I get a lot of emails with links to Mablog where I reply by saying I agree with Wilson. In the following op-ed, Dr. Nick Gier makes a sloppy guilt-by-association argument that’s high on emotion but short on facts. And I agree with Wilson (not completely). I also agree with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (not completely). Here’s Doug Wilson’s former philosophy prof. from today’s Daily News:
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HIS VIEW
Local pastor agrees with Trump on Charlottesville
Nick Gier | The Palouse Pundit
In an Aug. 16 blog post entitled “In Praise of Our President,” Douglas Wilson, pastor of Moscow’s Christ Church, wrote that “Trump refused to be steered by mob action, and when two evil groups clashed violently, he refused to take sides.”
Wilson commended President Donald Trump for identifying “the game plan that is being run on us all by the violent Left.” That plan was the removal of monuments dedicated to Confederate leaders and their battle flag, but how could this be a leftist plot if Southern mayors, state legislators and governors have been at the forefront of this movement?
When Nikki Haley, Trump’s U.N. ambassador, was governor of South Carolina, she signed a bill that removed the Confederate flag from the statehouse. A conservative House and Senate voted 130-23 in support of the legislation.
One of the “evil groups” at the Charlottesville protest was the neo-Confederate League of the South (LOS). In a July 24 tweet, LOS president Michael Hill declared: “If you want to defend the South and Western civilization from the Jew and his dark-skinned allies, be at Charlottesville on 12 August.”
At one time, Michael Hill was a member of the Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church in Monroe, La. The church’s pastor Steve Wilkins was a LOS founding director, and in 1996 he teamed up with our own Wilson to write “Southern Slavery As It Was.” This sentence sums up the book’s message: “There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.”
On Jan. 16, 2004, Wilson wrote to his congregation about Wilkins and the League of the South. He explained that Wilkins resigned from the LOS board not because he thought the organization was racist, but because he had moved on to other priorities. The problem, of course, is the LOS has been racist from the beginning and continues to be, as LOS President Hill’s statement clearly indicates above.
In his memo to Christ Church members, Wilson offers “mild” support for the LOS, and he disagrees only with their belief in secession from the union and reconstituting the Old South along white nationalist lines.
Wilson is not always consistent in his views. In his self-published book “Angels in the Architecture,” he predicts that by God’s will “the South will rise again.” In a 2006 feature article in The Spokesman-Review, he admitted, “Confederate flags have adorned (his) office and school walls at times,” and I possess an image of Robert E. Lee’s portrait in Wilson’s Logos School.
In his blog post, Wilson admitted to a respondent that he had indeed “equated Black Lives Matter with the Klan. Hatred and murder are to be reprobated, period.” I challenge Wilson to find any leader of Black Lives Matter preaching hate or encouraging murder.
In stark contrast, here are the words of a Klan leader. In an interview with Univision’s Ilia Calderon, Christian Barker, the imperial wizard of the Loyal White Knights of the KKK, called Calderon the “N” word, and declared that “we’re going to burn you (Hispanics) out. We killed 6 million Jews the last time. Eleven million is nothing.”
Wilson must reconsider his position now that Trump has backed away from his comments blaming both sides, claiming that the media distorted his remarks. Turning to his Dr. Jekyll persona, this is what he said about the Aug. 19 Boston protesters: “I want to applaud the many protesters in Boston who are speaking out against bigotry and hate.”
We know that Trump is a rank opportunist and a dishonest man, but Wilson claims to be a man of God. Those who would still cast equal blame on both sides of this issue can be nothing but moral reprobates.
Nick Gier taught philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years. He can be reached at ngier006 at gmail.com.
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Fact Check
I am not aware that Michael Hill was a member of Steve Wilkins’ congregation. It would not surprise me if he was. He did found the League of the South with Mr. Wilkins and both men are virulent racists. And to round out this trifecta, Doug Wilson shared the stage with both reprobates in 1995. But I cannot confirm that Michael Hill was a member of Wilkins’ church. Contra Dr. Gier, Douglas Wilson does support the League of the South’s political goal of secession from the Union. Nick misread this email. Finally, Dr. Gier wrote, “I challenge Wilson to find any leader of Black Lives Matter preaching hate or encouraging murder.” I refer Dr. Gier to this Huff-Po article. And Dr. Gier should look at these photographs if he wants other examples of BLM-inspired hate & murder.
VENTING
Please let me get this off my chest: Douglas Wilson is a white supremacist but not of the neo-Nazi stripe. He would distinguish between the master race of Arianism and the master race of the Confederacy. Sure, this may be a distinction without a difference, but I am not aware that he hates Jews the same way he hates blacks (he really resents the Confederacy’s defeat and vents this bitterness on blacks in particular). Doug Wilson would only gas his enemies, not for racial purity but for political ideology. Remember, he’s a political animal only. He wants his enemies dead because they do not agree with him. No other reason. He’s a Maoist (total leftist), not a conservative or a libertarian. But he’s a leftist to himself. He requires absolute conformity to the State of Doug. And in a perfect world, the State of Doug would see blacks in chains laboring on Plantation Kirk to prove how much they really love forced servitude for the master race.
Regarding heroic monuments for Rebel dastards, I believe that all Confederate monuments on public property should be removed and replaced with monuments for the slaves, without whom the Confederacy could not have existed. I regret that the United States of America did not hang Robert E. Lee from his neck until dead. He committed treason and brought more death & destruction on this republic than any other man — or nation — in history. The same goes for Edmund Ruffin, Jefferson Davis, Alexander H. Stephens, P.G.T. Beauregard, and Nathan Bedford Forrest — they should have all hanged, along with the entire Confederate army. Death by hanging would have been an appropriately ignoble end for these treacherous men. Few images leave a more lasting impression than a corpse swinging from a rope. All the monuments in the world could not erase that. And if the United States had executed these traitors, they would have reduced the chance of Lost Cause propaganda taking root. Most if not all of the Confederate monuments originated in Lost Cause mythology. The League of the South grounds its ideology in Lost Cause horse manure. Douglas Wilson bases his errant history on Lost Cause revisionism. So ultimately the Lost Cause must be eradicated, but not in a Stalinist way ala Antifa. History books in the South must be corrected or this problem will never end.