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The Worst Week Yet: July 16-22, 2023

24-7-2023 < Counter Currents 28 2903 words
 

Jason Aldean (left) and Andre Longmore


2,442 words


Georgia-Born Country Singer Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” Video Gets Banned for Being “Racist”; Meanwhile, Black Man Kills Four White People in a Small Georgia Town



As much as I love me some old country music — any song recorded in Nashville prior to 1970 is an aural narcotic to me — new country is the musical equivalent of non-alcoholic beer. Its main problem is that, unlike vintage country music, it’s apologetic — alongside emptily corny appeals to God and the flag, it’s the sound of a broken and compromised rural white proletariat agreeing with the rest of the nation that things such as racism and sexism and homophobia are legitimate problems. Case in point: Garth Brooks’ recent embrace of Bud Light and “diversity.”


That’s why I was mildly excited to hear that a Nu-Country artist named Jason Aldean, who has recorded multiple platinum albums while entirely escaping my notice, is embroiled in a controversy about his song “Try That in a Small Town,” which, heavens forfend, is not only being accused of “racism,” it’s being described as a nakedly enthusiastic endorsement of lynching.


Just as most people have been brainwashed into thinking that “racism” is something that only white people do and that “sexism” is something that only men do, we’ve also been manipulated into thinking that “lynching” is something that only groups of white people do to solitary non-whites who have been falsely accused of sexually assaulting white women.


Putting aside the pesky fact that interracial rape these days is lopsidedly non-white-on-white, the technical definition of “lynching,” even according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is “the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process.” One need not be a search-term wizard to find dozens of videos of blacks in packs swarming, beating, and often killing white people whose only apparent crime was being white.


The lyrics to “Try That in a Small Town” can in no way be construed by any sane person as encouraging white people to go out night-riding and stringing up the first darkie they see. If anything, it’s a warning that people who grow up in small towns won’t tolerate unhinged urban “unrest”:


Sucker-punch somebody on a sidewalk
Carjack an old lady at a red light
Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
Ya think it’s cool, well, act a fool if ya like
Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
Stomp on the flag and light it up. . . .


Try that in a small town
Full of good ol’ boys, raised up right
If you’re looking for a fight
Try that in a small town


Although an argument can be made that the song endorses violence, it is clearly retaliatory violence rather than the predatory kind. The song was released in May, but the official video didn’t drop until Friday, July 14. The video is packed with what Aldean refers to as “real news footage” of violent and fiery “mostly peaceful” urban mayhem. I tried — friends, I even slowed things down frame-by-frame searching in vain to see even a single black criminal depicted — to find any overarching racial themes, but I came up disappointingly empty.


You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.


This, but of course, didn’t stop personages such as Tennessee State Representative Justin Jones, who caused a big to-do earlier this year for raising black-power fists against the phantom demon of “gun violence” after a tranny shot and killed six people in Nashville — of describing “Try That in a Small Town” as “a heinous song calling for racist violence.”


It was also pointed out, repeatedly, that the song’s video “was shot in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tenn., a site known for the 1927 mob lynching of Henry Choate, an 18-year-old Black [sic] man” who’d been accused of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old white girl. What was hardly ever noted is that there’s zero evidence that Aldean or anyone on the film crew was aware that an anti-black lynching had occurred there nearly a century ago.


Last Monday, a mere three days after debuting the video for “Try That in a Small Town,” Country Music Television, the cable network that bears most of the blame for spreading the plague of Nu-Country throughout this land, yanked the video from its rotation without offering an explanation.


On Tuesday, Aldean posted a predictable self-defense claiming that his song had nothing to do with race, and that small-town people look out for one another “regardless of differences of background or belief”:


In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song (a song that has been out since May) and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests. . . . These references are not only meritless, but dangerous. There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it — and there isn’t a single clip that isn’t real news footage — and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music — this one goes too far. . . . “Try That In A Small Town,” for me, refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief. Because they were our neighbors, and that was above any differences.


Okay, well, David Allen Coe, he’s not. And he’s definitely not Johnny Rebel.


Interestingly, Aldean was the artist performing onstage in Las Vegas in October 2017 when Stephen Paddock began randomly firing into what was presumably an almost all-white crowd from his 32nd-floor suites at the Mandalay Bay hotel, killing 60 people in what remains the largest mass shooting by one person in American history. But no one in the mass media seems to care about “gun violence” or “white lives” when five dozen or so white people get mowed down in a hail of bullets — and Las Vegas is a big town, not a small one.


Last weekend, as the controversy was burbling around Aldean’s song, a 40-year-old black man broke into three separate homes in Hampton, Georgia, shooting dead four white people and then leading police on a manhunt that ultimately injured three cops before the perp, one Andre Longmore, was shot dead.


In contrast with the nonsensical hubbub around “Try That in a Small Town,” the actual shooting and killing of four white people by a black man received almost no news coverage. According to the 2020 Census, Hampton has a population of only 8,368: 35% white and 50% black.


Hampton resident Kevin Pugh, a neighbor of two of the shooting victims, told the Associated Press,


I’m not going to say it makes me uneasy, but it does drive home that this kind of thing could happen anywhere. Up until Saturday, the most ruckus we had was the Canadian geese.


People describing Canadian geese causing a “ruckus” — yeah, that’s definitely a small town. And with four elderly whites shot dead, that small town just got a little less white.


Study Finds that White Male Retirees Develop Dementia More Quickly than All Other Groups; White Supremacy Is Blamed


Knowing the modern world as well as I unfortunately do, I can state definitively that if a new study emerged which established that retirement-age black women were far more likely to develop dementia than white men of the same age, there isn’t a “researcher” on the planet who wouldn’t blame it on the brain-scarring ravages of “white supremacy.”


Well, a new study recently emerged that established the opposite, and, wouldn’t you know it, white supremacy was also the culprit.


According to an article in Gulf News titled “Why White men experience biggest cognitive declines after retirement”:


Post-retirement cognitive declines were almost three times more acute among White [sic] Americans compared with their Black [sic] peers, and twice as large for men as for women. . . . White men experienced the steepest post-retirement cognitive decline, while Black [sic] women showed the least, according to the study, which tracked 2,226 participants over a period of up to 10 years.


The Gulf News article is illustrated with a touching photo of an apparently mentally intact older black man reaching out and compassionately holding an elderly white man who’s probably wearing his diapers backward.


The study, “Retirement and cognitive aging in a racially diverse sample of older Americans,” was published last Wednesday in Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.


Rather than reaching the obvious conclusion­ — which is that life these days is hard for white men, seeing as how they are blamed for everything that’s wrong with society and don’t even receive sympathy from white women, which may make them feel hopeless, trapped, and cause their brains to go haywire in a desperate attempt to escape this thankless world — the study’s author, Ross Andel, came up with a much more creative explanation. He told Gulf News that


exposure to lifelong structural inequalities may actually ease transition to retirement with respect to cognitive aging. . . . That’s because longstanding racial disparities in US education and hiring practices mean that black workers have faced substantial barriers to entry into more engaging jobs.


This echoes the study’s official conclusion on its published abstract:


Cognitive functioning may decline at an accelerated rate immediately post-retirement, more so in White [sic] adults and men than Black [sic] adults and women. Lifelong structural inequalities including occupational segregation and other social determinants of cognitive health may obscure the role of retirement in cognitive aging.


In other words, because life is much harder for black people and women, white men go senile at a much faster rate than black people and women. Makes perfect sense.


“Guide to Talking About Racism” Claims the Word “Denigrated” Is Racist


For some reason — most likely deep-seated guilt for actually being privileged beyond all reason — well-heeled “philanthropic” organizations such as the John Ellerman Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, and something called Voice 4 Change England toss untold gobs of cash at something called “Reframing Race” to publish idiotic “studies” called “A Guide to Talking About Racism” whose unintended effect is to make me strive to be more racist than I’ve ever been before.


The worthless “report” apparently received a hefty public-relations push from its benefactors, because it wound up getting coverage at such places as CBS in Austin, which ran with the headline “Phrases like ‘dark times’ and ‘denigrated’ carry racist undertones, report claims”:


“It is self-evidently not enough to be on the right side of the argument on racism,” the report reads. “This conversation needs to be unstuck in order to build collective understanding of racism, as an ideology, a practice and a source of harm, and to move towards real change and solutions.” . . .


The report also condemns concepts like “blushing red, ashen faces or lips turning blue” for the way they only apply to white people. These terms act as a “universal standard for all humans” and can make minorities feel excluded, the report claims.


Because I have boundless love for and an overweening protective instinct toward my readers, I bit the bullet and perused the report so you don’t have to. In attempting to persuade people — none of whose continental ancestry could be traced with a simple DNA test — not to use the term “‘race’ to describe a person or people,” authors Sanjiv Lingayah and Nina Kelly argue:


‘Race’ as a concept is entirely socially constructed and only meaningful in relation to racism. Therefore, phrases such as ‘the Black [sic] race’ or ‘her race was Asian’ have no meaning.


You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.


Okay, if race has no meaning, why do you attach deep meaning to it by insisting on capitalizing “black” and lowercasing “white”? If race has no meaning, why is it the only fucking thing you ever talk about?


The authors also pooh-pooh the term “the white working class” because it “wrongly excludes Black [sic] and Minoritised [sic] people from this class group and falsely divides the interests of all working-class people along racial lines.”


They also discourage people from using the non-race-specific term “the wealthy elite” because it “can trigger antisemitism and feed the conspiracy theories of far-right white nationalists.”


Right, right, so there is no white working class and there are no Jewish wealthy elites, but far-Right White Nationalists exist and are an ever-present threat. I can see where this is all headed.


But what’s wrong with the word “denigrated”? The only plausible explanation I can come up with is that it contains the text string “nig,” which causes this group to be demoted and rated lower than white people, even though it’s obvious that neither group actually exists.


Majority of Americans Say Trump and Biden Aren’t “Fit” to Be President


If anyone reading this is less excited than I am about the looming 2024 presidential election, please contact me, because I’d like to be your friend.


Living as we do in a postmodern hellhole where nothing is new except for sequels and remakes and “reimaginings,” even though there’s actually nothing new about sequels and remakes and “reimaginings,” it should come as no surprise that the 2024 election is shaping up to be nothing more than a flaccid reimagining of the 2020 campaign, and fuck you if you don’t like it, you lowly, grousing serf.


But hold the presses, because I might have found something that is legitimately new: In what may be a historical first, a new poll finds that a majority of Americans find that the presumptive presidential nominees for both major political parties in 2024 are not “fit” to be president.


A Yahoo News/YouGov poll of 1,638 US adults conducted from July 13-17 reached the following conclusions:



  • 55% say Joe Biden is not fit to serve another term as president, whereas 53% say the same thing about Donald Trump.

  • 92% of Republicans say Biden is unfit; 85% of Democrats say Trump is unfit.

  • Of those who voted for Trump in 2020, 94% say Biden is unfit; of those who voted for Biden in 2020, 91% say Trump is unfit.

  • Of those who say Trump is unfit, 21% say it’s because he’s “dangerous,” 17% say it’s because he’s “corrupt,” 6% say it’s because he’s “incompetent,” 5% say it’s because “he did a bad job during his first term,” and only 2% say it’s because he’s too old. (At 77, Trump is only three years younger than Biden.)

  • Of those who say Biden is unfit, 20% say it’s because he’s “incompetent,” 12% cite his advanced age, 10% say he’s “corrupt,” 9% say he’s “doing a bad job,” and a mere 3% allege he’s “dangerous.”


Regardless of all this, Biden leads Trump 47% to 43% in a theoretical matchup, according to those polled.


It’s becoming increasingly evident that the only thing the American public is fit for – or more accurately, should be fitted for — is a straitjacket.


Jim Goad

*  *  *


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