A capital letter makes all the difference. When you say Southerners, you are being specific. When you say southerners, you are speaking of anybody from the southern parts of the United States.

Puerto Rico is the southernmost large area of the United States. Puerto Ricans are southerners, but they are not Southerners.

Hawaii is south of the Rio Grande. Hawaiians are southerners. They are not Southerners.

Most people think that San Francisco is in northern California. Actually it is about the middle of the California coast. San Francisco is also south of the northern border of the Old Confederacy. So over eighty percent of the population of California is made up of southerners.

The South is something else again. When you capitalize it, you mean the Old Confederacy, et al.

If you say “the south” you are not just being insulting, you are being wrong.

I wrote this to William Buckley a couple of years back, and he actually put it in his “Notes and Asides” in National Review. And he agreed with me! If you say southerners when you mean Southerners, you are simply using bad English.

But the present editors of National Review hate the white race and they hate the South as only a conservative who is desperately trying to be respectable can hate the white race and the South. They always make it southerners and the south for a very specific reason: they mean it to be an insult.

But it isn’t just insulting; it is bad English.

What is particularly ironic is that California liberals and respectable conservatives militantly put the south in the lower case. They are making THEMSELVES southerners, which is the last thing on earth they mean to do.