White Privilege | Always Question Authority

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Memphis, on the eve of the Civil War, was one of the biggest slave markets in the South. After the war the city was an epicenter for Ku Klux Klan terror that included lynching, the nighttime burning of black churches and schools and the killing of black leaders and their white supporters, atrocities that continued into the 20th century. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

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[Black journalist Ida B. Wells] investigations revealed that lynching was fundamentally a mechanism to rid white businessmen of black competitors. . . . [T]he lynching[s], she wrote, was “[a]n excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down.’”

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The steady rise of ethnic nationalism over the past decade, the replacing of history with mendacious and sanitized versions of lost glory, is part of the moral decay that infects a dying culture. It is a frightening attempt, by those who are desperate and trapped, to escape through invented history their despair, impoverishment and hopelessness. It breeds intolerance and eventually violence. Violence becomes in this perverted belief system a cleansing agent, a way to restore a lost world. There are ample historical records that disprove the myths espoused by the neo-Confederates, who insist the Civil War was not about slavery but states’ rights and the protection of traditional Christianity.

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Sorry, gun nuts, you’re on the wrong side of our Founding Fathers.

For example, in a tirade against CNN’s Piers Morgan, Alex Jones argued, “The Second Amendment isn’t there for duck hunting. It’s there to protect us from tyrannical government.”

It’s an argument that’s often echoed by gun nuts – as though their fully-loaded AR-15 with 100-bullet drum will keep them safe from Predator drones and cruise missiles. If indeed this is the true intent of the 2nd Amendment, protection from the government, then here’s the newsflash: you guys are woefully outgunned. And the 2nd Amendment would have allowed you to own a cannon and a warship, so America today would look more like Somalia today with well-armed warlords running their own little fiefdoms in defiance of the federal government.

But luckily, this was never the intent of the 2nd Amendment. Our Founding Fathers never imagined a well-armed citizenry to keep the American government itself in check. It was all about protecting the American government from both foreign and domestic threats.

Poring over the first-hand documents from 1789 that detailed the Fist Congress’ debate on arms and militia, you’ll see a constant theme: the 2nd Amendment was created to protect the American government.

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