It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature
I see from Brooks’ blog that Billy Bearden, who not long ago said he would “hope and pray” for the gang rape of a federal judge whose decision he disagreed with, is at it once again. Then we have Carl “Amanda Buncle” Roden, Josephine “Shoot Up Your Kid’s School” Bass — all active voices in the Confederate Heritage™ movement whose violent fantasies bubble up to the surface every now and then.
Also, mark your calendars, it’s just 25 more days before James Montgomery-Ryan says he’s going to make sure “that the yankees [sic.] will be wiped from the earth,” through exile (to where, exactly?) or by firing squad.
It’s easy to point and laugh at silly people like John Hall, who a few months ago worked up the courage to stand for “Dixy” by stabbing a sheet of paper when no one else was around, but underneath it all runs a culture that rewards angry rhetoric and fosters a pathology of violent fantasy, actively abetted by their friends who ignore, defend or explain it away.
These are the Defenders of Southron Honour. Know them for who they are.
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Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
I always wonder if the fact that slavery was (is) based first and foremost on violence, is this casually violent rhetoric a legacy of slavery? This is in no way meant to minimize violence in the North or the American West, of course; but the South does seem somewhat “special” in this way.
We Americans are a pretty violent people generally — North and South, East and West — but traditional southern culture tends to embrace it and ritualize it in a way that other subgroups don’t.
I think part of it has to do with a way of looking at the world that systematized oppression forces on the oppressor. Such regimes always have to be sustained through terror and violence, and the habits of thought required to make such things acceptable corrupt a society in ways big and small. That we’re still dealing with the aftereffects of slavery and Jim Crow at this late date ought to indicate just how deep the rot went.
I’ll leave it to somebody else to figure out why the Confederate Heritage crowd seems to attract so many prize specimens like the ones listed above. I don’t think I’d care to be associated with such a collection of cowards and chuckleheads, but that’s just me.
The pool of hard-core, unreconstructed True Southrons is limited. They take who they can get. And frankly, I don’t think they really find those actions that troubling, so long as they’re directed at people they dislike.
Kirk Lyons is a great example. The more you know about his long, long history of personal and professional affiliations, and the beliefs he’s embraced, the more stunned you’ll be that anyone would willingly be associated with him. And yet, he’s sort of an elder statesman of Confederate Heritage, collecting praise (and donations) from people who willfully ignore his rancid history.
And hopefully, getting more limited by the day. The rhetoric sure seems to have an increasingly desperate edge to it.
“. . . an increasingly desperate edge to it.”
It reflects a profound insecurity. It’s not sufficient that an individual can fly a Confederate flag from his or her home and fill the house with shrines to Nathan Bedford Forrest; there’s a need for public and official validation of that. Thus the freak-out over the removal of flags from the exterior of the chapel at VMFA, which only dated to 1993, and no actual Confederate veteran ever set eyes upon.
I go to a lot of civil rights meetings and no one ever even mentions using violence. If someone did, the crowd would be in shock. It is just weird that this is an acceptable option to discuss among the Heritagers.