A Farewell To RedState

RS: A Farewell To RedState

President Ronald Reagan poses for photographers in the Oval Office of the White House, Jan. 11, 1989 after delivering a televised farewell address to the nation. In the parting address, Reagan said that during his eight years in office, “we meant to change a nation and instead we changed a world.” (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)

I’m not great at goodbyes, having little experience with them, but the time has come for one, and I have a major announcement to make: I am leaving RedState after 13 years here (12 of them as a front-page Contributor) and moving my online writing to National Review.

I will miss this place, its writers and its readers.  I started here as a diarist in the summer of 2004, in the fifth year of my blogging career and the first of the site’s existence, after The Command Post (a war-oriented site) shuttered its doors as we transitioned, maybe inevitably, from a nation united against its enemies back to a nation of political tribes united against each other.  In the fall of 2005, at the insistence of Leon Wolf, I was promoted to a front-page Contributor on the strength of my writings questioning Harriet Miers – a preview, though I did not expect it at the time, of where this site’s posture towards blind party loyalty stands today.

  • Erick Erickson, of course, joined the site near its inception and went on to become its public face and voice before moving on last year to his own site, The Resurgent, having outgrown the job of running this place.  Along the way, Erick became one of the nation’s top metro-area talk radio hosts at Atlanta’s WSB, a major power broker in GOP circles, a TV commentator on CNN and Fox and sometime guest host for Rush Limbaugh, and an elected member of the Macon City Council.
  • Ben Domenech, one of our site’s founders, now publishes The Federalist and the popular Transom newsletter, and is a fixture as a pundit on national cable TV.
  • Hunter Baker, maybe the most decent and even-tempered of all our many Contributors over the years, has carved out a distinguished career as a professor, university administrator, writer on religious liberty, and now a candidate for Congress in Tennessee’s 8th District.
  • Victoria Coates left us to assist Don Rumsfeld in assembling the massive historical archive supporting his memoirs, and has gone on to be a foreign policy adviser to Rick Perry’s presidential campaign and the chief foreign policy adviser to Ted Cruz in the Senate and his presidential campaign, as well as authoring a recent book in her chosen field (as an academic art historian) on democratic themes in the history of art.
  • Amanda Carpenter, who started as a joint contributor at Human Events and RedState, went on to be Cruz’s Senate communications director and now a successful pundit on CNN and one of the RS alumni writing now at The Conservative Review.
  • A few of our alumni have become judges and prosecutors, including Chad Dotson, now an appeals judge in Virginia and still baseball blogging his beloved Reds at Redleg Nation, as well as at The Hardball Times and ESPN. I’ve also had two RS writers join me as colleagues at my law firm.
  • A number – including some who only wrote here pseudonymously and others who have since departed social media – have done great labors in the public and private vineyards of the conservative movement.

No, Ronald Reagan Didn’t Launch His 1980 Campaign in Philadelphia, MS

RS: No, Ronald Reagan Didn’t Launch His 1980 Campaign in Philadelphia, MS

Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, left, moves through the crowd shaking hands at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi on Sunday, August 3, 1980. There crowd was estimated at 20,000. (AP Photo/Jack Thornell)

One of the wearying things about arguing with liberal/progressives is that they never stop trying to rewrite history; a bogus claim that is debunked only stays debunked if you keep at debunking it year after year after year. So it is with the hardy perennial effort to tar the reputation of Ronald Reagan by claiming that his 1980 presidential campaign and subsequent two-term presidency was tainted from the outset by having kicked off his campaign with a speech about “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi – Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel was retailing this one on ABC’s Sunday show The Week just two weeks ago, trying to compare Reagan to Donald Trump:

There’s all this nostalgia about Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site for where three civil rights workers were killed by white supremacists.

There are many other sources that assert this as fact – see, for example, this Huffington Post column from April by Nicolaus Mills, Professor of American Studies, Sarah Lawrence College:

[I]n going to Patchogue, Long Island this coming Thursday to speak at a controversial Republican fundraiser, Trump is taking a page out of the Ronald Reagan playbook. He’s following the path that Reagan took in 1980 when he began his presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Long Island? Forget it, he’s rolling. More examples from one presidential cycle to the next can be found from David Greenberg at Slate, William Raspberry in the Washington Post, Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert in the New York Times, and so on. Wikipedia even has a page for “Reagan’s Neshoba County Fair “states’ rights” speech”.

Where to begin? This particular canard has so many things wrong with it, I feel obligated to set them all down in sequence. Hopefully, doing so here should – at least for a little while – collect the context in one place.

Continue reading No, Ronald Reagan Didn’t Launch His 1980 Campaign in Philadelphia, MS