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Coming up, I'm going to be discussing another looming indictment for Trump, this one in Georgia.
I'm going to consider the applicability of the RICO statutes enacted to go after the mafia and ask who's the real mafia boss here.
I'll celebrate the world's swimming body limiting female competition to biological females.
Author Harry Crocker joins me.
He's going to make the case for the greatness of the much maligned Robert E. Lee.
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Is Donald Trump a mafia boss?
Well, of course not.
He is the patriarch, if you will, of a very successful company that runs golf courses and casinos.
But this is a guy who's been in the public light for decades.
And was a beloved figure.
So the idea that Donald Trump is some kind of mafia boss is downright absurd.
And yet this is exactly what the Fulton County DA, Fannie Willis, is going to try to make him out to be.
We've been waiting for some time for this Georgia indictment, and it looks like it's going to come down imminently, sometime perhaps in the next day, maybe next few days.
There's an article in the Wall Street Journal, Trump faces looming threat of racketeering charges in Georgia cases.
Racketeering charges.
This conjures up images of Al Capone, of John Gotti, of people running either financial, criminal rackets, or other types of racketeering charges.
And indeed, the journal says, Trump is facing, likely to face, in Georgia, charges under Georgia's RICO Act.
Now, the word RICO involves racketeering.
It's a law that was passed in 1970.
It's the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
This is what RICO stands for.
And this law was passed, really, to go after the mafia.
Basically, what happened is that the feds would find out that they could catch some lower-level mafia guys, but they couldn't tie them to the mafia chiefs, to the mafia bosses.
And so they came up with this idea of a law.
And what the law basically says is that if you can show that there's a corrupt kind of organizational structure that is there to engage in, let's just say, bank robbery or other types of criminal intimidation or violence, and then you can show that all the members in it, even if they're not directly tied, let's say, to a particular event, to a particular murder or to a particular embezzlement, nevertheless, because they're part of this corrupt organization,
they too can be prosecuted.
Why? Because the organization itself is deemed to be corrupt and unlawful.
So this was the RICO statute, and you can see right away, based on the RICO statute itself, that there's something a little bit problematic here.
And by that I mean you have a guy, and let's say a bad guy.
And he's a member of an organization.
Let's say it's a criminal organization.
And you show that the criminal organization has done X, Y, and Z. But this guy had nothing to do with it.
This guy was, let's say, for example, in California when all these activities were going on in New Jersey.
There's no tie to him.
So the idea is, can you prosecute him, Mr.
X, because he belongs to this organization?
The organization is doing stuff, but other guys are doing it.
So right away, criminal defense lawyers have raised the point that RICO allows you to go after the innocent as well as the guilty.
Now, you can say, wait a minute, this guy's a member of a criminal organization.
He's not innocent. Well, he's not being prosecuted for being a member of an organization.
There's no law that says you can't be a member of an organization, even a gang, even the mafia.
So... So, the RICO statute is very problematic.
There's a federal RICO statute, and a bunch of states, apparently some 20 states, 30 states, have their own RICO laws.
Now, Georgia's RICO law goes beyond the federal statute.
Why? Because, number one, it covers crimes that the federal statute doesn't cover, and number two, it includes aspects of crimes like making a false statement.
Now, typically in the federal RICO statute, making a false statement by itself is not a crime.
It can be used to show that your motives are bad or you don't really have an alibi.
But in the Georgia statute, the false statement itself is a crime.
So if someone makes a false statement, you can go after them on that basis.
Now, Fannie Willis has realized, this is the Fulton County DA, that this RICO statute allows you to go after all kinds of people and And make it sound like they're part of a criminal organization and try to get everybody in the group, even if they didn't do anything themselves.
And this is really her idea of how to get Trump.
Let's get him in Georgia by showing there's a ring of Trumpsters who are working in Georgia to change the outcome of the Georgia election.
First of all, she has to show that they were doing that unlawfully.
If they were just merely filing lawsuits and taking lawful measures to change the outcome of Georgia, that, of course, is allowed.
But her point is, if she can show that there's some violation of the law on the part of some of these Trumpsters, she'll just then say, well, this is a big ring.
It's a criminal ring. Trump is sort of the Don Corleone of this ring, and so we have a right to go after him.
Even if he didn't do anything bad, even if he didn't even urge anyone else to do anything bad, he's part of this criminal operation, and therefore we can go after him on that basis.
So this is a very dubious—well, the second dubious part of it I want to highlight is not just the problems with the RICO itself, but RICO was established to go after the mafia, to go after these kinds of criminal organizations.
The problem is, as with so many federal laws, they get applied in very different contexts.
In fact, in Georgia, they used the RICO statute to go after some public school administrators and teachers.
Now, these teachers were doing something unlawful.
What were they doing? They were inflating the grades and test scores of students so the school would look better in terms of getting funding from the federal government.
And so, the RICO statute was used to make this seem like a criminal operation, like all the administrators and teachers were part of this.
Even if certain individual administrators and teachers did not participate, nevertheless, it's a criminal ring.
So what the government goes, hey, listen, since we were able to take this mafia statute and use it against the administrators and teachers, why not use it against the Trump people as well?
Of course, the great irony of all this is that there is a mafia boss, but it's not Donald Trump.
There is a mafia boss with the word president in front of his name.
That's the guy currently sitting in the White House.
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I talked yesterday about a very interesting conversation between journalist David Samuels and author David Garrow.
So, a conversation between the two Davids.
Now, David Garrow is a progressive.
He is the author of Bearing the Cross.
Remember, there was also a documentary based on that called Eyes on the Prize.
This is a Pulitzer Prize winning guy and someone on the liberal side.
In fact, I invited him to come on the podcast and he sent a sort of sheepish no, basically saying, I want to be viewed as nonpartisan.
So I guess he thinks I'm partisan.
Well, I mean, I'm fully capable of engaging with him just on the intellectual level.
But I think he's trying to maintain an image of being removed from left and right politics.
In any event, I want to talk more about this interview and start by noting that David Samuels talks about—he asked David Garrow, he goes, listen, you wrote more than one book about the civil rights movement.
You know everything there is to know about Martin Luther King.
And what David Garrow, in a sense, says is, yeah, I've interviewed, you know— 2,000 people who participated in the civil rights movement.
And what he's getting at is that against this backdrop, I can tell you, he says, that Obama is not one of them.
He doesn't have the same ethos, the same mood, the same spirit.
He's not motivated by the same thing.
So here you've got a guy with civil rights credibility basically saying of Obama, not just that he's no Martin Luther King, but he's not like any of the guys who took part in the civil rights movement.
He also has this poignant and interesting phrase contrasting Martin Luther King with Obama.
He calls Martin Luther King Doc and I guess that's because Dr.
Martin Luther King and so he calls him Doc throughout the interview.
He says, Barack chooses to be black.
Now, it seems like here David Garrow is mainly talking about the fact that Obama is, you know, half black.
He's got white ancestry.
But I don't think that's really what he's getting at.
I mean, Martin Luther King has white ancestry.
In other words, when you look at...
Probably the vast majority of American blacks have some white ancestry, and that's why they're very different in complexion than African blacks.
By and large, African blacks are a lot darker than American blacks, some of whom are not just my color, but lighter than me.
Well, how is that possible? Obviously, it's because they have a considerable trace of white ancestry.
What he's getting at here is that for Martin Luther King, he was African American.
He was a black American.
He was inextricably a part of being black in America.
And he experienced the same kind of black experience that most blacks have.
Obama, on the other hand, was raised in Hawaii.
Where there is a kind of a racial consciousness, but it has far more to do with the indigenous people versus the whites, the black-white distinction is not so important in Hawaii.
It's the kind of anti-colonial thrust.
Hawaii was colonized by the white man.
Hawaii was an annexed by the United States.
All of this is the politics of Hawaii.
So this is what he means when he says, Barack chooses to be black.
What he means is that, well, compare for example, Obama with somebody like Tiger Woods.
Tiger Woods by and large has chosen not to be black.
And why?
Because he has a multi-racial heritage and it's just not that important to him and he doesn't talk that much about it.
But Obama decided tactically, I wanna be black.
I wanna tap into the black thing.
And so it's really ironic that this guy who, quote, chooses to be black is the guy who has stoked the fumes of racial resentment in America.
At one point...
David Garrow talks about interviewing Bob Bauer.
Bob Bauer is Obama's lawyer.
He's the one who sort of managed the interviews with Obama that Garrow undertook for his book.
And here's what Bob Bauer tells Garrow.
He says, whatever you do, don't ask him about his father.
And here I think you get to the heart of Obama's twisted development.
It has to do with his crackpot dad.
Now, his dad wasn't a dumb guy.
He was an economist, he was a smart guy, but he was a con man.
In fact, he conned Obama's mom, impregnated her, and basically took off before Obama was really, I mean, right after Obama was born, this guy was gone.
So it seems really ironic that Obama became obsessed with his deadbeat, runaway dad, but of course he did.
So he was formed in the twisted image of his father.
And I think this is a very accurate aspect of Dreams from My Father.
David Garrow emphasizes that there's a lot about this book that is fictionalized.
It's made up. Obama omits a lot of things.
Women are almost nowhere to be found in the book.
Obama barely talks about his mom, even though his mom himself is...
She herself is also a very important character in his life.
In fact, his mom, like his dad, abandoned Obama.
So Obama has a lot of insecurity, a lot of self-doubt, all camouflaged by his preening, confident public demeanor.
Essentially, what David Garrow is saying is that this guy put one over on America.
He sold America on a false image, and America so eager to have a black president, so eager to overcome the racial legacy of the past, You know, thirstily elected this guy not really knowing what they were signing up for.
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I'm continuing my discussion of the conversation with David Garrow about Barack Obama.
David Garrow is Obama's biographer, published a very detailed book about Obama a few years ago.
And I think he set out to like Obama.
I mean, he's on the left. He's somebody who would normally be attracted to Obama and what Obama represented.
So I think he set out to write a book that would lionize Obama, that would bring out, if you will, the intellectual aspects of Obama, the nuances of Obama.
In other words, he himself bought into the Obama image.
And then he met Obama.
And when he met Obama, he came to a completely different conclusion.
First of all, he came to the conclusion that this man is a freak.
And I mean that really quite literally.
Let me quote David Guerra. He's not normal.
As in not a normal politician or a normal human being.
The second part of it is what interests me.
Obama may not be a normal politician.
Donald Trump is not a normal politician.
But Donald Trump is, in fact, a normal human being.
He's a unique human being.
He's got his own peculiar characteristics.
But he's a normal human being.
He has the normal range of human feelings and emotions.
And we can testify to that from personal experience.
Obama's not like that.
Obama, with him, everything is a show.
It's an act. He's putting on a performance.
And in fact, David Garrow caught on to this.
Let me read. When I started reading about Barack in early 2008, I read Dreams and thought, this is a crock.
It's not history. It's make-believe.
Now, I want to analyze the statement because I think at one level it's true.
It's, well, all memoirs are to some degree selective.
I don't think that's what Gero's getting at.
What he's getting at is that Obama creates a kind of literary image of himself.
And that's really what the book is all about.
He's not someone who says, let me reflect upon my life, what actually happened.
Let me describe what happened and then comment on it.
Rather, let me think about what is the kind of person I want to portray to the public.
Let me write a story about that.
And I'm not really going to pay too much attention.
Facts that don't fit that narrative, I'm going to leave out.
In fact, I'm not going to give a whole bunch of facts.
And so this is what David Garrow means when he says it's not history, meaning it's not true.
You cannot rely on it.
He says it's all make-believe.
But see, I think that this is something that David Garrow misses here, which is when you say something is make-believe, He implies that it's just sort of concocted for public consumption.
Well, yes, it is. But I also think make-believe is very interesting, because let's think about it.
Let's just say that I decide I'm going to write a story about my life, but I'm not going to describe what actually happened in my life as a middle-class kid growing up in a suburb of Mumbai.
I'm not going to actually talk about my brother and sister the way they are.
I'm going to create this kind of fictionalized portrait of myself.
And it could be any portrait.
Let's just say I decide I'm going to tell a log cabin story, Indian style.
So I'm going to portray that I grew up sort of like the people in Slumdog Millionaire.
I'm going to say, look, I've overcome all these obstacles.
Pretend like I had no education, even though I had a very good education.
So I'm going to sort of tell a story about myself.
But it's still interesting what story I choose to tell.
Because I could tell all kinds of stories.
I could say that I was born into a high-caste Brahmin upbringing, and I renounced it.
I was born into a very low-caste upbringing, and that just puts me at the very bottom of the totem pole.
I experienced discrimination.
So the story I tell, the make-believe I indulge in, is itself revealing.
And I think this is what Gero misses.
I think it's interesting to see that Obama He developed a twisted obsession with his dad, rewrote that story in order to make his dad the hero of his life, even though his dad was nowhere to be seen.
Now, his dad, by the way, was an alcoholic.
He was a wife abuser.
At one point, the guy got in.
He was a horrible driver, so he got into massive traffic accidents.
At one point, both his legs had to be cut off.
So you've got this drunken, wife-beating paraplegic Who was also an America hater and a hater of Western civilization.
And this is Obama's model.
This is his role model.
This is, in fact, the ghost.
You know, I talked yesterday about Obama is the ghost who seems to be sort of governing the Biden administration.
Well, guess what? Barack Obama Sr.
is the ghost that's governing Obama.
So you could, in some ways, say that this is not even Obama's third term, but it's the third term of the father of It's a third term of this Kenyan alcoholic who was thrown out of government positions, who was exposed in Kenya as a fraud and a masquerader.
In fact, he would often show up at international conventions pretending to be another guy.
He'd pretend to be some Kenyan minister and go, And then the real guy would show up, and people go, what?
Then they realize it's Barack Obama Sr.
And so Obama is a fraud exactly like his dad.
He's cut from the same image.
It's almost like his dad was a fraud in the old-school, carnival-style way.
I'll dress up and pretend to be somebody else.
Obama is a more subtle version of the same kind of con man.
And I find it really interesting that, by and large, David Garrow is onto this guy.
Here's a progressive who set out to praise Obama, Bury him.
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Some very good news on the athletic front, and that is that the World Swimming Body, this is called FINA, F-I-N-A, has decided, has changed its rules regarding transgender participation in sports.
Under the new rules, only biological females can compete in women's sports.
Wow, this is a big change.
We've seen some smaller organizations make these sorts of decisions and it's been a welcome.
It's signaled a sort of shift occurring in the culture.
But this is a big one because this is an international organization.
Obviously, the ultimate international organization to make such a rule would be the IOC, the International Olympic Committee.
They have not done this yet.
In fact, the problem with the IOC is that they're very much pressured by activists, and so they have shown themselves to be...
They're cautious, but their caution makes them cowardly.
But good news on the swimming front.
So, according to this new FEMA... Rule.
Which, by the way, it looks like it was passed by this guy, Hussein al-Muslam.
So a Muslim guy is head of the World Swimming Organization.
And he goes, listen, this is it.
He says, we're going to set up a new open category.
So anyone can participate in that category.
Transgenders can participate.
But the cool thing about an open category is men can too.
Let's remember, there's an interesting asymmetry here, and Debbie's pointed this out, and it's a very good point.
She goes, listen, how come I never hear about biological females We're good to go.
So, this undercuts totally the idea that being transgender, moving, in a sense, across the aisle from one to the other, makes no difference.
Hey, listen, if somebody was a biological male, they decide I'm female, they take treatments and so on, they're now a woman.
Well, if that's the case and it makes no difference and they can now compete on par with women, it should also work the other way around.
We should have all these transgenders who are biological females not only participating but winning.
Why? Because after all, there's nothing to stop them.
They're just as good as men, aren't they?
They have the same... They've decided they're men and so they are men.
Well... FINA is having none of it.
And so FINA now says, listen, if transgender males, i.e.
biological women, want to compete against males, be our guest.
But they, of course, chuckle, chuckle.
They know that this is not actually happening.
The British government has endorsed FINA's decision, so they've put the weight of the government behind it.
And they have said other sports should also start taking a look at this.
Now, British cycling has also gone the same way.
Which is to say they have suspended domestic transgender, quote, inclusion policy pending a review.
And here is the head of FINA. We have to protect competitive fairness, he says.
He goes, that's the key issue.
We're not against inclusion, but the point is you are including people who belong to the same category, right?
Think of it, when you use the word inclusion, you're not talking about including everybody.
Even when we say, let's make voting more inclusive, we mean let's allow more people who are eligible to vote.
We don't mean we want to have more mental incompetence, we want to have more illegals, we want to have more children and people who are underage voting.
That's not what we mean by inclusion.
We mean including people who fit the category, who in a sense are eligible to vote, or in this case, who are able to compete on the same basis.
I mean, there's a very important distinction to be made here, which our civil rights law is unfortunately muddy.
The civil rights laws talk about no discriminating on the basis of race or national origin or sex.
And you get the impression from that that race and sex are kind of the same thing.
But they're not the same thing.
Why? Because race is kind of the painted face.
There's no reason that a white runner can't run with a black runner, for example, or compete for a job or whatever.
But in the case of men and women, we have truly...
What used to be called separate but equal.
Remember, separate but equal was a policy under segregation, which said that blacks and whites should go to separate schools.
The schools might be equal in that the southern states insisted they were treating the schools equally, were funding them equally.
They weren't doing that, but they said they were.
But the separate but equal policy was intended to justify a certain type of segregation.
Well, that doesn't really belong in the area of race.
But guess what? It does belong in the area of gender.
Why? For the simple reason that even the best women can compete against relatively mediocre men.
And this has been proven time and time again.
For example, the top women tennis players in the world have played against a man who's, like, ranked 200.
And the man wins easily.
Why? Just because men have so much more power.
You can just see it. If you watch tennis, just go to Wimbledon or go to the US Open coming up the end of this month, you can see that the male serve in tennis.
The men's shots are vastly more powerful than the women's shots.
And this even applies to a very strong woman like Serena Williams.
Even Serena couldn't hold up against males.
and not even males in the top 10 or the top 20, but males much further down in the ranking.
So competitive fairness is truly the issue.
I'm really glad to see that an important organization here, FINA, has stepped in and decided to take a bold stance and the correct stance, a stance anchored in science, anchored in common sense.
Debbie sometimes makes the point, she goes, listen, the only way for this to really stop and stop it cold is for women athletes all over the world to say, if there are transgenders running in our, if there are biological males running in our category, we're getting off the track.
We're getting out of the pool.
We're not participating.
And we're not participating in the Olympics.
We're not participating in nationals.
We're not participating in any sport where this is allowed.
If the women sort of collectively did this, kind of coming together in a sort of solidarity of sisterhood, this whole nonsense would grind to an immediate halt.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast really an old friend of mine.
I call him Harry Crocker.
He goes by H.W. Crocker III. And he's vice president and executive editor of Regnery Publishing.
He's also a former speechwriter, editorial writer for the San Diego Union.
His articles have appeared all over the place.
National Review, The American Spectator, The Washington Times.
He's also written books, actually a fiction book, as well as best-selling books, And we're going to talk about his book called Robert E. Lee on Leadership.
Harry, welcome.
Great to talk to you.
It's been a little while.
And I got to say that we go way back.
In fact, I'm trying to remember if I knew you from my Dartmouth days or if it was subsequent when I went to Princeton and you were at that time, if I remember, in California.
Yeah, well, I actually worked for you when you were in Princeton.
I was a freelance writer for you.
But now we go back to Dartmouth days when you were at the Dartmouth Review and I was at something called the California Review at UC San Diego.
And we used to exchange letters and phone calls way back when...
So yeah, it's been a long time, Dinesh.
Like 40 years. Yeah, and then we've also had a long time working relationship.
I mean, I've now done, I don't know, 16 or 17 books, and it seems like between Adam Bellow as my editor at various different publishers and then you, between the two of you, pretty much all my books have either gone through Adam or gone through you.
And I remember, I think, I remember one of our really fruitful collaborations was my first book on Obama, The Roots of Obama's Rage.
Right. So in any event, we're here to blurb a couple of my books, by the way, it's gone both ways. Yes. No, absolutely Well Harry, it's it's it's it's great to have you on and this book on Robert E Lee I think is really important just because today in in you know in woke culture Robert E Lee is almost a sort of demonic figure because he's he's Southern He's white. He's male
He at least inherited some slaves.
He fought on the wrong side of the Civil War.
So this guy is the kind of poster boy to some degree of bigotry, of racism, of kind of reactionary politics.
I want to bring out the Robert E. Lee that you have come to understand and know and portray in this book.
So let's begin with a simple fact, and that is that, is it not a fact that Robert E. Lee, a military man, was recognized as a leader, and to such a point that Lincoln and the Union forces offered Robert E. Lee supreme command of the Union Army?
Yes, this is true. Robert U. Lee had served the United States all his life.
He got into West Point. He was later a superintendent at West Point.
He fought in the Mexican War.
And he was regarded as perhaps the best officer in the army.
And he was offered to command the enforcers.
And he turned them down, even though he opposed the session.
He said, you know, I want no flag but the Stars and Stripes.
I want no national anthem but hail Columbia.
I want a united America.
But I will not consent to raise my sword against my home, my family, my native state, and save in defense of Virginia, I will raise my sword against none.
And this was the great calamity for him, was that he did not want the union to separate.
However, he was not willing for the union to be maintained by force.
He famously said, a union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets.
It has no charm for me.
One of the things about Lee is that Lee, even though he was a military man, was used to giving orders and whatnot, he thought it was essential, an essential part of Americanism, that you persuaded people, including when you led them.
You led them by example. He was very opposed to force.
He thought that when someone has to resort to force in any form, they are no longer a gentleman.
And so even though he himself, he wrote a famous letter About four years before the war, four or five years before the Civil War, where he wrote to his wife talking about how he thought slavery was such a horrible thing.
But he thought the way to abolish slavery was through moral persuasion, especially Christian moral persuasion.
And he was opposed to what he thought was the extremism of the abolitionists, like John Brown, who he actually arrested at Harper's Ferry.
And it was that that really pushed him over.
Well, it was two things that pushed him over the edge.
That, the idea of force.
And two...
That Virginia had elected to secede.
And he was always a believer as well in...
Duty was his big thing.
And he felt his duty was to follow his state out of the Union, however tragic it was for him.
And of course, he lost everything.
I mean, he lost his home.
He lost all his money.
He lost his reputation.
He lost his citizenship.
I mean, after the war, he was as bereft of anything, of everything, save for his immediate family members who had survived.
And I think in some strange way, if the wokesters succeed and we face another reconstruction, he's kind of like a saintly role model for conservatives about how to endure a regime that Let's take a pause when we come back more with Harry Crocker,
H.W. Crocker III, the book Robert E. Lee on Leadership.
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I'm back with Harry Crocker, H.W. Crocker III, the book Robert E. Lee on Leadership.
Boy, Harry, you said a bunch of things that are so interesting and provocative.
Let me start this way. It seems like after the Civil War, the United States became a different country.
And by that, I mean that some of the things that Robert E. Lee said, which made sense, are almost incomprehensible to people today.
So today, for example, except here in Texas, where I live, where people will say things, where there is a Texas pledge, you pledge allegiance to the Texas flag, no less than the United States flag.
But in any other state, if someone were to say something like, my loyalty is to Montana...
It's not that they would disagree.
They wouldn't even get what the guy was saying.
So what does Robert E. Lee mean when he says that he has a sort of primary loyalty to what is local, his family, Virginia, over, seemingly, his loyalty to the United States of America?
It's because it wasn't abstract for him.
It was real. You have to remember that Robert E. Lee...
He's a son of the American Revolution.
His father, Light Horse Harry Lee, fought in the American Revolution, served under George Washington.
And when the Constitution was ratified, it was ratified by the separate states.
And so this idea of, and this is a man, of course, who served all over the country as a soldier, but he was rooted in Virginia in a way that people maybe lack that sort of rootedness now.
I mean, he was married into Washington's family as well.
So he had all these, his family had been in Virginia since the 17th century.
So he had these deep, deep roots in Virginia.
Instead of just, you know, his loyalty to an abstraction, say, in the United States, this vast thing, his loyalty, his primary loyalty, he was loyal to the United States, but his primary loyalty was to people and place and flesh and blood.
I often used to say to people, look, suppose something Catastrophic happened in the United States.
Suppose Biden stole the next election, and Texas, and where I live, Mississippi, and all these southern states were to secede again.
How many people would think that the appropriate reaction of the Biden administration would be to send tanks over the 14th Street Bridge, blockade southern ports, and carpet bomb southern cities?
I don't think many, because many people actually, if they think about it, they actually think the way Robert E. Lee does, which is that, wait, No, a union should be voluntary.
It should be something people want to belong to, not something they'd be forced to belong to, or dragooned into, or held at gunpoint into.
And so I think in that way, I'll say this too, that there are two things in my own 62 years, like we're the same age, that have changed the most dramatically in this country.
One is obviously the whole trans thing.
That didn't exist until like five or ten years ago.
Where did that come from? But the other thing is how people view the Civil War.
And, I mean, you can see this kind of like dramatically by the statues that went up, and now they're all virtually gone or destroyed or defaced.
And those statues symbolized a, you know, to quote Lincoln, a mystic chord of memory, which is now snapped.
They memorialize a sort of regional...
Patriotism, but also a national patriotism, which was recognized not long after the war.
People forget, Lee only died within five years after the war.
In that time, a New York newspaper thought that Lee should run for president on the Democratic ticket.
And not for the South, this is for everybody, because Lee had already become this sort of national unifying figure.
Teddy Roosevelt gave a famous speech where he said, you know, we can take pride in both those who marched with the blue and with the gray, because both fought for the right as they sought to see the right.
And he was a big Unionist himself, but he had a Southern mother.
He had more than fought on a Southern mother.
But this sort of became the American consensus, which existed all the way through the 20th century, that this was sort of the American Iliad with heroes on both sides, Greek and Trojan, blue and gray.
And you would see this even among liberals.
I mean, two of the most celebrated liberal historians of the latter half of the 20th century were Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Elliot Morrison.
Harvard people, just both.
Now we consider them extremely sympathetic to the Confederacy.
Or even more recently, in Ken Burns' PBS documentary, The Civil War, which was, I don't know, around 2000 or maybe the middle 90s, early 90s.
But, you know, he gave lots of airtime to Shelby Foote, a Southern historian, big molasses drawl, who loved Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And that sort of idea of a liberal television show that gives the South a respectful treatment and treats us as a tragedy with good people on both sides, as opposed to the sort of critical race theory version, which has now become virtually universal.
It's just shocking to me.
It's utterly shocking to me.
It is such a change from the America I grew up in.
I grew up not in the Deep South.
I grew up in California.
But even in California, that was like an assumed thing.
The war was partly about slavery, but not entirely about slavery.
Sure, Lee, he was a great man.
He was a great Christian hero.
Stormwall Jackson, wow, against the odds, he did all these incredible things.
Jeb Stewart, what a cavalier!
Even if you prefer Grant and Lincoln, you could equally hold those same views of these Confederate heroes, which is why they were national heroes.
And it's why it's no surprise that when those statues went down, so did the founders, so did Abraham Lincoln, so did everybody else, because they're all connected.
Let's take a pause, Harry. When we come back, a final segment.
And the book Robert E. Lee on Leadership, you can get it in bookstores.
You can also go straight to Regnery.
It's just Regnery.com.
R-E-G-N-E-R-Y.com.
Be right back. I'm talking to Harry Crocker, H.W. Crocker III, author of Robert E. Lee on Leadership.
Harry, based on your last comment, I think it is important to lay out the Southern argument, if you will, for secession.
Because I think that gives a context because...
What you're saying, I think, in effect is, listen, I'm Robert E. Lee.
I don't support secession, but if democratically, or in other words, if through the electoral process my own state makes a decision to secede, I am, in a sense, bound by that, and I will respect it, and I will fight on the side of Virginia against anybody who tries to sort of overturn Virginia's decision.
Now, As I understand it, Abraham Lincoln's case was pretty simple, which was, I won the election.
You Southerners don't like the outcome of the election.
I haven't actually done anything.
In fact, I haven't even taken office.
And yet all these states are already seceding.
So you can't have any sort of an electoral democracy where every time the outcome doesn't go your way, you break up the country.
Now, if you were Robert E. Lee or if you were making the case for the South, how would you answer that?
And what was the Southern kind of frame of mind in thinking about all this?
Yeah, well, it's interesting because the president of the Confederacy was Jefferson Davis, who was a U.S. senator for Mississippi.
And he followed Mississippi out of the Union for the same reasons Lee did.
But there's two important contexts here.
Jefferson Davis said, all the South wants is to be left alone.
But in Lee's case, the secession didn't happen all at once.
The states of the Lower South came out first.
Now, in Virginia and the Upper South, those states did not leave at the same time.
They did not leave immediately. But what tipped them over the edge was when Lincoln said he wanted to raise troops from the Upper South to put down the insurrection in the Lower South.
And that's what brought things to the...
Let's say like Virginia, brought them to the boil.
And they were, no, no, no, no. I mean, we would like to negotiate a compromise here, but we're not going to go to war against our sister Southern states.
And that, again, is sort of the lead position.
So for the Upper South, it really was a matter of, all right, look, we'd like to work this out, but if it comes to coercion, we're out.
We're not going to fight the lower states.
The lower states, it was just like, look, we entered into this pact voluntarily.
We're getting the hell out of here.
Just like South Carolina tried to secede, you know, over tariffs in 1832.
And Jackson stopped them.
And there was rumors of secession in New England during the War of 1812, because they didn't support the War of 1812, because they thought it interfered with...
Well, they had several reasons.
One was they had big trade with England, and thought France, Napoleonic France was there.
France was there, not Napoleonic France.
So that, I think, is it.
And again, it comes down to Is this a union that states voluntarily enter into and can, again, leave not...
I think the way you can say it's not irresponsible is that the state governments are leading them out.
It's not like a secession movement like in Portland or Seattle where it's not like a block that scares itself a Marxist, you know, republic.
This is why Lord Acton actually is the fellow who gives us the phrase that absolute power preps absolutely.
He actually corresponded with Lee immediately after the war.
And he said that he warned for what was lost at Appomattox more than he rejoiced for what was won.
I forgot if it was Waterloo or Agincourt.
And the reason was this.
He thought that secession was a check on the federal government, a necessary check on the federal government.
The federal government had to moderate its course If it couldn't maintain a willing union of the states, if California, Virginia, or Mississippi said, we're going to leave if you do that, the federal government then had to, like, well, I guess we won't do that necessarily.
Which is a great point, which no one considers it anymore.
If you think about secession as a check and balance.
I mean, yeah, Acton was, of course, a great apostle of liberty.
He thought he's sort of a libertarian hero.
So the point you're making is that while today a lot of people think of the Southern position as totally reactionary, You had prominent liberals, liberals in the old sense, from Europe who looked over the pond and go, actually, our sympathies are with the South and not...
And Lincoln, by the way, knew this and he was worried about it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, on the liberal point, there's even more to that.
I mean, the South was free trade.
That was one of their objections. They hated the protectionism of the North.
They hated the tariffs. In the Confederate Constitution, which is very close to the U.S. Constitution, The president is term-limited.
He can only run once. He has one term, and then he's done.
It did not reopen the international slave trade.
I mean, a lot of it's a very limited, and this is actually a problem for Jefferson Davis fighting the war, was that his authority was so limited by the states, he had a lot of trouble, actually, organizing these fractious states made up of equally fractious sort of rights-driven individuals in the South.
That it was hard to get them all on the same page often.
I mean, the Georgia militia often wanted to attend Georgia.
Not going to Texas or someplace.
Right. They definitely guarded their prerogatives, to put it that way.
Well, guys, you can see just from this brief conversation what a kind of universe of knowledge opens up when we talk to Harry Crocker here.
There's just a lot there.
And this is a wonderful book, Robert E. Lee on Leadership.
Harry, as always, great pleasure to see you again and really fun having you on the podcast.