Liberals have long insulted Southerners.  The facts show them to be wrong.

Jonah Goldberg has written a column contrasting the character of the people of Charleston with the character of pundits and others who pounced on the horrendous murders at the African-American church perpetrated by a white racist.  Funny how liberals use the actions of one evil person to indict an entire region.  They never have done the same when Muslims commit acts of terror.  But liberals have never needed reason to disparage Southerners.

For example, Goldberg points to the insults leveled by Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast last year:

Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment[.]”

And the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins commented about the flag and by implication all of the South and its history:

The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins glibly asserts that “the Confederate battle flag is an American swastika, the relic of traitors and totalitarians, symbol of a brutal regime, not a republic.”



Goldberg points out some uncomfortable truths to those who hurl the insults.  If the South mistreated African-Americans, why are they flocking there to live and raise their children?

Demographer Joel Kotkin found that 13 of the 15 best cities in the country for African Americans to live in are now in the South. Over the last decade, millions of African Americans have been reversing the Great Migration of a century ago to live in Dixie. A big part of that story is economic, of course — the “blue state” model has failed generations of minorities — but it’s also cultural. Word has gotten out that while the flags may be around in some places, the Old Confederacy is gone.


In 2007, I was offended by the liberal habit of insulting Southerners.  (For the record, I live in Chicago but was raised in St. Louis, a city some northerner friends in college considered being in the “South.”  Martin Luther King, Jr. said the racism he saw in Chicago was worse than what he saw in the South-keep that in mind.)  I wrote a column, “The South Rises,” comparing Southern records of achievement with Northern ones.  These include measures that liberals themselves hold dear (pre-school education, levels of charitable giving, race relations) as well as ones many liberals don’t like, including patriotism and religiosity.

I wrote:

Southerners are also the most generous people in America. The top 10 states in terms of generosity per capita are all Southern states. New Hampshire, Massachusetts (Kennedy -land), New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Connecticut are at the bottom of the barrel. A few years ago, author Jane Smiley characterized Red America as selfish and lacking in compassion -- as "unteachably ignorant." Perhaps that is the pot calling the kettle black?

As journalist Don Feder noted, Smiley's views are symptomatic of the views of liberal elites:

"...liberals have concocted a fantasy version of America where all the nation's brainpower, productivity and generosity reside in the Blue States, while Red America is a land of trailer parks, country-music bars, and Klan rallies".

This is an inversion of the truth.

The irony is clear: liberals decry prejudice but have no compunction about smearing a whole region for the acts of one person.