Politico: What Ulysses Grant Can Teach Joe Biden About Putting Down Violent Insurrections

I believe that a large part of Joe Biden’s appeal, especially to older voters, was the perception that he was a moderate who would lower the temperature of the country and that voting for him was a vote to “return to normalcy.” They were tired of the endless hysteria and polarization of the Trump presidency and wanted to move on. These Democratic voters soundly rejected the radical wing of their own party.

Politico:

“The deadly siege of the Capitol in Washington, which sought to overturn a legitimate election by targeting lawmakers with assassination, was not the first attempted insurrection in American history.

During Reconstruction, a raft of attempted insurrections flared up across the former Confederacy. Violent storms of white supremacists rocked swaths of the South, all aimed at undoing the Union’s victory during the Civil War, as well as the civil rights gains made thereafter. Racial equality, civil rights protections, basic recognition of democratic outcomes — all were targets of rampaging white terrorists, using violence to launch themselves to power once more. Numbers are hazy, but dozens perished as a direct result of insurrection, part of the thousands of victims of white supremacist political violence during the era. …

There is, of course, much that is different between the insurrectionists of Reconstruction and those of the Trump era.

The white supremacist insurrectionists of the 1870s focused on just one region — the South — while the Trumpian insurrectionists have no geographic restrictions. This explains why, in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot, the FBI found it necessary to warn of potential attacks and insurrectionist activity on state capitols and federal buildings across the country. And the Trumpian insurrectionists, at least thus far, don’t yet come with the full-throated, unequivocal support of a major political party (though that may change if non-Trumpian Republicans continue to lose ground). …”

The same was true of many of us in the Alt-Right.

It was fun to support Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016. It was part of being immersed in an online meme culture. Most people were joking around and having a good time. MAGA in those days was full of positive energy which gradually faded as Trump started governing. There came a point around 2018 or 2019 or so when we got tired of the endless hysteria, chaos and incompetence.

It has been non-stop hysteria on the Left though since the 2016 election. The Russia conspiracy hoax went on for years on CNN and MSNBC. We saw all the Antifa and Black Lives Matter violence which culminated in nationwide riots in the summer of 2020. The censorship which began with banning people like MILO from Twitter spiraled out of control. Millions of people were caught up in this absurd narrative that “Donald Trump is a fascist” and that the Trump presidency was like Nazi Germany.

I think that moderates were hoping that the progressives who have gone insane over the last five years would settle down and come back to earth when Joe Biden became president, Democrats won control of Congress and Donald Trump left Washington. Instead, people like Luke O’Brien are going on CNN to boast about how the shitlord Ricky Vaughn has been arrested by the DOJ because he was like “a field commander in the assault on our democracy.” Some liberals have moved on from pushing ridiculous historical analogies like Donald Trump’s America being Nazi Germany to Joe Biden’s America being Reconstruction. Meanwhile, Antifa have continued to riot against Joe Biden out on the West Coast. The Patriot crowd has been quiet since the Capitol Siege and QAnon has been discredited.

Virtually all of the hysteria is coming from people with this phenotype:

Is there a direct line connecting the Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction South with the QAnon Shaman and Baked Alaska occupying the U.S. Capitol and leaving when asked to do so? If you are a “journalist” who lives in a woke echo chamber in New York City, this might be the conventional wisdom.

I would say it is a bit of a stretch. There is no “insurrection” going on in America. No one is being lynched or terrorized in Joe Biden’s America. It is just another weekend in January here in the Deep South. In reality, thousands of people are still dying every day from COVID-19, not from “domestic violent extremism.” If there is a proper historical analogy to our times, it is certainly the Spanish Flu.

Reconstruction is a terrible historical analogy. Aside from the fact that nothing is actually going on except for liberal hysteria and the country thankfully isn’t a war zone after the 2020 election, the Democrats have a razor thin House and Senate majority. Unlike Joe Biden, Ulysses S. Grant was a Union war hero who crushed Horace Greeley in the 1872 election. The Republicans came away with 199 House seats to 85 Democratic House seats and 56 Senate seats to 17 Democratic Senate seats. The Democrats also came roaring back in the 1874 midterm elections and the Republicans lost control of the House. Millions of Trump voters also haven’t been disenfranchised by the 14th Amendment, the U.S. military isn’t occupying the South and the GOP hasn’t been vanquished and has a larger majority on the Supreme Court. The 2020 election was another close, but deeply polarizing election like the 2016 election.

The Democrats have zero chance of passing anything remotely comparable to the Reconstruction Amendments. Joe Biden will be lucky if anything passes Congress aside from the COVID-19 relief bill which will likely require budget reconciliation rules. The only way in which Joe Biden’s America is similar to Reconstruction is that his congressional majority is far more precarious and historically illiterate progressives stand a far greater chance of losing it through a similar act of overreach.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

20 Comments

  1. The Jews are paranoid schizophrenics. I am telling you the walls are out to get them. There has been too much inbreeding in Jew blood. Jews have been producing children with their sisters and cousins for centuries. Freud got into the field of mental studies to try and help is own people, but the job of treating Jew mental illness was too big for him and turned him into a coke fiend.

  2. This screaming and hysteria is only for pushing radicals against Donald supporters and away from establishment.

    But radicals will not go away. There is still possibility that somehow they get some Donald supporters repressed but now it seems that Donald trap worked and radicals will not go away.

    Strategic retreat works only when it is huge. Enemy must lured so deep into hostile ground that he can`t get out anymore.

    Strategic victory is getting enemy permanently gone. Symbolic and reversible victories like the wall are pretty much useless. Also draining The Swamp must be permanent. Just firing the people is giving Swamp Things few years vacation until next president rehires them, This is also temporary and useless.

    I think that a lot of establishment already miss Donald. And with every last say passing, they will miss more.

    • Wise words. Few have that strategic thinking, but it is very interesting to actually see it being put into action.

  3. Key recent history behind what is happening today –

    Many months before Charlottesville, George Soros groups planned de-platforming & banning all right wing people and Donald Trump himself from social media and internet hosting “by 2020”, at a January 2017 meeting right as President Trump was inaugurated – The leaked 44-page plan is online.

    Boasting of already-in-place ties to Facebook, Google and Twitter, Soros-Clinton operatives took the Trump 2016 election itself, as signalling the need to weaponise the whole Western internet to shut down Trump & anyone with conservative or right-wing & especially pro-white viewpoints.

    The leaked ‘Democracy Matters – Strategic Plan for Action’ was presented to Democratic Party oligarchs at Turnberry Isle Resort, Aventura, Florida, by Soros-Clinton operative David Brock, founder of Soros-backed ‘Media Matters’, as a map of how Democrats will “kick Donald Trump’s ass”, ruin anyone supporting him, & sabotage 2020 voting so Trump would lose.

    The document slanders conservative writing as ‘fake news’, ‘extremism’ and ‘toxic propaganda’, promising a war to impose oligarch leftism:

    “Right-wing propagandists will be exposed … journalists, activists, allies will take action against … right-wing targets will see influence diminish

    Internet & social media platforms, like Google & Facebook … will no longer host [the right]… Facebook will adjust its model … Google will cut off access to revenue … [Right-wing] campaigns will be punished & halted … alt-right figures will lose credibility & influence

    We’re on track toward our top outcomes – defeat Trump 2020, change the balance of power … defeat white nationalist awakening”

    Links and article here
    https://henrymakow.com/2021/01/soros-planned-to-silence-trump.html

    • That’s for sure. If someone were to ask me what I mean when I describe someone as “striking,” I’d say, “Each time I see him or her, I feel as if I’m seeing him or her for the first time.” Lindbergh, to me, is that way. He’s virtually the type-specimen of the noble Teuton, a premier manifestation of the breed.

      When I saw the headline about Lindbergh’s death, in August 1974, I happened to be in a sort of general store near a Vermont campground. The accompanying photo on the newspaper’s front page was vintage, a shot from the same period as the one in which this Occidental Dissent banner-picture was taken. That struck me as simultaneously odd and perfect, and I think the headline or sub-headline included his vintage appellation “Lone Eagle.” The something that bothered me about all that was, as I now realize, my inchoate sense that his race—your race, Mr. W.’s race—was being exterminated.

      Avoid what you must avoid if you would not be exterminated.

  4. These so called “radicals” are not even really radical. My mother who is a die hard Trumper was just watching the Harriet Tubman movie and weeping about how cruel we were to black people. The Boomers and most others are just angry at the system but they dont know who or why or what? It is a misguided lashing out that they are not willing to break a sweat for. The Capitol so called riot was never supposed to be anything other than a presidential approved protest. I dont want to Blackpill anyone about the state of normies but these people dont have an ounce of conviction compared to early Americans.

  5. Literally no attempt by the media to understand “white terror” during
    reconstruction. The KKK was a liberation force! What happened after the war?

    1. hundreds of thousands of dead white men fighting for Dixie’s freedom
    2. their death was for nothing, CSA loses the war
    3. confederates are disenfranchised, no political representation
    4. blacks make up over 50% in many southern states at this time, Haitian
    revolution wasn’t a distant memory and feared that they will be slaughtered,
    women raped etc in a racial revolution by empowered blacks.
    5. opportunistic northern whites (carpetbaggers) stoke up racial
    resentments, create nepotism & are totally self-interested. The elite hate and
    fear their subjects.
    6. Blacks are used as union soldiers and have their own militia, whites are
    victimized, robbed & violently attacked etc by these forces, that’s what caused
    the “hamburg massacre”.

    All these forces in tandem lead to the KKK. KKK would have killed a carpetbagger
    over any black since their a liberation force, they weren’t trying to do
    “race war” since that is not their goal. Wikipedia is actually more honest on
    the matter and cite a interview with Nathan Befford Forrest who states his
    intentions are against the carperbagger elite & the “Union league”. Here is the
    interview

    https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026994/1868-09-08/ed-1/seq-1/

    I recommend the book “The Day Dixie Died: Southern Occupation, 1865-1866” By
    Thomas Goodrich, he is not a southerner so he has no vested interest in the
    topic.

    Do I support every action the historic KKK did? No. But things must be understood in their historical context, not as a bogeyman.

  6. Why, in a country of 300 and 30 million people are 300,000 deaths something to create and maintain an endless paranoid hissy fit that we’re all gonna die and these lockdowns have to be maintained indefinitely. This is one tenth of one percent of the U.S. population. Many of the people who died were old and sick in the first place.

    About 70,000 Americans died in 2019 of drug overdoses, and somehow we got through it without shutting everyone’s life down. And it’s been going on for many years.

  7. I believe Richard Spencer’s logic at this point, such as it is, is that if blatant censorship and unconstitutional prosecution is permitted against the right people on the right, then Spencer will once again become famous. His massive failures and audio clips and sieg heil videos of course won’t follow him around and discredit him instantly before even getting off the ground. CNN is going to imprison Vaughn and probably others, ban Fox News entirely, but suddenly provide a platform for Richard Spencer? It would be like them welcoming home David Duke. It all makes sense, and all those bridges Spencer burned will re-open, and this all happens while we get to experience another Reconstruction.

    Brad, an honest question. Not considering the other defendants in the Sines vs Kessler case, but if the defendants lose, does that mean Richard Spencer goes to prison?

  8. Not sure if the M$M will “furnish Grant a free pass”…

    In 1862, in the heat of the [war], General Ulysses S. Grant initiated one of the most blatant official episodes of anti-Semitism in 19th-century American history. In December of that year, Grant issued his infamous General Order No. 11, which expelled all Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi:

    The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department [the “Department of the Tennessee,” an administrative district of the Union Army of occupation composed of Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi] within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.

    Post commanders will see to it that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and any one returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from headquarters. No passes will be given these people to visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal application of trade permits.
    –Jewish Virtual Library

    A group of Paducah’s Jewish merchants led by Cesar Kaskel dispatched an indignant telegram to President Lincoln condemning Grant’s order as an “enormous outrage on all laws and humanity… the grossest violation of the Constitution and our rights as good citizens under it.” Jewish leaders organized protest rallies in St. Louis, Louisville, and Cincinnati, and telegrams reached the White House from the Jewish communities of Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia.

    Cesar Kaskel arrived in Washington on January 3, 1863. Two days earlier, the Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect. Kaskel conferred with influential Jewish Republican Adolphus Solomons and then went with Cincinnati Congressman John A. Gurley directly to the White House. Lincoln received them promptly, studied Kaskel’s copies of General Order No. 11 and the specific order expelling Kaskel from Paducah, and COMMANDED HALLECK TO ORDER GRANT TO REVOKE ORDER NO. 11. Grant complied three days later.
    — Jewish Virtual Library/American Jewish Historical Society

  9. “General Ulysses S. Grant initiated one of the most blatant official episodes of anti-Semitism in 19th-century American history. In December of that year, Grant issued his infamous General Order No. 11, which expelled all Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi…”

    Well, well. Suddenly, I like Ike- err- Grant!

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