Richmond: Paradox & Permanence

I once read a travel writer describe Ireland as “mystical and modern, beautiful yet bleak, proud and vulnerable, peaceful yet divided, rich in talent but poor in resources, foreign and friendly.” I think Richmond, Virginia, is such a paradox.

I’m a native Richmonder and have a love-hate relationship with my home of 24 years. Richmond molded me, yet I didn’t even go to my 30th high school reunion in the fall because I find its current state so damned depressing. Brimming with progressive zealots, apathetic Boomers, invaders both foreign and domestic, and quislings as far as the eye can see, it’s a case study in the effects of 100+ years of “New South” reconstruction. As Leslie Alexander succinctly describes my emotion, I feel like a “stranger in a strange land.”

Take Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam, who’s not only a gun-grabbing turncoat, but also a self-loathing Southerner seeking to replace the Robert E. Lee statue in the US Capitol with a Virginian who “would better represent our Commonwealth.” As one option, he suggested Booker T. Washington, who actually is worthy of a monument since the famous orator wasn’t a revenge-filled ingrate. Washington actually sought true peace and reconciliation, just like Robert E. Lee, and unlike Northam and his regime of ancestral ruination.

“Confederate statue critics increasingly argue that the monuments should be torn down because they honor traitors,” explains Philip Leigh. Okay, seems about on par with cultural-Marxist histrionics. But what is mind-blowing is that “Among such advocates is Christy Coleman, CEO of Richmond’s American Civil War Museum.” This is the level of racial-retribution insanity that seems to permeate the Old Dominion capital, from its hipster brew pubs to its cobblestone streets.

Richmond’s Virginia Museum of Fine Arts now displays the social-justice sculpture “Rumors of War” – a comical and “intersectional” version of the exquisite J.E.B. Stuart statue, which was erected on the city’s famous Monument Avenue back in 1907. Talk about cultural appropriation.

In line with the ceaseless penance for and self-flagellation of white folks, Richmond City Council renamed The Boulevard (the historic street that has long been home to a stunning Stonewall Jackson statue at its crossroad with Monument Avenue) Arthur Ashe Boulevard. Richmonders seem to revere the black tennis star as much as they do Saint MLK. But at least Ashe wasn’t a heretic and a commie, like King, so there’s always that.

I could go on. And on. And on.

This is one of the reasons my husband Stephen and I went back and forth all weekend as to whether we should attend VCDL Lobby Day. Our plans literally changed from minute to minute. We both wanted to go. Then neither of us. Then one of us. Then not. Then the other. Then neither one again.

We thought, “Why should we stick our necks out for Richmond, whose people have let the city and state go to hell? We don’t even live in Virginia.”

Ultimately, Stephen did decide to attend the event without me, but with my sister, who is a lifelong Richmonder and a VCDL member. He wanted me to stay back in NC with our sons, just in case something bad happened at the event. No sense in upping the chances of losing two parents to leftist violence.

We kept coming back to the idea that the rally represented a much-needed and long-overdue testing point. Turns out it’s not gay marriage. Or endless wars. Or hate-speech laws and censorship. Or corporate capitalism. Or environmental religiosity. Or high taxes. Or assaults on parental rights a la vaccines or homeschooling.

It’s not illegal and legal immigration. Or abortion. Or LGBT coercion or Drag Queen Story Hour or the normalization of pedophilia. It’s not even satanism. The line in the sand is guns.

We thought that maybe, just maybe the normies who’ve been sleepwalking through the last two years, or two decades, or two centuries will arouse from their liberal slumber. Will the Pledge-reciting, thin-blue-line-cheerleading, military-worshiping, rule-following, Medicare-loving masses wake up?

Will they come to understand that they are as much the archetype as is David Duke? I mean, just being a straight white man is considered violence in 2020. If he tries to assert his rights, it’s intimidation. If he acts masculine, it’s toxic. If he builds coalitions, it’s white nationalism. If he breaks the chains of his master, it’s hate. How dare he challenge the “progress” of dismantling his own culture, his own belief system, and everything he holds dear. Bigot. Now throw some guns and Christianity on top of that, and well, you have the makings of a domestic terrorist.

Will they see that being painfully silent or incessantly disavowing “white supremacists” does no good. It doesn’t matter if you think those people are scoundrels, “racist rioters” who deserve to rot in jail. Or that you are an anti-racist who’s defending everyone’s constitutional rights, a patriot who may even have mixed-race grandchildren and know a gay person or two. No one cares. To the globalists and the malevolent mobs who do their bidding, you’re the same as Richard Spencer.

Will they grasp that in 2020, not practicing identity politics is a suicide pact? Tribalism is applauded for “diverse” peoples, so why not you? Notice that the very same people who are at risk of losing the most – Southern-without-apology folks, traditionalists, conservative Christians, nuclear families, straight white men, law-abiding gun owners, etc. – are typically the only ones who adhere to the “live and let live” mantra. It’s a deep-seated altruism that flows through us normal Americans, but it will also be the death of us if we don’t get real real fast.

Will people see that this is bigger than “muh Constitution” or “USA” chants? After all, my family doesn’t even live in Virginia, but neither does the progressive California professor who federal courts allowed to redraw the Commonwealth’s electoral maps, ensuring permanent Dem domination. Why should elite-appointed “experts” get to have all the fun, and we plebs have to follow all the old rules that leftists smashed to bits in 1865? (Or if that’s too much truth for you to handle, let’s just say 1965 then.)

Take the Sanctuary County movement spreading across Virginia. Philosophically, it’s nullification. “Whensoever the General government assumes undelegated powers … a nullification of the act is the rightful remedy,” wrote Jefferson.

However, 2A-sanctuary is not technically in line with Jeffersonian republicanism. Legally, counties are a creation of the state, and therefore cannot nullify bad law. Constitutionally, states have the right to pass any kind of gun control they want if done through the legislative process. The 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution only applies to the federal government. “Congress shall make no law.” Brion McClanahan explains it well.

But in my opinion, this isn’t about the law; it’s about realpolitik. US 2A or VA Article I, Section 13, it doesn’t matter to me. You’re not getting my guns! Resisting the imperial status quo is the conservative approach.

Plus, when was the last time progressives upheld their oaths of office? When was the last time Congress voted for a war? When was the last time oligarchs had to live by the same laws as the rest of us? When was the last time “the people” told the courts to stick it where the sun don’t shine when the judicial branch legislates? When was the last time the states said, “Hey, feds. All your alphabet-soup agencies are illegal, so we’re not going to play the law game with a bunch of lying law-breakers. No more money for you, Leviathan!”

Don’t like a state law? Nullify the legislation. Don’t like a good guy being railroaded in the courts? Practice jury nullification. Don’t like a federal regulation, act, or executive order? Don’t capitulate. Nullify! Don’t like the corporate media trying to pass fake news as fact? Nullify the leftist narrative! Don’t like the globohomo smut on TV? Nullify Netflix!

We conservatives so often play under the elastic rules of the faulty incorporation doctrine. It’s a like a loose-fitting but still-too-snug noose. When progressives want federal edicts, they rally around the 14th and 15th Amendments with the US Supreme Court always giving aid and comfort. When they want to start the cultural-Marxist ball rolling closer to home, they all of a sudden become ardent states-rights advocates.

As imperial nation-statist Chief Justice John Marshall wrote, “The great object of an incorporation is to bestow the character and properties of individuality on a collective and changing body of men.” Translation: progress as defined by the kritarchy. I say, it’s well past high time to cut the rope.

This is precisely what VCDL did. They went “on the offensive” against the draconian anti-gun bills that affected not only their right of self-defense, but also extended the web of oppression to free speech and corporate censorship. That’s how you attack tyranny of law: never be on the defensive. Never apologize. Never play by the left’s rules. Know your enemy.

This 2A sanctuary movement is growing, even in my neck of the woods, so let’s not get complacent. Don’t listen to the normies who fall back asleep because the rally seemed to be an overwhelmingly peaceful event. Ignore the libertarians who wouldn’t know solidarity if it smacked them upside their objectivist heads. Laugh at social-justice bullies when they call you nasty names. Get teflon about it and empathize when you hear someone maligned as a “white supremacist,” now that you’ve been castigated as one. (Perhaps there aren’t as many “Nazis” running around as the narrative would have you think.) Build networks. Ally with like-minded people. And stay focused. This could be the beginning of something big, y’all.

I agree with Pat Buchanan: Virginia is the front lines of the culture war. It represents secession from leftist degeneracy and destruction, secession from progressive reform and reconstruction, secession from nihilism and identity-less-ness. Richmond was just one battle, but it did put a tiny chink in the globalists’ armor.

Southerners and their conservative compatriots need to continue being a lot more tribalistic and a lot less hospitable to hostile ideas that threaten their hearth and home, the way Italian-Americans do, advises Paul Gottfried. Don’t be afraid. Keep tapping into your rebel roots, like you did today.

Richmond. The place where Patrick Henry gave his revolutionary “Liberty or Death” speech. The site where Henry and other anti-federalists like George Mason railed against the culture-crushing, liberty-usurping potential of the US Constitution, with Mason demanding a Bill of Rights at this Virginia Ratifying Convention which took place a stone’s throw from the Capitol. The city where Thomas Ritchie and Spencer Roane disseminated those same Jeffersonian principles through the Richmond Junto. And the final resting place of Southern heroes, from Jefferson Davis and John Tyler, to James Monroe and George Pickett, to J.E.B. Stuart and my kin A.P. Hill.

Today, VCDL members, Virginians like my sister, and their courageous allies like my husband raised the black flag. Stonewall would be proud. Keep it flying high.

As paleocon stalwart Russell Kirk once opined, Dixie has become “homogeneous with all the rest of the nation,” thus, “its peculiar role as conservator of norm and convention [has been] terminated.” If the South’s “permanence … will have ceased to exist: it will have lost its genius.” After today’s fine stand, maybe Richmond hasn’t lost its genius after all. The paradox still persists, but permanence clings to life. Lord willing, it will grow healthy and strong. Thus always to tyrants.