As goes the nursery tale of Br’er Rabbit and the briar patch, Br’er Fox sets a trap and catches the cunning Br’er Rabbit. Figuring that he is done for, Br’er Rabbit devises an escape plan. He begs the Fox not to throw him in the briar patch, given its threatening thorns.
“Oh please Br’er Fox, whatever you do, please don’t throw me into the briar patch,” Br’er Rabbit says according to the tale.
And that is exactly what the Fox did, allowing Br’er Rabbit to escape since rabbits are at home in briar patches.
Such is the situation Gov. Kay Ivey is in. For more than a hundred years, the Democratic Party was the party of the South and the party of preserving Confederate folklore. All of these Confederate monuments and much-maligned Confederate holidays celebrated by the state of Alabama were creations of the 20th Century Democratic Party in the Yellowhammer State.
Near the turn of the last century, the Democratic Party abandoned its populist tendencies and has become more enamored with securing a role as the home for those with a far-left view on social issues.
With this transition, it has turned against all of those symbols Southerners have clung to for generations, and for better or for worse the GOP has adopted a role as being their protectorate.
The Alabama media and demagogic Left have derided Alabama and its history — where ancestors who were on the wrong side of history were simply evil and deserve to be erased. These factions believe they have any Republican who dares to defend this evil dead in their sights.
Enter Ivey’s recent advertisement, promoting her position that she will neither allow Alabama’s history to be erased nor allow outsiders to dictate what monuments are unacceptable.
So, the media struck.
At the Ivey-less GOP gubernatorial debate last week in Birmingham’s Lyric Theatre, co-panelist John Archibald asked the candidates if they thought the monuments in Alabama “accurately” reflected the history of the state and all its people.
None of those candidates took the bait.
Ivey’s advertisement didn’t explicitly mention “Confederate monuments,” but AL(dot)com’s Archibald-in-training Kyle Whitmire heard someone “dog-whistling Dixie” in the background of the ad. Being a humble servant of the Alabama citizenry, he translated and let everyone know what he had heard.
“The ad smells of polling and focus groups. Someone in her campaign decided Ivey needed a knock-out blow — to finish off her GOP challengers and avoid a runoff altogether,” Whitmire wrote. “They needed an issue. But in Ivey’s brief tenure in the governor’s office, this is what counts for a monumental achievement: Signing a bill passed by the Legislature.”
Meanwhile, somewhere that was not Birmingham’s Lyric Theatre, Ivey and her supporters received the gift they had hoped to get.
“Oh please Alabama’s mediocre fourth estate, whatever you do, please don’t raise the issue of Confederate monuments.”
While the statues of Robert E. Lee, streets named after Jefferson Davis and the Confederate flag are off-putting in a lot of places, they are apparently not off-putting in Alabama. In fact, they’re a winner, but not for the easy knee-jerk reaction-type reasons laid before us.
People are tired of the institutional left dictating the constantly changing terms of what is and is not acceptable.
For many of the left, their instinct is to see racism in everything. If it isn’t authentic racism, it is at least motivated by racism.
They will probably see racism in my abridged retelling of the Br’er Rabbit story. In fact, I expect and look forward to it. But if they would take a moment to fine-tune their dog-whistle radar, it isn’t “Dixie” they are hearing whistled. Instead, it is probably Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” blaring at full-blast.
@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University and is the editor of Breitbart TV.
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