By Hunter Wallace

As I reported here in May, my friend Tom Pierce was holding Confederate flag rallies in Knoxville before it was cool.

The Southern Kristallnacht actually began in April when a group of communists burned the Confederate Battle Flag at the Florida State Capitol in Tallahassee on the 150th anniversary of Appommattox. It was such an outrageous provocation at the time that we organized a protest against it.

By May, we had already noticed a sharp uptick in anti-Southern activism: Tom’s rally in Knoxville was a response to another provocation at the University of Tennessee, Myron Penn’s theft of the Confederate flags in the Union Springs Confederate cemetery happened shortly after that, and finally on Memorial Day a black artist named John Sims livestreamed the burning of Confederate flags in 13 states.

Also in May, my friend William Cawthon wrote a prophetic essay for the Abbeville Institute in which he keenly observed that the White South had “already undergone a “softening up” for more radical triumphs of Left-Liberalism” and that “the obliteration of the historic distinctive South is in sight.” He wrote that Confederate monuments are in “serious danger of being destroyed, moved to an inconspicuous location, or relegated to a museum” and that “the South as a distinct culture and people is in the process of disintegration and ultimate extinction.” Distracted by any number of things, he predicted “liberals and Leftists view the time as ripe for the beginning of the complete strangulation of the distinctive, historic South.”

Last Thursday, Tom Pierce organized a second Confederate Battle Flag rally, and this time he was joined by well over 100 people. The Southern genocide has struck a nerve with millions of Southerners. It seems fairly clear that many of those who may have been asleep three months ago are now wide awake.