Scott Lively on race and the mechanisms used to divide us.

Scott Lively is a guy who in his own right can split a room down the middle, depending where one is at.  However, his words are most often thoughtful and well considered.

But he warns those in the MAGA movement about those who vindicate arguments made against them. Popular figures who draw attention to themselves as representatives of a movement but can do more harm than good in the end.  He points out the way in which the ‘elite’s’ have positioned themselves to politically profit from divisiveness based on race.

In his most recent writing that I received by email (and you can see here), he discusses the way in which MAGA folks can be manipulated and polarized. Those of you who find their family members going off the rails (no matter which side of the argument) might look deeper to find that their (or your) arguments might be a little antagonistic and possibly fomented through hyperbole.

His concluding thoughts:

” .. What most bothered me was that Fuentes was literally and blatantly vindicating the accusations of the left against the MAGA movement, and that struck me as intentional, and thus Obiden-orchestrated. That hypothesis and the whiff of a potential homoerotic undercurrent in Fuentes’ network was partially vindicated in the recent (joint venture?) sabotage of President Trump by self-declared “ex-gay” (but still “gay” acting) Milo Yiannopoulos, using Fuentes and Kanye West as either allies or props.

Thankfully, Fuentes was only a small sideshow in the wild carnival atmosphere on 12/12, where tens of thousands of MAGA faithful from every conceivable constituency flowed and swirled like white-water rapids around both the several officially planned and the many spontaneous mini-rallies all over the Washington Mall and its environs – none of which echoed Fuentes’ themes (except a suspicious-seeming speech-maker at the Proud Boys stage the members there didn’t seem to know).

My point here is that the MAGA faithful need to carefully guard ourselves against the temptation to join the “right-wing” polar extreme that is characterized by blaming “the Jews” or “the blacks” collectively as the problem because that is just another “Whitmer trap” of the elites – used to justify the violence and cancel culture of the left, and to prevent the empowering unification of the conservative/populist Jews, blacks and whites against the elites themselves. ..”

The entire article can be read here:

Nick Fuentes and the elites’ manufacturing of white resentment

As a bonus, and for perspective:

Slavery at America’s Founding

(The above article was inspired by the conversation cited below.)

I’ve just had an email debate with a man who believes in racial segregation and thinks that the phrase “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence was intended by the writers to mean white men only, because of other writings in which some founders held that exclusionist view.

In my reply I admitted that racial perspectives were not the same then as now, BUT, pointed out that the ideals in the Declaration were clearly aspirational, and were articulated by the most ethically advanced men of their generation. I have no doubt that Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, the Adams’ and a few others fully understood and believed that all men of all races are created equal as a philosophical/theological principle, while also understanding the difference between philosophical ideals and practical realities, like Paul’s approach to slavery in Philemon.

“Equal in inherent value to God” is also very different from “equal in function and purpose in human civilization.” Husbands and wives are equal in value, but the wife has a duty under God to submit to the authority of her husband.

What evolved over time was the appreciation of individualism in the exercise of liberty, as America slowly led humanity out of the millennia-old world-wide mentality and practice of rigid top-down human social hierarchy in which everyone’s life and prospects were regulated by their social strata and familial/”tribal” relationships. To them, chattel slavery was just a component of the economic order, one step below indentured servitude on the lower end of scale of stratified class distinctions.

The nearly universal (non-race based) practice of chattel slavery in the “laws” of war and conquest was just a fact of life for them, from time immemorial. How different was African slavery from that realistically speaking to a world with that perspective? Did they view a person enslaved by accident of losing a war as having less inherent value to God than someone born to royalty? Not if they read their Bible. And yet, all but a few went about their lives without turning into abolitionist zealots — just like Christians do today in this abortion and sodomy dominated culture of death we can’t seem to restore to sanity.

The Pilgrims had literally made themselves indentured servants for a seven-year term to pay for their passage to America on the Mayflower. What percentage of the Founders generation were their grandchildren and great-grandchildren or had a similar heritage?

I contended that this man was falling into the modern “progressive” trap of trying to impose advanced ethical mandates on people from less ethically mature generations — Except that he was doing it in reverse by suggesting that the Founders’ failure to impose advanced ethics on their society meant they didn’t hold those ethics themselves as individuals.

In response he emphasized that Franklin, for example, had displayed personal aversion to Black people. To that I reminded him that one can accept that people are inherently equal in value and still dislike them personally for various reasons.

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