An estimated 2,000 vehicles, mostly motorcycles and trucks adorned with Rebel flags, took part in a rally and ride Sunday afternoon in support of keeping a Confederate flag flying in front of the McPherson Governmental Complex in Ocala.
The event was organized by David Stone, of Ocala, and was called the Florida Southern Pride Ride. Police officials estimated participation at a couple thousand vehicles.
The ride started at about 1 p.m. and, as of 1:30 p.m., could be seen winding its way through Ocala.
Participants were wearing shirts that said "heritage not hate" and talked of defending a way of life rooted in Southern traditions.
Danny Hart, of Dunnellon, had two Confederate flags and the American flag in the back of his truck. He pointed out that the U.S. flag was flying higher and said that he had come to participate in the ride to "defend freedom."
Another ride participant, Rick Hart, said, "It's a history thing. The flag is also a military flag. It's not a race symbol."
Yeah except that it is a race symbol. Just like the Nazi flag is a symbol of antisemitism.
Which is why groups like the KKK fly them both.
So here we have both Alabama and South Carolina taking the Confederate battle flag off of the state Capitol grounds, and Mississippi poised to vote to change their flag entirely, yet in Florida there is a rally 2,000 strong of supporters who are just like, "Fuck it, we're racist and not afraid to let EVERYBODY know it!"
I lived in FL for 20 plus years. It is a third world country full of numnuts from NY, IN, Jersey, and wherever else they could barely peck out a living, usually from some form of fraud and crime. And drugs.
ReplyDeleteBet most all of the red necks were not from Florida. However, the red neck crackers in Florida are as shitty as they come. They do old trucks with a gun rack, a dawg, and a rebel flag. (Because they hate niggers. )
Not bikes.
What is funny is a Long Island "southern" accent... kinda' like Palin's fake southern shrill. Oh and like Palin, they think women are expendable.
So, in totality, going to Florida is like going to the toilet.
'Red neck crackers'? Look in the mirror bigot.
DeleteLarensd1 - As a born and bred Floridian who fled the state back in the early 80's - and as someone who has Florida Red-necked Crackers as family members, I wholeheartedly support your statement.
Delete8:22.
DeleteI know Florida history and the real Cracker families are for the most part... quite gracious and genteel.
Not to bother you with facts, however.
I am talking about the red necks from everywhere AND red neck Florida crackers. There is a huge difference between Florida Cracker families and Florida cracker rednecks..
Where did you say you reside?
The few times I have visited Florida, I have wondered why anyone would want to live there. EVER.
ReplyDeleteThe political situation alone should make people leave. And then there is the heat and humidity in the summer. And the bugs!!!
Please point me to the state that is free of political corruption, conservative extremism, and has ideal weather the year round.
DeleteUgh! Bugs... I remember I once went for one of the last Space Shuttle launches. It was the time of the Love Bugs to swarm! UGHUGHUGHUGH!!! They are attracted to anything light colored. Trying to get in/out of any door was a NIGHTMARE. each doorway was simply COVERED in them, sometimes even the handles! Also, after each drive, we had to wash those lovebugs off the front of the car so you could even see the color of the car and the lights! (BTW: a dryer sheet does WONDERS for getting rid of them! W/o a dryer sheet, it was almost impossible, but wet the car, and use a dryer sheet to wipe, and they come off real easy!)
DeleteNever again Florida - and definitely not in late spring!
Those Love Bugs were some kind of University of Oklahoma experiment gone awry - they set them out in Florida for whatever reason, but NO BIRD or other critter will touch them, because they are so bitter. Hence, they are taking over Florida for two weeks each year now.
TC, I don't think 6:52 said that there was a state free of corruption, extremism, or ideal weather. But you have to admit, there definitely are states that are better than others, if you are using those criteria. Although, I guess it's subjective, depending on who you ask.
DeleteMildred
Even Bugs knew.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IDwpTABJG4
Two miles worth of peckerwoods and not one accident? They'se slippin!
ReplyDeleteThe 1970’s ‘History’ Book That Taught Southerners How Great Slavery Was (IMAGES)
ReplyDelete...When the issue of the Confederate flag on the State House grounds in South Carolina came about the response from southerners was quick and merciless. They didn’t want their beloved hate symbol trashed; in fact, they wanted it revered. The version of Civil War history and slavery they used to defend their rag seemed to be so impossibly skewed that there was no doubt it was either made up or they all read it on the same conservative web site somewhere.
Slaves were happy-go-lucky folk just pleased as could be to serve their masters. In return, those masters graciously gave them freedom so they could fight the North, and treated them like family. The real jerks were those northerners. They kept their slaves until the very last-minute and hated them, treating them like animals and not even letting them fight in their army.
Reading the absurdity of the southern version of “heritage” and “pride” was absolutely depressing.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/07/12/the-1970s-history-book-that-taught-southerners-how-great-slavery-was-images/
"Fuck it, we're racist and not afraid to let EVERYBODY know it!"
ReplyDelete-------------
That's not true of all of them. I keep hearing and reading pro- confederate flag flyers say that they are NOT racist. It has Nothing to do with racism. Right.
It's called justifying. In their eyes, it is about "heritage" because they certainly can't admit that their ancestors fought on the side of slavery. They will fight it till the day they die. The alternative is to tarnish their history forever.
Mildred
Spot on, Mildred, thanks!
DeleteThis seems like a no-brainer to me. A citizen of the municipality in question needs to sue. ACLU, where are you on this? Let the city decide whether they want to pay the legal fees to keep their "deeply held beliefs" or if they want to let this one go. Maybe David Stone has the money to fight that. I suspect they'd have to raise taxes to keep that fight going. What will his opinion on that be?
ReplyDeleteWhat exactly would be the basis for your your go nowhere lawsuit? ACLU would probably not land on the side you are thinking either dummy.
DeleteThe ACLU does not support the flying of the confederate flag over government buildings.
Delete8:24 - Really? "Dummy" is what you've got? 10:09 has it right.
DeleteThe ACLU would protect an individual's right to fly that flag, and that's as far as that would go. The ACLU would come down on the side of the offended individual, not the government on this one. The government has no right to fly any flag other than the flag of the government. They MAY fly other flags, but when those other flags are offensive to the citizens of that government it has to come down.
Dummy.
Flags of the Confederate States of America
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_Confederate_States_of_America
Southern historian Gordon Rhea further wrote in 2011 that:
It is no accident that Confederate symbols have been the mainstay of white supremacist organizations, from the Ku Klux Klan to the skinheads. They did not appropriate the Confederate battle flag simply because it was pretty. They picked it because it was the flag of a nation dedicated to their ideals: 'that the negro is not equal to the white man'. The Confederate flag, we are told, represents heritage, not hate. But why should we celebrate a heritage grounded in hate, a heritage whose self-avowed reason for existence was the exploitation and debasement of a sizeable segment of its population?[23]
Symbols of the Confederacy remain a contentious issue across the United States and their civic placement has been debated vigorously in many southern U.S. state legislatures since the early 1990s, such as the effort that led to the replacement of Georgia's flag in 2001.[24] Supporters have labeled attempts to display the flag as an exercise of free speech in response to bans in some schools and universities, but have not always been successful in court[25] when attempting to use this justification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_display_of_the_Confederate_flag
Trump, The Confederate Flag, And How Fox News Created The GOP's Summer Of Discontent
ReplyDelete...And note that the emerging Trumpmentum unfurled itself at the same time Republicans have struggled during the national debate about the Confederate flag, coming in the wake of its association with the alleged killer in last month's South Carolina shooting rampage in an historical black church.
Indeed, the front page of the New York Times last Friday featured two articles detailing a pair of mini crises Republican leaders were forced to grapple with: Trump's troubling rise in the polls, and the messy debate that broke out in the House of Representatives when Republicans at the last minute tried to introduce an amendment to protect the Confederate flag in national cemeteries, only to then withdraw the controversial measure. A "fiasco," is how the Washington Post's Dana Milbank described the GOP's confederate flag two-step; the Times tagged it "an embarrassment."
Those two issues bedeviling the GOP are inexorably linked. And a key force driving both is Fox News.
Contorting itself into ugly dead ends over the issues of race and immigrant bashing, Republicans have themselves to blame for allowing this kind of ugliness to fester unobstructed for years. But Republicans can also blame Fox News for the party's unfolding summer of discontent.
...As for the Confederate flag, Fox News shoulders some blame because of the channel's hallmark, toxic race-baiting during the Obama years. As conservatives grapple with the historic legacy of slavery and day-to-day racial injustices it's impossible not to notice that previous pattern of ugly rhetoric lurking beneath the surface of the flag debate, especially while Fox hosts and analysts play down the significance of removing the Civil War artifact. (One Fox reporter asked if the American flag would soon be targeted.)
The conservative media's soft spot for the Confederate flag doesn't exist in a vacuum. It seems to spring from a dark, ugly well of race baiting.
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/07/13/trump-the-confederate-flag-and-how-fox-news-cre/204371
Fox News Reporter Wonders If U.S. Capitol Will Be Banned After Confederate Flag Removal In South Carolina
ReplyDeleteDoug McKelway: "Would You Ban" The U.S. Capitol "Which Is Here Only Because Of The Back Breaking Labor Of African American Slaves?"
http://mediamatters.org/video/2015/07/10/fox-news-reporter-wonders-if-us-capitol-will-be/204368
I will never forgive Florida for its role in the 2000 election.
ReplyDeleteFlorida has been dead to me ever since.
If only we really COULD pull the Bugs Bunny routine and slice them off of the continent...
DeleteBarbara, I agree with you about Florida... with the exception of diverse, arty, funky Key West!
DeleteSome thirty years ago, Mr. B's parents (and his father was a rather conservative Northern businessman) decided that their snowbird months would be spent in Key West. NOT, they gloated, in some walled fortress in Boca Raton or such.
They LOVED it there, and got along swell with residents of the Conch Republic however, ahem, non-typical-Floridian.
And after a number of visits, I can see why: Long live Key West!
Speaking of racism and ignorance, and O/T, the Palinbots
ReplyDeleteare now hedging on Quitter Queen declaring for President.
They were sure it was going to be July 4th
Then August 1, or 3.
Oh, wait, it's August 29th, the anniversary of John McCain's biggest EVER mistake, and the day she was "introduced" as a brainless conflation of lipstick, dumbass, and pit bull.
Also, apparenty, the same day she married Tawd.... have you seen Tawd.????..... anyone seen him since April? MIA..
What a sad group of idiots these Pbots are!
Has anyone seen Todd? I'm honestly asking here. Maybe he is permanently missing, likely under the melting permafrost.
DeleteGood for them.
ReplyDeleteThis flag issue is ridiculous.
Good for who?
DeleteTo many, if not most, of these people the confederate flag is not a racist symbol--it is a symbol of the romantic myth of the rebel. Much like a James Dean movie, to them it is all about sticking to your guns and not caving when people tell you what to do. Much of the American mythos from the Pilgrims to the Boston Tea Party and beyond is based on the romantic myth of the Rebel. And I get that, and I think it is fair to acknowledge that. If that is what this all was, then it'd be less of a problem to fly the flag of traitors. However, you can't get 1 millimeter deep into the history of this flag without having to confront that the thing these rebels were rebelling against was the abolition of slavery.
ReplyDeleteCut out the weasel words and when someone says "Heritage" ask them for specific examples. If they say "the Southern Way of Life", ask them what does that Mean!? If they say "States Rights" remind them that when the civil war started, the South was against northern states' rights to disregard fugitive slave laws and that the South really became interested in States Rights when desegregation was being enforced by the feds.
Racism and romantic myth aren't mutually exclusive, not by a long shot. I think you are being mighty generous saying that many, if not most, of these guys drooling over the confederate flag as a symbol of their "heritage" aren't also racists.
DeleteOf course the "States Rights" they're referring to is the right to buy and sell human beings.
DeleteAnyone who claims the war wasn't about slavery, should read Alexander Hamilton Stephens', the Vice President of the CSA, "Cornerstone Speech". It's easy to find online. It's called that because Stephens said this:
"Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition"
The entire foundation of the Confederacy, their secession, the Civil War, was based on their defending the idea that blacks are inferior to whites and they had the right to enslave them.
Even if there's people who sincerely see it as a symbol of the heritage and bravery of their ancestors, it's time for them to come to grips that it got turned into a symbol of racism and for the good of the country to roll it up and put it away where the past belongs.
I live in Alabama and believe me when those people fighting for the flag because of heritage not hate are lying. The hate is strong in our local newspaper comments. I hate this state.
ReplyDeleteTheir heritage is largely one of hate. That's what they're fighting for.
DeleteBack in the 90s I traveled to Alabama every year for a special event that I helped some people in Birmingham get established. They tried to convince me to move down there and take over running it. As a liberal Yankee from NY who hates the heat and humidity, there was no way in HELL I could survive in Alabama!
DeleteRandy Newman "Rednecks". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTFw_eht4TE
ReplyDeleteLady Beaters, Fetus Shooters And Bar Fights: Your Florida Roundup (Is Extra Violent This Week)
ReplyDeletehttp://wonkette.com/590782/lady-beaters-fetus-shooters-and-bar-fights-your-florida-roundup-is-extra-violent-this-week
Ocala is a nice city. My mother retired there to an all white elderly community. I was surprised how much this area reminded me of Galveston, a mix of black and white residents. I was also surprised to see old men as sackers in the grocery store.
ReplyDeleteWhere these young men work, I sure don't know as the wages were minimum wage mostly. I will also say that there were very nice horse ranches bordered by shanties...rich and poor living side by side. I never saw the rebel flag flowing....most be certain clusters of workers.
In the eyes of a beholder, Ocala is a depressing barren place with zip personality. The signature horsey set and wannabe horsey set compete with the meth labs in the woods where the young men "work."
DeleteFactoid.
The people live in complete harmony as long as the blacks do what they're told. The wages are NOT minimum. They are whatever the "right to work market" will bear. Roofers start at 7.50 an hour to work in the blistering heat.
Meth and drugs are more profitable.
Go live with an Arby's worker for a month. Betcha can't.
So I assume that's Muslim Americans and Kenyan Americans, Swiss Americans, Greek Americans and Russian Americans are all free to fly their flags above the United States flag. It's heritage, not hate, after all.
ReplyDeleteThe US flag was flying above the rebel flag.
DeleteYes. Individuals are free to fly whatever flag they please. Other individuals are free to tell them it's repugnant to fly the Stars and Bars, and to explain why it IS HATE after all.
DeleteGovernments are free to fly flags of that government - PERIOD FULL STOP. Governments are NOT free to fly the flag of a losing seditious government.
Ocala is a hotbed of white supremacists, so no surprise here. Be worried if Tallahassee joins the fray.
ReplyDeleteFlorida has rednecks, certainly. It also has a lot going for it, like Miami, Key West, sugar sand beaches, palm trees, sea breezes, and good seafood.
ReplyDeleteLike every state, Florida is occupied by people all along the continuum from liberal to conservative, with some wingnuts along the way.
For the commenter who found the bugs objectionable, there are nuisance critters everywhere. When I moved to the Pacific Northwest, I was horrified to find that every summer our house is invaded by giant house spiders, who become very active in the middle of the night. Hawaii has cane spiders. The southwest has tarantulas. There are fire ants all over the south. Killer bees are spreading northward. And just like these insect and arachnid pests, scary bigots can be found in every state.
What's good is that Ocala has a big classic automobile show every year. You can't run one of those in a town the size of Ocala without your audience coming from far away (which they do).
ReplyDeleteReasonable people aren't going to feel welcome in a place that holds Nuremberg rallies. I'm a classic car enthusiast myself and Ocala will never get a cent of my money.
"The event was organized by David Stone, of Ocala, and was called the Florida Southern Pride Ride."
ReplyDeleteUhn, I don't think David really means "Pride", or those racist flags would be rainbow ones, and the people attending would have more class and taste. Perhaps he meant to call it "Florida Southern Bigotry Ride".
Being a yankee, all I have to say is "The north won, get used to it". And I don't care how "proud" you are, we're ONE country, The United States and we're not going back, there's nothing about any war that's "civil".
How many generations will it take when we're all considered equal in a free society? Old habits die hard, but this is beyond ridiculous.