In December 1864, my great- great-grandfather Harlan Pope was a lowly private in Company B of the 51st Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment. He and his fellow Ohioans were cold and miserable in the defensive earthworks constructed outside the city of Nashville, Tennessee, amid the American Civil War.
The regiment was part of Maj. Gen. George Thomas’ 55,000-man federal Army of the Cumberland, which was gathering its strength and waiting for the frozen weather to clear so that it could strike at the much smaller Confederate Army of Tennessee that was lurking nearby.
Despite meddling and pressure from Washington, including an underhanded effort to replace Thomas out of mistaken belief he was being too slow, the Army of the Cumberland did strike on Dec. 15 – and it landed a death blow.
The 51st Ohio had been serving in the federal army since October 1861 and participated in numerous bloody battles including Chickamauga and Missionary Ridge. At Nashville, it was part of Maj. Gen. Thomas Wood’s IV Corp, specifically serving in the First Division’s 2nd Brigade, which had regiments from Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio.
Pvt. Pope, a 25-year-old farmer from Strongsville, Ohio, who’d joined the army only a few months before, was among the thousands of Union soldiers that began a diversionary attack that December morning against an earthen and timber artillery and infantry redoubt constructed on the Confederate right flank. The federal soldiers, in the cold and thawing mud, trudged through musket and cannon fire throughout the morning and afternoon to reach the redoubt, and stormed up the steep slope to swiftly overrun it later that dark, cloudy day.
That ended Day 1 of the Battle of Nashville. The Confederates retreated that night and formed a new defensive line, which the federal army smashed again the following day, with the 51st Ohio among the regiments seizing Overton Hill and forcing a Confederate collapse. The remnants of the Confederate Army of Tennessee fled and were pursued for days. It was finished as a fighting force. The Battle of Nashville was hailed as a magnificent victory by the Union Army, and it functionally ended major combat in the Western Theater of the war.
The federal army has lost fewer than 400 killed and about 2,500 wounded in the two-day battle – and lucky for me, Pvt. Harlan Pope survived and lived until 1901.
The Confederates lost an estimated 2,500 dead and wounded, and another 4,600 captured – out of just 25,000 troops at the state of the battle.
That’s a deadly ass kicking. The southern army was commanded by Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood, a young and aggressive leader who had quickly risen through the ranks at the start of the war and who lost a leg and had an arm rendered useless in battle. He was to gain a reputation for bravery but also impetuous and foolish attacks that bled his forces white at a time such losses couldn’t be replaced in the South.
Worse, he was asshole, often blaming others for his own blunders.
Hood also was an avowed racist, writing this to federal Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman while opposing him during the Atlanta campaign in 1864: “You came into our country with your Army, avowedly for the purpose of subjugating free white men, women, and children, and not only intend to rule over them, but you make negroes your allies, and desire to place over us an inferior race, which we have raised from barbarism to its present position, which is the highest ever attained by that race, in any country in all time.”
It’s no surprise that Hood, an 1853 West Point graduate and a U.S. Army cavalry officer, betrayed his oath to the Constitution and United States. He quit the Army in April 1861 to join the Confederacy.
Despite this, and not uncommon for the time, a new army camp in Texas was named for Hood in the early days for World War II. The reason was that Hood had commanded a brigade of Texans early in the Civil War. True enough, and back then the racism and treason of the Confederacy had largely been ignored in the mainstream as part of the odious “Lost Cause” mythology.
During the Biden administration, and as America continues to struggle with its bloody racist past, Fort Hood and others named for Confederate generals were given new names. Hood and the others remain in the history books, classroom lectures, museums, innumerable History Channel documentaries, but there was no need to continue honor a blundering racist who betrayed his country to preserve chattel slavery. If nothing else, he was literally a loser.
Fort Hood was renamed in 2023 for Gen. Richard Cavazos, a highly decorated Korean War and Vietnam soldier who became the Army’s first Hispanic four-star general and who once commanded a corps at the fort. This week, Donald Trump announced, amid his fascist carnage, that Fort Cavazos would be renamed Fort Hood, but for Col. Robert B. Hood.
Col. Hood was an officer in World War One and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery directing artillery fire during a battle in France.
Not to demean Col. Hood’s actions, but what the fuck?
This is clearly a pathetic, craven, and half-assed attempt by the Trump regime to restore the Confederate name by using the story of an obscure mid-level white officer as flimsy cover. Not that Gen. Cavazos was a household name, but he also was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross – which was upgraded in January to the Medal of Honor. He also earned the Silver Star, five Bronze Stars, and a Purple Heart for wounds suffered in battle.
Gen. Cavazos was a bad-ass.
He also was a Mexican-American, and the Trump regime cannot possible tolerate a major military instillation being named for a non-white man, especially when that man’s name had replaced a treasonous racist like John Bell Hood. So the regime had its underlings scrape the history books to concoct this nonsense about renaming the installation for some World War One officer that no one has ever heard of. When they say Fort Hood, they absolutely mean John Bell Hood.
This is so very on-brand for the Trump regime, which governs not to improve the lives of all Americans but exists to troll and to advance white supremacy and the interests of the ruling class and capital.
It’s why we see militarized ICE raids ordered by the White House’s chief architect of racism and bigotry, Stephen Miller, a vile sentient obscenity on two legs.
By now, we’ve all seen the photos and videos out of Los Angeles and elsewhere of masked paramilitary gunmen rounding up brown people they claim without evidence are gang members and terrorists. And now the cops, National Guard, and a Marine infantry battalion have been employed to “protect” these ICE raids, and by protect I mean attacking unarmed protestors and journalists.
The Trump regime, like every brand of fascist movement, at its core is hollow and brittle. That’s why it must project an image of strength and bloviate about law and order and accuse protestors of being paid outside agitators, criminals, terrorists, Marxists, Beatniks, reds, pinkos, commies, breaking up the Beatles, and whatever other slurs they can gin up. It’s empty security theater to appease bigots and credulous media outlets. The butch rhetoric always is about public safety and protection, like every other authoritarian regime has used. It’s their justification for unleashing federal secret police and the Marines on the people. And the hypocrisy is staggering: This is the brain-rotted, soulless regime that pardoned and released the Jan. 6 insurrectionists that sacked the U.S. Capitol.
What we see unfolding is a regime desperate for optics that its state media – Fox News, et al – can project to the country to prove that more cops and more soldiers and more money are needed. More control. They claim L.A. is being overrun by an invasion of brown criminals, which even the LAPD says is balderdash (as it continues to attack protestors). Trump and his oily cronies want more violence so they can crack skulls, imprison their enemies, and boast of their deeds on state television. American cops doing what’s starting to look like IDF cosplay are out of control, and the Trump regime is egging them on, reinforcing them. Turning up the heat rather than trying to calm things.
Do they want another Detroit 1967? Another Chicago 1968?
They have to lie because the protests are largely peaceful and filled with singing and dancing, food trucks, and joy. Where there is violence, it’s brought by the cops themselves, who cannot abide anyone not respecting their authority. Disobedience engages them.
“Never be stupid enough to respect authority unless that authority proves itself respectable.” — Tom Robbins
It’s all racist, bigoted bullshit. The Trump regime is frightened. Regular people are pushing back. And yes, centrist boob pundits and other blockhead moderates, and the brain-dead national media dipshits, are scolding protestors for every single rock tossed at riot police that are openly and gleefully shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at unarmed crowds. There always are Vichyites collaborationists insisting upon polite, inoffensive, quiet protest.
There is no middle, no center for anyone with a soul and conscience and shred of empathy and compassion for humanity. I’m not going to tell people how to protest when phalanxes of cops and soldiers and Marines are on the streets acting with impunity on behalf of a cruel, buffoonish, anti-democratic regime. This is a nation founded and sustained upon violence.
Trump also is filling Washington D.C. with tanks, armored vehicles, and nearly 7,000 troops for a June 14 military parade ostensibly to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Army. It also happens to be Trump’s 79th birthday – the true reason he’s spending an estimated $45 million for his own Nuremberg Rally. Let’s be real: Trump doesn’t give a fuck about the Army’s birthday. He famously avoided serving in the same Army five times by claiming bone spurs during the Vietnam War draft call-ups. And keep in mind, with the casualty rate of that war, one young man was probably killed or wounded in his place.
Will those Abrams tanks, self-propelled guns, Bradley armored fighting vehicles, and troops leave the capital after Saturday? Or will some or all remain there to protect Trump and his regime? It’s demoralizing to have to wonder such things today.
It’s also telling that Trump demands this parade despite the tradition of America staging such spectacles usually only after a successful war. Trump this year was humiliated by the Houthi militias in Yemen, who fought the U.S. to a stalemate after we had two jets fall off an aircraft carrier and wasted a billion dollars trying and failing to suppress them. Ostentatious displays of militarism are a warning sign of a diseased, degenerate society. Haven’t we had enough armed folly this century?
Fascist regimes and authoritarians glorify themselves and the state with sweeping propaganda and grand spectacle. It’s what Milan Kundera, the Czech writer and author of the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, called “totalitarian kitsch” which he also means as a political sanitization of culture and humanity and ideology on behalf of an autocratic regime or movement.
“In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it,” he wrote. “Whenever a single political movement corners power we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.”
Kundera was writing in the context of the Soviet invasion and repression of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush what had been an effort to liberalize and soften that country’s harsh communist governance (which eventually led to the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe). It’s easy to see something similar eventually occurring here.
It’s not all bleak. Saturday is also a day of nationwide protests, with nearly 2,000 rallies planned under by “No Kings” organization and others. Millions are expected to take to the streets. I will be one of them.
Saturday could be one of the major turning-point milestones in American history. Do we begin to roll back Trumpian fascism, or do we continue our tragic journey into endless night?
Trump is aware of the planned national protests and already has promised violence if anyone dares defy him to exercise their Constitutional rights to dissent against his military parade.
“If any protester wants to come out, they will be met with very big force,” he said Tuesday. Those are the pompous words of a thin-skinned, petulant schoolyard bully unable to fulfill his hussar fantasies. A hateful heart, dead soul, and thermonuclear insecurity.
Fuck him. Fuck MAGA. Fuck Trump voters. Fuck his enablers in Congress. Fuck his state media allies. Fuck the “centrists” that excuse his totalitarian desires. Fuck the New York Times and other major new outlets that have failed the people and failed democracy by sanewashing this fascist, racist, oligarchical bullshit. Fuck the fat Paul Blart cops cosplaying as Special Forces soldiers.
I shit on all of them. They have no dignity.
I’ve long said Trump is the Confederacy’s revenge. And now ICE is our Confederate Gestapo, not even bothering to target alleged criminal undocumented immigrants but instead just filling quotas by arresting job site workers, children in schools, in restaurant kitchens, people at immigration hearings, grandmothers, and those standing at Home Depot waiting for work. America has decided these people do not deserve due process, have no rights (civil or human) and just kidnaps them off by the street and sends them to gulags and concentration camps in terrible places.
This is the lawlessness, not the righteous protests against it.
Immigrants, documented and otherwise, are a central load-bearing pillar of the American economy. Undocumented immigrants alone collectively pay more than $100 billion annually in taxes, and per capita commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. But the ruling class that wants to pay no taxes at all, and steals from the poor and sick and elderly and children to finance their tax breaks, wants all immigrants removed. Some of them don’t want any immigration at all. Even the non-white members of the ruling class want to slap a WHITES ONLY sign across the border and to pull up the ladder behind them.
MAGA’s most influential online ghouls are now openly advancing the idea of ending non-white immigration in what’s obviously a coordinated effort, and I’d not be shocked if this originated from Miller at the White House.
This is madness. Troops and tanks in the streets. A morally and intellectually bankrupt regime occupying the White House. Media excusing it all, and castigating anyone pushing back. Our rights are being chipped away by a sleazy and corrupt cabal of scheming racists, bigots, rapists, perverts, pedophiles, meatheads, sadists, drunks, junkies, greedheads, and vindictive shithead oafs that loathe democracy.
It’s impossible for me to have anything but contempt for them.
The president and his henchmen are publicly fantasizing about arresting California Gov. Gavin Newsome, who although sometimes a neoliberal jagoff is at least loudly pushing back on Trump. Imprisoning political opponents is the sort of thing we read about in stories about unstable dictatorships overseas, but it’s looming here, now, today.
They want us to be quiet, unquestioning compliant serf-consumers living in a techno-corporatist police surveillance state, with white men in charge, women at home as broodmares, and minorities expelled or existing as the lowest caste of servant-service workers. Why do you think the regime wants a mass database of everyone’s personal information? It’s a means of control, not just peddling algorithmic advertising at us. It’s to monitor speech. It’s the Thought Police. It’s all the terrifying shit Orwell and sci-fi writers and others warned about. It’s here, now, today.
Again, with feeling and louder for those in the back: It’s here, now, today.
They want a modern Confederacy, and more than a few MAGA proponents absolutely believe the wrong side won the Civil War. So I wonder what my great- great-granddad would think of all this, after what he experienced and suffered. He saw his fellow soldiers torn to shreds by musket balls and cannon fire because some people do not think Black people are fully human beings and should exist as property. His regiment lost 346 men during the war, to combat and disease. Pvt. Pope probably lost friends.
My guess is he would be heartbroken to see what’s become of the United States that he fought to ensure remained united and without slavery. I’ve no illusions that, even as an abolitionist born in 1839, that his 19th century attitudes might not be especially progressive today, but I firmly believe he would be mortified and angry by what the Trump regime is doing.
Let me be crystal clear: The American Civil War began as a traitorous rebellion to preserve human enslavement on behalf of the South’s ruling planter class. Nothing more. Slavery is listed in every state secession declaration, and Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens famously gave the “Cornerstone Speech” in which is explained that enslavement of Black people is why the war was being fought.
It was a bad war started by bad people for bad reasons. To honor those people, rather than to just study the conflict and its politics, is disgusting. It also was a war that never truly ended. It didn’t end at Appomattox with Robert E. Lee’s surrender, nor when the final Confederate holdouts quit in the summer of 1865. The Civil War became a racial cold war, one that still took many lives. It lived on as the Klan, Jim Crow laws, red-lining, police brutality, and in so many other ways. It lives on in Confederate names on streets, schools, buildings, and Army bases.
It lives on within MAGA.
Reconstruction ended after just 12 years, and it’s clear to me now that it should never have ended. It should still be under way. MAGA and Trump never come to power if Reconstruction was allowed to do its job.
The Trump regime is a 21st century vestige of the Civil War, in the tragicomic form of an Atlantic City mob aristocracy. The administration is as openly racist as it thinks it can get away with. It cannot use the N word officially but uses “woke” as is flimsy code word in its place. It influences young people and businesses to follow its lead in rolling back progress. And it literally is rolling back Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts protections.
Trump is the direct political descendent of Jefferson Davis, mutated and metastasized for the first quarter of this century.
MAGA worships the smallest, meanest gods. This regime has lost any legitimacy. We’re on a path that doesn’t just come to a fork; it’s the whole goddamned silverware drawer. I do not know what comes next or how this plays out. This is an out-of-control fascist regime indulging in its racist fever dreams. We are hurtling toward an authoritarian state that will require enormous bloodshed to overthrow if it’s not stopped now.
Monsters are real and have immunity from consequences under Trump. That cannot last if we’re going to remain a democracy.
I fear for my country. Confederate Fascism is on the march.
But so are the forces of good. I hope to see you on Saturday as we embark on a long, hot summer to save the United States of America, again.
-30-
Unpaid Bills 
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