Some Slavers Were Nice People

By Douglas V. Gibbs
Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host

History is an interesting animal.  It is supposed to be an honest account of what happened in the past.  However, political forces throughout history have done all they can to manipulate history to serve their interests.  Today’s book-burning, internet-censoring, safe-space screaming, snowflake, offended, veins-popping-out-of-their-neck, angry, enraged, authoritarian, woke crazy people of the hard left progressive commie Democrat Party are a great example.  They have changed the textbooks, pulled down statues, and changed the names of streets, schools, monuments, team mascots and pretty much everything else they can get their greedy little paws on for the sole purpose of changing everything you see, touch, feel and read so that it may be squeezed into a little box that fits their “America is a horrible place” narrative.

First of all, as we have said over and over again: "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it." 

Second of all, their anti-racist actions are quite racist.  If their goal is to make sure that each group that resides in the United States as a minority faction gets their due, then how is it that eliminating anything that refers to them, and then poisoning the very system that has allowed all Americans the opportunity to better themselves, good for them and us as members of this society? 

As for those of you that just spit out your coffee, or latte, or whatever it is you are sipping as you read this because I said that “all Americans” have the “opportunity to better themselves,” of course there are those that have not done as well as others.  But, let’s put that into perspective, a little, shall we?

The progressive leftist commie Democrats have always pushed welfare programs, and these “benefits” have become a way of life for a number of people.  When you are given something, and you don’t believe you have the incentive to reach for the sky you will probably remain inside the little political plantation that the lefties in government have prepared for you.  Folks on government programs have just as much of an opportunity to better themselves in our free market economy as anybody else.  They just have to deny themselves the psychological place they have resided in and take a risk.  Step out.  Go for it.  Don't believe what the political slavers of the Democrat Party are peddling anymore.

It’s hard to achieve.  Wielding liberty and competing in a free market can be challenging.  There will be a fistful of failures along the way.  You will be competing against other people seeking the same.  I get it.  I grew up with pretty humble beginnings.  And, like a fool, I didn’t go to college even though the opportunity was there for me as a young man. 

“Yeah,” I can hear some of you saying.  “But, you’re white.  You have white privilege.”

·  White privilege did not get me into the United States Navy.  There are no recruiters sitting there in their offices saying, “Nope, just white folks get to come in to the military.”

·       · White privilege did not get me a job at a military credit union afterwards.  My service in the Navy is what jettisoned me into the position.

·       · White privilege did not get me a job for a city after I left the credit union.  In fact, public employment diversity is incredibly high, as is the fact that most public employees tend to be democrats.  My conservative beliefs, in fact, led to me losing my job because I dared to be different.  In fact, you could say in order to remain employed in a government job one needs to have Democrat Party Privilege.

·      · White privilege did not get me into the construction industry.  In fact, I was the minority.

·       · White privilege had nothing to do with me eventually, after twenty years, leaving construction to pursue my constitution education efforts full-time.  That was a result of my hard work, and support from my wife (who is a minority, by the way) who suggested that she was making enough money to keep us afloat so I should “go for it” with my constitutional efforts.

As an added note, my minority wife who we are told is at a disadvantage because of our institutionalized sexist and racist society:

·       · Makes more money than me.

·       · Has a bachelor’s degree (I have 32 units of night school)

·       · Ranks high in her profession and has only turned down becoming a manager because she does not want to take away from her time and opportunity to be a grandmother at home.  More responsibility means more time at work.  “Thanks, but no thanks,” has been her reply.  She could be making more than her male counterparts who have climbed the corporate ladder in her industry, but she chooses not to so that she can work less hours per week, and not have to shoulder so much more responsibility without the appreciation that would likely be deserved but never received.  Hers is a common attitude among females in the workforce.  Kind of puts the claim of a wage gap into context a little, doesn't it?

·       · She grew up in a barrio, and yet her dad never took government benefits, and taught his daughters to do so is a stigma.  “Stand up, work hard, and take care of yourself” was his lessons to them.

The American System offers opportunity to everyone if they are just willing to stop being convinced of the leftist lies being fed to them.  The Democrat Party has created a welfare state government controlled political plantation, and most people of color have fallen for the lie.  A culture has developed that basically says, “I am stuck, I can’t do anything about it, and anyone doing better than me must’ve gotten special opportunities so I hate them for having such privilege.”

And in truth, it is a bunch of bull.

The thing is, the political left (mostly Democrats, but it also includes a fair share of Republicans) has a political leviathan at their command.  It gives them power.  It gives them riches.  And it gives them a nobility status that may not be legally official, but exists, nonetheless.  So, they are not only willing to do everything they can to keep feeding that leviathan, and keep it strong, but they are even willing to lie, cheat, steal, and change history to not only feed the leviathan, but change America into a socialistic-style system that would ensure their power could never be challenged again by the likes of Donald J. Trump, or any of you out there who doesn’t buy their giant heap of manure.

So, to convince you that the system needs to be changed in their favor, they tell you the system is rigged.  Your life should be better but the system is actually against you and that makes it so broken that it must be dismantled and reshaped into something more “fair” and “equitable”.

To prove how broken the system is, and how broken its foundation was, the left then pulls out their spotlight and shines it squarely on the biggest culprit history has to offer: Slavery.

We are told that:

·       · America was founded on slavery.

·       · Every white person owned slaves.

·       · Every white person in America has white privilege because of the white patriarchal society that emerged in America thanks to slavery.

·       · America was a major player in slavery, and the worst of all of the slaver countries.

·       · America was also sexist, and to prove it women couldn’t vote early on, just like blacks could not vote.

·       · Women and blacks were seen as property and that attitude in ingrained in the hearts of white males, so, because of their sex and skin color they are automatically racist.

·       · Slaves at all times in America resisted constantly and always had the desire to escape on their mind.

·       · All slave owners in America were vicious slavers who beat their slaves into submission, provided less-than-adequate quarters for their slaves, and fed them scraps and food that even the animals would not eat.

If you disagree with any of that, we are being told you are a racist white supremacist with white privilege and angry violent tendencies.

I will address each of those points later in this article, but first, let’s talk about the “All slave owners in America were vicious slavers” bullet point, first.

Enter into the arena, Dennis Prager.

Dennis Prager is a conservative radio host, writer, and has a great series of videos that are a part of what he calls “Prager University.”

Prager recently angered pretty much every lefty on the planet for daring to say: “therewere “undoubtedly many nice slaveholders” who treated people “beautifully”.

He then, in his explanation, went on to say, “many nice people help destroy societies” and how “nice people can support vicious things”.

“We think that people who do bad things either think they are doing bad and so they are truly evil or they will be obviously bad at interpersonal relations but it doesn’t work that way,” the far-right radio host said.

“There were undoubtedly many nice slaveholders in the south. This is not meant facetiously, again, it’s meant literally. If you had been invited to one of their homes, you would’ve been treated beautifully. But they supported a vicious system,” he added.

He has another video where he talks about “good intentions,” and along the same vein says that many people who did evil things did so with the best of intentions.  But, as we know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

In the recent video that claimed some slavers were “nice people,” Mr. Prager also pulled into the discussion how today’s leftist activities are in line with slavery.  Both are involved in the “diminution of human rights and liberties, which is a form of enslavement”.

He called today’s progressive policies and style of governance a “vicious system” whose end result will be the enslavement of the population.

Millions of lefty heads exploded.  He received quite a bit of angry rage from the lefties, particularly on social media, because he dared to say that some slaveholders were “nice”.

“Nice enough to pay after the fact? Nice enough to not treat people like actual property? It seems Prager seems to forget what the definition of slave actually is in his rush to be intellectually dishonest,” said one Twitter user.

Some pointed out the lack of knowledge on critical race theory in the far-right radio host’s remarks.

“I guess they don’t teach ‘critical race theory’ at ‘Prager University’ – wow, just wow,” said historian Joseph Palermo.

No, we don’t teach “critical race theory” at any of our conservative educational apparatuses.  Rather than tying someone’s identity to their skin color we think it’s better to judge folks by the content of their character.  To address another idiotic point in the bullet points, just because one is white it does not mean they are automatically a racist white supremacist who must pay reparations for something that happened in history that they had nothing to do with.

The Constitution, in fact, in Article III, disallows "corruption of blood". 

Attacks on Dennis Prager is nothing new.  He often dares to voice opinions contrary to the “woke” left crowd and he dares to do so with a big audience and a lot of popularity. 

He was previously condemned for claiming unvaccinated Americans are “the most hated” group of people “since slavery.”

“How did people get governed by irrational fears?” he told Newsmax . “Whether it is of the non-vaccinated, who are the pariahs of America, as I have not seen in my lifetime, any pariah group like this.”

Not all slavers were mean people who beat their slaves.  They were, in America, often pillars of their communities.  Nice people who were participating in something that was not a nice thing.

As for the rest of the bullet points, just so that we can get things into perspective:

· America was not founded on slavery.  In 1619 The White Lion Dutch slave ship that docked at Jamestown did not deliver the first slaves to the English Colonies.  They were indentured servants.  The first slaves from Africa didn’t begin to arrive until 1645 (as per slavevoyages.org).  Slavery was not popular among most of the colonists, but because the United States was a revenue source to the British Empire the overlords of the empire pushed slavery in the English Colonies to ensure the revenue kept flowing.

·       · Every white person did not own slaves, and in 1860, when compared to the overall free white population in the United States, less than two percent of free white people owned slaves in the United States.  In the states that would secede and become the Confederate States of America the percentage was less than five percent.

·       · Not every white person in America has “white privilege”.  As stated earlier, I am an example of how false that statement truly is.

·       · America was not a major player in the slave trade, and in fact less than two percent of the total number of slaves that came to the Western Hemisphere during the Atlantic Slave Trade from Africa came to the shores of the English Colonies that ultimately became the United States.  We were a minor player who fought against slavery the entire way.  In fact, the Commonwealth of Virginia requested over sixty times to the British Government to allow them to abolish slavery, and every time the request was denied.

·       · In ten of the original thirteen states women and free blacks could vote at the time of the writing of the Constitution.

·       · Women were not seen as property, and in fact, men in marriages could not sell any property owned by the couple without the wife’s written approval.

·       · Blacks who were enslaved may have been treated like property but free blacks were not.  The “property” label was associated with enslavement, not the color of one’s skin.

·       · Slaves in America were not in constant resistance and attempting to escape as Nikole Hannah-Jones erroneously says in The 1619 Project.  In fact, slaves went to the market, worked side jobs, and did other things in town.  The most trusted slaves under the service of labor to “slavers” were given money, guns, and the opportunity to make money working for others.  Mary Chestnut’s Diary refers to many of these realities, one of which was that the slaves were armed with rifles so that they could go hunting; her perspective was as late as the years just preceding the War Between the States, and the years during the war.

* I am currently writing a book, The 1607 Project, in which I go over each of those points, and more.  The bibliography is rich with sources.

Getting back to Prager, he was not wrong, and the rage against him is not because of what he said, but because what he said dares to challenge the progressive narrative.  Thomas Jefferson, in fact, was so popular among his slaves (of which he could not afford financially to free) that when he returned from trips they would run to the bottom of the hill, hoist him on their shoulders, and carry him up to the house.

He was undoubtedly a nice guy.

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary