SECURE THE BAG
We’ve made it to Missouri.
It is going to be an interesting few days. While I am up here, we’re going to explore Little Dixie in the Missouri River Valley and tomorrow we are going to take our son out to western Missouri on a family trip to check out the birthplace of Jesse James.
My wife’s side of the family is from Missouri. This part of Missouri was colonized by Southerners from Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia before the War Between the States. In the 21st century, Missouri has an identity crisis and it has a lot to do with what happened here after the war.
As I have explained on this blog, I am a Southern Lutheran. There are virtually no Lutherans in Alabama in the Deep South where I am from, but here in Missouri the Anglo-Celtic South and the Germanic Lutheran Midwest meet and intersect. We have yet to get our son a DNA test and it will be interesting to see whether he takes after the English or the German side of his family more.
I married into a Lutheran family in 2013 and converted several years ago. My wife is from the St. Louis area and has both German and Anglo-Celtic ancestry. Back in 2015, we celebrated Confederate Memorial Day here and went to check out the Confederate monument in Forest Park in St. Louis:
OD CELEBRATES CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL DAY 2015
MISSOURI SEEN THROUGH THE LENS OF CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY
SLAVERY IN THE MISSOURI RIVER VALLEY, 1860
LITTLE DIXIE IN MISSOURI
Jesse James was the Robin Hood of Missouri.
He came of age in the maelstrom of violence that was the War Between the States which kicked off in the 1850s in Bleeding Kansas in the Kansas-Missouri Border War. Quite honestly, the War Between the States began in Little Dixie and some of the most savage guerrilla warfare between Confederate partisans and Union forces took place here. During the war, there were only more battles in Virginia and Tennessee between Union and Confederate forces than Missouri.
Jesse James fought with Bloody Bill Anderson in Missouri during the War Between the States. Frank James rode with Quantrill’s Raiders and participated in the Sack of Lawrence. The fighting was so intense in Little Dixie that Union General Thomas Ewing, Jr. issued General Order No.11 which ordered the ethnic cleansing of Jackson, Bates, Cass and Vernon County, MO of pro-Confederate White Southerners. After the war during Reconstruction, pro-Confederates were disenfranchised in Missouri like they were elsewhere in the South and many lost their land to pro-Union German farmers in Little Dixie.
The war didn’t end in 1865 for Jesse and Frank James. Over the next 11 years, the James Gang became legendary in the United States for a series of high profile robberies of banks, railroads and stagecoaches. The James Brothers saw themselves as freedom fighters who were avenging the South’s defeat in the War Between the States by targeting both their former enemies like former carpetbagger Gov. Adelbert Ames of Mississippi in the Northfield, Minnesota raid as well as hated symbols of the new Northern-controlled order of industrial free-market capitalism – the banks, stagecoaches and railroads – that were being imposed on the defeated South during the Reconstruction era.
joking/not joking Stonewall knew what the “Civil War” was really about
The James Gang never robbed the rich to give to the poor, but like Robin Hood in Medieval England they struck back at the Republican Party on behalf of the dispossessed White Southern Democrat farmers of Missouri. 150 years later, we in the Yang Gang find ourselves in a similar situation with the Republican Party during the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the emerging age of artificial intelligence.
THE GILDED AGE
Just as the rise of Free Society and its economic order of industrial free-market capitalism replaced Slave Society and its economic order of agrarian humane capitalism in the 1860s, now it is Blompf and the Republican Party and the free-market capitalist “Goldilocks” economy (Chief Economic Adviser Larry Kudlow’s pet phrase for it) of the 2010s presiding over the silent killer of automation destroying working class and middle class jobs which is being driven by deep learning AI. Similarly, we are living through a new Gilded Age in which a tiny handful of tech oligarchs like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg – all of whom benefit from the tax cuts and deregulation mandated by conservative economics – are vacuuming up all the profits at the expense of the great majority of Americans.
History has come full circle. After decades of neoliberal economics, we’ve returned to the Gilded Age in the 21st century. We’ve also returned to two movements which were a response to the raging social inequality and loss of social cohesion of that era: rural populism and urban progressivism.
Note: The rise of anarchist violence was also a feature of that era. It was an anarchist who assassinated President William McKinley in 1901.
JESSE JAMES HAD HIS REVENGE
HAND OVER THE BAGS, BEZOS – YANG GANG
JESSE JAMES WAS KNOWN FOR SECURING THE BAG
Have fun. Road trips are always enjoyable.
And here is today’s reminder that Lolbertarianism cares more about saving money than public health. Today’s dispatch comes from Reason – and it argues that dealing with asbestos is just not worth the time or money:
“The researchers estimate that nationwide asbestos abatement costs could reach $150 billion. “What is being done in renovating a lot of public buildings makes no sense from a medical, biological, or environmental standpoint,” said J. Bernard Gee, of the Yale University School of Medicine. “In our judgment, it’s a monumental waste of money.””
—- Jacob Sullum
LMAO.
If these people had it their way, where would we be now?
Yep. Many of us wouldn’t be here at all – or maybe we’d just be retarded due to dangerous chemicals entering our mother’s bloodstream.
Some of their beliefs would be amusing as long as they never actually get to enforce them. Like that guy who ran to Gary Johnson’s right on a campaign to give driver licenses to people who fail eye exams.
We need to secure “the bag” from the ground up, TAKING IT OURSELVES instead of having it HANDED TO US from the TOP DOWN.
Thats SOFT SLAVERY, SIR.
Jesse James did not take a social bribe, he was TAKING BACK WHAT HAD BEEN USURPED FROM HIS PEOPLE BY FORCE.
BIG DIFFERENCE IN HOW THE “BAG” GOT SECURED, BRAD.
I know the reply..” You can’t do that in today’s world.”..
YES YOU CAN. ITS THE MINDSET, NOT THE METHOD.
Its being done every day by serious political groups all over the world.
If I’m not mistaken, Jesse James’gang was the first to EVER ROB A TRAIN…
I think at the time, trains were cutting edge technology and were considered “unrobbable” due to the speed and weight…
Jesse never got that news, though…
And he sure didn’t wait on Gov. Crittendon or the railroad owners to pay him $1,000/mo to go away and leave them alone.
Nor would he have trusted any sort of offer like that to begin with, if out of nothing more than pride if not prudence.
Yes, it is a lot easier to secure the bag for everybody by simply voting for it rather than for yourself and your comrades through violence.
Not advocating violence before its’ time. Not at all. I am merely illustrating the difference in the mindset of taking it proactively versus taking a payout from slavemasters to not revolt.
The analogy was in the seeming impossibility of James’ undertakings, not suggesting anyone should rob a train. Get serious.
I’m just pointing out the difference between an ineffective tactic (violence) and an effective one (persuasion).
And as far as “EASIER”,..Yes, it is easier to vote.
There are all kinds of proverbs and negative things to be said about THAT, sir.
“Men and water choose the path of least resistance, so you have crooked rivers and crooked men.”
YOU take the easy way, …I’ll meet you on the other side.
Besides, YOU’RE the one who brought up Jesse James and his “securing of the bag”, sir…
Yes, the story of Jesse James ended badly.
By the 1880s, Missouri politics had changed and he had alienated his ex-Confederate allies. He was shot in the back by one of his own gang members at the behest of the conservative governor.
You do know that regular citizens nearly annihilated the James-Younger gang in 1876 in Northfield, MN, right? So securing the bag through violent means tends to not work out so well.
Fighting the good fight requires a sacrifice on the part of the combatant. It means the finer things of life are set aside to correct an injustice or social malady. It means WORK.
THAT is how we “SECURE THE BAG”.
WE ROLL UP OUR SLEEVES AND WORK.
And workTOGETHER!
National Socialist Germany did just that.
And until the ZOG golem arose, they did VERY well…
We MUST do the same. The only thing we own is what we work and fight for and are willing to defend to the death. And that’s IT.
Frank James stated “Robbing trains is hard work and not for layabouts.”
So true…
Why are you so focused on National Socialist Germany?
As I have shown, there was a lot of things that Hitler was doing in Germany which were really no different than what we did here during the New Deal. Most Western countries rejected free-market capitalism during the Great Depression and shifted toward a mixed economy.
Because the Nazis had a blood-and-soil spirit along with their economic policies that lit a fire in the hearts of men.
“Economic policies” have no power to inspire. They do not move men to heroism or to loyalty to their people and heritage — which collectively make up their “nation.”
Any ideology based solely on “the bag” is doomed the second someone else offers “a bigger bag.”
An economic policy can be useful. Immensely useful. But it does not provide men with a sense of purpose, of mission. Without a sense of national purpose and mission, people see no reason for their nation or posterity to survive. They become fatally indifferent.
What you get from the New Deal and belief in nothing more than “a mixed economy” is what we have now. Social disintegration in which nobody really cares to bestir themselves to stop the advance of other peoples who still have a sense of collective purpose and identity. You get people with no backbone, no collective will to survive and thrive.
This is why cuckservatism lost. The cuckservatives gave the people nothing to believe in. The Left has given people plenty to believe in. Sure, all of it’s destructive of their own race and nation and country, but it still gives them a sense of mission and purpose beyond stuffing their gut and belching.
This is a pure bugman position. Like the cuckservatives, “baggism” is a losing proposition that is no basis for re-inspiring a nation to survive. There is nothing in this approach to appeal to people more than anything the Left has to offer. Less, actually — they offer BOTH money and virtue signaling, which is a type of purpose even if it’s ultimately suicidal, whereas this new identity-free baggism has nothing to offer but money and a limp absence of purpose.
That’s why the other side has all the ardor.
No man’s heart is filled with sacred purpose by stock options.
No nation started, and survived for many generations, based on an economy. It requires what we’ll call spirituality of some kind to inspire it.
And that’s why the gun issue is probably the only thing that has inspired people on the Right. Because it’s not solely about “secure the bag” — it’s about retaining status, masculinity, and power.
The one issue that has produced fire in the heart, real zeal and ardor, on the American “right” (such as it is) has nothing to do with making or less money, but about intangible things — being free, and strong — being a member of the warband, being a mastiff and not a tame, domesticated, submissive, helpless sheep.
The fact that you can’t see the difference between the National Socialists and the New Deal is a straight-out bugman perspective.
Focusing on economics as the sole, or even main, backbone of your “culture” is a weak and failing strategy. Cuckservative, which conserved nothing — except for guns, which are NOT an economic issue, the exception proving the rule — is the poster child for the futility of an identity-free bow-tie baggist approach.
“The fact that you can’t see the difference between the National Socialists and the New Deal is a straight-out bugman perspective.”
In terms of both their economic and environmental policies, there were a lot of similarities between the New Deal in the United States and Germany under the Third Reich. Actually, there were a lot of similarities all over the West, not simply in Germany, because lots of nations began to move toward a more mixed economy and away from 19th century liberalism in this era.
BTW, Nazi Germany’s racial policies were inspired by its American antecedents.
It was Americans like Madison Grant who had popularized Nordicism and racial science. It was the United States that had passed eugenic sterilization laws in dozens of states before Nazi Germany. It was Virginia which passed the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 that established the one drop rule.
It was the United States that was racially segregated at the time and had an immigration policy designed to favor the Nordics while screening out anarchists and feeble-minded idiots. It was the United States that had secured “lebensraum” in the West through the Louisiana Purchase and Indian Removal. In the 1920s, the Klan was a mass organization in the United States and there were dozens of men in Congress that explicitly defended “white supremacy.”
From the perspective of the 1930s, the Nazis were seen primarily as a bunch of upstarts who were a threat to the dominant British led international order.
I’d say you hit the nail there, Ironsides. Our problems go way beyond economics, to say the least. There has to be a purpose, a unifier, a goal.
Ultimately, I think it does come down to economics.
Here’s why: if there was enough money in the world and it was distributed more equally, then the current system of wage slavery and political correctness would collapse and everyone would have the ability to live wherever they wanted. In such a world, we would naturally resegregate because fewer and fewer people would work in a post-scarcity economy. Cosmopolitan people would sort with other cosmopolitan people. Ethnocentric people would sort with other ethnocentric people.
It is free-market capitalism which has destroyed the social fabric. In order to see this, you have to take a widescreen view and look at how capitalism has evolved from the very beginning of the Early Modern Era down to our times. In the Middle Ages, Europe was racially and culturally homogeneous. It was the rise of free-market capitalism which began to change this. It is what made the New World such a racially diverse place. It is what has demolished the culture that gave birth to it.
The culture that we have today exists on top of our economy and environment. If you began to change the two things that underpin our current culture, then you will change the culture. For example, if everyone was guaranteed an income of $1,000 a month and $100 to spend every election cycle to counter the influence of big donors, then political correctness would be severely undermined and the control of the current MIGA oligarchy over our politics would be severely weakened.
You’re absolutely spot-on right. Thank you for such an eloquent and thorough defense of that historically ignorant question. Why indeed…
The nation should be a natural extension of the family, and conversely the family should be a microcosm of the nation, ideally. As it goes in one, so it goes in the other realm.
We in American Dumbocracy are so far removed from good side of that model its pathetic.
America is not and has not been that “family” EVER.
Anyone who says so is lying or deluded.
The closest we had to that model on a national level WAS the Confederacy. The closest thing that STILL EXISTS TODAY would be the Amish or the Mennonites, but their existence is more like a cultural preserve than a nation.
They are impotent like the Indian Nations have become.
Somewhat self-sufficient, but politically impotent nonetheless.
I, for one, do not wish my progeny to be confined to an open-air human zoo to be gawked at by muddy brown tourists “checkin’ out da wipepo..”
I want them to flourish and be strong and content in their lives, with faith and power.
And they will…
The USA is plagued by a failed paradigm – liberal democracy and free-market capitalism – that is currently in the process of breaking down. The South was different from the rest of the United States. The institution of slavery caused it to emulate Greece and Rome. After the war, it became poor as shit and it has gradually grown wealthy in the Sunbelt era, although federal military spending has a lot more to do with that than conservatives and lolbertarians would ever acknowledge.
“In the 21st century, Missouri has an identity crisis and it has a lot to do with what happened here after the war.”
It did back in the 80’s, too.
A friend of mine was from Missouri. He wore his Confederate gear to school, like everybody else did in high school in those days. His sister was a a year or two ahead of us and kept insisting that she was a Yankee.
She wasn’t. But you couldn’t convince her otherwise.
A lot of people here in North Texas are descended from the diaspora that left Missouri during and after the war.
The state government of Missouri went into exile in Marshall, Texas in 1861.
An interesting history piece, Hunter. I commented a tad on this in the 10th chapter of *Rethinking The Propositions*, where I quoted James’ acquaintance and distinguished Confederate son of Missouri Cole Younger. Cole knew that the state’s corporations were an extension of the state, hence his post-war career.
So its all about economics, Brad? Are you SERIOUS?!
Thats Marxist at its core. That was his biggest flaw in theory,..basing everything around economics. Thats also a very Judaic mindset.
Your comments today have put you in a new light, Mr. Griffin. I thought you were a little more rooted than what your opinions reveal.
Still friendly to you as a fellow Southerner, but thats about all I can muster for the moment.
No, it simply true that the environment and economics underpins the social order.
Let me give you an obvious example: the tobacco plantations of the Virginia Chesapeake as well as chattel slavery was made possible by the sub-tropical climate of the Tidewater, the multiple rivers which made transportation so easy and the profitability of tobacco as a commodity which was exported back to England and other European markets. The social order that organically grew out of the Virginia Tidewater by 18th century was made possible by chattel slavery and cash crop agriculture.
New England had a totally different social and economic system. The plantation complex never took root there because the environment of New England was incapable of sustaining cash crop agriculture whether it was grain in the Middle Colonies, tobacco in the Chesapeake, rice in South Carolina or sugar in the Caribbean.
It seems to me that some people are addicted to nostalgia and simply wish they could conjure whatever dead regime they are so fond of back into existence in the United States of 2019 through sheer force of wishful thinking. In order to do so, they have to ignore all the time that has passed since then, how our culture has changed, how the economy has changed, etc. They want to jump straight into politics while ignoring everything that Aristotle correctly pointed out is the foundation of politics.
Hunter,
Porter is simply making the point that Historical Materialism is the foundation of Marxist doctrine. Marx’s view was that the form of the social order was based on the means of production. All in Das Kapital, if you can bear to read that turgid book.
So what you have just described follows Marx.
I happen to think that there is a little truth in this. But I would take it further, as I believe Mr Porter would.
In the hypothetical case of say, the Chinese running the plantation system in the South, an observer would note many TECHNICAL similarities because of the environment you described.
But the fundamental characteristics of White and Chinese “Southern” societies would still be entirely different.
Culture trumps economics every time. That’s why Americans are so stressed out. Economics must fit the culture and at the moment it does not.
I’ve read Marx.
I have also read Friedrich List and Ha-Joon Chang and lots other economists who adhere to the German Historical School of Economics. It was Pat Buchanan who first got me interested in the subject. In my study of Southern culture, it is crystal clear to me that the economy and the environment interacted with inherited cultural patterns to generate the social order.
Want another example? Until recently, Florida was the smallest Southern state. The Florida Peninsula was a frontier that was settled after much of the West. The invention of the air conditioner utterly transformed the state of Florida in the mid-20th century and was responsible for making it what is today which is one of the largest states in the country. The same was true of the eradication of endemic tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever in Florida.
At the onset of Lincoln’s war Missourians wanted to stay neutral and not secede from the Union and did not want to fight their fellow southern states.
Lincoln called for Missouri’s Governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson to supply the Union with it’s share of the 75,000 that Lincoln had called for. Fox refused and soon the Union sent it’s army to expel the elected government of Missouri and send it into exile.
The government in exile later voted to secede while in Neosho , Missouri .