I am a new writer and for the last 9 months my goal has been to show that the “South was not uniquely evil and racist”. My life experience is not Southern which begs the question why do I care?

My mother was an Irish Catholic from Spokane, Washington. My dad was from Cabarrus County North Carolina. He was a career naval officer, so we lived all over the US when I was growing up.

I went to high school in New England and college in Washington State. My Southern ties are tenuous. My lived experience in the South is recent except for 3rd grade in Pensacola, junior high in Northern Virginia, and being stationed in Jacksonville when I was in the navy. I am not religious and prefer Classic Rock to Country. In high school I thought Muscle Shoals was a kind of fish you got from a swamp and “ole Neil” didn’t bother me.

I saw my dad as a patriotic and conservative American. He was Southern, but was at home in Philadelphia, Arizona, and Texas. I always thought of the values he taught me as conservative. When I lived in New York, London, and Kuala Lumpur I saw them as conservative values. Ronald Reagan, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review, the London Times, and Ayn Rand are where I got my conservative education.

My values have not changed.

Individual rights that preexist government are the foundation of real freedom and justice. The more local the government the better. The smaller the government the better. The Constitution is clear about what power the states allocated to the central government. There are valuable American traditions to teach and preserve for the sake of those who come after us.

Today, the South is the best representation of those values which is why there is a concerted effort to erase Southern history. The hatred is political, and the aim is to destroy an American tradition which is the last coherent defense of the founding. My new aim is to explain this in my writing.