lyrics – The Progressive Midwesterner

Ladies and gentlemen, our long, national nightmare is over.

Scott Walker will not be our nation’s 45th President of the United States, as he has officially dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

Long story short, Scott Walker defeated himself. Walker ran a horrible presidential campaign, most notably proposing some downright asinine ideas (such as eliminating the National Labor Relations Board and building a fence along the U.S.-Canada border). Other factors that brought down Walker’s campaign is the national corporate media not giving Walker as much of a free pass as the corporate media in Walker’s home state of Wisconsin has done, the rise of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, and Walker’s support for the Milwaukee Bucks arena giveaway alienating anti-corporate welfare types within the far-right Tea Party that dominates the Republican caucus/primary electorate in many states. Right before Walker dropped out of the race, Walker was polling at 0% among Republicans according to CNN opinion polling, which obviously doesn’t sell well to Republican voters as 0% financing on a new car.

I’m not done criticizing Scott Walker by any stretch of the imagination, as he’s still Governor of Wisconsin with a majority of Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature, and Walker still has a little over three years left in his second term as governor. I thank everyone in Wisconsin and across the country who has opposed Walker’s horrible policies, but I’ll also remind everyone that the fight for progressive values will never end.

I’ll leave you with a video of me singing a modified version of an old Willie Nelson song (lyrics here) commemorating Walker’s exit from the presidential race:

The national organization of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon (ΣAE, also abbreviated SAE) fraternity closed its University of Oklahoma (OU) chapter after a video showing OU SAE members singing a song to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands” that included flagrantly racist lyrics was posted to YouTube.

As it turns out, there’s far more to SAE’s bigotry than just a video posted online by a member of the group’s University of Oklahoma chapter.

First, the national SAE organization touts its ties to the pre-Civil War South and the Confederacy on its own website:

Sigma Alpha Epsilon was founded on March 9, 1856, at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Its founders were Noble Leslie DeVotie, Nathan Elams Cockrell, John Barratt Rudulph, John Webb Kerr, Samuel Marion Dennis, Wade Hampton Foster, Abner Edwin Patton, and Thomas Chappell Cook. Their leader was DeVotie, who wrote the ritual, created the grip, and chose the name. Rudulph designed the badge. Of all existing national social fraternities today, Sigma Alpha Epsilon is the only national fraternity founded in the antebellum South.

Founded in a time of intense sectional feeling, Sigma Alpha Epsilon confined its growth to the southern states. By the end of 1857, the fraternity numbered seven chapters. Its first national convention met in the summer of 1858 at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, with four of its eight chapters in attendance. By the time of the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, fifteen chapters had been established.

None of the founders of SAE were members of any other fraternity, although Noble Leslie DeVotie had been invited to join all of the other fraternities at the University of Alabama before founding Sigma Alpha Epsilon.

The fraternity had fewer than 400 members when the Civil War began. Of those, 369 went to war for the Confederate States and seven for the Union Army. Seventy-four members of the fraternity lost their lives in the war.

SAE was founded in an era when slavery was legal in many states, and was founded as a fraternity of, for, and by white racists and slavery supporters, most of whom fought for slavery and the right of states to secede from the Union. Sadly, it’s not surprising that SAE is full of racists.

Second, the SAE chapter at Oklahoma State University (OSU), a public university in Stillwater, Oklahoma, had at least one member hang a Confederate flag in the window of his room, and the flag was clearly visible from outside the OSU SAE fraternity house.

Racism in the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity is absolutely rampant.