard and the Drifters. A contender for the title of first British rock-and-roll number, it was written by the London-born Ian Samwell, who was a member of the group. The following section, which, I gather, was added by Samwell decades later, offers Southern imagery:

            “It’s all over town—there’s a brand new beat
            It’s a-hangin’ in the air like a Mississippi heat
            There were fireflies in the night an’ bullfrogs croakin’
            Here comes the train, an’ boy is she smokin’
            Headed out from New Orleans, clear to L.A.
            You better get ready—it’s a brand new day.”

            Final note:

            As I look now at that Delaney & Bonnie album, I’m struck by its “authenticity,” which rivaled the psychedelic as an aesthetic of rock-album covers in that period. (See, e.g., “Crosby, Stills & Nash,” by the group of that name, or “Sweet Baby James” and “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon,” by James Taylor.) Back in my high school days, when I would have considered a cute, hippie-ish chick like Bonnie a fine ornament, it would not have occurred to me that such authenticity actually was authentic. The home on the cover of “Home” actually was Delaney’s home, the log cabin where he grew up. I don’t know whether such unpainted abodes are any longer to be found in the South, but the older man there, in the photograph, is authentic, too. He’s Delaney’s grandfather.

            Anyway, don’t worry about responding to the present long comment. It’s just things that have come into my mind as you, I, and others here, at Occidental Dissent, have discussed these subjects. In case you want to hear Southern music as played by Englishmen, I’m including a link to “Move It.”

            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/56e5093d4aa94af7f9b7dbb87ae182b6702a3ceafea9b9da75defc0f098bbff3.jpg

      • You can toss Indiana in too, I see lot’s of confederate flags when I take the state highways through small towns off the Interstates.

      • I have seen all manner of these maps. I have seen them that leave off Missouri and West Virginia, I have seen them that include them and leave off Maryland, I have even seen the strictly 11 state map. Personally I prefer the 13 but I would color the territories differently like with stripes, to denote the occupied territories. Arizona is an occupied territory, Maryland is an occupied territory and a few other places are occupied territories.

  8. FYI – apparently Russia blew up an Israeli/American (same thing as Israeli silly me)/Saudi secret ISIS installation yesterday. The final putsch for Aleppo is on. Why not? Every-one is distracted by Charlotte, and Will Hillary Drop Dead on Monday Night?

  9. I understand that Trump is putting Bill’s mistresses front row at debate.

    Was at a concert tonight. DJ and performers etc full blown panic about Hilary and debate.

  10. I predict that Trump will be a let down and people will lose confidence in populism. They’ll then turn to alienation, which is the real threat to the system. Kind of the opposite of what you think. I prefer Trump vs Clinton only because I think Clinton is actually dumb enough to make a no fly zone in Syria and because I want populism to be tested and either fail or succeed (paving the way for system changing ideas). I certainly don’t think Trump is sincere in much of what he says.

  11. I predict that Trump will be a let down and people will lose confidence in populism. They’ll then turn to alienation, which is the real threat to the system. Kind of the opposite of what you think. I prefer Trump vs Clinton only because I think Clinton is actually dumb enough to make a no fly zone in Syria and because I want populism to be tested and either fail or succeed (paving the way for system changing ideas). I certainly don’t think Trump is sincere in much of what he says. Even if he is, he faces systemic obstacles which will become obvious. It will become obvious that having a leader represent “the people” isn’t going to cut it, the system has to change in the way it is engineered. The very system of Government we have has to be questioned (the three branches, state, federal etc., defensive of free market).

  12. Trump says he’s against ISIS but he sure does LOVE the country of Israel which owns-and-controls ISIS. Trump says he’s all for Putin defeating ISIS in Syria while simultaneously Trump fully supports the country of Israel which owns and controls ISIS. The government of Israel wants ISIS which the government of Israel owns and controls to win in Syria ; Trump says he’s opposed to ISIS, yet he fully supports the government of Israel which owns and controls ISIS while he also supports, or says he supports, Putin who is fighting ISIS which is owned and controlled by Israel. Some cognitive dissonance going on in Trump’s mind, to say the least.

    Compared to Hillary, Trump is preferable, but that doesn’t mean he’s that wonderful. He’s not that wonderful, and don’t expect too much from him, as the messages we’re getting from him are too cognitive dissonant.

  13. Somehow I missed reading this article when it was first posted. Excellent work.

    Examining the two different possibilities and how to gain from them is exactly what we should be doing right now. We cannot predict everything and some predictions may turn out to be wrong, but most of these predictions are probably right on. I don’t believe Hillary winning will give us instant secession either, but it will bring us a lot closer to that point.

    Whether Trump or Hillary wins, our views will soon be more mainstream conversation than what they have been. With a Hillary win, it will be more push for secession where with a Trump win there will be less support for secession and more for race realism/generic altright. Trump will not MAGA unless he does some kind of major, major, major racial purges (far beyond deporting illegals), and race based immigration reform, or simply a ban on all immigration. Unlikely he will go that far.

    This article definitely merits becoming a series.

  14. In the beginning of a Trump Presidency, his effectiveness may involve intimidating, ignoring, and inveighing against Con-grass. I’m Ok with that. Re-structuring is a latter calendar item: TERM LIMITS FOR ALL, INCLUDING JUDGES.

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