The Federalist Is Super Mad Virginia Will No Longer Subsidize Racists

Failures

from the but-who-will-remember-the-good-things-about-Harry-Byrd dept

The state of Virginia is trying to break with its racist past. It’s not pretending it doesn’t exist. But, better late than never, it’s trying to undo some of the damage still being perpetrated by Virginians and their legislators. Governor Abigail Spanberger signed a bill into law that stripped confederate-friendly organizations of their tax exempt status. (She also signed a bill that ended the production of specialty license plates featuring Robert E. Lee.)

Now, there’s a legitimate argument to be made against this legislation. (And a more nuanced argument to made in favor of it.) And we’ll get to all of that in a moment.

But not yet. That’s why you’re getting the headline I gave you, because I’m not the one making a nuanced argument for or against this bill. And that’s why The Federalist is getting all the bile I can fit into a handful of words because it for goddamn sure isn’t making any valid arguments in support of letting historically racist organizations continue to operate as tax exempt entities.

Hayden Daniel (scope the rest of his output to confirm your suspicions about this Federalist contributor) of The Federalist seems to think that separating confederacy supporters from state tax exemptions is one of the more noxious violation of rights he’s ever had the opportunity to witness.

Spanberger’s signature represents, as The New York Times put it, part of “a yearslong Democrat-led push to shake off the state’s legacy as the capital of the 11 Southern, slaveholding states that seceded from the country in the 1860s.”

And indeed it has been a years-long campaign by the left to erase Virginia’s, and America’s, history. The era that began with the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009 and reached its fever pitch during the fiery George Floyd riots of summer 2020 saw the slow but sure disappearance of Confederate history from the public sphere. 

“Erase history.” What a convenient turn of phrase. Making entities like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (whose splash page pic looks about as inclusive as a “Gone With The Wind” cast photo) and the Sons of the Confederacy continue to do the apparently essential work of reminding people that there are still plenty of racists in Virginia without a state-sanctioned leg up is hardly “erasing history.” Everyone will remember the Civil War and the racists who lost the war they started because they were hooked on free, imported labor.

And try as you might, you’re not going to find Daniel arguing against the deliberate erasure of history being perpetrated by the Trump administration, which is steadily stripping parks and national monuments of anything that might portray white Americans as anything but fault-free heroes and saviors. (In fact, a perfunctory search immediately surfaces the opposite: The Federalist’s active participation in this administration’s bigoted erasure of US history.)

That’s the way it always goes with these people. The only history they think needs to be preserved is the stuff when white males were legally considered to be the owners or overseers of every other race and sex. These are people who yearn for simpler times when women and minorities couldn’t vote and people were willing to die to keep white Christian nationalists in power.

Moving on from this complaint about (non)erasure of Hayden Daniel’s favorites parts of US history, he then decides to pretend that white people who love the confederacy have been terrorized by people who don’t.

During a BLM riot in Richmond, Virginia, in May 2020, extremist agitators attacked the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy with “incendiary devices.” The building, deeded to the organization by the state in 1950, was filled with countless Civil War-era documents and artifacts. The resulting fire and destruction caused $4.1 million in damage to the building and its contents, according to a lawsuit filed by the UDC. The wanton vandalism that night also extended to the multiple Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue, including the famous equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee that was removed in 2021.

Wow, man. That’s rough. It’s almost as though it outweighs the decades of torture and slavery that were followed by more decades of terrorism perpetrated against Blacks by people who just couldn’t accept that non-white humans were actual human beings. A statute goes down and a pro-confederacy HQ gets torched and this nation is nowhere near breaking even in terms of what this state’s “legacy” is when it comes to slavery and the treatment of those who were only allowed their freedom after enough Virginians had died trying to prevent their emancipation.

Summing things up, Daniel veers into the hyperbolic:

[T]his law signed by Spanberger constitutes a new escalation. It is no longer about pieces of paper that need to censored or statues of bronze that need to be ripped down; it is about people who need to silenced and punished for daring to believe that America, and the South in particular, has its own unique identity independent of the left’s racialist and globalist dogma.

Spanberger is sending an unequivocal message — it’s open season on those who would honor American history and the heritage of their ancestors. And the full force of the state will be used to quash them.

I have no idea why you would want to “honor” that particular sliver of American history or celebrate the “heritage” left to you by racist slaveholders and the descendants that love them. You’re not using words like “history” and “heritage” because you don’t want Americans to ever forget the horrors we inflicted on others during our history. You’re just an awful person who wants similarly awful people to continue to be awful without fear of consequence.

A people without a history, or who are ashamed of their history, are easily manipulated by the whims and ambitions of the dystopian, tyrannical left. 

Tell that to Trump, you mook. You aren’t actually ashamed of this history. You — and the people running the party you love — are secretly proud of their racist past and bigoted present. That doesn’t make you immune from manipulation. It just means the people who subject you to their whims and ambitions not only won’t be members of an opposing political party, but they won’t be any smarter than you think you are.

Now… having said all that, here’s the argument against this law, which does make sense:

The new law strips property tax exemptions from the pro-Confederate groups, while leaving them in place for all the others. That’s pretty obvious discrimination based on political ideology. The Virginia state legislature could end this tax exemption for all the groups in question, or reduce it in various ways. It could eliminate some groups but not others based on nonideological criteria. But it cannot do so based purely on the views of the groups in question.

Such viewpoint discrimination with respect to tax exemptions and government benefits is a potentially very dangerous tool that government can use to penalize opposition (even as it rewards its supporters). If courts were to uphold the Virgina law against First Amendment challenges, it would set a dangerous precedent that state and federal officials of various political stripes could exploit to target their opponents.

That’s the argument Hayden or anyone else from the Federalist could have made. That would have clearly demonstrated the inherent danger of giving the government the legislated power to engage in viewpoint discrimination. But no one at the Federalist is apparently capable of coming up with cogent, nuanced arguments, not when the livelihood of people who resolutely celebrate the racist losers of America’s only Civil War (to date!) is on the line.

Beyond that, there’s the question of whether or not tax exempt status is government speech, which means viewpoint discrimination may actually be lawful if the government prefers not to throw tacit support to groups it doesn’t care for. That doesn’t make it much better than openly violating the First Amendment, but it does give it something to work with if this law is challenged in court.

For now, the sons and daughters of the confederacy will have to try to make do without their tax exempt status. On the hardship continuum that involves the Confederacy, this doesn’t even amount to a rounding error.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, abigail spanberger, celebrating losers, free speech, racism, slavery, virginia
Companies: sons of confederate veterans, the federalist