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May 6, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
50:13
Standing Up for the South
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Hey, everyone.
Welcome to Left, Right, and White.
I am Gregory Hood, and today we have a special episode.
I'm joined by Martin O'Toole, who is the Director of Litigation and the spokesman for the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Mr. O'Toole, thank you for being with us today.
Thank you.
Good to be here.
I'm glad to talk to anybody.
This week at American Renaissance, it is your article that is going to be the feature article talking about Confederate Memorial Day.
Can you give us some insight as to what your thinking is on that and what the status is of Confederate Memorial Day in the form of Confederacy?
Well, the Sons of Confederate Veterans is a hereditary organization which was founded in 1896.
And it's fairly straightforward.
If you're a descendant of a Confederate veteran and you are somebody who served in the Confederate government, you're entitled to be a member.
It's very limited in its aspect.
It's interested in commemorating the people who fought to create an independent Southland.
And as far as Confederate Memorial Day, that dates back to 1866 here in Georgia.
And it was the Operation of the women of the South to decorate the graves of the dead.
The South had an enormous loss as a result of their failed quest for independence.
So that's where its origins are.
It's a state holiday, and it's also a holiday in most of the South today.
It's the forerunner of what became known in the North as Decoration Day, which is now known as Memorial Day.
So how many people of the white population in the South, about how many, ended up serving either in the Confederate government or the Confederate Army?
The estimate I've been given is about 75% of the white males of military age served in some capacity for the South.
So, I mean, this is basically everybody.
If you are a legacy American from the South, odds are you probably have somebody who fought for the South.
It's pretty difficult to miss that.
As you look at your family tree, you know, of course, it blossoms out.
You go back three generations or so, and you almost certainly hit somebody who has had some service in the Confederate Army, Navy, Marine Corps, or government.
My question To you is, have you seen, I mean, it's not even a question, obviously we see a push to get rid of Confederate symbols, not least from Republicans who have basically taken over the once democratic solid South, but don't seem to have any enthusiasm and standing up for the Confederacy or standing up for the historic population of those states.
Is there any danger that Confederate Memorial Day is eventually going to be eliminated in the South?
Yeah, I think it will be if the people are willing to put up with it.
It's a matter of what people are willing to put up with.
And yes, the Republicans are often referred to as the stupid party, as opposed to the Democrats who are the criminal party.
So when they do something bipartisan, it's both stupid and criminal.
But at any rate, we find a lot of our Republicans here in Georgia are still open and empathetic to commemoration of Southern American history.
As far as Democrats go, it's very hard to find a Democrat who will permit any commemoration of traditional America.
And as I understand it, Stacey Abrams, if she becomes governor, will go so far as to remove Stone Mountain and presumably whatever other memorials still remain to the Confederacy.
Well, when she ran for governor in 2018, she promised to, quote, sandblast, unquote, the bas-relief sculpture from the face of Stone Mountain.
People who know something since it's made of mountainous quartz say they would take approximately the time of the sun to go supernova before that would actually be accomplished.
But that's her promise.
There are other ways they could get rid of it that would be, shall we say, less time-consuming.
She could probably go to her friends in the Taliban and blow it up like the folks did to the Buddhist monuments over there in Afghanistan.
That would work.
But he certainly is committed to getting rid of that in any Confederate commemoration.
In the 2021 General Assembly, we had a bill introduced which would call for the removal of anything dealing with the Confederacy on any public land except possibly a battlefield, and anyone who supported slavery, anyone who owned slaves, etc., etc.
So that would strike out 12 of the first 18 presidents of the United States They also said anybody who supported anybody who supported slavery, which would probably knock out everybody but the Adams family, and I'm not sure if anybody else would remain of the first 18 presidents.
I think just we'd wind up with just two.
So yeah, there's a general purge of American history going on.
And a lot of this is due to, of course, demographic change because Georgia is becoming increasingly non-white.
You've got a lot of reverse migration from the blacks who moved north during the Great Migration coming back now.
You also have a large Hispanic population that's been coming in in recent years who obviously don't have any real ties to the Confederacy.
Although, interestingly enough, probably the best known area where people still celebrate the confederacy quite openly is in brazil where all those confederate officers and soldiers fled and essentially set up a town where the descendants celebrate confederate memorial day to this day but george itself seems to be losing it so i mean is this basically is this just a question of waiting for whites to become
More of a minority and it's inevitable that all these things are going to go away.
Or do you see any signs that people are beginning to say, hey, actually this tradition is something we should value?
It varies.
It's hard to really say all that.
You have a lot of folks who, for reasons of corporation or politics or whatever,
are terrified to have anything to do with the Confederacy now.
The big bugaboo is the fact that the Confederacy was identified with slavery,
even though the American nation was identified with slavery.
And virtually, I can't think of a race, a region, or a nation that hasn't had slavery at one time or another.
So as long as that guilt is placed on the backs of whites, then we can expect that there will be
less and less support for this.
And it also is that you move further away.
The original Confederate Memorial Days were given by people who actually knew the dead and
deceased.
I don't think there's anyone living today who knew an actual, well, there could be some,
but they'd be quite elderly, who knew an actual Confederate veteran
or an actual slave or an actual slaveholder.
you Yeah, it also—the deracination of Americans.
I mean, how many Americans even know their family tree is beyond one or two generations at this point, especially because there almost seems to be a kind of moral push for whites to cut themselves off from their heritage and their past.
Instead, you get to self-create and become a modern person who creates your own identity, searching for yourself, be without roots, be without history, be without culture.
I mean, it does seem to me that what we're living in now, when you see particularly whites, they're actively discouraged.
from looking into their own traditions.
And obviously that's going to have an impact on things like Confederate Memorial Day
because they're not going to know what to memorialize.
I think there's some truth in that.
There was an interesting thing sent to me the other day that the Council on Islamic-American Relations
I forget which state it was in they were ranting and raving about the Confederate Memorial
Day has to go.
And you'd wonder what somebody of an Islamic heritage, why they would be offended by the Confederacy.
And it was just rather surprising to see that because since many Muslims around the world today still keep slaves, it can't be an objection to slavery.
And I just was rather baffled because all they did was use the usual epithets, racism, slavery, and bigotry.
So, you know, you mentioned earlier about changing demographics.
Clearly, if you have a group like the Council on American-Islamic Relations wants to come in, rather than having a relation, they immediately want to assert censorship.
So, that was an interesting little thing.
I'm going to look into that further.
Well, let's stop talking about being on the defensive.
I mean, one of the big things that I'm always frustrated with in the movement is kind of this idea that things are constantly getting worse and worse.
And, oh, woe is us, this is happening, and there's nothing we can do to fight back against it.
And I've always said, like, look, we need to be taking the offensive.
We need to be presenting ourselves as the party that is actually owed something.
In other words, we're the ones who are owed reparations.
In fact, Doesn't seem fair that the South, which basically had its wealth destroyed in the Civil War, and when Sherman took total war to the South using methods that far more vicious than what Vladimir Putin is doing in Ukraine today, something which we're supposed to be offended by now.
Is basically celebrated.
I see it among many historians where they think that what was done to the South, particularly to Georgia, was justified and a good thing.
And I do think we need to get that kind of moral.
Righteous indignation.
About what was done back in our bellies and back in our veins, because this is this is something that was an outrage, and this is something that shouldn't be tolerated.
In your own words.
What is the value of Confederate Memorial Day today?
I think the value would lie in looking back at what our ancestors were willing Well, I'll start off by saying this.
Wars never seemed to wind up the way people who start them think they're going to go.
Neither the North or the South expected that the war for Southern independence would be a lengthy war.
Both sides thought it would be quick, over, done, and dirty, and stuff like that.
So both sides underestimated Lincoln, in fact, referred to the idea of secession being complete humbug.
These things, as many people have found out, wherever a war starts, it never seems to quite wind up the way people thought it would be at the beginning.
And that's certainly the case here.
But our ancestors wound up, once things got bad, most of them were willing to get into the fight.
They were willing to make enormous sacrifices.
And in the end, they held out far longer than anybody would have had any right to expect.
So it shows a determination, it shows courage, it shows sacrifice.
Those are all things that you can see part of in Confederate Memorial Day.
Obviously, with the iconoclasm in 2020 and something that continues today, We've seen how the left has been energized to try to tear down these things.
But do you see evidence of real backlash?
I mean, obviously, you saw the Republicans win an unexpected victory in Virginia, which was the site for a lot of these battles to take down memorials.
And while the Republicans took over there, it's not like they're going to be putting memorials back up.
So basically, Go ahead.
Basically, is there a backlash forming among the white population of the South where we're actually going to see more of a willingness to fight to preserve what is still left and maybe to rebuild what has been destroyed?
I think you can answer that in two ways.
One is that the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans has initiated A number of lawsuits around the state where people have attempted to remove Confederate monuments and markers.
We have what we thought was a pretty good law.
Official Code of Georgia annotated 50-3-1 for any lawyers who might want to look it up.
was passed as a compromise, which is something interesting to say about compromise, when Governor Roy Barnes decided he wanted to take the Confederate battle flag off of the state flag and replace it with what was referred to as the placemat flag.
That only lasted for about a year, and then we went back to a flag again, which was based on the first national Confederate flag or regimental flag.
At any rate, part of that was that we had the law changed to protect Confederate monuments and protect Stone Mountain.
And so that was all regarded as part of this big touchy-feely deal.
You get the flag changed and we get the protection for our monuments in Stone Mountain.
The very next year, some of the same people who had proposed the compromise started once again, let's remove Stone Mountain, let's change, let's get rid of Confederate monuments, let's change the law.
So the so-called compromise didn't last 12 months before the usual suspects were out there ranting and raving that they were offended.
Nevertheless, when government agencies come in and attempt to remove these monuments, we have filed probably about 10 lawsuits right now, which are pending.
We've just been granted certiorari in two of them before the Supreme Court of Georgia.
Now, at the lower level in the courts, we have had dismissals for most of our cases based on the legal concept of standing, and in one case, sovereign immunity.
But Georgia, fortunately, repealed its sovereign immunity, which means you can't sue the state without the state's permission.
We argued that we had the permission of the state based on the law, but one judge said, no, you don't.
And that's still ongoing and pending.
But standing is an interesting concept, legal concept.
What that means is, do you have a right to come into the courtroom?
Are you a person who has an actual interest in this?
And our Confederate ancestors were probably happy to know that the courts that want to remove their monuments are stating that we have to show Article III constitutional standing under the federal constitution, not under the Georgia state constitution, which does not make such a requirement.
So the Supreme Court of Georgia has agreed to hear this and decide whether or not we actually don't.
Basically what they're saying is the General Assembly of Georgia does not have the right to say that someone can file a lawsuit.
That's what it boils down to.
And so we'll find out whether or not this happens.
Some liberal organizations said they were going to join us in this because they have cases that they would like to file lawsuits against the state on environmental reasons or stuff like that.
But in the end, they all chickened out because they didn't want to be identified with any Confederate memorialization.
So we're standing alone on that.
What if we can win it?
We win it by ourselves.
So that's the offense in the lawsuits.
We also in the Georgia Division have put up new monuments in at least five places that I can think of.
We had some really good Statues cast in bronze a few years back and we've put five of them up around the state and we still have a few more that if somebody has a good location to place one, we have I think two more left that we could put up if provided the local people were willing to put a little skin in the game.
But they're really nice monuments.
We're very pleased with how they look.
Yeah, that's something I really wanted to talk about.
Could you tell us what the statues are of and How much it would cost what people are looking what you guys are looking for in terms of putting up new memorials and then also what's been the reaction to the new memorials that have already been put up?
Well, basically, the memorials have a dedication ceremony, and a small crowd will show up, usually people interested in the Confederacy, some reenactors, some historians, stuff like that.
There'll be a couple of speeches, and then they just stand there, and that's the end of it.
People come by to look at them from time to time, but they don't seem to be controversial at all.
They've been put up on city hall grounds, in veterans' parks, in cemeteries, stuff like that.
They are usually, in fact all of these are, an image of a Confederate soldier standing there, usually at rest.
He might be wearing a kepi, he might be wearing a slouch hat, and he'll be in his kit.
And a monument marker in the base might say something to the memory of the Confederate soldier.
There's a book, if people are interested enough, by Mercer University Press called Georgia's Confederate Monuments by Gould Hagler.
And which he went around the state and photographed every monument to the Confederacy that he could find.
And he has a photograph of each one and also a rendition of what the inscription is on each one.
And almost all of them are basically the same thing.
They're in memorial to the Confederate soldier.
There's some individual ones, such as there's one of General Johnston.
They're in Dalton.
It's very nice, but it's to him more than anybody else.
There is the Lion of the Confederacy, which is based on the Lion of Lucerne in Switzerland.
And that has been removed by the city of Atlanta and put into hiding.
That was to the unknown soldiers buried at the Oakland Cemetery.
So we have all kinds of different ones.
There's another one that they hate.
There's the Peace Monument, also in Atlanta, which was dedicated by Union and Confederate veterans 50 years after the war.
And it's a statue of a woman with, if I remember correctly, she has a dove that she's releasing and there's a soldier standing or actually kneeling near her feet and it commemorates the reunification of the nation.
So you have all kinds of things like this.
So the Peace Monument a few years ago was kind of funny because it became controversial because it could be a Confederate soldier.
It probably is a Confederate soldier kneeling at the feet of peace.
The reunification of the nation is evidently a bad thing under these circumstances.
Yeah, it seems like the war never really ended.
The monument of the Lion, of course, is one of the most breathtaking ones, and its removal obviously shows tremendous spite.
Now, do you know what happened to it?
Has Atlanta just got it in storage somewhere?
Are they going to go out of their way to destroy it?
Are they going to claim they lost it?
What's the status of it?
I don't know.
There's actually in the statute a part that says if they lose a monument, they're held responsible, too.
And that was put in.
One of the little side things is you may have heard the story of the Francis Scott Key House, the National Park Service dissembled it.
Yes.
And for your listeners benefit.
And they were able somehow to completely lose an entire house.
They don't know where it went.
Just disappeared.
Sort of like it is Baltimore.
So.
Yeah.
Sort of like Raiders of the Lost Ark.
There's some building somewhere, there's completely disassembled houses and boxes somewhere, and no one can find it.
But the Lion of Atlanta is supposed to be in storage.
I know that there's going to be an offer made to move it to another cemetery, where it'll be treated with more respect.
But a few years back, the Atlanta Psychorama, I think it was when Mayor Jackson or Andrew Young was mayor.
I can't remember which one it was.
They talked about how it was terrible, hateful.
The psychorama was a painting commissioned by Union General John Logan, and he wanted to run for president of the United States.
And he's had this enormous painting of the Battle of Atlanta done, in which the central thing is General Logan riding to the rescue.
Most people have never heard of him who aren't historians.
Well, unfortunately for General Logan, after commissioning this enormous and very interesting piece of artwork, he up and died, so he didn't get a chance to run for President of the United States.
So, the Sakurama came to Atlanta.
It was a traveling exhibition.
It's been there for a number of years.
Well, the mayor, either Andrew Young or Maynard Jackson, whichever it was, said it needed to go.
And a city said, we'll take it.
All of a sudden, they changed their mind.
No, no, no, no.
It was just apparently a hysterical point to pander to their constituency that this piece of art needed to go away.
But when somebody said, we'll take it, all of a sudden, no.
And so I suspect the same thing will happen to the Lion of Atlanta when someone says, we want to put it in our cemetery.
All of a sudden, the City of Atlanta said, no, no, no, we got to keep it.
Right.
And the whole point will be to keep it in storage so nobody can see it.
I'm sure that's certainly something that they would enjoy.
They would be happy about that.
These new Confederate memorials that are being put up, what are the types of groups that are doing this?
And are they put, I know you refer to cemeteries and places where they're put, but are they put sometimes on private property as well?
The ones that I'm aware of are all on public property.
Which would be better to have it there because it's better protected by the law, as Georgia's law presently stands it on private property.
And also, too, the city or the county is responsible for the maintenance, upkeep, and protection of the monument.
So that's actually a better place for it to be than a private property.
But down in South Georgia, and in Florida also, there are people who are going to city governments, and they have this idea of what I call monument graveyards.
They're going to cities and counties and saying, we'll take your monument, and we're going to put it over in such and such a location.
I'm told by colleagues in Florida that the guy who has gotten several of them in Florida now charges admission to come and see them.
So in effect, they are just as disappeared as if they were placed into a box and shoved
Yeah.
into some storage bin somewhere for most people.
And certainly, you're not going to be able to go to the Welcome Center in Florida and
say, oh, go here to the Confederate Memorial Park.
So that's a pretty, pretty sorry thing.
Yeah.
What about the ones that are put on public property?
How much do they cost?
And is it a question of, as you say, they just generally represent the Confederate soldier,
but what's the style and what was it based on?
Is it based on a particular picture, a particular soldier, or was it just something that the sculptor created himself?
Well, actually, we had a fellow pose for the sculpture, and we cast a couple of different heads.
And so the body is pretty much the same on the seven or eight that we made, and the head changes a little bit.
So it's based on an authentic reenactor's kit that he was wearing and his pose.
So then, like I said, some of the heads have a mustache on them, some don't, some have a kepi, some have a slouch hat, and stuff like that.
So they look different, but they're all a Confederate soldier basically standing at rest.
And of course, they are facing north, because you don't want to turn your back on those Yankees, so they're technically all made to face to the north.
How much do they go for?
How much do they cost?
I think they're all paid for, the ones we have.
What the SCV Georgia division has done is we will subsidize the placement if we can find a worthy place.
But we'd like to have the local people, if they can find a really nicer location to have to place them in, the less contribution we would look for from the local people.
We haven't put any up that were free yet.
I don't think anybody's paid us over probably $1,000 for one yet, which, you know, considering how expensive they are, it's quite a bargain.
Yeah, that is a tremendous bargain.
Is this something that the organization would be open to, putting it on private property?
Or is there definitely, I mean, I know there's a preference for public property, but is this something that is designed solely for public property?
And are there any plans to make new statues, given that you've already got the casts?
Actually, the molds decay over time, and the more you use them, the less true they are to the original one.
And so the castings that we have, we have run all the statues can be run on the present molds.
So if we did more, we'd have to start over again with a new mold.
As far as private property, I can't say that we've ever been asked to do that, so I don't know what the answer would be to that.
I guess it would depend on what the proposal was.
But all the ones that we've done so far have been on public property.
What was the production cost, give or take, for making the statues?
Probably about 10,000 apiece.
In terms of the SCV, I Obviously, you need to have a biological tie to a Confederate ancestor, and as you point out, the farther back you go, the odds are pretty high that you have a Confederate ancestor, even if you don't know it, particularly because of intermarriage, you know, between Northern and Southern people in the years after the war as people traveled around more.
So, I mean, you probably have ancestors from both the Union and the Confederacy if your family's been in the country long enough.
Right.
That's pretty common, actually.
One of our officers is an officer in the Sons of Union Veterans, as well as being an officer in the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
And again, as you pointed out, I mean, a lot of these monuments were put together, the original monuments were put together by efforts of both Union and Confederate soldiers.
Well, the one in Atlanta, I think, is an outstanding one.
It's a really wonderful piece of art.
And if you come to Atlanta, you need to go to Piedmont Park and take a look at it.
It's right near one of the main gates off Piedmont Road.
And it's a very, very elegant monument.
And the sentiment is that we are one nation.
And that, of course, is offensive, apparently, to our moral superiors today.
After all, who can possibly have union with the rebels?
Right.
Has the SCV or Heritage Protection Groups more broadly seen any kind of an influx after 2020?
Did people get angry and try to do more to defend these monuments or do you think a lot of people just sort of took it?
I think a lot of people were very irritated.
I haven't seen a huge influx in membership But I have seen a very greater sympathy for this, and people are saying, this is ridiculous.
It's getting out of control.
You know, when you mentioned that, I will talk about our event last weekend at Stone Mountain.
Several groups had what they called counter-protests.
Well, ours was not a protest, so truly it wasn't a counter-protest.
We were having a memorial service.
The interesting thing was the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People both put out press releases calling for our permits to be revoked.
Now, the SPLC, I couldn't get a copy of the statement of the NAACP, but the SPLC's statement was very interesting.
It reveals, it rips the mask from their face as far as they're going to be a quote civil rights unquote organization because they are basically calling for the suspension of the First Amendment for a thought they don't agree with.
And, you know, the First Amendment, of course, as everyone knows, includes the right to peaceably assemble and speak freely.
Well, they demanded that the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Park not have a Confederate Memorial Day service during the month which is designated by Georgia law as Confederate Memorial and History and Heritage Month.
What was the rationale for that?
I mean, did they just assert it?
be permitted to hold anything at Snow Mountain Memorial Park, but no organization should
be permitted to have any kind of commemoration of the Confederacy on any public land.
And so that's...
What was the rationale for that?
I mean, did they just assert it?
I assume they gave some kind of an excuse.
No, you would be wrong.
They just simply said, well, they did give one excuse.
The conclusion remark they said was that Stone Mountain, Georgia is now a majority black community.
And it's offensive to these people that this mountain is there and white nationalists are commemorating slavery and stuff like that.
And well, even if they were commemorating slavery, which they were not, the whole purpose is that's First Amendment protected speech.
And the so-called Southern Poverty Underline Law Center was advising the Stone Mountain Memorial Association to reject any future events by any group that can celebrate the Confederacy.
So they had a content-based call for censorship.
Then the other thing that we had to be kind of amused at was apparently the awful, painful influence of the Confederate Memorial Park and Stone Mountain did not stop black people from moving to Stone Mountain.
So it became a majority black community in about a 20-year period.
So somehow this awful, baneful Confederate influence didn't drive black people away.
And you can imagine what would happen if a white community announced that they thought it would be offensive for blacks to hold a demonstration in their community.
It would be international news.
As near as I can tell, no news media outlet has commented on this complete a complete repudiation of the First Amendment by a so-called
civil rights organization.
So maybe we should try saying that it would be offensive to us and see what will happen.
Oh, why bother?
You know, you know what would happen.
It'd be the usual problems, the usual smears, the usual screaming and hollering.
Oh, yeah.
We've already been through that.
I mean, they can only scream so many times and they keep screaming the same thing.
I mean, that's that's actually one thing I want to say to anybody listening to this.
I mean, you go through it once, it's over.
It's not.
I mean, it does.
They can't do it again.
I mean, they can just repeat the same thing.
So what difference does it make?
Well, that was the other thing I wanted to mention about our memorial service at Stone Mountain.
The people that showed up were, they were incredibly profane.
It was really shocking.
They apparently broke through a fence where they were supposed to be staying up at a free speech zone and came down very close to us and chanted obscenities continuously for the entire service, including they got particularly loud when prayers were offered and when taps were played.
And if you happen to go online, there's a Twitter thing from a New York Times reporter where he posted up, you can enjoy the full privilege of listening to these wonderful intellectuals as they curse and swear and carry on.
I'll see if I can find those.
I'll see if I can find those and put that in the article of this recording.
I think that'd be very interesting.
I'll try to find it and forward it to you, but yeah, it's worthwhile seeing.
It had a really good effect on our people.
I'm reminded of Lord Marchmain that Brides had revisited when he said, I'm just what my enemies would have me to be in a great reproach to my party.
Because we couldn't have paid them to behave worse than they did.
And it had a real effect on everybody who was in attendance, and I probably had a dozen emails and phone calls from people who, after reading the media accounts of what went on, they said most of them made no mention of the bad behavior of these, quote, counter-protesters, unquote.
And so it was a real wake-up call to people who were in attendance of what to expect.
And as I tell people, When you deal with a news account, which you have personal knowledge of, have they ever gotten it right to your knowledge?
They never do.
And particularly when a political angle is involved, then there is an agenda, and there was an agenda this thing.
One of them said, for example, they exchanged insults.
Well, I don't think our people shouted anything back at them.
At any rate, it's just...
It just really ripped a mask from their faces as far as claiming any kind of intellectual argument.
All they did was curse and scream and holler and try to keep other people from expressing their opinions.
Yeah, and I think you definitely see that with the media when they cover any kind of confrontation.
It's not just that they get it wrong, it's that they They often seem to deliberately overlook or they just outright invent something that will give them that political angle.
As you say, I mean, every, every political event that I've ever been involved in, the media reports have always gotten something important wrong.
And oftentimes it's something that it's, it's very hard to believe that was, Oh, it's just a mistake or it was something done in good faith.
But that is, that is the nature of journalism.
And perhaps it always was.
I think it always has been.
I mean, but at least they used to be.
They didn't go through this stuff that journalists do today where they claim to be impartial arbiters of the truth.
It used to be you might have the Springfield Republican or the St.
Louis Globe Democrat and stuff like that.
And you knew when you picked up the paper, this is a Democratic Party organ, this is a Republican Party organ, this is a Whig organ or whatever.
Now they come off with this crap that they say, oh, we're the trained professionals, impartially telling the story, which is just garbage.
It's just part of their life.
Yeah, of course, without the internet and without Twitter and things like that, you'd have no way to prove them wrong, which of course is the main reason they want these things shut down and as many people de-platformed as possible.
Well, we must have the Ministry of Truth to make sure that disinformation is restrained.
Otherwise, people draw wrong conclusions.
Right.
And of course, this is one thing I want to make clear.
We shouldn't just object to this because First Amendment free speech.
Yeah.
Okay, fine.
But that's everybody.
The issue is not that people who have quote-unquote extreme speech have the right to speak.
The issue is that on racial matters, We are objectively right and they are objectively wrong.
The most destructive misinformation out there is the idea that all racial disparities can be explained by white privilege.
That's inherently an encouragement to violence.
And that's also not very helpful when you look at these discrepancies and you're trying to solve them with programs that don't admit this fundamental truth.
Well, I should say this since I'm the spokesman for the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans does not take a position on race, as you have delineated it there.
As a matter of fact, the National has voted a resolution condemning white supremacy.
And so the official position of the Sons of Confederate Veterans is it's limited to the recognition of the sacrifices of the veterans and the like.
It is not a racialist organization.
So they would not, the Georgia SCV and the National SCV would not pick up that issue.
Right.
Are there any blacks who have been joining the Sons of Confederate Veterans?
I mean, obviously, we hear a lot about the blacks who served in the Confederate Army in one form or another, and of course, near the end of the war, General Lee was calling for them to simply just be admitted on a large scale.
There are some blacks that have joined the SCV.
Usually, they are people who have come from racially mixed marriages, and you can find a few here and there that are authentic.
I wrote something on that.
There are a lot of members of the SCV who like to say, I've heard some people go so far as to say that 100,000 blacks drew arms for the Confederacy.
Sensible historians point to, well, there are some funny little things on that.
For example, the first Union officer killed in the war was probably killed by a slave at Big Bethel, North Carolina, where a slave was watching the Federals advance on them, and he turned to his master.
This would be 1861.
He said, I believe I can hit that man.
And the master, who was an officer, turned to one of those soldiers, give me a rifle.
And the slave was handed a rifle, took a careful aim, and boom!
Shot a Massachusetts officer, making him the first federal officer to die on the battlefield in the war.
And the amusement of that, as history has all these little wrinkles, is that there a slave killed a Massachusetts officer who came from an abolition family.
That's one of these little weirdo things, but it doesn't mean that that's the way the war was fought or won.
And most historians say that slaves came in as servants for their masters, but as the war turned harsher, they were sent back home, and they were not that common.
There were at least two companies of black infantry raised in Richmond, according to a Rebel War Corps diary by Jones.
And so, but as near as I can determine, they were engaged one time when federal cavalry overran them after Richmond was evacuated and they surrendered.
And there is an absolute fraud that is put out by some of the people who are sympathetic to the South of the Louisiana Native Guard, where there's a photograph that people push out there, and it shows a number of black men under arms.
And it says underneath in a font called Algerian, Louisiana Native Guards.
Well, there was a group of soldiers under that name that were raised prior to the federal invasion of Louisiana.
They apparently never fired a shot in defense of Louisiana as a Confederate state, and many of them joined the federal troops as United States Colored Troops after New Orleans fell.
But the photograph, which is a fraud, is actually a picture made of a colored infantry regiment photographed in Pennsylvania.
And they clipped off the white officer on the far left-hand side.
If you look closely at the picture, you will see that they're wearing federal equipment.
And so whoever first put that out is a liar.
And that's a very unfortunate It's a good thing to do.
We don't need to have lies on our side.
At any rate, that's my rave on that point.
It pops up from time to time.
Ed Bars, who was the historian emeritus for the National Park Service, said a few dozen, maybe a hundred, I think it was his numbers, blacks served as soldiers in the Confederacy.
And you couldn't have, for example in Virginia, it was unlawful for blacks to have firearms.
That was a rule that was really not enforced very much, but obviously you can't raise black troops when you have it unlawful for them to carry arms.
So the state of Virginia repealed that, I think it was in February or March of 1865, since the pressure was building to recruit black troops into the Confederate Army.
And so, at any rate, the other little thing I'll mention on that is, if you read Pat Cleburne's memorial that he wrote in early, I think, January of 64, it talks in there, we have these people saying that all these blacks were serving the Confederate Army.
Cleburne, who's calling for blacks being enlisted, given their freedom and enlisted in the Confederate Army as a former British soldier, he knew that the British Empire had made good use of non-white soldiers, particularly those who were officered by whites.
And so he was not of the same impression, coming from a totally different background, that a lot of Americans were.
He thought that blacks could be made into good soldiers, were properly disciplined, and officered by whites.
Similar to what the US Army did up until the time of the Korean War.
Cleburne's letter, his missive is, if there were hundreds of blacks or thousands of blacks
serving the Confederacy, why didn't he mention that in his memorial to release blacks in
1864?
Apparently, it was unknown to him.
So.
Yeah, so I guess the position is obviously the SCV doesn't take any position on race
one way or the other.
But also, we shouldn't say that there were these vast numbers of blacks who fought for
the Confederacy, though there were some.
There were some.
Not many, but some.
And there was also other blacks who served in other capacities.
They would be hustlers, cooks, mule skinners, all kinds of stuff like that.
And that's important to an army.
But they were usually black people or slaves who were brought into the service with their master.
So it wasn't exactly like they were there voluntarily.
You know, the Master said, you know, and a lot of these people were young people, like there's a famous photograph of a young white 18-year-old with his servant or slave, as we would call them now.
Or actually, we now know I can call them slaves.
I don't know if you knew this.
They're enslaved persons.
Because calling them a slave dehumanizes them.
At any rate, so this white young southerner is there with his enslaved person, and Chandler, I think was their name.
At any rate, it's a famous photograph, and that's an authentic event.
I mean, he went off with his master into the service.
The story you tell about the slaves shooting the Union officer and perhaps taking out the first Union officer in the war reminds me, of course, of John Brown's raid, where the first person John Brown killed was a free black man who they shot in the back.
That's right.
That's right.
Literally, we're going to start this insurrection to help blacks by randomly murdering a black guy.
Now, that would be a hateful thing to call that an insurrection, because we know that John Brown was not involved in an insurrection.
He was involved in a great civil rights demonstration, a mostly peaceful protest, because there was actually not that much shooting done.
It was only occasionally that there was shooting done during the time that he was under siege.
So it was a mostly peaceful protest at Harper's Ferry.
That's right.
That's right.
Well, the real question is how people Get involved.
One, in the sense of defending what memorials still exist.
Two, more broadly, if they have a link to the Confederacy, how they can join, what they should be doing, what they should expect.
Because again, as you say, it's not a racial or political organization, really.
And third, if you're one of these groups that wants to put up a new memorial, is there a website people can go to?
How should they get in touch?
Well, I'll try to remember all the questions you put to me.
If I leave one off, you can prod me.
The thing is, in Georgia, it's georgiascv.org.
There's also scv.org for the National Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Women might consider joining the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
I think their website is udc.org, but I should have checked that before we came on here, but I'm sure that you can do an internet search and you'll come up with the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
You don't necessarily have to be a blood descendant to become associated with the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
If you think you have a Confederate ancestor but don't know, you can become, I think they call them an affiliate member.
And generally, in Georgia, for example, we have a guy who will help you do some genealogical research to see if he can link you up to a Confederate ancestor.
If you have, let's say that you came from Scotland yesterday, and you know for an absolute fact that you have no Confederate ancestry, you can still become a friend of the SCV and join on that basis.
You would not be a voting member or anything like that.
As far as what to do, I think one of the big things about these monuments and memorials is that the elected public officials are in charge of these because they're almost all in public land.
They don't hear anything from the traditional American or the heritage American or whatever you want to call them, Confederate descendants or what have you.
They only hear from the professional complainers.
So whenever you hear something like this going on, they need to speak out.
They need to start telling their elected public officials, I find this deeply offensive.
And whatever they need to say to them, After all, most politicians are probably sociopaths, and they want to have their snout in the trough, and the idea that the greatest crime to humanity to them would be their deprivation of being an elected public official and getting a salary from the public.
So therefore, their terror at being removed from an elected office is so great that if they put their finger up in the air and they find the wind is blowing the wrong way, They will change their course, so that's the big thing.
We found enormous success in putting this I'll tell you a small thing.
There was a proposal made about a year or so ago in Georgia that they wanted to put up a bell on the top of Stone Mountain for Dr. King because he talked in his plagiarized speech of I Have a Dream, which, as you probably know, was actually plagiarized from a speech made at the Republican National Convention in 1952.
Anyway, so they thought, well, they'll put this bell on top of Stone Mountain.
Well, that's not in the law in Georgia.
Stone Mountain has got two designs.
It's a confederate memorial, and it's a natural resource.
It doesn't have any other goal in the law whatsoever.
But all the Republicans were racing forward so they could get a third of the black vote or whatever.
And they were all saying that this would be a great thing to do.
And we just happened to be down at the General Assembly meeting with some members about some changes we want to make to 50-3-1.
And they came in and told us this.
And one of the leaders, I'm not going to embarrass him by mentioning his name, one of the leaders of the General Assembly came into the room and was introduced to us and told us about it and said, it's a done deal.
It's going through.
It'll be voted on this week.
So we went out on our constant contact list and informed our members this was coming on.
And he had told us before we left, he says, if you think you can get your people stirred up on this, we'll reconsider it.
We got a call within 24 hours saying the governor had called him up and said, stop this.
Do not bring this to a vote.
And so that shows that you can do something if people are properly organized.
Yeah, definitely.
And then the last thing is just about any towns or groups that want to put up one of these new memorials.
Oh yeah, well they can contact, I don't know what other states are doing, what we're doing in Georgia.
I don't know what other states have these sort of things, but they certainly probably would be interested in doing it.
But they'll contact the Georgia Division and say, you know, we'd like to have a monument in Well, I think that about sums it up.
Martin O'Toole, thank you very much for being with us.
What do you have in mind?
How many people can see it?
And if it works well, we'll certainly be willing to talk to you about what your role would
be in that.
All right.
Well, I think that about sums it up.
Martin O'Toole, thank you very much for being with us and to everybody listening.
I'll catch you next week.
All right.
Well, thank you for having me as a spokesman for the Georgia Division, getting these enormous checks from George Soros.
I'm always happy to have some free time to get our name out.
I'll talk about anybody.
I've been interviewed on black podcasts as well as now I'm on a white podcast, so we'll do what we can.
All right.
Thank you, sir.
All right.
Take care.
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