Posts Tagged → Tennessee
Hurricane Helene says No Such Thing as White Privilege
“White privilege” may be the most racist thing you will hear anyone say or allege in your lifetime, probably from the most racist people on Planet Earth, white liberal Democrats, but that has not stopped this fake social construction from being pronounced and bandied about like it is actually real.
Well, Mother Nature herself has recently descended from the heavens above to demonstrate that in reality and in the natural world too, there is no such thing as “White privilege.”
In the form of Hurricane Helene last week, Mother Nature inflicted huge devastation and destruction upon eastern Tennessee and northern North Carolina and the regional demographic there. It is a group of people I have had a lot of life experience with and who I maintain intense admiration for, white rural working people.
That there are a lot of white liberal Democrats in Asheville folded into the mix of Hurricane Helene victims does not mitigate or reduce my sympathy or hope for everyone’s full recovery there. Everyone is equal before the law, everyone is created in the image of God, and we are all Americans who should be caring for one another, regardless of our political opinions or religious views.
So Hurricane Helene destroyed billions of dollars in built infrastructure, including homes, towns, villages, farms, rural roads and interstates and bridges and schools and hospitals, stranding hundreds of thousands of largely white rural American citizens without power, water, or food.
And so just to demonstrate that white people can be victims and actually have no racial privilege whatsoever, the federal government response to Hurricane Helene has been… almost silent. Like cavalier and ignoring the huge mess of human misery. Like on purpose.
Recall that to our elites, Appalachian whites are the deplorable, disposable, ignored, maligned, forgotten Americans who nonetheless mine the coal that gives us most of our electricity, serve as the roughnecks on oil and gas drilling platforms that run our vehicles, fill up the special forces and combat infantry positions in our most highly motivated and patriotic high-risk fighting forces, who log the forests that provide us with high grade lumber for our fancy kitchens and furniture, who work for the railroads, and who drive trucks across the interstates that bring Amazon Prime to your home super pronto.
In every one of these professions, these (white, rural) people are taking big risks that almost always exceed their expected financial return. Why? Because they are proud to work hard, and they love America more than they love themselves. And they are devoted to America because there is no other nation anywhere that will give them the same freedom and opportunity.
White rural working people are the people who disproportionately make America work and run and give you, dear reader, the comfortable lifestyle to which you have become all too accustomed. And now that these people need a lot of help to get through this natural catastrophe, it sure appears that they are being abandoned by the same federal government that is simultaneously giving away unlimited taxpayer dollars right and left to border-jumping illegal migrants and to the porous demi-government in Ukraine.
I am hearing mostly consistent reports of aid efforts from acquaintences, friends, and family in Asheville and eastern Tennessee (some of their own photos are below; one of my family members from there is now in a hotel in South Carolina). Last week a friend of mine from Harrisburg loaded up his work van with bottled water and food and drove seven hours to the literal end of the paved road in eastern Tennessee, where he followed signs to a Baptist church. There in the church parking lot he was met with tears of fear and appreciation, and many needy hands as entire families sought shelter there with their sole remaining belongings: Their clothing on their bodies. (Some of his own photos of this are below).
Radio personality Glenn Beck reported his unbelievably negative experience with a sole FEMA crew instructive example of No White Privilege To Be Found Here.
Plenty of political fallout has resulted from apparent Biden-Harris government failure, or even willful blocking of aid efforts. While checking his email at a FEMA post, a partisan leftist Democrat in my family there said this is all politically generated misinformation, but I don’t know if I can accept that. The damning reports and real-time online videos are overwhelming and seem irrefutable, while politically partisan mainstream media outlets appear locked into a defend-Kamala Harris-at-all-costs posture, instead of having their crews on the ground recording what the citizens journalists are capturing.
Tons of on-the-ground reports are pouring out of the region, showing a complete lack of federal interest in helping, and a complicated mix of local territorialism, miscommunication, petty power flexing, and even theft of supplies. And even when the Biden-Harris Administration does speak publicly, they are actually saying sorry, we have no money for your disaster relief.
Because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ALREADY GAVE AWAY all the unsustainable taxpayer money to illegals and the endless war in Ukraine.
Folks, not only was there never any such thing as White privilege, but when there was an opportunity to demonstrate that American Whites get treated at least equally with everyone else, both American citizen of color and illegal border jumper alike, the point is made by our current federal government that American White people come last, if they get any help at all.
Project 2025 & Hawk Tuah Girl
Liberals are not “crazy” or “idiots” or “stupid.” Liberals/ woke/ PC/ Democrats just see the world differently than people who want to survive.
While the political Left is not very religious, it is messianic about the coming role of big government that has to happen for the world to be perfected, in their view. Most leftists decry socialism, and earnestly deny they are socialists, but the policies they want are all socialist. And leftists are OK with or will look the other way from the brutal anti-freedom actions and crushing societal dominoes falling that need to happen for leftist policies to be implemented.
So I don’t think leftists/ Democrats are “crazy” or “idiots.” They just see the world really differently than I do. And I believe that their policies are either overtly communist or are going to naturally usher in communism, which is the end of a free America.
Why leftists/ Democrats think this way is confusing to me. America is a pretty great place to live, the best place, actually. So why screw it all up? As radio host Mark Levin pointed out last year, the Democrat Party is now the party of big government. It sure is NOT the “party of the common man, the little guy.” That ended a long time ago when Silicone Valley, Wall Street, Corporate America, mainstream media, academia, teacher’s unions, federal government, etc all fell into the Democrat Party partisan orbit.
There is no room in that elitist orbit for the common man, the little guy, the electrician or auto worker. His sole role is to work hard, pay taxes, obey the elites’ arbitrary laws and diktats, and feed that hungry constellation of interests with his union dues and taxes.
And I say all this because of not yet meeting one leftist / Democrat (in my entire life) who is able or willing to engage with me in a calm, sustained, analytical discussion about politics or economics. Without fail, the leftists/ Democrats in my family, life circle, work world all quickly become hostile, defensive, begin to yell, and cannot have a civil discussion when their ideas are questioned. They go from a calm 0 to a set-you-on-fire 100 in about twenty seconds.
Probably because Leftists/ Democrats are thinking with their emotions – the exciting feeling release of dopamines when their brains’ neural pathways smoothly flow with the perfect messianic mantra of Democrat Party political words and promises of utopian Nirvana on earth in our lifetimes. If only with higher taxes and less damned freedom in the way. How dare I drop a turd into the punchbowl at their dopamine party and screw everything up that just feels so good with my annoying numbers ‘n stuff?
Something like that.
Again, leftists/ Democrats are not stupid, or dumb, or idiots, they are emotional thinkers uncomfortable with the boring numbers and cold logic of conservatives. These are two ships passing one another in the night, and never the twain shall meet. Except they do tend to meet at Antietam, Gettysburg, Bull Run and let’s not remind ourselves of where this fracture naturally goes and flows.
So when the cold, annoying numbers of “Project 2025” suddenly burst on the national scene, it was the leftists/ Democrats who were the first to chimp out and draw attention to it. Literally no one else in America had heard of Project 2025, most especially the Republicans and conservatives who had their faces smooshed into it by Democrat mainstream media accusations. President Trump plainly said “I have no idea what you are talking about. I have never heard of Project 2025 and no idea what it is.” He was speaking for all of us. It was true.
The fierce leftist/ Democrat accusation being that mean old Project 2025 was Trump’s own personal policy agenda. And apparently this policy agenda really sucked for Democrats because it was full of annoying numbers ‘n stuff. Zero emotion. Ergo it must be bad, must be destroyed, and everyone associated with it or who could be thrown onto the bonfire with it.
Like Trump and everyone else around me (to many people in my personal life and work circle I am “Mister Republican” and “the political guy” who people call, email, and approach on the work site to talk about politics) I had no idea what Project 2025 was when the mainstream media went crazy with it. Like I just said, and which you can see for yourself with the link above, it is just a bunch of wishful wonky policy gobbledegook by the policy nerds at the Heritage Foundation, a thinktank in Washington, DC. But Project 2025 served as the scary harsh foil and mean boogie man for the Democrats’ happy happy joy joy joy approach to politics.
While all of this oh-so-crazy hullaballoo was happening about Project 2025 and Elon Musk live interviewing President Trump and other really just terribly awful things that ruin emotional thinkers’ days and America too, some cute young lady was overheard in public talking about (sorry folks, this is actually real) spitting on a man’s p*nis.
“You just go hawk tuah, and spit on that thang,” said Haliey Welch, joking around in her Southern Tennessee twang.
And just like that, an American star was born. No lie, Haliey Welch, a pretty and nice enough young lady who lives with her memaw in a farming community in rural Tennessee, became a rock star. An influencer. Big time. With lawyers, and agents, a team, and trademarks and intellectual property contracts and lawsuits and millions to be made. Overnight, Haliey Welch went from 0 to 100 in about one week. That’s probably measured in millions, not miles per hour.
And you know what? Hawk Tuah stickers and tee shirts and emblems and flags are now everywhere in America. Nobody knows what the hell the phrase means, until you look it up on the computer chip implanted in your hand while driving behind a truck with Hawk Tuah on their back window in the grocery store parking lot, and you then say out loud in your most shocked emotional thinking voice possible “Is that really what the hell that means?!”
So get this straight, my fellow Americans: Project 2025 is very, very naughty, and everyone who can be accused of being associated with it is also very naughty. Hurt them, destroy them, go chimp out on them and get all sadistic on them. But Hawk Tuah? Why that is happy happy joy joy joy! Wahoo, let the good times roll.
Everybody get a Hawk Tuah tee shirt on, a cold beer in hand, and smile and laugh, and just feel good for whatever reason enters into your brain at that moment. Mom and dad buy all the groceries and pay all the bills, and college tuition is gonna be free one way or another, and man is life good in America.
Ain’t America in great shape?
Excuse me while I hawk tuah on the ground.
Liberal Democrat mass murders children in Nashville
Another liberal Democrat mass murder has happened in America, this time in a Nashville, Tennessee, school.
No question about it, there is an ongoing dispute on how to categorize and describe violence committed with firearms. The longtime dodgy approach by the mainstream 
establishment corporate media and the Democrat Party is to describe it as “gun violence,” and so their message is always “guns are bad, guns are inherently violent, don’t own guns, take away guns from the citizens.”
But the beauty of using our innate critical thinking skills is that any clear headed person can easily look at the same set of facts in a violent crime scene and come to a totally different conclusion than the corporate Democrat Party media. It is easy to see that their “gun violence” narrative is actually the opposite of the factual truth.
Let us consider yesterday’s bloody mass murder in a Nashville, TN, school, by 28-year-old transexual Audrey Hale. Hale was a former student at a Presbyterian Christian school, The Covenant School, and she apparently bore a big grudge about what she had learned there. So big was her grudge that she heeded the recent public call by transexual activists in Tennessee for acts of violence against traditional Americans and their institutions there. Audrey Hale took several firearms into a school and had shot and killed three little children and three adult teachers until local police killed Hale.
The cause of Hale’s murderous depravity may be something personal, but I think we can squarely hang the responsibility for her mass murder on the shoulders of liberal Democrats everywhere. This is because the Democrat Party is a full-blown advocacy vehicle for transexual everything, without any cautions or any limitations, as well as being the main promoter of anti-Christian narratives and apologetics for transexual malfeasance against Christians. There is a huge pile of evidence for this in the way the Democrat Party is the official sponsor of and get-out-of-jail card for ANTIFA, whose most violent and destructive members are overwhelmingly transexual.
Child murderer Audrey Hale was transexual, yes, but even more than that, she was a liberal Democrat who heeded the recent call of other liberal Democrats to commit acts of violence against Christians, in the name of promoting transexual identity. Guns have almost nothing to do with this, because without the liberal Democrat impetus to murder vulnerable children and teachers, the guns do nothing by themselves. It is that recent transexual battle cry that convinced Hale to commit her savagery.
I have a soft spot in my heart for transexual people, and for gay people. Having grown up with people who were born differently than me, whether it is a chemical or hormonal imbalance who knows, I personally witnessed the painful and frustrated personal struggles of these individuals well into their adulthood. They always had my sympathy and empathy, because in and of themselves they offered no threat to anyone. They are simply different. Being validated as full humans like the majority around us is something we all crave, and it is something we all deserve to a great degree, regardless of our differences. My gay and transexual friends and family members deserved to be treated equally, and I always stood beside them. But that degree of validation and acceptance ends when your personal political movement is fundamentally about inciting and committing acts of violence, arson, murder, and destruction.
Especially against practicing Christians, whose gentle teachings are simply different than the angry violence of the transexual Antifa mob.
The transexual movement started out like the gay rights movement, a call for equal treatment. And in America, we should treat everyone equally. Equal opportunity for everyone, absolutely. Core American principle there. But both the transexual and the gay rights movements have been co-opted by the Democrat Party, which is historically one of Planet Earth’s most insurrectionist and violent political movements, responsible for enslaving Africans, for the 1860-1864 Civil War, the KKK, Jim Crow laws, and the impoverishment and destruction of modern Black communities in every major American city.
So now that the transexual and gay rights movements are fully embedded in this destructive political party, we must be honest about not only Audrey Hale’s Covenant School shooting, but the vast majority of murders nation-wide: Liberal Democrats are fully responsible for all of this misery. The transexuals tormented by and incentivized by the Democrat Party to commit violence and murder are simply their cannon fodder, and the inanimate guns they use are like any hammer or molotov cocktail Antifa uses to destroy cities, businesses, homes.
Every murderous bullet fired in Chicago or Nashville, Tennessee, has the name LIBERAL DEMOCRAT clearly imprinted on it.
Remembering neat people, Part 1
A lot of neat, interesting people have died in the past year or two, or ten, if I think about it, but time flies faster than we can catch it or even snatch special moments from it. People I either knew or admired from afar who changed me in some way.
There are two men who influenced me in small but substantial ways who I have been thinking about in recent days. One of them died exactly ten years ago, and the other died just last year. Funny how I keep thinking about them.
It is time to honor them as best I can, in words.
First one was Charlie Haffner, a grizzled mountain man from central Tennessee. Charlie and I first crossed paths in 1989, when I joined the Owl Hollow Shooting Club about 45 minutes south of Nashville, where I was a graduate student at the time.
Charlie owned that shooting club.
Back before GPS, internet, or cell phones, the world was a different place than today. Dinosaurs were probably wandering around among us then, mmm hmmmmm. Heck, maybe I am a dinosaur. Anyhow, in order to find my way to the Owl Hollow club, first and foremost I had to get the club’s phone number, which I obtained from a fly fishing shop on West End Avenue. Then I had to call Charlie for directions, using a l-a-n-d l-i-n-e, and actually speaking to a person at the other end. You’d think it was Morse Code by today’s standards.
After getting Charlie on the phone, and assiduously writing down his directions from our phone conversation, I had to use the best map I could get and then drive way out in the Tennessee countryside on gravel and dirt roads. Trusting my directional instincts, which are good, and trusting the maps, which were pretty bad, and using Charlie’s directions, which were exactingly precise, I made my way through an alien landscape of small tobacco farms and Confederate flags waving from flagpoles. Yes, southcentral Tennessee back then, and maybe even today, was still living in 1865. Not an American flag to be seen out there by itself. If one appeared, it was either directly above, or, more commonly, directly below the Confederate flag. The Confederate flag shared equal or nearly equal footing with the American flag throughout that region.
Needless to say, when I had finally arrived at the big, quiet, lonesome gun range in the middle of the Tennessee back country, the fact that I played the banjo and was as redneck as redneck gets back home didn’t mean a thing right then. Buddy, I was feelin’…. Yankee, like…well, like black people once probably felt entering into a room full of Caucasians. I felt all alone out there and downright uncomfortable. And to boot, I was looking for a mountain man with a deeeeep Southern drawl, so it was bound to get better. Right?
Sure enough, I saw Charlie’s historic square-cut log cabin up the hill, and I walked up to it. Problem was, it had a door on every outside wall, so that when I knocked on one, and heard voices inside, and then heard “Over here!” coming from outside, I’d walk around to the next door, which was closed, and I would knock again, and go through the process again, and again. Yes, I knocked on three or four of those mystery doors before Charlie Haffner finally stepped out of yet one more doorway, into the sunshine, and greeted me in the most friendly and welcoming manner.
Bib overalls were meant to be worn by men like Charlie, and Charlie was meant to wear bib overalls, and I think that’s all he had on. His long, white Father Time beard flowed down and across his chest, and his long, flowing white hair was thick and distinguished like a Southern gentleman’s hair would have to be. And sure as shootin’, a flintlock pistol was tucked into the top of those bib overalls. I am not normally a shy person, and I normally enjoy trying to get the first words in on any conversation, with some humor if I can think of it fast enough. But the truth is, I was dumbfounded and just stood there in awe of the sight before me.
Being a Damned Yankee, I half expected to be shot dead on sight. But what followed is a legendary story re-told many times in my own family, as Charlie (and his kindly wife, who also had a twinkle in her eye) welcomed me into his home in the most gracious, witty, and insightful way possible.
Over the following two years, I shot as much as a full-time graduate student could shoot out there at Owl Hollow Gun Club, which is to say not as much as I wanted and probably more than I should have. Although my first interest in guns as a kid had been black powder muzzleloaders, and I had received a percussion cap .45 caliber Philadelphia derringer as a gift when I was ten, I had not really spent much time around flintlocks. Charlie rekindled that flame in me there, and it has burned ever since, as it has for tens of thousands of other people who were similarly shaped by Charlie’s re-introduction of flintlock shooting matches back in the early 1970s, there at Owl Hollow Gun Club.
Charlie died ten years ago, on July 10th, I think, and I have thought about him often ever since: His incredible warmth and humor, his amazing insights for a mountain man with little evident exposure to the outside world (now don’t go getting prejudiced about mountain folk; he and many others are plenty worldly, even if they don’t APPEAR to be so), his tolerance of differences and willingness to break with orthodoxy to make someone feel most welcome. Hollywood has done a bad number on the Southern Man image, and maybe some of that negative stereotype is deserved, but Charlie Haffner was a true Southern gentleman in every way, and I was proud to know him, to be shaped by him.
The other man who has been on my mind is Russell Means, a Pine Ridge Sioux, award-winning actor, and Indian rights activist who caught my attention in the early 1970s, and most especially as a spokesman for tribal members holed up out there after shooting it out with FBI gunslingers.
American Indians always have a respected place in the heart of true Americans, and anyone who grew up playing cowboys and Indians knows that sometimes there were bad cowboys who got their due from some righteous red men. Among little kids fifty years ago, the Indians were always tough, and sometimes they were tougher and better than the white guys. From my generation, a lot of guys carry around a little bit of wahoo Indian inside our hearts; we’d still like to think we are part Indian; it would make us better, more real Americans…
Russell Means was a good looking man, very manly and tough, and he was outspoken about the unfair depredations his people had experienced. While Means was called a radical forty years ago, I think any proud Irishman or Scottish Highlander could easily relate to his complaints, if they or their descendants stop to think about how Britain had (and still does) dispossessed and displaced them.
Russell Means played a key role in an important movie, The Last of the Mohicans. His stoic, rugged demeanor wasn’t faked, and he was so authentic in appearance and action that he easily lent palpable credibility to that artistic portrayal of 1750s frontier America by simply showing up and being there on the set. Means could have easily been the guy on the original buffalo nickel; that is how authentic he was.
Russell Means was representative of an older, better way of life that is disappearing on the Indian reservations, if that makes any sense to those who think of the Indian lifestyle that passed away as involving horses and headdresses. He was truly one of the last of the Mohicans, for all the native tribes. Although I never met you, I still miss you, and your voice, Mr. Means.
[Written 7/23/14]