Confederate Statues Were Never Really About Preserving History

 https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/confederate-statues/

In recent weeks President Trump has railed against tearing down statues across the country — and has been particularly dogged in his defense of Confederate monuments. But his argument that they are benign symbols of America’s past is misleading. An overwhelming majority of Confederate memorials weren’t erected in the years directly following the Civil War. Instead, most were put up decades later. Nor were they built just to commemorate fallen generals and soldiers; they were installed as symbols of white supremacy during periods of U.S. history when Black Americans’ civil rights were aggressively under attack. In total, at least 830 such monuments were constructed across the U.S, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which maintains a comprehensive database of Confederate monuments and symbols.

Pride and prejudice? The Americans who fly the Confederate flag

 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/06/pride-and-prejudice-the-americans-who-fly-the-confederate-flag

The post-war white south embraced the Confederate battle flag, making it their sentimental symbol of the “lost cause” of the war. By the time Mississippi embedded it into its new state flag in 1894, the flag was used to both honor the Confederate dead as well as a romanticized version of the war’s purpose.

About 93% of racial justice protests in the US have been peaceful, a new report finds

 https://myfox8.com/news/about-93-of-racial-justice-protests-in-the-us-have-been-peaceful-a-new-report-finds/

About 93% of racial justice protests in the US since the death of George Floyd have been peaceful and nondestructive, according to a new report.

The findings, released Thursday, contradict assumptions and claims by some that protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement are spawning violence and destruction of property.

The report was produced by the US Crisis Project, a joint effort by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) and the Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University, which collects and analyzes real-time data on demonstrations and political violence in the US.

Donald Trump's Response to DOJ Filing Blasted as 'Full of Nonsense'

 https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trumps-response-doj-filing-blasted-full-nonsense-1738784

Conservative jurist John Yoo told CNN that the response from Trump's lawyers seemed "confused" and seemed like an effort to "really kick the can down the road."

"The thing it's missing is any response to the photographs and to the allegation that 100 sets of classified documents are found, which is really a startling claim by the government that you would have thought Trump would have responded to it here," he said.

University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck reacted with a tweet, saying "If Trump declassified everything, why are his lawyers agreeing with DOJ that any Special Master should have a Top Secret/SCI security clearance??"

‘Clearly’ Trump had ‘nefarious intentions,’ ‘nothing short of our national security at stake’

 https://www.foxnews.com/media/brennan-clearly-trump-nefarious-intentions-nothing-short-national-security-stake

John Brennan, former CIA Director, appeared on MSNBC’S "The ReidOut" Wednesday to discuss how he considers former President Donald Trump to be a "national security" risk with "nefarious intentions" after the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago home.

He went on to cast aspersions on Trump, appearing to imply that he was like a traitor who spied on his own government for foreign adversaries. "And the types of things that he’s doing, it reminds me of some individual U.S. government officials who were recruited by foreign intelligence services who did their utmost to conceal their activities, to conceal the documents that they might have taken and stolen from the U.S. Government," he continued.

Trump's legal gambits offer fresh revelations and deepen his political risk

 https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/01/politics/trump-legal-gambits-political-risk-analysis/index.html

At the same time, however, Wednesday's filing also threatened to backfire since it appeared to admit to the transgression of which Trump is accused -- keeping classified information at his home. This could be another self-inflicted legal blow. Much like the revelations by the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection, the longer the process goes on, the more damning it seems to become for Trump.

While the ex-President has succeeded in politicizing the investigation, and uniting much of the GOP behind him, his gambits so far have often only revealed more and more damning evidence about his own conduct.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, seems to be constantly outwitting Trump's politicized and emotional defenses, which typically fail to address substantive legal issues.

Five myths about Robert E. Lee

 https://reevesjw.medium.com/five-myths-about-robert-e-lee-d9d6fa331aa

The belief that the Confederate leaders didn’t really commit treason is widely held in America today. In 2017, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said of Lee, “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days.” Lee himself made a similar argument in 1866, when he said, “Virginia, in withdrawing herself from the United States, carried me along as a citizen of Virginia, and her laws and her acts were binding on me.”

Regardless, of Lee’s and Kelly’s view of the matter, it was always the position of the United States Government that Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and the other Confederate leaders had committed treason, as defined in Article III of the Constitution. On June 7, 1865, Robert E. Lee was indicted for treason by a federal grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia. He faced death by hanging if convicted.

A Current Officer’s Thoughts on Robert E. Lee

 https://angrystaffofficer.com/2017/09/01/guest-post-a-current-officers-thoughts-on-robert-e-lee/

Lee’s Army killed or wounded 1,100 Union Soldiers during the 7 Days Battle, Lee’s first as the Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. From there, the Union suffered over 1,600 casualties at Second Manassas, 11,100 (2,100 killed) at Antietam, 12,600 casualties at Fredericksburg, 17,000 casualties at Chancellorsville, 23,049 (3,155 killed) at Gettysburg, and the list goes on through the 1864 campaigns against General Ulysses S. Grant, the siege of Petersburg (4,200 losses estimated), and Lee’s final surrender at Appomattox. (See: McPherson, James and James Hogue, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction.)

So should Lee’s statue be removed? The simple removal of a statue does not equate to destroying our common American history. It simply sends the message that Americans will not tolerate the honoring of such an intolerant man who was responsible for the deaths of so many Americans. A statue is not “history” in and of itself, but simply a reflection of how we Americans remember our past. Those who see this as a removal of history may be surprised to discover books, perhaps a better means of learning history than a statue.

The Meaning of Oaths and a Forgotten Man

 https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a24208/what-an-oath-means/

"I think that Robert E. Lee, as a traitor and betrayer of his solemn oath before God and the Constitution, was a much greater terrorist than Osama Bin Ladin… after all, Lee killed many more Americans than Bin Ladin, and almost destroyed the United States. What do you think?"

The oath I, and all modern officers swear, runs this way: "I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."

DNA analysis solves mystery of bodies found at bottom of medieval well

 https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/30/europe/medieval-well-mystery-bodies-scn/index.html

The identity of the remains of the six adults and 11 children and why they ended up in the medieval well had long vexed archaeologists. Unlike other mass burials where skeletons are uniformly arranged, the bodies were oddly positioned and mixed -- likely caused by being thrown head first shortly after their deaths.

To understand more about how these people died, scientists were recently able to extract detailed genetic material preserved in the bones thanks to recent advances in ancient DNA sequencing. The genomes of six of the individuals showed that four of them were related -- including three sisters, the youngest of whom was five to 10 years old. Further analysis of the genetic material suggested that all six were "almost certainly" Ashkenazi Jews.

THE MYTH OF THE KINDLY GENERAL LEE

 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

Lee was a slave owner—his own views on slavery were explicated in an 1856 letter that is often misquoted to give the impression that Lee was some kind of abolitionist. In the letter, he describes slavery as “a moral & political evil,” but goes on to explain that:

The argument here is that slavery is bad for white people, good for black people, and most important, better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention. That black people might not want to be slaves does not enter into the equation; their opinion on the subject of their own bondage is not even an afterthought to Lee.

Lee’s cruelty as a slave master was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”

A Pennsylvania Lawmaker and the Resurgence of Christian Nationalism

 https://www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/a-pennsylvania-lawmaker-and-the-resurgence-of-christian-nationalism

Doug Mastriano, a Republican state senator from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and parts of neighboring counties, was a little-known figure in state politics before the coronavirus pandemic. But, in the past year, he has led rallies against mask mandates and other public-health protocols, which he has characterized as “the governor’s autocratic control over our lives.” He has become a leader of the Stop the Steal campaign, and claims that he spoke to Donald Trump at least fifteen times between the 2020 election and the insurrection at the Capitol, on January 6th. He urged his followers to attend the rally at the Capitol that led to the riots, saying, “I’m really praying that God will pour His Spirit upon Washington, D.C., like we’ve never seen before.” Throughout this time, he has cast the fight against both lockdowns and Trump’s electoral loss as a religious battle against the forces of evil. He has come to embody a set of beliefs characterized as Christian nationalism, which center on the idea that God intended America to be a Christian nation, and which, when mingled with conspiracy theory and white nationalism, helped to fuel the insurrection. “Violence has always been a part of Christian nationalism,” Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist and co-author of “Taking America Back for God,” told me. “It’s just that the nature of the enemy has changed.”

"Robert E. Lee and Me

Donald Trump’s latest excuse for losing doesn’t quite add up

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/25/donald-trumps-latest-excuse-for-losing-doesnt-quite-add-up/

At a rally Monday, Donald Trump added a new piece to the "rigged election" puzzle. He said the polls are rigged against him — which he's said before. Then he added another layer: The rigged polls were themselves a form of voter suppression.