The Bridge To Nowhere

Editor’s Note: Selma was once a beautiful antebellum town like Eufaula. It had the misfortune though of becoming a target for MLK & Co. during the Civil Rights Movement.

Joe Biden ‘marching’ with Al Sharpton this weekend in Selma, Alabama. pic.twitter.com/4hBG2GQjr5

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 6, 2023

Sam Dickson made a remark at the latest Amren conference that stuck with me.

In his speech, Sam brought up the last days of the Soviet Union. He talked about a Hungarian couple who were nobles and exiles who lived in Florida during the Cold War. Sam’s friends had an unshakeable conviction that the Soviet Union would ultimately fail because the communist dream wasn’t based on reality. I recall him saying something to the effect that communism failed when the people of the Soviet Union and its satellites came to believe that they were on “a road to nowhere.” The contradiction between the official ideology and material reality became too large to sustain the faith in the system.

It occurred to me that we are living through a similar moment with the American faith in multiracial liberal democracy. The Great Disappointment of the Obama presidency shattered the illusion that America was on the cusp of reaching the millenarian “postracial” paradise the liberal establishment set out to achieve in the 1950s and 1960s. Toward the end of the Obama era, frustration and disappointment began to curdle into anger and rage which manifested in the Black Lives Matter movement. Are we also on our own road to nowhere? Why did the first black president achieve so little with two terms in office?

Wokeism as we know it today exploded into the mainstream in the 2010s. The diehards didn’t lose their faith in “antiracism.” Instead, they convinced themselves that the racist boogeyman that is holding back progress was more powerful and insidious than anyone had ever previously imagined. “Racism” wasn’t a personal failure to treat other people equally. It was now “structural” or “systemic.” Intent is unnecessary. The new buzzwords describe a general force of oppression that operates like gravity. The new fundamentalist version of “antiracism” is openly, explicitly and aggressively anti-White. It doesn’t simply gesture toward the future colorblind utopia that MLK sold America on in the 1960s. The presence of White people even of good will creates a malign force that inexorably oppresses Black people. Aunt Jemima, the Washington Redskins and Christopher Columbus didn’t survive the iconoclastic frenzy that erupted in 2020. It was like watching, say, the Aztecs offering up sacrifices to appease their angry gods. The despairing faithful prostrated themselves en masse before Black people and promised to Do Better.

Millions of White conservatives noticed this cultural sea change. Apparently, it has alarmed them. Trump voters now believe that anti-White racism is a greater problem than anti-black racism. It has become mainstream to notice that Whites are trending toward extinction in the United States. Whites are becoming more defensive and less complacent in response to the new “antiracism.” At least on the Right, faith in racial equality and America’s march toward the future colorblind multiracial paradise has been shaken enough that suddenly debate has reemerged about the subject. The skeptics and scoffers like Steve Sailer and Jared Taylor used to be shouted down and ignored. Now, there seems to be a sense that this hasn’t worked and that their influence has grown. Bright young White people see that the inability to tell the truth about race and break with establishment orthodoxy has caused all of this.

Anyway, I was still mulling all of this over when I heard from James Edwards that Uncle Jared was going to be coming here to Central Alabama last weekend. James wanted to know if I was interested in meeting up again for back to back conferences. The Southern Cultural Center was holding its second annual national conference and James Edwards, Jared Taylor, John Hill and John Friend were all going to be speaking at it. We never get enough time to catch up and socialize at Amren. I also haven’t seen many of my old friends from the League conferences in years. The old League conferences were always less formal and more relaxed than Amren. I told James Edwards that I was on board and would be there.

Jared Taylor has only visited Alabama on a handful of occasions. America’s top race realist had never seen much of the area – Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma – where the defining moments of the Civil Rights Movement that crystallized racial attitudes and shaped the course of the nation for a generation took place. The Wizard of Tuskegee had guided race relations in his generation. MLK rose to fame here during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. The Selma-to-Montgomery March and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were the highwater mark of the Civil Rights Movement. Bull Connor’s actions Birmingham stirred the conscience of the nation in 1963 and gave America the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There is so much to see here. We didn’t have time to see it all, but I knew that Jared Taylor had to see Selma. I couldn’t let Jared Taylor fly in and out of Montgomery and not see all the progress that has been made.

Selma isn’t just a small city in Alabama where people live. It is a key symbol in the orthodox narrative about racial equality. It is where righteous civil rights martyrs like John Lewis and the forces of good triumphed over pure evil on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It shaped how the nation thinks about race. Every year the same elderly politicians make the pilgrimage to Selma in March for the annual photo op. They parachute into Selma, link arms, walk over the magic bridge and fly back to DC by the end of the day. People from all over the world come to Selma to walk over the bridge to nowhere and feel morally superior to others. Medieval pilgrims used to travel across Europe to gaze upon holy relics and pray to various saints. The various Interpretative Centers in Selma perform the same religious function for pious liberals.

James Edwards and Jared Taylor on the Bridge to Nowhere

James Edwards at the Fountain of African Wisdom

Jared Taylor drinks from the Fountain of African Wisdom

The Fountain of African Wisdom doesn’t work and smells like sewage

The Amelia Boynton House

This is the house where the Selma campaign was organized which ultimately gave us the Voting Rights Act. Legend has it that the first draft of the Voting Rights Act was written here on the living room floor.

The whole city is blighted like this.

The tornado that recently hit Selma did less damage.

As I told Jared Taylor, Selma is like our version of Pompeii. A mysterious disaster occurred there in the 1960s which destroyed the town. It gets worse and worse with each passing year. At least for me, this cursed city has always been a monument to the liberal orthodoxy on race, a Blighted City on a Hill.

Honestly, what happened to Selma goes back at least 50 years before 1965 to the revolt against Victorianism. It goes back when Progressives put their faith in the New Social Science which became a new consensus in the 1930s. It goes back to the liberal triumph in World War II and the lessons that were drawn from that conflict. It goes back to when the hereditarian predecessors of Jared Taylor – people like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard – lost to environmentalists like Franz Boas and Ashley Montagu. It goes back to when the rise of film and television made it easier for social engineers to reprogram the masses with various fantasies that changed racial attitudes in the 1940s and 1950s. The Voting Rights Act in Selma was the legislative capstone to a worldview which had matured over several decades.

The “road to nowhere” that Sam Dickson mentioned in his Amren speech reminded me of the bridge to nowhere that I had seen so many times in Selma. Specifically, it reminded me of the politicians who come to town to walk over the bridge in the backdrop of the town that is disintegrating around them. They are leading the nation to nowhere. They are getting older. A century of social science and social engineering and trillions of dollars in spending hasn’t eliminated racial gaps. None of their solutions worked whether it was public school integration, voting rights or marginalizing racists. Toppling statues of Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant combined with draconian censorship isn’t going to work either.

If communism failed in the Soviet Union, what does Selma say about multiracial liberal democracy? Selma is worse off than most cities in the poorest countries in eastern Europe. Sherman’s March to the Sea wasn’t as devastating as John Lewis marching through Selma and Lowndes County.

We all had a great time. We need to get together and do more of these tours. Discovering the Fountain of African Wisdom alone for the libtard pilgrims was worth the trip.

Source: https://occidentaldissent.com/2023/08/21/the-bridge-to-nowhere/