POL Did anyone see Ted Koppel's Mayberry story on CBS Sunday morning 9/19?

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foreverkeeps

Veteran Member
I was very surprised with the questions Ted Koppel asked visitors from all over the US while they were on a trolley car in Mt Airy, NC aka Mayberry.

He asks all the right questions, on who thought the election was accurate, what people thought of January 6th, what they thought of the Arizona audits, I think. Basically asking who beleived it was rigged, etc. And pretty much everyone said they thought it was rigged and Buy den is not our president.


It makes me wonder if Koppel is on Trump's 'side'? Very good. run time 13.23, the trolley conversations start at the 10 minute mark.

www.cbsnews.com

A trip to the original "Mayberry"

Mount Airy, N.C., the inspiration for Mayberry in the 1960s comedy "The Andy Griffith Show," has reinvented itself as a destination for hundreds of thousands of fans of the show who visit each year – nostalgic for a town that never really existed.
www.cbsnews.com www.cbsnews.com
Mayberry visitors talking Trump last 3-4 minutes

"It's a little bizarre, isn't it?" asked "Sunday Morning" senior contributor Ted Koppel. "It went off the air more than 50 years ago."
"Yes, sir."
"It captured a reality that never was."
"True; Mayberry is fictitious," Collins said. "Most everyone knows that! Except maybe some of the rabid fans of the show. They believe it's real."
And, let it be said, the town isn't doing a whole lot to undermine the illusion. Stop by at Wally's filling station, and you can get a ride around town in a vintage Ford Galaxy squad car. These days there's a whole fleet of them carting tourists around town.

Once a month or so, Betty Lynn, who played Barney Fife's girlfriend Thelma Lou, is brought from a nearby retirement home to the Andy Griffith Museum, where crowds of appreciative fans line up for autographs.
"I'm from Arkansas, I've been waiting to see you for 30 years!" said one woman. "I can die now!"
Collins said, "We are constantly looking at other ways that we can promote the community, 'cause we know the Mayberry generation won't be here forever. But now with streaming television, Andy will be forever with us, and we hope a younger generation will pick it up."
As if on cue, the Foster family, from Pomeroy, Ohio, showed up. It is no exaggeration to say that this re-creation verges, for the Fosters, on being a national monument.
Koppel asked the Fosters, "You watch 'The Andy Griffith Show' four hours a day?"
"More than that," said Bobby Foster.
"What do you mean, 'more than that'?"
"It's on sometimes early in the morning," Sarah Foster explained.
"Aren't you afraid that after a month or two of watching four hours or more a day, that you're gonna turn his little brain to mush?"

Koppel asked the trolley's riders, "I know you came here to have a good time and not to talk politics. But let me just ask you, as a matter of curiosity, how many of you think we had a fair election?"
"No way!" said one man wearing an American flag T-shirt with the word "Patriotism."
"I saw two hands go up," Koppel said. "So, is it fair to say the rest of you think that it was not a fair election?"
"No, no. No, it wasn't. I don't think it was at all," said the man.
Another man said, "I think there was a lot of voter fraud. It's never been proven. There's been people that's voted that's been dead 15 years. I think it's more the mail-in ballot stuff. You don't know how much of those that were duplicated, triplicated. The whole bit."
A third man said, "Look how many dead people voted for Biden."
Koppel asked, "One question, it's a serious question and I know you all will take it seriously: Tell me what you think happened on January 6 at Congress?"
The first man said, "They showed truckloads of people that they were bringing in for this. It was all staged. And that's how it started. They even showed pictures of it on the news, about these vehicles coming in with all these BLM people."
Another man, who believed the election was fair, called the January 6 attack, "A disgrace on our country."
"Whose fault was it?" Koppel asked. The man smiled.
One rider did blame Donald Trump, but he was in a distinct minority. A woman said, "I think it was staged. We've been to a lot of the Trump rallies, and I don't understand why they're focusing so much on that one issue when there's so many cities that are being burned down every day by protesters. It's supposed to be peaceful. But it's all focused on holding these two people."
"Murder and kill everybody there – hang 'em, put 'em in jail," said the first man.
Another woman said, "We don't even watch news on TV anymore. We don't feel like we're being told the truth. And we find our truth in other ways. And I won't say what those other ways are, but I feel like we're not being told the truth, because we're trying to be swayed in a direction that we know is not the right direction."
"I won't be offended," Koppel said. "I've been a journalist all my life. When President Trump talked about the press being the enemy of the people …"
"They are!" the woman replied. "And I love President Trump. And I love that man. I do."
A third woman said, "I just hope when this airs, it won't show Southerners as a bunch of dumb idiots. Like so many parts of the country do, you know? We have a lot of love in our hearts. We love our country. We love our fellow man. And if the rest of the country felt like that, it would be a better place."
A fourth man asked, "Mr. Koppel, can I say something? This conversation about politics and division is what people come here to get away from. We don't care what color you are. We don't even care what your politics are. We just want to be good neighbors and treat everybody alike. And that's why they're coming here."
The Barney Fife impersonator added, "That's what America should be."
And, when the script was written in Hollywood, that's the way it was.
 
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Appalachiastan: Culture of Resistance by John Meyers - ZeroGov

Appalachiastan: Culture of Resistance by John Meyers
30 Comments / Uncategorized / By Bill
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Publisher’s Note: The usual suspects among the communist chattering classes are now pivoting to a new mass advertisement campaign to attract apparatchiks to their serial killer ideology by painting every white human a white supremacist. While I think that government supremacists have done far more damage to earthlings, I look forward to seeing the unintended consequences and a mirror image of the very radicalization they so admire in their Antifa pets.
Keep pushing, collectivists.
Newton’s Third Law is a mother****er.

They say the collectivists can’t meme and one reason is their complete blindness to the irony of their creed. Individualism is the enemy of government supremacist creeds because the individual isn’t valued in the hive mind. It is merely mortar for the foundations and walls of the leviathan state. A human competent to be bent to the will of the violence broker class and its sycophants on pain of death depending on the resistance to state authority.

H/T to WRSA: “Western Civilization is not dying. It is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.” — “Sam Hyde”, via Gab

John has penned another terrific travelogue in the brave notions of resistance to tyranny in the mountain Southrons. -BB
Appalachia-1024x684.jpg

“You OK out there?” read the text message. “There is a guy with a rifle running around [redacted] mountain…”

When I pulled into the area, the local constabulary was staged. I had my EDC and typical vehicle load out already in place, which I didn’t even need to check. I had information from another local friend on where the guy was last seen. As I drove up the creek, the deputies were at the major lines of drift with radios. Most were in less than stellar physical shape and older in age.

The “man with a gun” was arrested several hours later.

The next day I heard several version of the same story, that involved a guy pulling a gun on another man. He then pulled a rifle on another totally unrelated bystander shortly after. Someone at some point called the law as the bystander is a well-known harmless and upstanding man in the community. When law enforcement responded the assailant apparently brandished the rifle while executing a poorly conceived escape plan.
The local constabulary didn’t waste any time in trotting out the dogs and the Special Response Team. In reality the show of force was kind of reminiscent of the famous and hilarious third episode of The Andy Griffith Show, The Manhunt that detailed a bureaucratic over the top reaction to a situation that Andy solved with out much effort.

One thing was unanimous; the residents of the community didn’t want law enforcement there. “We don’t call the sheriff out here, we handle our own business” was a common refrain. “Them deputies never waste a chance to show off do they?” said another. “Hell, that first guy might have deserved to have that gun pulled on him…”

In the Mountain South in particular, many disputes are settled even to this day in a private manner, if at all possible. The clannish nature of the residents, mostly descended from the Borderers of the English/Scottish border or of Germanic extraction, is still alive today in many ways.
Max Weber defines the state as has having a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence over a geographical area. To people historically and many still today in Occupied Appalachiastan, the state-only authority to dispense justice is a travesty of the highest proportions. Some do not want to outsource the dispensation of justice. Many do not want anyone mingling in the business of their community. Traditionally, the derbfine, the clan or even the community at large handled matters of justice. This goes back to lex talionis, which is the idea that if you are a righteous man and you are wronged, it is your duty to punish the offender, yourself.

A product of the clannish nature of the Southern Highlander is an unofficial intelligence network of sorts. News travels fast. Rural Appalachia has one of the most effective Underground’s in existence and it doesn’t even know it. If you want to see how it operates, let an incident like above happen, or hang around the bear hunters in the southern mountains around mid October. They will tell you every single detail about the game warden, his habits down to what he eats for breakfast and what flavor toothpaste he uses.

Nationalism and the American Founding
Nationalism: “A malignant ideology that causes the ignorant masses to believe that political kingpins who are deceiving, manipulating, and leading them to destruction are their friends, protectors, and benefactors.” – Robert Higgs

I’ve written previously that it is largely a fiction of bad revisionist history (usually to serve a modern political end) to believe that the Founding of this country was by an ethnically, racially and politically united and homogenous people. America was always divided despite the rants of the usual statist suspects when they espouse the mythology of the Founding. There were 13 separate nations that came together under an agreement not the opposite. (As espoused by folks such as Harry Jaffa)

Nationalism as is understood today by most people is largely a product of the French Revolution to push the French speaking peoples into a mode of hyper-statism and away from decentralization. It is ironic that the modern Right embraces the leftist notion to such a degree.
Many today declare themselves civic nationalists while laying claim to the intellectual thought of the conservative movement, which ironically always critiqued nationalism from a traditionalist perspective.

Traditional American conservatives such as Robert Nisbet or Russell Kirk were extremely critical of nationalism and identified it with social engineering and consolidated federal power vs. localism. Today it is seen as bedrock of a hard right, statist movement, which often tends toward fascism.

I have written elsewhere:
“Professor Clyde Wilson, staunch traditionalist and someone the SPLC would label a ‘neo confederate’ famously stated, ‘Patriotism is the wholesome, constructive love of one’s land and people. Nationalism is the unhealthy love of one’s government, accompanied by the aggressive desire to put down others—which becomes in deracinated modern men a substitute for religious faith. Patriotism is an appropriate, indeed necessary, sentiment for people who wish to preserve their freedom; nationalism is not.’

In the classical American understanding of the concept of republican virtue, we see a devotion to localism and a fiendish quest for decentralization at all costs. When Thomas Jefferson referred to his “country” he was referring to Virginia. John Randolph of Roanoke was cut from the same cloth. “When I speak of my Nation, I mean the Commonwealth of Virginia,” he stated.

It is no coincidence you’ll commonly see among Zerogov.com writings the use of “these united States” vs. “the United States.” This is not a typo.
Nationalism means consolidation. Centralization was the chief fear of all those who favored liberty in the American founding mythos and a chief grievance in AMREV1.

The Constitutional Coup was an invention of the Nationalists. The Hamiltonian wing was the group that favored the Tariff, the National Bank, Crony Capitalism/Mercantilism, and all power vested in the Central government. The republicans were the decentralists who kept true to the values of the American Revolution and fought it all.

The framing of the cultural divide can be seen in the politics of the War Between the States. Most conservatives of the ‘radical’ type today, particularly in the South, have little problem with laying claim to the intellectual tradition of Confederate Secession. Yet, the Nationalists were the Northerners. Their devotion and cause was preservation of the Union at the expense of 650K and 50K Southern Civilians killed, dead, dead dead. The Southern soldier rallied around their sense of place, kinship and community to defend from the invading horde. Which is it, Gents, the concepts of liberty of your ancestors or nationalism?”

I reject nationalism on its face as a ghost of the mind that holds no substance. It’s an article of faith and nothing more. It could be a useful heuristic if it were used as a bulwark against a greater power as it has been done elsewhere. The problem in our context is that FedGov is the default world government and any attempt to employ nationalism in the American context today further consolidates power in the central government. Gold flag fringe and apple pie do not represent freedom or a culture of resistance.

I am told by everyone from the Alt Lite frat boy to the Racial Nationalist that I must be loyal to Bob next door, who lives on welfare, votes Democrat, smokes dope, and beats his wife rather than to the black guy who shows up at every firearms training course that comes to town, goes to Church, carries a 9mm, works 10 hour days and makes hellacious bbq. Why? Their response: “Western Identity” or “only white people value freedom.”

If one values culture in the eternal struggle for freedom, they must reject collectivism and focus on specific cultural values that are important and they must embrace and live by those values while leading from the front, rejecting top down approaches to preserve them. Preservation of whatever your conception of noble culture is won’t happen at the barrel of a politician’s gun.

Appalachiastan: A Culture Apart
Appalachian culture is largely a culture all of its own in America. Yet, it is still not a monolith. There are several variations and I tend to focus on the things most applicable to me in my life. The culture of which I’m speaking has always been at odds with the rest of the lowland South and Yankeedom in general.

We can see anti-authoritarian traits throughout the world in the mountain peoples of Zomia to the Basques to the Scots and Celts. They remain resilient even though they have been harassed throughout their existence. These peoples have long histories of avoiding the state, evading taxation and slavery, and attempting to practice the art of not being governed to the best of their ability, largely in the manner of the quiet insurrectionist.
Buppert’s Law of Military Topography rings true; “Mountainous terrain held by riflemen who know what they are about cannot be militarily defeated.”

Generally seen as backwoods and Neanderthal by lowland town folks, urbanites and Northerners, this culture still retains some very important aspects that are useful in cultivating liberty in todays world.

I was talking to a friend recently who reminded me that there is more to class analysis than a simple State vs. Us analysis offered by the typical hardline libertarian. While I reject Marxism, there actually is a traditional libertarian and individualist anarchist analysis of rich and poor. There are also divides, which are even more useful to us, with the urban and the rural dweller. Class conflict was a very large part of American history.
David Hackett Fischer relates in Albion’s Seed, that the frontier idea of “natural freedom” was created by a “complex interaction between the American environment and a European folk culture. It derived in large part from the British border country, where anarchic violence had long been a condition. The natural liberty of the borderers was an idea at once more radically libertarian, more strenuously hostile to ordering institutions than were the other cultures in British America.” (777)

James Webb in Born Fighting does a pretty good job of detailing the Scots-Irish border culture.

“It reaches back to the distinctions in ancient Scotland that encouraged strong family pride and even patriotism while at the same time dismissing notions that nationalism needed to be wrapped up in a specific racial identity…or even in a larger loyalty to king and crown…. On the whole they an embracive people who have tended to focus more on shared concepts such as family loyalty and personal honor than on simple ethnic similarities” (124)

Controversial author Jack Donovan talks about how Barbarians were outside of the empire and their loyalty to their own kin, rather than a distant king or government took precedence. We see this trait alive today. You are much more likely to see a mountain person be in the corner of another mountain person than in the corner of an outsider even if they might agree with the outsider on a certain issue for instance. And the ties are often extremely local. It’s not uncommon to this day to hear men of one county refer to a man from another as a “furriner.”

The modern conception of nationalism is entirely too collectivist to be useful. What on earth could a life long Kentucky coal miner who never left his home county and a gender fluid “man,” that is a democratic socialist that lives in Manhattan and wears skinny jeans possibly have in shared cultural values and customs?

I posed this to a cultural justice warrior once and he replied with “a love of country.” Golly bum, that sure clears it up. What he really meant was they live under the same central government and that is to be celebrated above all else. Anne Frank and Adolf Hitler found themselves in similar circumstances.

Buppert eloquently points out that cities are incubators of collectivism. The backcountry was always at odds with the Eastern cities. They were even more at odds with the Southern Gentry with their conservatism and a fondness of the Thrown, Altar and Aristocracy. The borderers on the early frontier were known as Cohee’s. The Tidewater peoples were known as Tuckahoe’s. John Shane, a famous source for information on the early Kentucky settlement detailed “Irish mostly from the Pennsylvania country and Carolina were called Cohees. Mostly Presbyterians. Virginians were called Tuckahoes. You could tell where a man was from, on first seeing him.” (Perkins, 85)

These terms were often used as slurs. The mountain peoples of early America were small holders in nature. They were prone to violent action and held to a rugged individualism with strong reliance on family, kin and community. The Hatfield-McCoy or the Watson-Hooper feuds are examples of an attempt to settle disputes outside of the state. In general these people held an allergy to authority that cannot be bred out of them. They had relatively little in common at all with the slave holding Tidewater Gentry that were the beneficiaries of government privilege and protection.
In the North Carolina backcountry in particular we see that the backwoodsmen around the time of the Revolution were more worried about targeting the oppressors du jour, the lowland Gentry, rather than unifying its efforts against the farther away tyrant in England. The Regulation is the culmination of this and we saw that in essence the people in a quasi-stateless manner were running the area until the Battle of Alamance, which then resulted in many of the radicals retreating into the mountains. They were a bottom-up coalition of folks of differing opinions, but they vehemently agreed that the Tidewater ruling class should be expelled. To further illustrate non-universal American values from the time, we had near Anarchist folks in the Regulation, to men like Herman Husband, who was a pacifist and was an early class warrior advocating a hard, progressive taxation on the rich and fiat money. He went on to fight in the Whiskey Rebellion.

The Regulators operated from Virginia to Georgia taking care of private criminals and government criminals the same. They beat lawyers, hung tax collectors, and urinated inside courthouses. They protested lowland rule of their communities.

American nationalists of today spend most of their time talking about immigration and instituting fascism in order to save freedom. They seek to make government greater again. It struck me as ironic as the tradition of Appalachian Anti-Statism, was founded by a patchwork of different peoples, religions and settled by first generation immigrants. They sought refuge from a devastated homeland or were trying in affect to escape the tyranny of the place they left. The Scots-Irish arrived in massive numbers, in waves, from 1700 to the 1770’s almost all due to some sort of upheaval in their native lands, mostly from government sanctioned absentee landlords enforcing ungodly rents and taxation on the tenants.

These peoples hit the hills as quick as they could. It was essentially anarchical in practice. They hit their first lick of lawlessness by the mere act of settling past the King’s Proclamation line of 1763.

Horace Kephart describes the backwoods people very well in his seminal work, Our Southern Highlanders:
“The Western piedmont and the mountains were settled neither by Cavaliers nor by poor whites, but by a radically distinct and even antagonistic people who are appropriately called the Roundheads of the South. These Roundheads had little or nothing to do with slavery, detested the state church, loathed tithes, and distrusted all authority save that of conspicuous merit and natural justice.” (Kephart, 439)

“Our Highlanders have neither memory nor tradition of ever having been herded together, lorded over, persecuted or denied the privileges of freemen… they recognize no social compact.” (Kephart, 382-383)
While the modern proponents of the European Ethno-State calls for a “peaceful ethnic cleansing,” they whistle past the graveyards of their forefathers who were anything but ethnically homogenous. The Germans (“Dutch” in the Dixie Highlander lexicon) were seen as culturally odd folks to their Ulster counterparts as were the French Huguenots.

On an ironic note, some of the lines in my ancestry were some variation of; a German married a Scots Borderer whose daughter married an Irishman and their militia records were all found in a French bible from the Revolution. Michael Stoner, a German and notable early Kentucky settler spoke in broken English and contemporary first person accounts of the same period detail this being common place for these types of people. German settler George Plott and his descendants were responsible for bringing the Plott hound, the North Carolina state dog, to the Smoky’s and creating the tradition of running bear with dogs.
 
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Dozdoats

On TB every waking moment
Pt 2
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The far western colonial era frontiersman was more often than not culturally mixed with the Native population. Nearly all war fighters, hunters, militiamen, scouts or spies were wearing Indian dress and fighting in Indian ways. They adopted Indian customs, sometimes had Indian wives. Mixed race children were not uncommon. Large pluralities of Southern Appalachian residents today claim some type of Indian ancestry. (I could bore you to death with citations for a hundred pages detailing all of this, but this is not a doctoral dissertation.) Maj George Hanger of the British Army, as detailed by Webb, talked of the backwoodsman being
“More savage than the Indians, and possessing every one of their vices and not one of their virtues. I have known these fellows to travel two hundred miles through the woods never keeping any road or path, guided by the sun by day and the stars by night, to kill a particular person.” (Fischer, 168)

We tend to see the hill folk of Appalachiastan tend to focus their resistance efforts amongst the most likely threat to their livelihood. It was not uncommon to see in areas like the backwoods of NC leading up to the Revolutionary War more focused at fighting the local Colonial government than the British Army.

Most of the Southern Gentry didn’t care for secession from Britian anyway. They got their power and wealth from the Empire’s cronyism.
The American Revolution, as well as the War Between the States was generally seen as “lowlander problems.” It wasn’t until later in the Revolution that we saw a more united backcountry on the quest to expel the Army of a distant king. Namely after Ferguson threated to lay waste to their country. Webb continues:
“Ferguson called them mongrels, but they should have known better. Certainly new settlers, while retaining their own identities, had begun to mix their blood with German, French, Welsh, Irish and English, not to mention Cherokee. But that had always been the case. Mountain culture was Celtic culture, and Celtic culture had always been assimilative… The Celts assimilated first into families and then into tribes, and the concept of duty, kinship and personal loyalty always trumped any fanciful notion of racial purity.” (Webb, 168)

The Overmountain Men rallied at Sycamore Shoals and crossed the divide at Roan Mountain, dressed more as Indians than white colonials, they set out to destroy Ferguson. The militias were a patchwork of free men, on their own account, with arms they privately owned and supplies they bankrolled themselves.

They largely operated on an unconventional mission-type order framework. Isaac Shelby, a commander at the battle of Kings Mountain was known for telling his men to not wait for orders, but to “be your own officers…availing yourselves to every advantage that change might throw your way.” (Webb, 169) The Overmountain Men fought like Indians. They took the field and there was no more British advance into their country.
Many like to wax poetic about the universal Christian nature of the colonial frontier folk. Actual backwoods travelers and preachers, detail something totally different; A culture of backwoods heathens that do not know law or God. Others were hardly the White Anglo Saxon Protestants we imagine as the American ideal. Folks like Joseph Doddridge discuss dissenting Religious sects in depth.

The Tidewater Elite often characterized the hill folks as “white Indians” and thought them of the same ilk; worthless.

The hill people of the backwoods of what would become Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia all had their own smaller secession movements away from the Crown and even away from their own mother colonies.

Despite this, their first mistake was allowing the counties to be formed. We also see that at this same time, many settlers still headed west. One could argue they were heading west to stay away from the new government set up in Mordor on the Potomac.

The Founding mythology presented by some today is that the nation was wholly united at the time of the Revolution and the time the Constitution was drafted.

The truth is the nation was as divided as it is today, if not more so.
Anti-federalists duked it out with Federalists. Whiskey Rebels who fought under Washington to free themselves from oppressive British mercantilism, taxation and infringements on their natural liberties, were now fighting Washington when he was taxing them and infringing on their natural liberties. A quasi-civil war was eminent around 1800 when French Revolutionaries animated many Americans. John Adams ended signing the Alien and Sedition Acts and was locking up suspected terrorists and limiting free speech. He locked up one man for calling him fat.

The Thermidor of most Revolutions turn this way and detail the usual Pyrrhic victory for liberty. The new boss is usually just the same as the old boss.

The War Between the States brought yet another interesting conflict to the mountains. Brother against brother and county against county. East Tennessee was part of a confederate state but in a region with a Union majority. West Virginia seceded from Virginia and rejoined the Union. The Mountains were refuge to draft dodgers, deserters and renegades throughout the war from both sides.
It is my view that again the Mountain South took up arms to the most direct threat they saw to their own lives, liberty and sacred honor. Some saw it as the Union. Some saw it as the Confederacy. An interesting unit in the war from Western NC was William Holland Thomas’s Legion of Highlanders and Cherokee composed of roughly 1000 highlanders and half as many Cherokee at any given time, they were an irregular confederate force that was mainly tasked with protecting the lines of drift through the Smoky Mountain corridor. Thomas also helped purchase land for what would become the Cherokee Reservation in Western North Carolina, to get around the fact that the Cherokee’s couldn’t buy property. These were the same Cherokee that evaded Andrew Jackson’s Slave Patrols to forcefully evacuate these people on the Trail of Tears.
When the war was over, we saw the different sides united again against the outlander in the Revenue Wars. This period was a time of nearly open guerrilla rebellion against the federal government. The unionists must have had to take some hard to swallow pills after the Feds betrayed them during Reconstruction and began assaulting their natural liberties to distill whiskey unhindered by the apparatchiks from Washington Town. It wasn’t much different than the Revolution and Whisky Rebellion correlation. Every county in the mountains probably has a tale or ten of various Revenue Agents coming in to bust up distilling operations and never leaving. Even Tennessee’s state song, Rocky Top details this.
One can easily argue that parts of Appalachia weren’t totally reconstructed until the 1970s. These hills house the renegades, outlaws and folks of a fairly libertarian disposition. This is not universal but it’s a common trait among many.

In certain areas you will encounter people who still vote Democrat because by God, their Daddy, and his Daddy before that, and his Daddy before that voted Democrat and they are not changing now. Yet when you talk to them on a personal level, you see the local Dem and Rep voters agreeing that we don’t need another foreign war. They damn sure don’t want to pay a dime in taxes if they can get away with it. They are completely against giving up any guns. Are we really going to say these democratic voters are less “American” because they do not support the MAGAt in office?

Individualism gets a bad wrap in some circles but I think it is semantics. People think of Ayn Rand type cults when the word gets thrown around in some circles. Lets not forget that individual autonomy grants one the ability to form communal, tribal or operate in kinship bonds.

“Except as kinsman or partisans they cannot pull together. Speak to them of a community of interests, try to show them the advantages of co-operation and you might as well be profiteering the North Star…. Labor chiefs fail to organize unions or granges among them because they simply will not stick together… There is no such thing as a community of mountaineers. They are knit together, man to man, as friends, but not as a body of men. ” (Kephart, 383-384)

Cultural as a Tactic: A Bulwark Against the State
I strongly suggest if your goal is to use liberty culture as a bulwark against the infringing outside cults of statism, you must seek distinct nuances and traits, not something so broad as Western Culture or Americanism. These lack descriptive value, legitimate definitions and are a spook of the mind. Ask 10 different people what those terms mean and you’ll 30 different answers. These united States may still maintain a history of a culture that contain traits that we see benefit in, but let us not forget Americans as a group do not want liberty. If they did, we’d be living in a free country right now.

Dr. Ron Paul in the 2007 Republican primaries got 1% of the vote. The Libertarian Party has never garnered more than a few percentage points of the vote throughout its history in Presidential elections.
Let us not forget it is predominately white Americans of European extraction that have given us the largest states in history, the biggest debts, a US world empire and a domestic police state that is unrivaled anywhere else. Europe has gone socialist. A quick analysis of the historical Anarchist movements from Europe we can see they tended more toward collectivism. Everything we say and do is recorded and it is estimated that the average person commits 3 felonies a day just by existing in these united States.
A leftist democratic socialist is just as “American” as a Trump voter. Antifa and the Proud Boys, both “Americans” are just 2 different wings of preferences of the ruling class. There is no challenge to the status quo. This is why a focus on specific subsets of cultural values is of utmost importance.

The human terrain of Appalachiastan, though largely modernized in many ways, still retain useful characteristics that are beneficial in ones journey to live free on their own hook. Focus on the specific cultural values you hold dear not broad abstractions, because they are not universal across the billions of peoples of the West.
There is a reason why shows such as Moonshiners are extremely popular. Illicit liquor in the hills is viewed by most as a normal part of life. I’ve even heard uniformed members of the local constabulary state “Aw, if I pulled a guy over and he had a jar on him, I could care less.” Popcorn Sutton, on several occasions distilled alcohol, illegally, at public events for a public exhibit. Nothing happened to him. (For those offenses at least)
Folks with an interest in the mechanics of insurgency know that the human terrain, legitimacy, and support in the mass base are vital components. This culture often nullifies bad laws by means of social norms. This speaks further to the notions of thinkers that put forth the idea that a revolution is not needed if people can arrange themselves where the state has no affect on them.
Appalachian peoples have also had a long history of resisting the great object of libertarian scorn; the roads. Historically in many locales, roads were maintained by means of conscription instead of fuel taxes. Instead of paying fuel taxes as we do in modern times, men were conscripted for a time each year to work the roads. Quill Rose of Eagle Creek in what is now the Great Smoky Mountain National Park famously dodged the roadwork crew. He even purposefully lived without any sort of road within miles of his house. Roads bring in outsiders, who not long after bring their politics. Its still fairly common place for residents along state controlled single lane gravel roads to resist their expansion and paving.
The ruling class is not a class in which you are part of. Its going to be an interesting dynamic down at the Uprising when the patriot militias who back the Republican government, show up to whoop the armies of Hillary and they are both wearing the same flag on their shoulders. Some of these militia people hold mutually exclusive belief sets. If you claim you are going to go to war over a gun grab (Trump has done more harm to gun rights in the last 20 years than any other President in the same time) or take on the regime over identify politics, but you are getting butt hurt when a flag is burned by a lefty, you are going to have a hard mental challenge ahead. You cannot dream of balkanization and wave the Federal flag while remaining consistent.

If the cultural justice warrior thinks that masculinity is in decline, what are you doing in your personal life to ensure it isn’t lost? Instead of complaining about millenials and their lack of manners, are you leading from the front? Instead of complaining about America being De-Christianized or prayers not being in schools, are you living the teachings of that religion daily? Instead of complaining about how modern men can’t protect their woman, are you training for that mission? Are you actually doing something to live and preserve those cherished “western” values or are you just drinking with your frat boy buddies at the weekly western chauvinist get-together, acting like high school kids?
Lots of people yammer on about “getting active.” You cannot preserve culture by going to a rally or building a wall. Peter Schiff just pointed out on the Twitter-verse recently that FEDGOV is going to start revoking passports of those they suspect of owing back taxes. He related that if the wall were built, it would effectively turn the country into a giant debtors prison and keep Americans in instead of keeping Mexicans out.

Many on the Right understand that a gun free zone will not keep guns out or stop crime. Some might even understand that a drug war will not stop drug use. They may also understand that from an irregular warfare context when the government declares war on something, like “terror” or “insurgents” you get more of it/them. Yet some how they also think that if they give the government more money, power, control and bureaucracy, they will create a more effective immigration police state and stop the ‘invaders’ and preserve their culture. News flash: American culture has been dead since long before any illegals started coming in. It’s not the guy with an expired visa that is taxing you, raiding your house and killing your dogs, giving you speeding tickets, confiscating your house if you do not pay property tax, spying on you, eroding every right you have, marching your kids off to war, governing you with 76,000 pages of federal regulations and 19,000 police agencies across the country, or instituting gun control.

I’m sure the usual suspects will try to call me a globalist or some other pejorative. Which always struck me as odd considering the statists were calling us “isolationists” back during Ron Paul 2007/08.

You must understand your span of control. Top down approaches never turn out good for the freedomista. If you criticize the death of the West, you must recognize that you have no control over what other people do from a cultural perspective. And I’d argue that letting people live how they want, is one of the utmost cultural traits we should be preserving.
You are whom you surround yourself with. If you are spending your time complaining about the cultural shift in America, you should realize you could mitigate a lot of it by hanging around like-minded people. If you are complaining about X or Y culture issue while living in an area that is dominated by the thing you are railing against, vote with your feet.
Bill Buppert wrote recently on the concept of Irish Democracy here.
I first heard James C Scott use the term in his several works on the history of stateless peoples several years ago. He writes in Two Cheers for Anarchism:
“Quiet, anonymous, and often complicitous law-breaking and disobedience may well be the historically preferred mode of political action for peasant and subaltern classes, for whom open defiance is too dangerous…. One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called “Irish Democracy”—the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people—than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.”

The concept is no different than the quiet insurrection of people like Quill Rose. With his half Indian wife, he lived a life as an outlaw, rebel and man on his own hook defying every outlet of authority he encountered. “Never Get Ketched!” was his motto. More on Quill here.

You can’t change what the apparatchiks are doing in DC any more than you can change what cultural preferences your neighbor has, especially if it’s an urban or suburban hellhole. The national level is done. It’s a sinking ship and its time to get off. The only viable option that is available is to build alternate ways of life or infrastructures and networks. Arguing over tastes and decorum (aka partisan politics) is pointless. Why fight the culture war in your idiotic padded Game of Thrones suits and shields at the local Alt-Right/Antifa bash when you could be building your own world? It used to be the liberty community didn’t want to inflict ‘good’ government on others, now its their sole focus, all in the name of an undefined and meaningless crusade of the cultural justice warrior.
I’ve written extensively about Etienne De la Boetie and his eloquent defense of the right of refusal and non-compliance. Revolution, as detailed by the German philosopher, Johann Kaspar Schmidt, is the wish for new arrangements. While Insurrection is not allowing you to ever be arranged again. Make the choice. Many people of Appalachiastan did. The culture still lives. Go Live it.

“No such thing as spare time, no such thing as free time, no such thing as down time. All you got is lifetime. Go.”
–Henry Rollins

Works Cited:
Kephart, Horace. Our Southern Highlanders. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 1983.
Webb, James. Born Fighting. New York: Broadway Books. 2004
Perkins, Elizabeth. Border Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998
Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford Press. 1989
 
Dennis Olson

Dennis Olson

Chief Curmudgeon
_______________
FK, I’m not tryin to bust on you, but the original article has a bunch of content. Please add it to your OP.

Thanks!
 
Countrymouse

Countrymouse

Country exile in the city
Dozdoats said:
zerogov.com

Appalachiastan: Culture of Resistance by John Meyers

Publisher’s Note: The usual suspects among the communist chattering classes are now pivoting to a new mass advertisement campaign to attract apparatchiks to their serial killer ideology by painting every white human a white supremacist. While I think that government supremacists have done far...
zerogov.com
Click to expand...


This man KNOWS the South of the mountain folk---of whom my parents come.

This is how I was raised.

This is the South the North has never understood--the Southern man who, when asked why he was fighting when he was neither a plantation-owner nor a slave-owner, replied:

"Because this is OUR LAND, and you're on it."

Nail. Head.


:applaud:
 
S

SlipperySlope

Veteran Member
I didn't like his political slant on the piece. DId you notice how he was focusing on the 1960's black problems? I guess I always liked Sunday morning because it was soft news and NOT political. KInd of an informative show to relax by. It is gradually creeping into a harder format which is way too prevalent nowadays. I think it used to be a Mayberry type program. I may have to change my Sunday morning relax routine.
 
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