Nikki and the Madman
by Paul H. Yarbrough (February 2024)
Recently on a Fox News program, The Five, one of the regulars, Judge Pirro, was launching her rapid-fire boisterous opinion regarding Republican candidate at the time Nikki Haley. At the time Haley was only a few days past her “controversial” comment that: “The ‘Civil War’ was not about slavery.” The verbal assault by Pirro was criticism of Haley’s weak showing against Donald Trump in the New Hampshire primary. “Even a third-grader could have answered,” was Pirro’s stated condemnation of Haley.
Pirro probably was a typical non-Socratic (back door affirmative action) female law school student. But who knows anymore with the millions of attorneys who mostly are poseurs and half-baked students of the law? Most attorneys today, I suspect could not pass a simple ten-point test my peers and I had to pass on the Constitution when we were freshmen in high school. Forget Socratic methodology.
The Fox viewers were left with the suggestion (demandingly) that Haley was childish in her views. Each of the other participants seemed to nod in agreement with the Judge, i.e. slavery indeed did cause the war! Regularly this sentiment is flashed about our happy land without any concept as to how such an idiotic action could happen.
So how could it be that the “five” concurred? They probably have been subject to the same public education and consequently, public view that most of their Yankee cohorts have. Probably they believe such nonsense because they believe their own press and have read such nonsense as television history rather than studying from skilled history teachers of the arts and humanities.
Just look at what passes on television and online for history experts. The socks far outweigh the buskins (the real experts will understand this point).
The same can be said of the squalid halls of the universities with their “tenure” system which supports educated flaks, fools, and frequently downright liars. Difficult to determine socks from buskins with this bunch.
Too scathing? Too abrasive? Really? Those whom I scathe are the same jerks who with a straight face will tell you that your children should be allowed to “change their sex surgically,” or men can marry men and women can marry women. NO insult is too scathing or abrasive for such a class or sort. They promote plenty of other lunacies, to be sure, but that trans-surgery business puts them in the Frankenstein-creep academic thuggery room alone.
To be honest, I doubt Haley knows any more than any other conservative pretenders know about what that often erroneously called “Civil War” was fought for. That sobriquet Civil War should tell you something about her absence of knowledge of wars and insurrections; but then it was a madman (you know who) who suctioned life into that erroneous term in order to bring a New England Yankee war onto one of the greatest civilizations in world history—the American South.
Yes, the American South. The people and culture who did not own people as souls but possessed them via circumstances of the contemporary times, times that would become history and judged in the past by mendacious “Republicans” (not “republicans”) from the North and in the present by the contemporary presentists, whose sanctimony would shame 19th-century liberals like Dickens or Lord Acton. The same American South that the Yankee slavers (Biblically called man-stealers) became wealthy from, via the New England Yankee slave-trade’s chattel and their work product from the South that built Northern textile mills. That is, the Yankees made money on the front end and the back end of the slave while the South in the interim at least provided labor, food clothing, and shelter to him (and to that end only 10-15% of Southerners possessed slaves).
And for the record, not being locked up, unless being criminals, the only thing preventing the slaves from walking away was they had to walk North to be free but the North didn’t want them. The madman and his friends were clear on the worth to them of the Negro in the 19th century.
More than once the madman pointed out the inferiority of the Negro relative to Caucasians.
So, with such a madman leader what would one expect? He even lied (or was indeed mad) when he referred to the states as a “Nation” in 1776 in his grand address over the bodies of several thousand men of both blue and gray; an address that modern Democrats and Republicans would add as a 67th book to the King James Bible if they could—believing themselves gods themselves.
An address that H.L. Mencken scorned (remarkedly well) as no more than mendacious poetic drivel.*
So, a war to save a nation from being a union (which its members no longer wanted) was fought to “free” slaves who for the most part could have walked away, unless they were in jail.
This lie was no accident, and has survived like a disease, until this very day—a Nation! Not a Union. Karl Marx, the political Doctor Kevorkian of the day, reveled in the blessing of Lincoln’s victory that the young western hemispherical republican union (he called a nation), one that had only a few years earlier lived under the epithet of “The Era of Good Feeling” so-named for essentially the absence of political partisans during the period. Marx wrote of his thrill to the madman. He and the madman exchanged letters frequently in 1865.
So, what was Haley’s strategy? Had she learned the truth? Or was she taking a chance on gaining some support from South Carolina’s gray souls who knew that the flag of the Cross of St. Andrew was honorable and the online and television “teachers” were phonies and the universities had allowed them to graduate gloriously with a universal education. Who knows?
And today the descendants of Karl and the madman revel in the national state conquering the republic union that is now The Deep State. And that—THAT, is what the war was “about.”
And a P.S. to Al Sharpton, Shelia Jackson Lee, Jesse Jackson et al: If you want reparations, try tracking down the African tribal leaders who seized and sold their African neighbors to the Yankee and European traders in the first place. Now, there’s a place where civil war was rife.
*But let us not forget that it is oratory, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of every day! The doctrine is simply this: the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination— “that government of the people, by the people, for the people,” should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle an absolutely free people; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and vote of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that vote was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely any freedom at all. Am I the first American to note the fundamental nonsensicality of the Gettysburg address? If so, I plead my aesthetic joy in it in amelioration of the sacrilege. —H.L. Mencken
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Paul H. Yarbrough has written for The Blue State Conservative, NOQ, The Daily Caller, American Thinker, The Abbeville Institute, Lew Rockwell, and more. He is the author of 4 novels: Mississippi Cotton, A Mississippi Whisper, Thy Brother’s Blood, and The Yeller Rose of Texas, in addition to many short stories and poems.
Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast