TexasCHLforum.com

Our small group of patriots is growing and we hope to make a difference in Texas. Currently, intel indicates two events in Austin where the opposition (antifa) will be in large numbers and we are looking for assistance in showing them that they are not welcome in Texas.

Sat July 1 - There is a Freedom March scheduled that has been marketed as "family friendly." This has drawn the attention of several groups including antifa and BLM.

Sun July 2 - Nationwide impeachment protest - It's their party, need I say more?

Last night, we came to an agreement with another group to join forces and attend these two days in Austin. If you are interested in helping out either day or both, please look us up on Facebook and join our discussion group - additional details available there.

Additionally, if you live in the Austin area and would like to offer up a couch or extra bed for the night, it would be well appreciated.

Texas Patriot Network - We are not a militia or hate group -- just a group of ordinary Texans with various backgrounds that want to help protect our state from communism/socialism/fascism.

Who are what is the other group that has agreed to join forces?

twomillenium wrote:Who are what is the other group that has agreed to join forces?

This is Texas reached out to us yesterday. We had a long call last night with them and are confident with our combined efforts.

https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams

Were Confederate Generals Traitors?

My "Rewriting American History" column of a fortnight ago, about the dismantling of Confederate monuments, generated considerable mail. Some argued there should not be statues honoring traitors such as Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, who fought against the Union. Victors of wars get to write the history, and the history they write often does not reflect the facts. Let's look at some of the facts and ask: Did the South have a right to secede from the Union? If it did, we can't label Confederate generals as traitors.

bblhd672 wrote:https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams

Were Confederate Generals Traitors?

My "Rewriting American History" column of a fortnight ago, about the dismantling of Confederate monuments, generated considerable mail. Some argued there should not be statues honoring traitors such as Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, who fought against the Union. Victors of wars get to write the history, and the history they write often does not reflect the facts. Let's look at some of the facts and ask: Did the South have a right to secede from the Union? If it did, we can't label Confederate generals as traitors.

Walter Williams is one of my favorites!
He has a wonderful grasp on history, economics and most importantly, common sense.

bblhd672 wrote:https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams

Were Confederate Generals Traitors?

My "Rewriting American History" column of a fortnight ago, about the dismantling of Confederate monuments, generated considerable mail. Some argued there should not be statues honoring traitors such as Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, who fought against the Union. Victors of wars get to write the history, and the history they write often does not reflect the facts. Let's look at some of the facts and ask: Did the South have a right to secede from the Union? If it did, we can't label Confederate generals as traitors.

People who throw out the "traitor" label forget some salient facts.......

Salient Fact #1:

• Most of the generals of the Confederacy had fought alongside their Union colleagues in the Mexican-American war. By ANY definition, they were patriots right up until secession. For them, the salient fact wasn't that they hated the United States, it was that they were first and foremost sons of the states they came from, and they responded to the call of their states. In their view, they were being patriotic when they responded to that call, and it was their northern colleagues who were being UNpatriotic by prosecuting a war against sovereign states. Today, it is easy for us as armchair quarterbacks to reduce any war to a case of "who fired first?" to justify their cause. In the case of the Union, their view is that the Confederacy fired first at Fort Sumpter. In his excellent MUST READ Civil War Trilogy, historian Shelby Foote wrote of Jefferson Davis's actions in January of 1861 - months before the first battle of Fort Sumpter:

  By now he [Jefferson Davis] was one of the acknowledged spokesmen of secession, though it had not always been so. By nature he was a moderate, with a deep devotion to the Union. He had been for compromise so long as he believed compromise was possible; he reserved secession as a last resort. Yet now they were at that stage. In a paper which he had helped to draft and which he had signed and sent as advice to his state in early December, his position had been explicit. “The argument is exhausted,” it declared. “All hope of relief in the Union … is extinguished.” At last he was for disunion, with a southern confederacy to follow.
  
  During the twelve days since the secession of Mississippi he had remained in Washington, sick in mind and body, waiting for the news to reach him officially. He hoped he might be arrested as a traitor, thereby gaining a chance to test the right of secession in the federal courts. Now the news had been given him officially the day before, a Sunday, and he stayed to say goodbye. He had never doubted the right of secession. What he doubted was its wisdom. Yet now it was no longer a question even of wisdom; it was a question of necessity—meaning Honor.

  The sovereign southern states insisted on preserving their sovereignty - which had always been the case for all 34 of the states during the first 90 odd years of the nation's existence. In any case, months passed between succession, and the attack on Fort Sumpter.
  
  To a sovereign state which had realigned itself with a new union of states which would respect its sovereignty, the Union refusal to remove its troops from territory which the South viewed to be "foreign" to the Union was a provocation which could not go unanswered, and this new union, called the Confederate States of America, had an obligation to respond by force of arms to preserve its national integrity. But the attack on the fort was not something that happened just out of the blue. It happened within the context of a new federal refusal to continue recognizing the here-to-fore long-recognized sovereignty of South Carolina.

Salient Fact #2:

• Prior to the first Civil War (yes, I used the word "first" deliberately), the country wasn't known by its own citizens - northern OR southern - as THE United States; it was known as THESE United States. The implications of that with regard to how U.S. citizens viewed state sovereignty are enormous. Ante-bellum, they viewed the nation as a federation of sovereign states which were united under a common Constitution, which limited the federal gov't to issues such as the national defense and regulation of interstate commerce.
  
  Thomas Jefferson's famous letter to the Danbury Baptists was a reflection of that fact. Connecticut -a northern state - under questionable wisdom had exercised its sovereign right as a sovereign state to establish Congregationalism as the official state religion. The Baptists of Danbury had written Jefferson to complain that their religious rights were being trampled. His famous response was essentially to say "I feel your pain and I agree that they shouldn't have done that, but the federal gov't can have no part in deciding religious matters".....hence the famously misinterpreted by modern Americans term of "separation of church and state".
  
  In an environment in which the federal gov't had, for all practical purposes, dispensed with the notion of state sovereignty, southern generals and politicians may well have viewed their northern counterparts as the treasonous ones, whose treason forced the south to seek relief from that treason by seceding from the union.

Now, reasonable people can debate all day long whether or not the resulting new post-bellum nation (THE United States) was a better outcome than the ante-bellum federation of sovereign states (THESE United States), but the question of who fired first becomes moot when the real problem was a very deliberate federal decision to no longer recognize the sovereignty of a state. My personal inclination is to believe that, so long as the federal gov't acted constitutionally, we were better off.......but the federal gov't hasn't behaved constitutionally in most matters since at least 1865, possibly earlier than that. The federal gov't has, and continues to, ignore the limits the Constitution places on its powers, and to usurp and deny the sovereignty that the Constitution affirms to the states. So although I would prefer that we continue as THE United States under a due regard for the Constitution, I increaingly believe that this may no longer be possible in the not too distant future......which is why I make reference above to the first Civil War. That said, intellectual honesty compels me to understand the situation in 1861 as it was understood by the people living then, rather than through the eyes of modern revisionists. We cynically say that the victors get to write the history, and to some degree that is certainly true. But "get to write the history" does not mean that the written history is accurate.

I cannot recommend Shelby Foote's Civil War Triology too highly. It is a masterpiece, and one of the reasons it is so darn good is that it humanizes rather than demonizes BOTH sides to the conflict. Because he refuses to portray either side's participants as monsters, it is as neutral a telling of the actual history.

VERY good summary of the secession issue. Slavery was only one part of a much bigger problem, one that we are beginning to face again. That whole period is purposely misinterpreted to gain political points. I see the atmosphere today as very similar to the 1850s, when a man named Helper wrote a book urging the North to invade the South and kill landowners, and the govt said nothing.

skeathley wrote:VERY good summary of the secession issue. Slavery was only one part of a much bigger problem, one that we are beginning to face again. That whole period is purposely misinterpreted to gain political points. I see the atmosphere today as very similar to the 1850s, when a man named Helper wrote a book urging the North to invade the South and kill landowners, and the govt said nothing.

And note that it was Jefferson Davis's hope that he would actually be arrested for advocating for the right of secession, so that the courts could have an opportunity to weigh in on whether or not it was Constitutionally permissible before conflict broke out. It was the federal gov't that refused to allow the courts to decide the constitutionality of it.......which in fact propelled the south into taking matters into their own hands.

My admittedly unsupported suspicion is that Lincoln and his cabinet probably discussed whether or not to arrest Davis, and they had come to the conclusion that arresting Davis would give the courts jurisdiction over the issue, and that they would lose the argument at the SCOTUS level.

The Annoyed Man wrote: Prior to the first Civil War (yes, I used the word "first" deliberately),

Personally, I always think of the first Civil War (for residents of what is now known as the United States) as being the one in which certain British colonies asserted their right to secede from the British Empire. So by that measure the conflict you are referencing would be the second Civil War. And the "rebels" are one for two.

Or, thinking of Texas specifically, the first Civil War would be when the people of Texas decided to secede from Mexico. Those same folks (or their descendants) later fought in the same second Civil War as the rest of the folks above. They are also one for two.

It might well be time to have us a tie breaker....

skeathley wrote:VERY good summary of the secession issue. Slavery was only one part of a much bigger problem, one that we are beginning to face again. That whole period is purposely misinterpreted to gain political points. I see the atmosphere today as very similar to the 1850s, when a man named Helper wrote a book urging the North to invade the South and kill landowners, and the govt said nothing.

I agree that the issues behind that Civil War are misrepresented. But I do enjoy reminding my Democratic friends that they belong to the party of slavery, and if not for the actions of a great Republican president, we might still have people in chains like their party leaders wanted.

If they want to insist that it was all about slavery, then we can at least remind them what side they were on.

I love this discussion....it's so grown up, so educated, so mature....

ktfiend wrote:

TPN Austin Event 7-1.jpg

To the OP, sorry for taking your post so far off topic. I thought the article I attached would be something you and your group would be interested in reading, as preserving the heritage of Texas is part of preserving the heritage of the entire country.

We cannot allow the ignorance and schemes of a few to mute us and take away the history of the country, both the good and the bad parts.

No worries. It's kept the post from not being buried. Please pass our information out to your interested friends to assist. The opposition has now taken notice of our marketing and are gearing up.

I'm more worried about the direction this country is heading. I want it to be safe for my children, their children, and future generations.

it is too bad that groups only post information on facebook, guess they do not realize or care that many people who would attend refuse to use it

Salty1 wrote:it is too bad that groups only post information on facebook, guess they do not realize or care that many people who would attend refuse to use it

We are working on that. We know many can't be reached through one media outlet. We're burning 24/7 trying to get information out to as many as possible. Please message me and we can talk if you'd like.