Pence pretends to go high, actually goes low.

Asked on the unapologetically pro-Trump show “Fox & Friends” whether Pence agrees that Confederate monuments should be removed from the Capitol, Pence told host Ainsley Earhardt that he stands with the president in wanting to preserve those monuments that glorify traitors of the United States.

EARHARDT: Some are calling for the Confederate monuments at the Capitol to be taken down. Do you agree?
PENCE: Well, first off, I agree with the president that seeing people destroy public property in the name of any cause is just simply unacceptable. […] I hold the view that it’s important that we remember our past and build on the progress we’ve made. […] What we have to walk away from is the desire by some to erase parts of our history in the name of some contemporary political cause.

Oh please. The “history” that moving monuments erases is the “history” of putting up monuments to very literal white supremacy. Saying we shouldn’t erase that kind of “history” is like saying we shouldn’t desegregate schools because that erases our history of having segregated schools.

EARHARDT: So you’re in favor of keeping the monuments?

PENCE: Obviously, I think that should always be a local decision. […] I’m someone who believes in more monuments, not less monuments. What we ought to do is we ought to remember our history. But we also ought to celebrate the progress that we’ve made since that history. You know, when I walked, back in 2010, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis, arm in arm, and we remembered Bloody Sunday, and the extraordinary progress of the civil rights movement, I can’t help but think that rather than pulling down monuments, as some are wont to do, rather than tearing down monuments that have graced our cities all across this country for years, we ought to be building more monuments. We ought to be celebrating the men and women who’ve helped our nation move toward a more perfect union.

Monuments to literal white supremacy have not “graced” our cities, they’ve disgraced them. Our long heritage of formal, legal, crime against humanity racist exploitation and rights violation is not a thing to raise monuments to. Monuments aren’t history lessons in stone, they are tributes. We get to choose what we want to pay tributes to. We don’t put up monuments to Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, and we can also decide we don’t want monuments to slavery.

Pence is right that we should celebrate Lewis and his colleagues (let’s have a lot more celebration of Diane Nash, for instance), but that does not in any way depend on keeping monuments to slavery and white supremacy.

Guest post by Tasneem Khalil, originally on Facebook.

So far Tillerson seems to be a dreadful Secretary of State.

He said some words on Friday about how we all condemn hate speech yadda yadda – of course without mentioning his foul-mouthed hate-spewing boss.

In a speech announcing a new effort to expand diversity at the State Department, Tillerson did not explicitly mention either Charlottesville or President Trump’s reactions to the presence of white supremacists and neo-Nazis there, but he said the events of the past week were on everyone’s mind.

“We do honor, protect and defend freedom of speech, First Amendment rights,” he said. “It’s what sets us apart from every other government regime in the world, in allowing people a right to expression. These are good things.”

That right there? That’s some terrible secretary of state-ing. He said only the US defends freedom of speech. Way to antagonize a great many allies who also defend freedom of speech, Rex.

“But we do not honor, nor do we promote or accept hate speech in any form. And those who embrace it poison our public discourse and they damage the very country that they claim to love. So we condemn racism, bigotry in all its forms. Racism is evil; it is antithetical to America’s values. It’s antithetical to the American idea.”

Well now there again – that’s just silly. Which of America’s values? What American idea? Racism has certainly not been antithetical to America’s values throughout its history, and indeed it was firmly entrenched in government until well into the 1960s. It took marches and broken heads and deaths to get a Civil Rights Act and a Voting Rights Act, and that barely scratched the surface. He makes himself less than convincing if he can’t even acknowledge the truth about the US.

But he did go on to talk about taking real steps to make the State Department less white, so that’s good.

Tillerson said he has ordered that at least one minority candidate be included for every ambassador post that comes open. That will help target future leaders, he said, so their careers can be nurtured.

“We need a more deliberate process to cultivate the abundance of minority talent we already have in the State Department,” he said.

Tillerson said the State Department will step up recruitment of African Americans at historically black colleges and universities. Colleges in Miami and Chicago with large Hispanic populations will also be seeing State Department recruiters, he said. And he said the recruitment and promotion drive should include women and members of the LGBT community.

Ok then.

Family life alt-right style.

The same year Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique rocked American households by defining the dissatisfactions of housewives, Helen Andelin was on the other side of the country writing her own book, and coming to the exact opposite conclusion. Fascinating Womanhood would become the anti-feminist manifesto that galvanized a decades-long “family values” movement for conservative women.

Her marriage had gone kind of snoozy, you see; her husband just wasn’t that into it any more; as a Mormon with eight children she wasn’t about to take that lying down. She prayed, but God didn’t answer.

Andelin began scouring marriage manuals from the 1920s and came across one pamphlet in particular, “The Secrets of Fascinating Womanhood,” which counseled that female subservience was the way back into a husband’s heart. She followed the pamphlet’s advice, and her marriage experienced a miraculous recovery.

No kink-shaming, now.

As historian Julie Debra Neuffer explains in her 2015 book, Helen Andelin and the Fascinating Womanhood Movement, Andelin sought to teach women how to become good wives by reverting to traditional gender roles. The self-published Fascinating Womanhood is in equal parts a chatty self-help book, a religious text, and cultural criticism that uses the works of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens to support a “family values” agenda. Like Friedan, Andelin recognized a “problem that has no name,” but Andelin claimed the problem wasn’t caused by domestic drudgery, but by a lack of love. “[O]ne need is fundamental,” Andelin writes. “She must feel loved and cherished by her husband. Without his love, her life is an empty shell.” The book sold more than 2 million copies and sparked what is known as the Fascinating Womanhood movement. The New York Times dubbed her “a self‐appointed spokesman for the ‘silent majority’ of American women who believe that women’s place in the home.” Today, the book has become a totemic text for women on the so-called “alt-right,” a sort of “trad wife” Bible.

So the argument is that women must feel loved and cherished by their husbands, and the only way for that to happen is for the woman to pretend they’re living in the 19th century?

But why would that be true? Don’t at least some men prefer women who can carry on a conversation and help with the responsibilities of adult life? Or do I just think that because I’m a crazy delusional feminist? Who knows.

David Futrelle points out that organized misogyny (aka men’s rights activism) is a gateway drug to white supremacy. Of course it is. Noisy vituperative hatred of women is congenial to noisy vituperative hatred of Other races and Other despised groups in general.

There are good reasons why men’s-rights activism has served for so many as a gateway drug to the alt-right: Both movements appeal to men with fantasies of violent, sometimes apocalyptic redemption — and, like Cantwell, a tendency to express these fantasies in bombastic prose. And both movements are based on a bizarro-world ideology in which those with the most power in contemporary society are the true victims of oppression.

In other words, if you can convince yourself that men are the primary victims of sexism, it’s not hard to convince yourself that whites are the primary victims of racism. And it’s similarly easy for members of both movements to see white men as the most oppressed snowflakes of all.

Or, more crudely – if your idea of a good basis for friendship and collaboration is hatred of all things progressive, aka “politically correct,” then naturally these combinations will be inevitable.

Call it Lenny Bruce syndrome. (Or it could be Hitchens or Dawkins or Ricky Gervais or you get the idea.) See yourself as a scalding contrarian telling the truth to Power, and away you go.

Annette Gordon-Reed in the NYRB:

…the national tragedy that unfolded in Charlottesville last week struck at every aspect of my being—a black person, a friend, an American, and a scholar who has devoted many years to studying Jefferson, slavery at Monticello, and, by extension, Charlottesville. I knew instantly why the men holding tiki torches felt the need to make their case for white supremacy by walking toward the statue of Jefferson that stands in front of the Rotunda he designed for the university he dreamed about and then founded. I also knew instantly that there was a reason the much less remarked upon “counterprotesters” surrounded Jefferson’s statue to keep the tiki torchers from reaching it, staking a defiant claim, in the face of superior numbers, to ideas about human equality and progress that they correctly perceived were under siege that night.

On the one hand Jefferson was a slaveowner, one who never freed a single slave in his lifetime, and freed only five in his will; one who had at least one sexual slave, who had children of his, who were also slaves. She (Sally Hemings) was his wife’s half-sister: their mutual father was John Wayles, and Hemings’s mother was of course Wayles’s slave. Jefferson was deeply entwined with slavery and with the ideology that attempted to justify it.

On the other hand Jefferson wrote the words that undermined that ideology.

The Jefferson of the Declaration of Independence, with its words proclaiming self–evident truths about the equality of mankind and the pursuit of happiness, has inspired people the world over. Every marginalized group in the United States seeking inclusion looks first to Jefferson’s words to claim equal citizenship in the United States. Blacks have been in a dialogue with Jefferson and the Declaration from the beginning of the republic. It is not for nothing that the Declaration is called America’s creed—even when we know that is far more aspiration than reality.

Samuel Johnson was very harsh about that gap between the aspiration and the reality – more because he disliked the aspiration than because he abhorred the reality, but he was right all the same. (What he said: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”)

The day following the confrontation at Jefferson’s statue, the torch-bearers and their supporters went to another part of Charlottesville for the event that had brought them to the city: a rally to protest the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general who fought a war against the country Jefferson helped to found. Not surprisingly, there were mixed views about the Sage of Monticello even in the Confederacy. While some applauded his states’ rights philosophy, they abhorred the language of the Declaration, recognizing its inherent and destabilizing power.

Today, a time of intense focus on the personal and of misplaced faith in the importance of sincerity, we question whether Jefferson really believed the words “all men are created equal,” as if ideas are only as important and powerful as the personal will of the individual who utters them. The Confederates knew better than that. Ideas can have a power and life of their own. They weren’t taking any chances. They saw Jefferson as a public man who had put ideas into popular discourse that could be used in opposition to the society they hoped to build. The Confederates took him at his word, thinking it important to mention him by name and repudiate what they took to be his views. Alexander Stephens’s famous “Cornerstone Speech” said that Jefferson was wrong, insisting that blacks were not the equals of whites and, therefore, slavery was A-OK.

That’s the contradiction we’ve lived with for two and a half centuries. We’re a long way from resolving it.

The Washington Post editorial board says don’t forget about voter suppression.

[E]ven if all 1,500 Confederate symbols across the country were removed overnight by some sudden supernatural force, the pernicious crusade to roll back voting rights would continue apace, with voters of color suffering its effects disproportionately. Pushing back hard against those who would purge voter rolls, demand forms of voter ID that many Americans don’t possess, and limit times and venues for voting — this should be a paramount cause for the Trump era.

In statehouse after statehouse where Republicans hold majorities, the playbook is well established, and the tactics are becoming increasingly aggressive.

Mr. Trump’s voter fraud commission is at the vanguard of this crusade, and the fix is in. Its vice chairman, Kris Kobach, is the nation’s most determined, litigious and resourceful champion of voter suppression. Under his tutelage, the commission is likely to recommend measures whose effect will be that new obstacles to voting would be taken up in state legislatures. Millions of voters are at risk of disenfranchisement from this effort, and the knock-on effects of such a mass act of disempowerment are dizzying.

One, it’s racist disenfranchisement, and two, it results in the election of more conservatives and fewer liberals, which is not to the benefit of non-white people.

The Times reports a very different Saturday of protests from the one last week.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators, emboldened and unnerved by the eruption of fatal violence in Virginia last weekend, surged into the nation’s streets and parks on Saturday to denounce racism, white supremacy and Nazism.

Demonstrations were boisterous but broadly peaceful, even as tensions and worries coursed through protests from Boston Common, the nation’s oldest public park, to Hot Springs, Ark., and to the bridges that cross the Willamette River in Portland, Ore. Other rallies played out in Houston, Memphis and New Orleans, among other cities.

There were 40,000 just in Boston.

Boston, where officials had pledged to enforce a policy of zero tolerance for violence, faced dueling demonstrations, but a rally to promote “free speech” was brief and unamplified beyond the small bandstand where it was held. The event, whose participants appeared to number only in the dozens, was undercut by police planning and starved by an enormous buffer zone between the handful of protesters and the overwhelming numbers of their opponents.

Organizers of the speech rally had said they were appealing to “libertarians, conservatives, traditionalists, classical liberals, Trump supporters or anyone else who enjoys their right to free speech.”

“All of us here, in many ways, are true patriots because, in spite of that noise out there, we’re here to stand up for something very fundamental, which is called free speech,” Shiva Ayyadurai, an entrepreneur who is running a long-shot Republican campaign for Senate, told the rallygoers, according to a video posted on YouTube.

But thousands of others, fearing that the free speech event would be a platform for neo-Nazis and white nationalists, joined a robust counterprotest.

“This city has a history of fighting back against oppression, whether it’s dumping tea in the harbor or a bunch of dudes standing around with bandannas screaming at neo-Nazis,” said a 21-year-old protester who would identify himself only as “Frosty” and wore an American flag to obscure much of his face.

Some counterprotesters shouted down their opponents — “No Nazis! No K.K.K.! No fascist U.S.A.!” — as Massachusetts state troopers used their bikes to keep rival demonstrators apart.

Nothing bad happened, and the anti-racists far outnumbered the racists. This is good to know.

It’s tough and smart day in Donald’s brain.

Steve Bannon will be a tough and smart new voice at @BreitbartNews…maybe even better than ever before. Fake News needs the competition!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2017

Looks like many anti-police agitators in Boston. Police are looking tough and smart! Thank you.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2017

Ah now that’s good to see.

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/898974872604422144

Top photo: the Pepes.

Bottom photos: everyone else.

A former governor of Mississippi, Ray Mabus, is very blunt about all these Confederate statues.

Monuments to treason. That is exactly what blights nearly every courthouse square in the South, Confederate statutes and memorials celebrating those who took up arms against the United States in defense of slavery.

As a former Mississippi governor and a fourth-generation native, who grew up in the segregated South, I believe those monuments and statues and memorials never should have been erected in the first place, a view shared by Robert E. Lee, who wrote a few years after the Civil War that he thought it “wiser not to keep open the sores of war but to… commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”

These symbols of unrepentant oppression — every single one — must be removed now and forever.

The truth is the vast majority of these Confederate monuments — like the addition of elements of the Confederate battle flag to some Southern state flags — came between the 1880s and the 1920s to re-establish white supremacy.

See? Blunt. I think a lot of non-Southern politicians hesitate to be that blunt.

Donald J. Trump and far too many others refuse to accept the pervasive and toxic impacts of our inability to deal honestly with race and its history. These are incontestable facts. The Confederacy was created to defend the abominable idea that one human being could own another and violently attempted to overthrow the legal, elected government of the United States, subverting the principles and meaning of our Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

Removing these memorials and symbols, like the Confederate battle flag element that remains sadly and shamefully part of my home state’s flag, is not an effort to sanitize our history nor erase some part of our culture. In fact, the myths of “magnolias and moonlight,” of the benevolent slave owner (an oxymoron if there ever was one), the romantic narratives of “The Lost Cause” and the distortions of Reconstruction are the real efforts to sanitize and erase. Confederates made perfectly clear that the “states’ rights” they sought to preserve was the right to own slaves. This was no War Between the States or War of Northern Aggression, it was an existential threat to the survival of the United States of America.

I wish more Southern governors and former governors were that blunt.