Part of the problem with the crusade to tear down Confederate monuments is that it is selective and inconsistent. There are many other statues of controversial figures in our country, yet they all remain standing. Is it because those other problematic monuments commemorate liberal heroes? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| So a bunch of students tore down a Confederate monument at UNC Chapel Hill this week. | |
| And the media calls these people protesters, but they really are just vandals and criminals. | |
| Whatever you think about the Confederacy, it is felony vandalism to destroy a statue like that. | |
| But this is the precedent that we've set over the past few years. | |
| It's a very dangerous precedent, in my view. | |
| Where if you don't like a statue, well, then go ahead and just tear it down. | |
| The law is going to step to the side and allow felony destruction of property to occur without doing anything about it. | |
| Now, that said, I have no problem with this specific monument coming down per se. | |
| I think we can't lump all Confederate monuments together. | |
| Not all Confederate monuments are equal. | |
| This one was erected in, I believe, 1918 or somewhere around there. | |
| And it was clear from the beginning that it was associated with white supremacy. | |
| So, yeah, take it down. | |
| Now, I still don't think that a school should stand by and let students do it themselves because that's a crime, and you can't have that kind of chaos, and you can't allow students to just go, well, I don't like this, and so they take it down. | |
| And I still don't think we can lump all Confederate monuments together. | |
| I think we have to take it on a case-by-case basis. | |
| And there are several problems with the precedent that we're setting here and that has been said over the last couple of years when it comes to these monuments, not the least of which is how unevenly the precedent is applied. | |
| There are many monuments in America that may be reasonably considered offensive because they commemorate bad people or they commemorate people who represented bad things, or both in some cases. And the argument against Confederate monuments, I guess, is that they fought for a bad thing, which is slavery. Now, of course, everyone agrees in modern America that slavery is a bad thing. Not everyone agrees from a historical perspective | |
| that it's necessarily exactly accurate to say that the Confederates fought primarily for slavery. | |
| I'm not going to really get into that discussion. | |
| It's a different discussion about the real causes of the Civil War and everything. | |
| That is a multifaceted discussion. | |
| I think anyone who's done even a little bit of reading understands that it's at least not quite as simple as that. | |
| Now, there are those who argue that it was straightforwardly a war over slavery. | |
| Others will point out that slavery was only turned into the reason for the war about midway through. | |
| It was a political decision made by Lincoln when he began to see that Europe may come to the aid of the South, and he saw that, and that's when the Emancipation Proclamation came. | |
| And the Emancipation Proclamation was a political document that had no actual effect and did nothing at all except politically because it was It was written specifically to free slaves in the states that Lincoln no longer had any control over while allowing states that he did control to keep their slaves. | |
| So again, it was just a political document. | |
| And this idea that it was a war over slavery, something happened halfway through. | |
| Going into the war, Lincoln made it clear that he did not want to fight a war over slavery. | |
| If he could keep the Union together and keep slavery, he would do that. | |
| He also made it clear that And while he was running for president, that he did not believe in equality for black and white people. | |
| He did not believe that black people were equal to white people. | |
| So he was a racist himself. Now, all of these things are, you know, these are all relevant. | |
| But let's put all that to the side. | |
| What I don't think can be denied is that several of the men who've had their monuments torn down, especially Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, some others, These particular men, let's just talk about Jackson and Lee for a second. | |
| These were men of high moral character and great personal courage who did not themselves believe that they were fighting for slavery. | |
| Both men opposed slavery personally, as did plenty of other Southerners. | |
| Though I think Lee's wife did own slaves, which is true. | |
| General Grant's wife also owned slaves. | |
| You saw that in the North as well, which is another reason, which is another complicating factor when you think about, well, did the people in the North, the Northern soldiers especially, did they think that they were marching down into the South to fight against slavery? | |
| And I think the answer in most cases is no. | |
| And we kind of can see that the answer is no, because some of their generals actually owned slaves. | |
| But The point is that they, you know, guys like Jackson Lee, they felt obliged to fight on the side of their home states. | |
| You can say that they were wrong about that, that they were mistaken, they made the wrong choice, they were blinded by loyalty to families and homes and whatever. | |
| But if you paint them all as slobbering racists, or if you suggest that Jackson and Lee were fighting because they really wanted to keep black people enslaved, well, then it's going to be clear that you've just never read a history book because that's just not accurate. | |
| The interesting thing is that both Lee and Jackson were admired by the North and the South during the time of the Civil War. | |
| The men who marched down into Virginia to kill Confederates still had a greater respect for some of the Confederate officers than we do today, which is kind of interesting. | |
| I mean, these guys had a much greater reason to hate those men than we do, and yet they didn't hate them nearly as much. | |
| And I do think when you're looking at a guy like Robert Ely, you do have to look within the context of the time. | |
| This was a war hero, a man that was respected, as I said, across the country before the Civil War. | |
| The federal government comes to him and wants to put him in charge of the army. | |
| But from Lee's perspective, as a Virginia man, if he does that, even though he opposed secession and he was morally opposed to slavery, But if he were to take this job offer from the federal government, it means that he will be leading troops into his home state, into his home, taking up arms against his friends, neighbors, and even his own sons. | |
| So for him, it's a choice between the federal government or his family and his home and his country. | |
| Now, what we have to understand is that back in those days, especially in the South, When you talked about your country, when a guy said, my country, what he meant most of the time was his state. | |
| In the early days of the United States, people, especially in the South, identified much more with their state than they did with the country. | |
| They saw the country as this collection of states, but they looked at their state as their actual home and their country and what they were most loyal to. | |
| We don't look at it like that now, but it's kind of hard to say they were wrong for seeing it that way. | |
| I would argue that they were actually much more in the spirit of what was intended when the country was founded Where it was never really intended that people would necessarily identify with the federal government or have any great loyalty to it. | |
| People were more loyal to their actual homes because they were tied to their homes. | |
| They were tied to the land. | |
| They didn't have all the technology. | |
| They didn't have radios and internet and everything where they could kind of connect with everyone across the country. | |
| They just had their home and their land and their farms and their families. | |
| That's all they had, and that's what they were loyal to. | |
| And that's what guys like... | |
| So, someone like Robert E. Lee, he had to make that choice between, in his mind, it was between his home and the federal government. | |
| He chose his home. And then he proceeded to fight with great brilliance and dignity, always outnumbered, always outmanned, always outgunned, and yet winning battle after battle with courage and tenacity, and that's why he has monuments. | |
| The fact that the Confederacy was a slave-holding country is a very serious moral problem, and yes, he is stained by it inevitably, but Thomas Jefferson actually owned slaves personally, hundreds of them. | |
| Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of humans. | |
| He owned people, and yet most of us can still admire the great things that he did and honor him for those reasons, for the great things that he did, even aside from the very dark evil that he was personally and directly involved in. | |
| So what I'm saying is, my opinion on Confederate statues is that some of them are worth keeping up, some of them are not. | |
| And it really just depends on the situation. | |
| But I do think we need to try to develop a little bit of a more nuanced and mature and historically accurate perspective on that period in our history, which I think many of us simply don't have. | |
| Be that as it may, the argument is that all of these monuments must come down because the monuments represent slavery. | |
| Whether or not the individuals who actually fought for the South meant to or wanted to personally fight for slavery, and many of them had no such intention. | |
| But that's the argument. | |
| So we've established the precedent That people who are on the wrong historical side of a grave moral issue, even indirectly on its side, cannot have monuments. | |
| That appears to be, that's what we're saying when it comes to the Confederate thing. | |
| But then we have to ask, what about people who were personally morally depraved, rotten, and evil, yet were on the right side of some issue? | |
| I think we can agree, or should agree, that they don't deserve monuments either. | |
| We would all be kind of upset if animal rights activists erected a monument to Adolf Hitler on the basis that Adolf Hitler was himself a proponent of animal rights, which he was, or environmentalism or whatever. | |
| So it seems that the precedent is that only decent people who fought for decent things can have statues. | |
| Here's my problem, though. | |
| It has been open season on the indecent and offensive monuments only so long as those are monuments to 19th century white guys from the American South. | |
| That, to me, seems way too selective. | |
| If we're going to do this thing, if we're really going to start purging the offensive monuments on the basis that I've just mentioned here, then I think we have to do it all. | |
| It doesn't make sense to focus especially and only on these Confederate monuments. | |
| It makes no sense. If we do it so selectively, then the selective nature of this purging will lead people, myself included, to suspect that there is a specifically left-wing ideological motivation behind this outcry against statues, and it actually has very little to do with slavery or racism or anything. | |
| If it's not ideological, if our modern sensibilities simply will not tolerate statues that commemorate problematic figures of any sort, then I think it doesn't make any sense that the outrage has not extended beyond Confederate soldiers. | |
| Many people in the South feel that this is an attack on their heritage and their history. | |
| If it's not that, if it's not an attack on their heritage and their history, if it's really just a movement against evils like racism and slavery, then all of the statues associated with evil should come down If these are the only ones that come down, then I think people from the South that are upset about this because they feel like their heritage and history is being attacked, I think they're vindicated. | |
| They have every right to be upset, and their suspicions have been vindicated and confirmed. | |
| If theirs are the only statues that come down, if we're looking to be consistent, then we have to go for all the offensive statues, or we go for none of them and just let them all stay up. | |
| I think that's kind of the way, you know, That's the way we have to look at it. | |
| This is not whataboutism, okay? | |
| This is just simply a matter of consistently applying a principle. | |
| And I think a lot of the time, people are... | |
| I know I get accused of whataboutism. | |
| Anytime something is going on and you come along and you say, well, yeah, but whatabout... | |
| There's not always a problem. | |
| Sometimes it makes sense to say, what about? | |
| Because the argument you're making is, okay, let's extend this principle. | |
| Let's consistently apply the principle. | |
| And when a principle is only being applied over here, but not over here, I think it is perfectly reasonable to come and say, what about over here? | |
| Let's take that principle and extend it. | |
| And if you don't want to extend that principle across the board, well, then there's something wrong with the principle, and we need to reevaluate. | |
| That's the point of the what about argument, is what we're trying to do is we're trying to establish that if you don't want to consistently apply the principle, there's something wrong with the principle, we need to throw it out, or we need to consistently apply it. | |
| So let's go over... | |
| A few other offensive monuments and statues that, if we are consistently applying the principle, should also come down. | |
| Number one, there is the monument to child sex predator Harvey Milk. | |
| In San Francisco. | |
| Now, there are a few monuments to Harvey Milk in San Francisco, and I think across the country, there are even streets named after him and schools, and there's a naval ship named after him for some damn reason. | |
| I don't know why. He's got his own naval ship. | |
| And he has his own postage stamps. | |
| Okay, this guy's all over the place. | |
| I don't advocate for tearing down the schools just because they have his name, and I don't advocate for demolishing the naval ship. | |
| I think those can just be renamed. | |
| The postage stamps can be burned, but the monuments must come down. | |
| Harvey Milk is, despite what you may have heard in Hollywood, this is not a civil rights hero. | |
| This is not a hero of any kind. | |
| All he did, this is what he accomplished with his life, is he was attracted to other men and he was elected to public office. | |
| That was his whole achievement, is his own political advancement. | |
| That's what he did, okay? | |
| That was his one achievement. | |
| But I don't see how that minor political achievement outweighs the fact that Harvey Milk was a pederast who preyed upon drug-addicted boys. | |
| There's a quote from one of his friends that is instructive because even his friends, even the people that knew him don't deny this fact. | |
| One of his friends said that he had a penchant for young waifs with drug abuse problems. | |
| Let's be more specific about this. | |
| The young waifs were minors, runaways, and drug addicts who came to Milk looking for a mentor or a father figure, and instead they were groomed to be Milk's sex toys, essentially. | |
| At least two of his victims later went on to commit suicide. | |
| Okay? He was murdered by a fellow Democrat. | |
| That doesn't make him a martyr just because I'm sorry that he was killed. | |
| That doesn't change anything about it. | |
| Just because a guy's killed doesn't make him a martyr, doesn't make him a hero, doesn't make him a saint. | |
| You're not automatically canonized just because you were killed. | |
| Doesn't change the fact that he was a pederast who preyed upon 15-year-old boys who were runaways and drug addicts and were confused and lonely. | |
| That's what he liked to do. That's how he fulfilled his sexual urges. | |
| Doesn't change that. The fact that he was killed doesn't change that. | |
| He was still a deeply evil man. | |
| And he does not deserve to be remembered or commemorated or honored at all. | |
| Not at all. And in fact, I don't know what the law was back then, but according to the laws in California now, if he were alive today, he'd be going to jail for what he did with these boys. | |
| Number two, there is a bust of Bill Clinton in Little Rock, Arkansas. | |
| I think also needs to come down. | |
| Bill Clinton has been credibly accused of rape, assault, harassment multiple times. | |
| Juanita Broderick's story about Clinton is horrifying. | |
| I think most of us know it by now, but it bears repeating. | |
| According to her, she was lured to his hotel room where he proceeded to forcibly pin her down on the bed while she pleaded with him to stop. | |
| And he raped her, allegedly. | |
| This was forcible, violent rape. | |
| This was not even a, you know... | |
| A thing where some of the stuff you see in Hollywood where basically Clinton promised to advance her political career if she slept with him, and so she did it, and then she regretted it. | |
| It wasn't that kind of thing. | |
| This was, pinned her down on the bed, she's pleading with him to stop, she's saying no, no, and he rapes her. | |
| The kind of thing that would put most people in prison for a long time. | |
| But instead, Bill Clinton went to the White House. | |
| And there are many other stories of abuse, all of them from people who are far more credible than Clinton himself. | |
| And almost all these stories follow the same pattern. | |
| They sound very similar. | |
| They're very consistent. | |
| And the people that have been telling these stories about Clinton have been telling the same story for years. | |
| They haven't changed it. So that's what makes them credible. | |
| And yet this guy has a statue in Arkansas. | |
| I think it needs to come down. Number three, there's a statue of a mass murderer, Vladimir Lenin, in Seattle. | |
| Now, this statue, I believe, is privately owned. | |
| It's on private property. I would not support destroying private property, but the statue toppling mobs don't seem to mind destroying things that don't belong to them, so I'm trying to figure out why they haven't gone after this one yet. | |
| I'm not saying that they should. | |
| As I said, all these things should be done legally, should be taken down legally, but it's just interesting that they haven't set their sights on this yet. | |
| Lenin was a Marxist revolutionary who founded the tyrannical Soviet state, which would then proceed to murder, imprison, starve, enslave tens of millions of people over the course of the 20th century, hundreds of millions of people. | |
| For a while on the left, there was an effort, and I think there still is an effort, to separate Lenin from Stalin, and to say, well, Stalin was the butcher, And even though there are still some people who... | |
| In fact, we talked about a couple weeks ago, there was a poll done among millennials and a certain... | |
| Not that small percentage of millennials actually admire Stalin. | |
| They think he was an admirable guy. | |
| But I think among a lot of liberals, there has been historically an attempt to separate Lenin from Stalin and say, well, Stalin was the butcher and Lenin was just a fighter for Marxist ideals. | |
| They were both butchers. | |
| Although Lenin was a fighter for Marxist ideals, and that should tell you something about Marxist ideals, that he was a butcher and yet was also consistently a fighter for those ideals, because they are terrible and morally depraved ideals. | |
| But that was Lenin. | |
| So that needs to come down. | |
| Number three, or what are we on? | |
| Number four, I think. | |
| There's a bust of eugenist Margaret Sanger in the National Portrait Institute. | |
| Now, Margaret Sanger, of course, is the... | |
| And this bust is part of their civil rights exhibit, to make it even worse. | |
| Part of their civil rights exhibit. | |
| And the National Portrait Institute is run by the Smithsonian. | |
| Smithsonian. Smithsonian. | |
| I can't speak. Anyway, so it's part of their civil rights exhibit. | |
| Margaret Sanger, obviously the founder of Planned Parenthood, she once proudly spoke to the KKK And it is true. | |
| Maybe you've seen that picture online of Margaret Sanger standing up in front of a bunch of hooded KKK members and giving a speech. | |
| That photo is fake. | |
| It's Photoshop, not a real photo. | |
| But she did actually speak to the KKK. She spoke to a group of female KKK members. | |
| She was a proponent of the eugenics movement. | |
| And the eugenics movement, which was popular in the early 20th century, The eugenics movement was and is all about ridding society of the undesirable classes through forced sterilization and abortion and other methods. | |
| Now, Sanger's apologists will say that she was not a racist And that she wasn't looking to specifically annihilate the black race. | |
| Instead, she was looking to just get rid of poor people, and especially people with mental disabilities, regardless of the race. | |
| And that's true. | |
| That doesn't make her any better. | |
| That's a heck of a defense, isn't it? | |
| But I think it's interesting. | |
| I've actually seen, there's a certain quote from Margaret Sanger that her defenders will cite in order to defend her against racism charges. | |
| And I want to read this quote to you. | |
| This is her talking to a group of black pastors. | |
| And this is what she said. | |
| She said, To the Negro is through a religious appeal. | |
| We don't want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out the idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members. | |
| Now, I'm not sure that her statement about educating, quote, rebellious Negroes does much to debunk the racism charges. | |
| I don't think it does. | |
| But I do know that she explicitly desired to eradicate the undesirables, and then the organization that she founded, which was later known as Planned Parenthood, though at the time when she founded it, I think it was called the Birth Control League or something like that, that organization would then go on to actually eradicate over 7 million undesirables, according to her. | |
| I don't think that's a coincidence, you see? | |
| I think She had this idea, and then the organization she founded went on to carry out that idea, preying especially on minority neighborhoods and killing a disproportionate number of black babies. | |
| That's not a coincidence. Now, ironically, this bust of Margaret Sanger has been defended, the person who runs the National Portrait Institute, defended it on the grounds that her racist views mirrored her time. So they were part of the historical context. And also, the National Portrait Institute said that, well, the effort to remove the bust is really part of an ideologically | |
| motivated campaign. And the backlash against the various monuments to Harvey Milk has also been blocked on the basis that, well, you're only trying to tear those down, and you only want to get rid of those because you're anti-gay. | |
| But these are exactly the arguments that defenders of Confederate statues make. | |
| It's the exact same argument. What they'll say is that the troubling aspects of the Confederacy must be seen within their historical context And they'll also say that the effort to wipe these statues out is more political than it is ethical. | |
| Now, it would seem to me that in the interests of integrity and consistency, we must decide if we're going to apply that consistently or not. | |
| Are we going to tear down all of the problematic statues or none of them? | |
| Sort of problematic statue. | |
| And to ignore the monuments that enshrine other kinds of historical evil or other historically evil characters, to do that is to basically admit that the attack on Confederate statues is really nothing more than a political stunt. | |
| So we just have to make up our mind. | |
| That's the point. Thanks for watching, everybody. |