I’d not heard of a group that calls itself the Southern National Congress, but thanks to Rob Schilling and “The Schilling Show” on WINA-1070AM in Charlottesville, now I have, and, gotta say, I’m impressed that Schilling had actual people advocating for the return of the Confederacy on his show.
Schilling talked up this Southern National Congress on his May 11 show, reminiscing about how, “going back to the Obama days,” he’d have a spokesperson from the group on “every once in a while” to talk up how “they’re working on just a full-fledged withdrawal from the United States and a new constitution for themselves.”
Wow, so, Schilling, back in the “Obama days,” had a guy on from a group of neo-Confederates to fever dream about secession.
Saying the quiet part out loud there, aren’t we?
Schilling said on his May 11 show on WINA, the flagship station of UVA Athletics, that he doesn’t think the group is active anymore; I checked, and according to its still-active Facebook page, it held a national convention last November, but the website is no longer live.
The sentiment still is, though, to listen to Rob Schilling.
“There’s certainly a lot of people who believe that we just can’t coexist, that the left is bloodthirsty, that not every person, but the underlying premise of the left, and we’re hearing more and more stories about that, that it’s a culture of violence and death. Can we really live side by side with these people?” Schilling said.
But it’s the left that is guilty of the dangerous rhetoric, amirite?
Jan. 6 apologia
A lot of the rest of the week was a dud, largely, but, man, the May 11 show was fire!
In addition to the paen to the days of slavery, Schilling had a living, breathing J6er on the show, in the form of Thomas Caldwell, one of the more than 1,500 J6ers who have received pardons from Donald Trump.
Caldwell was on the show to hawk a book that he wrote about his, ahem, unjust prosecution – he was convicted on charges of obstructing Congress and of obstructing justice for tampering with documents after the riot, but was acquitted on the highest-profile charge: seditious conspiracy.
Prosecutors alleged that Caldwell, a retired Navy intelligence officer, helped coordinate quick reaction force teams stationed outside of DC to get weapons to the J6 army in the event they were needed.
The evidence against Caldwell, largely circumstantial, was nonetheless damning – it included messages in which he wrote that he hoped Trump would “start rounding up and executing traitors” and floated the idea of getting a boat to ferry “heavy weapons” across the Potomac River.
Caldwell dismissed those messages as “creative writing,” and downplayed messages that he sent as the events of Jan. 6 were playing out about “assaulting” the Capitol as “play by play,” referring to a past in which he had been am announcer on high school sports radio broadcasts.
We didn’t hear about any of that in Caldwell’s guest appearance with Schilling last week; Schilling, who casts himself as a hard-hitting interviewer, was lobbing up softballs for Caldwell to knock out of the park, with unchallenged claims that Jan. 6 was a “lovefest,” that he “saw no violence that day at all,” that it was “a surprise to watch the media coverage on television later that night, where they were showing people inside the Capitol, you know, engaged in some kind of mischief.”
The rest of the interview was about Caldwell’s experience in jail, which, yeah, cue the violins.
The guy shilling for the billionaires
The other highlight of the week was the May 13 interview with Jon Sutz, who was on the show to hype his report about how billionaires are unfairly criticized for not paying enough taxes.
Money line from Sutz in the interview: “I did the research.”
Which is to say, Sutz, who lists the Committee to Unleash Prosperity as the “sponsor” for the report, did basic Google searches on tax rates.
This Committee to Unleash Prosperity, by the way – it’s a front for the billionaires, who give these “researchers” a pittance to wallpaper the interwebs with their propaganda.
Which, fine – propaganda is what makes the world go round.
A hard-hitting interviewer like Rob Schilling is there to push back against a guest’s narrative to get to the heart of the matter, right?
Nah.
Were there any specifics from Jon Sutz on how, say, poor old Jeff Bezos shared his tax return with me, and here, in detail, is what he paid, and by gawd, look at how much he got soaked for?
No.
Semantics.
It’s all the far left creating a narrative – the narrative being, in Sutz’s words:
“They’re intent on creating a socialist revolution, based on the false claim that America’s tax system, that the entire system, is so rigged against poor people, that when a nurse or a truck driver opens their paycheck, and they see all these government deductions, it’s to convince them that that the only reason Jeff Bezos can afford to buy a $500 million superyacht is because of the money that’s deducted from their paychecks by the very government that’s supposed to uphold the law, and that we need a total Marxist revolution to remake America in the model of a socialist democracy.”
Many thanks to UVA Athletics for helping make this possible, by the way.
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Chris Graham
