An Alt-Universe U.S. Where Slavery Still Exists? Critic Says that’s America NOW

With Game of Thrones embarking on its penultimate season, HBO has announced that it will be producing the next series from the show’s TV creators, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss – a show called Confederate that will imagine what might have become of the United States had the South won the Civil War.

“CONFEDERATE chronicles the events leading to the Third American Civil War,” said HBO in its description of the forthcoming fantasy. “The series takes place in an alternate timeline, where the southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution. The story follows a broad swath of characters on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone  —  freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate and the families of people in their thrall.”

Sounds interesting, even if we can already imagine the “commentary” on modern-day America that will be not-so-subtly included in the show.

But leave it to liberals to see this as just another excuse for white people to relish in the daydream of an America where blacks are still in chains. Because, you know, that’s what white Americans do in their spare time – pine for the days of yore when instead of going to work in a boring office all day, you could just sit on the front porch of your plantation house and watch the subhuman blacks do your dirty work. In fact, as Daily Beast writer Ira Madison III puts it, the alternate-universe America envisioned by the show is not just “stupid as hell” “white nonsense,” it’s actually not much different from the America we’re all living in!

From the Daily Beast:

Even if we ignore the fact that this sounds a hell of a lot like the present — Klan membership and hate crimes in America are on the rise, the prison industrial complex is basically the government’s substitute for slavery, and Bo, Luke, and Daisy Duke are far from the only ones repping the Confederate flag — white people love to imagine a world where “the Confederacy won.” It’s been the subject of many pieces of fiction, from If the South Had Won the Civil War to The Confederate States of America. But Americans barely know enough about what actually happened during slavery as is, so how about HBO just pick up the canceled series Underground instead of this?

And, of course, this is exactly WHY people like Madison don’t want a show like this on the air. Because once you put the real horrors of American slavery in front of people, their modern-day racial grievances are immediately exposed as the vapors of privilege that they really are. No one could seriously read a book or watch a movie about slavery and come away worrying that there are 3,000 Ku Klux Klanners in a population of 350 million people. No one who has been recently refreshed on the horrors of slavery could still make that reckless comparison with modern-day American prisons. No one who directly compares the plight of blacks in 1855 to the South of today could get all that upset about a pick-up truck flying the rebel flag.

But to the current liberal, these minor racial grievances MUST be taken with the UTMOST seriousness…because that’s all they have to make themselves feel like they’re “making a difference.” And thus never comes the stand-back-and-say-whoa realization that while their forefathers were fighting for their very freedom, they’re railing against an insignificant bit of entertainment on HBO.