Ep. 248 - Another Horrific Attack On Parental Rights
Today on the show we’ll discuss a story of an innocent family being ripped apart by child protective services. Apparently, you have no rights and no presumption of innocence when the bureaucrats at CPS set their sights on you. Also, President Trump got himself into hot water when he called Robert E. Lee a great general. Well, Robert E. Lee was a great general, and it’s ridiculous that we aren’t allowed to say that anymore. Date: 04-29-2019
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, we will discuss a story of an innocent family being ripped apart by Child Protective Services.
Apparently, you have no rights and no presumption of innocence when the bureaucrats at CPS come knocking.
So we're going to talk about that.
Also, President Trump got himself into hot water when he called Robert E. Lee a great general.
Well, Robert E. Lee was a great general and it's ridiculous that we aren't allowed to
say that anymore, so we'll talk about that and other topics today on the Matt Wall Show.
Well I hope you all had a great weekend.
We had a pretty good weekend.
Well, I'll tell you one thing that we did over the weekend.
My kids had two more Easter egg hunts to attend.
Actually, the second one was rained out, so they postponed it for next weekend.
So we're going to stretch this into a third week.
They had two or three Easter egg hunts leading up to Easter, and it's this whole... This is what I was complaining to my wife about.
It's that it seems like our kids somehow celebrate every holiday Numerous times.
Like, for Halloween, they go trick-or-treating probably 12 or 13 different times.
12 or 13 different trick-or-treating events.
Christmas, they have about 5 or 6 different Christmas get-togethers where they get presents.
Somehow they celebrate their birthdays multiple times between all the different family members and friends and everything.
Is it just my kids who do this, or is this the thing now that all kids do, where every holiday becomes a two- or three-month-long ordeal?
When I was a kid, we had one celebration for each holiday if we were lucky, and we definitely only went Easter egg hunting once.
And we didn't get candy in the Easter eggs either.
There were little slips of paper with chores we had to do.
That's what was in our Easter eggs.
And we did our Easter egg hunt in the snow.
In January.
In our bare feet.
And we liked it!
Dammit!
Kids these days.
I'll tell you what.
Very spoiled.
Alright, there's a lot to talk about today.
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All right, another horrific shooting over the weekend.
Not just another shooting, but another synagogue shooting specifically.
There were multiple injuries, one fatality.
That victim, Lori Kay, the victim who died, sadly, is a hero who jumped in front of the bullet to save her rabbi, apparently.
Truly a courageous woman.
As I, you know, we were talking about something last week, I don't remember what it was, but I made the point that Words like hero and courageous are way overused these days, and tragically so, because they blunt the impact of those words when it comes time to actually use them appropriately, like in this case.
And she wasn't the only hero, by the way.
Another man chased the gunman out of the synagogue after his gun jammed.
And then another man came in, an off-duty border patrol agent came in and fired on the vehicle to try to, you know, take out its tires before he drove away and got away.
So, I mean, this is, this is apparently a synagogue that was attended by some incredibly courageous people.
And it's because of their courage that the deranged coward who carried out this attack did not succeed in inflicting the kind of damage that he wanted.
Obviously, one lost life is a terrible tragedy, but I think the heroes in this case prevented the tragedy from multiplying.
And those are the people that I would prefer to talk about.
You know, as for the anti-Semitic scumbag coward who did this, Well, what can you really say about him other than what I just said?
Anti-Semitic scumbag coward.
He doesn't deserve to have anything else said about him, really.
And antisemitism is a scourge that infects both the right and the left.
It is a plague and it needs to be eradicated.
And the plague, as we have seen, goes beyond antisemitism.
I mean, just in the last couple of months, we've seen attacks on synagogues, we've seen attacks on mosques, we've seen attacks on churches, many people dead, and for what?
You know, these were all people who were simply going to worship, going to practice their religion, In peace, but it seems that increasingly there are those who don't want you to practice your religion in peace, no matter what your religion is.
And the people in that camp are numerous, and their numbers are growing.
And so, pray for our world, folks.
We are heading into dark places.
We are already in dark places, I'm afraid.
All right, the website, I wrote about this on Friday and I wanted to mention it here because it is a horrifying and harrowing story that I think Needs to be discussed.
The website Reason, Reason.com, had a report about the months-long saga of corruption and abuse that a family suffered at the hands of law enforcement and child protective services in New Mexico.
And if you go over to Reason.com, you can read the whole article.
I would really recommend it.
I will briefly summarize it, but it's worth Reading the whole thing and getting all the details, which I don't have time to provide all of them right now.
So, the Lowther family, the Lowther family of New Mexico, they found themselves in the crosshairs of Child Protective Services after a teacher at the four-year-old daughter's school claimed that the girl reported that she'd been sexually abused by her father and also her seven-year-old brother.
Now, Fast forwarding to the end of the story here for a minute, the district attorney would eventually decline to move forward with the case because there was no evidence whatsoever, and the child's story kept changing wildly and included a number of obviously fantastical details, and the father passed multiple
And it's likely that the girl was really just describing her father helping her on the toilet, helping her wipe or something on the toilet, which is something that every parent has done for their three- and four-year-old kids many times.
So that's what would happen at the end.
But in between the initial report from the girl, if we can call it that, if we can call it a report, you know, and not just a story, But in between that and the DA's decision to drop the whole matter, the Lowther family was ripped apart.
The children were put in foster care.
The father was fired from his job.
He was labeled a child rapist by the media.
His picture and name were plastered on the front pages of the local newspapers.
The young girl was subjected to lengthy and incredibly invasive exams.
The son, the seven-year-old son, was also interrogated.
The family was forced to shell out $300,000 in legal expenses, and the accused father and his wife were summarily stripped of all parental rights, not to mention their Fourth Amendment rights and their Sixth Amendment and Eighth Amendment.
Basically, all of their rights went out the window for many months.
Based on something that the DA would eventually say is completely baseless.
Now, the most frightening aspect of the story is the malicious and underhanded, yet unfortunately familiar manner with which the Child Protective Services and law enforcement approach this case.
They basically decided from the outset that Adam Lowther, the father, must be guilty.
Because who's ever heard of a four-year-old child making up a story, right?
I mean, like, I guess that never happens.
And so they treated him like a child-raping felon from the very beginning.
These agencies were clearly interested in establishing guilt by whatever means necessary, not ascertaining the objective truth, but just finding guilt.
That's what they wanted to do.
And they had the advantage of a system that automatically turns entire families into wards of the state as soon as someone in government decides that someone in that family may have done something bad.
So after initially being contacted by the school, the police forced their way into the family's home.
Without a warrant, they forbade the mother, Jessica, from even speaking to her children to explain what was going on.
Eventually, the kids would end up in foster care.
They were briefly returned to Jessica's custody.
Now, the father was not allowed to see his kids at all for several months.
He was sent off somewhere across town.
But the mother also had custody removed.
Briefly, she had custody restored, but she had to have her parents move in with her to be safety monitors to make sure that she wasn't abusing her children.
But then the children were removed from her mother's custody again once Child Protective Services got wind of the fact that the safety monitors, which would be the mother's parents, were apparently sympathetic to Adam and didn't believe that he was guilty.
And so for some reason that meant that they were no longer fit safety monitors.
You know, as I said, go read the whole report.
As I was reading it, and often when I read these stories about, these horror stories about Child Protective Services, I think about the book, The Gulag Archipelago, which I've mentioned before, Solzhenitsyn's magnum opus about the Soviet labor camp system.
And as I was reading this report, I kept thinking about the Gulag Archipelago because there are some real uncomfortable resemblances there.
Where, you know, innocent, and their story is not unique, this happens a lot, where you've got innocent people, innocent mothers and fathers, who discover that they basically have no rights and no presumption of innocence once the folks that, you know, in this government agency decide to come knocking.
It was the same thing in the Soviet Union, where if the government decided that you were guilty of something, you had no rights, and they were going to prove that you were guilty.
One way or another, they were going to find evidence.
They weren't looking for any indication of innocence.
They'd already decided you were guilty.
And now it's just a matter of building a case, and anything that doesn't This is the kind of nightmare scenario that every parent dreads, and it could happen to any one of us.
If you're a parent, it could happen to you.
I mean, with the way the system is set up, if your child goes to school with a story that she made up in her head, or repeat something that she heard from her friend, or for whatever other reason, said something that accidentally implicates you as an abuser or worse, then you could lose your kids.
Just based on that.
There doesn't have to be any other evidence.
In the case of this family and these parents, there was no other evidence.
None.
They found nothing.
But their kids still ended up in foster care.
I mean, think about that.
I think about with my own kids.
My five-year-old daughter, she likes to, as five-year-old kids will often do, she likes to make up stories, especially about her brother to try to get him in trouble.
So she will erroneously claim that her brother, her twin brother, punched her in the head.
And they do smack each other and stuff, like as siblings do.
Especially twins.
But I've never seen my son punch anyone.
Like closed fists, just wallops.
I've never seen him do that.
Least of all to his sister.
And, but she'll, you know, she just says that sometimes.
And so I have to try to work with her and that you don't, if it's not true, you don't say it.
But what if my daughter went into, you know, went out in public one day and decided to tell a slightly different version of that story.
And instead of saying, my brother punched me in the head, she said, daddy punched me in the head.
That would be enough, it seems, to land my kids in foster care.
Just that sentence, if my daughter just got it into her head to say that, that could be it, right?
That's all, that's it.
And every parent is in this boat.
The only thing keeping our parental rights intact is that our kids haven't made up the wrong kind of story and told it to the wrong sort of person.
Which is another way of saying we don't have parental rights.
If you can lose them in an instant with no evidence, then what does it even mean to say that we have parental rights in the first place?
If they can be revoked by bureaucrats at the Child Protective Services, people who are unelected, who are apparently constrained by nothing, if they can come in and just take your kids, Then what does it even mean to say that you have parental rights?
Now, I believe, of course, that actual allegations of abuse have to be investigated.
And certainly we can't ignore a child who claims that they've been abused.
And some parents really are guilty of these kinds of horrible crimes.
And those parents need to be locked in prison.
But due process can't go out the window.
Unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats from social services cannot be empowered to act as prosecutor, judge, and jury.
The rights of the parents have to be preserved and respected at all times until it has been proven that they can no longer be trusted with those rights.
And then the rights will be revoked.
But that's not how these cases play out.
Here's the thing.
If agents of the government are looking into accusations against you, any kind of accusation, and they're assuming your guilt from the beginning, and therefore looking only for proof, that you did whatever they already assumed you did, rather than looking for facts on both sides, then you're screwed.
That's tyranny.
There's going to be tyranny in a situation like that.
Tyranny always happens when the people investigating an accusation assume the guilt of the accused beforehand.
And that's why presumption of innocence is the absolute bedrock of our justice system, is the presumption of innocence.
Our philosophy in this country has always been, in principle, at least in theory, has always been that it's better to let a guilty person go free because they were afforded the presumption of innocence than to punish an innocent person.
To punish an innocent person is the greatest miscarriage of justice.
It is the greatest travesty imaginable.
And so that has to be avoided at all costs.
But child protective services, they don't operate that way.
With them, the assumption at the beginning is guilt.
And then you have to dig yourself out of that hole.
You have to prove your own innocence beyond a shadow of a doubt.
And if you can't do that, then you're through.
You're finished.
And the thing is, the problem is, if you have a child who's telling stories, who's making things up, And if you interview them with the intent of actually figuring out what really happened, then oftentimes you'll be able to tell that something is amiss here and clearly it didn't happen how they say it happened.
I can do that with my own kids, right?
If they're tattletaling on each other, most of the time I'm not going to get in between it and play.
And, you know, play the lawyer trying to sort it out, especially when it's just frivolous stuff.
But if one of my kids tells on another, on their sibling, and makes a more serious accusation that they did something really unsafe or dangerous, harmful or whatever, then most of the time, if I sit them both down and talk to them, I can tell within like 30 seconds if this thing actually happened or something like it actually happened.
Because they're little kids, you know, they're not masterminds.
And usually you can tell.
But if you interview them just to get more information to prove guilt, because you've already assumed the guilt, then you're going to ask leading questions and you're basically going to coax the child into making up more stuff.
And I think that happens in a lot of these situations.
And with kids, as I've said before in other contexts, little kids who are four or five years old, they don't really have any concept of truth versus fiction, of honesty versus deception.
They don't understand the distinction.
They really don't understand the difference between fake and real.
Just conceptually they can't get their head around it, which is why a four-year-old can never be accused of lying Now they four-year-olds will say things that aren't true all the time But they're not lying now because a lie a lie is an intentional deception, but four-year-olds aren't trying to do that They just they don't they get something into their head and to them.
It's real because they're thinking it That's just how four-year-olds think that's the psychology of it.
I noticed this with my kids recently when I They were telling me about a movie that they had watched, and I asked them, I said, oh, I was trying to figure out what movie they're talking about, and I said, was it a cartoon or were they real people?
And my kids, they didn't understand what I meant.
To distinguish between cartoons and real, they don't really do that.
To them, it's all real, right?
Because they're watching it, it must be real.
That's how kids think.
And that's why it's so, a situation like this is so dangerous.
I mean, this family, although they, thank God, were, you know, ultimately vindicated, if the DA in that case had not exercised any prudence, then, you know, Adam Lowther could be in prison right now, based on whatever the kid, whatever the daughter said.
And it sounds like she may have just said something relatively innocuous, which then was was the teacher latched
on to. And then they started interviewing her and they coaxed
her into saying things that didn't happen. They just they led her into creating this whole fanciful, fake scenario.
You know, when I wrote about this, on Friday, I was reading
some of the comments under the under the I do read my comments
sometimes.
And there were a lot of interesting comments.
People, people that had, you know, experience with child protective services and were talking about their own experiences, which were horrifying.
But then I also saw a few people that said, well, who I assume are not parents.
And I said, ah, no, kids would never make something like that up.
I mean, if you're worried about a kid making something up, that clearly means that you're a, you're an abuser.
Well, these are obviously not parents.
I mean, if you actually have young kids and have dealt with young kids, you understand how they operate.
And that kids will, you know, they just get something into their head.
And it could be because they heard something from a friend or they saw it on TV or whatever.
They get it into their head and they say something and then it just snowballs from there.
But we're only discussing situations right now where a child innocently tells a story Or misinterpret something, or tries to talk about something that really happened, but phrases it in a way that makes it sound like something it isn't.
But there are also situations where a vindictive person, another adult, can make an accusation that is knowingly false.
I got an email from someone talking about their own experience.
They didn't want me to read the email verbatim on the air, but basically their situation, and I've heard situations like this many times, where a neighbor who didn't like them called Child Protective Services and said that they witnessed the person next door abusing their child.
And it was totally made up.
It was a complete lie.
And that's going to be even harder to get yourself out of because in that case you have
an adult who is knowingly lying and manipulating the system against you, which is really easy
to do.
Thank you.
It's just terrible.
All right, one other thing I wanted to, oh yeah, I wanted to also talk about this, because this is interesting to me.
President Trump touched off a controversy.
Shocking to hear, I know, that President Trump started a controversy.
But he did when he described on Friday Robert E. Lee as a great general.
Which I feel like we've done this controversy already, didn't we?
I feel like we did this like a year ago, but we're doing it again.
He said this while defending his previous comments about the protests in Charlottesville a couple of years ago, sort of as an aside while he was addressing that issue.
He called Robert E. Lee a great general.
And this sent the left into hysterics, as per usual, with them accusing Trump of being a racist and a neoconfederate and so on—slavery apologist and so on and so forth.
Now, I caught a little piece of the ricochet from this controversy myself because—well, first of all, you have to understand that I was—when this was going on on Friday, I was flying back from a speech in Texas.
And when I fly, I get bored.
And so that's when I just start tweeting to pass the time.
And it just so happened that this whole hullabaloo was happening while I was flying.
And I'm interested in Civil War history, and I'm actually reading Shelby Foote's three-volume work on the Civil War right now, which is great, by the way.
So I decided to jump into the fray to pass the time, and I said that I agree with President Trump that Robert E. Lee was a great general, and then I provided my own personal ranking of the best Civil War generals, which my list would go Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Grant, Sherman, and then Forrest.
Probably you could put Longstreet at number five, you know, Sheridan you could make an argument for.
Anyway, the point is, I also started getting backlash from the Blue Checkmark Brigade on Twitter, because I ranked three Confederate generals among the top five Civil War generals.
And this is offensive now, apparently.
So let's get into this a bit.
First of all, It is absolutely undeniable that Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and Longstreet and Forrest and a number of other Confederates were great generals.
I mean, that is, that is, that is, anyone who has studied the subject will arrive at that conclusion.
That is an uncontroversial, or at least it should be an uncontroversial thing to say.
It's not a statement about their ethics or their morals or anything else.
We'll get to that part of it in a minute.
But calling someone a great general means that you're making a statement about their abilities as a general.
That's all.
It doesn't mean you agree with the cause they were fighting for.
It doesn't mean you think they were swell guys.
It's not an endorsement of their ethics or their morality or anything like that.
Rommel was a great general in World War II.
And he was also a Nazi.
The fact that he was a Nazi obviously bears heavily on any assessment of his moral quality, but it doesn't really bear at all on an assessment of his military prowess.
Which is, when you're talking about great generals, that's what you're assessing.
In fact, there were people that were Trying to challenge me and we're saying, oh, so you include Confederates in a ranking of best, well, if you were ranking best World War II generals, would you include Nazis in that list?
And the answer is yes, of course I would.
There were some great generals who were Nazis.
They weren't great morally or ethically.
They weren't great in any sense, except for the fact that just in terms of their military abilities and their strategic brilliance, yes.
That, again, anyone who has studied World War II will say the same thing.
It is not a controversial thing to say.
Except among idiots.
O.J.
Simpson was a great football player.
Truly great.
No question about it.
He was also a murdering sociopath.
Is, I should say.
But if we were ranking, you know, the best football players of the last 40 years, OJ Simpson is going to make the list.
It's not a statement of agreement with anything that he did in his life.
It's just an assessment of his abilities as a football player.
You know, I happen to think that Michael Jackson is a child molesting freak.
But if we were talking about greatest pop stars of all time, it would be ridiculous to leave Michael Jackson.
Michael Jackson would be number one on that list as a pop star.
If we were talking about the most morally upstanding people in history, Michael Jackson would definitely not be anywhere on the list.
But that has nothing to do with his abilities as a pop star.
Yeah, the South lost the war.
Okay, everybody knows that.
Robert E. Lee eventually surrendered.
And this is often used as proof that, well, they couldn't be great generals if they lost.
Which, of course, is stupid.
I mean, again, going back to the football analogy, it's like saying that you couldn't possibly be a great quarterback if you ever lost a game, you know, or if you lost the Super Bowl.
I mean, you know, there are other factors.
Even if you have the greatest quarterback in the world on your team, if you don't have a defense, if you don't have an offensive line, if you don't have receivers, you're not going to win very many games.
There are other factors that go into winning besides just the quarterback.
And it's the same thing with a war.
You know, there are other factors that go into it aside from your generals.
The South, they were, in these generals, they were fighting an opponent who had them outmanned, outgunned, outnumbered, who could outlast them in a war of attrition.
These southern generals were commanding basically shoeless farm boys who were wielding hunting rifles And that's one of the reasons why we have no choice but to recognize their skills in generalship, because they were able to drag this thing on for four years and win many stunning battles against very long odds.
Think about what just Stonewall Jackson for a minute.
Think about what he did in the Valley campaign alone.
He marched his men 600 miles through the Shenandoah Valley over a month and a half, won five battles against a combined force that had him outnumbered 2 to 1.
Okay?
Does that make him a great general?
Yeah, it does.
The fact that he died after being shot by one of his own men at Chancellorsville, that doesn't mean that he's not a great general.
The fact that the South eventually lost, again, that doesn't mean that he's not a great general.
What struck me about the reaction to what I said and to Trump's comments is that apparently we've reached a point where we aren't even allowed to acknowledge that flawed men were good at anything.
Like, we can't acknowledge them in any context.
If they were flawed, we have to pretend that they were bad at everything.
And that is—you can't do history that way.
You can't study history that way.
You can't learn from history that way.
You just—you can't.
We have to somehow pretend that there's nothing impressive at all about the Confederate victories at Bull Run and Second Manassas and Chancellorsville.
I mean, we have to pretend that Robert E. Lee was just some hack, right?
Some hack who almost brought the North to its knees with his army of 17-year-old field hands.
Well, if that's the case, then this goes beyond the Civil War.
We cannot then acknowledge the greatness of pretty much any Great general that's ever existed, seeing as how none of them would pass muster by the standards of these preening blowhards on the left.
Even Grant.
General Grant was an anti-Semite who tried to evict all the Jews from his military district.
He also married into a slave-holding family.
So, I guess he can't be great.
And forget about Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Patton, I mean, any of these guys.
I don't think any of them would hold up to modern standards for various different reasons.
And so, apparently, none of them can be great now.
It's absurd.
But you know, I'm actually understating, I think I'm underselling the point a little bit because yes, any literate person, any person with a middle school education or better knows that Robert E. Lee was a great general.
That is only a controversial statement among morons.
But I would go further than that.
I would say that Robert E. Lee was a great man as well as a great general.
And I know that if people freak out when you call him a great general, only imagine what they would say when you call him a great man.
Well, I'm going to call him a great man.
I think he was a great man.
And I really don't care how politically incorrect that might be.
Was he flawed morally?
Yes.
But he was a flawed great man.
And he was far greater than the whiny do-nothing critics who trash his name today but have accomplished absolutely nothing in their own lives.
General Lee was opposed to slavery.
He called it a moral evil.
He never purchased a single slave, and the slaves that he inherited from his father-in-law, he eventually freed, which is more than they can be said for numerous Union generals who actually owned slaves themselves and purchased them themselves.
General Lee was opposed to secession.
He was offered the job of commanding the Northern Army, but he declined it because as a Virginian, he could not bring himself to march an army against his home and his sons.
Now, that is, it's not like that's a simple choice.
People act like it's, well, clearly he should have fought for the North.
Well, would you take up arms against your own family?
Would you take up arms against your own sons?
Against your home?
Maybe you would, but is that really a simple choice?
Is that really an easy, like, oh yeah, sure, definitely.
Can we not appreciate the moral complexity of the situation that Robert E. Lee faced, that a lot of these men faced?
Can we not appreciate how difficult that would be?
Robert E. Lee was widely respected on both sides.
You can read the accounts of his surrender at Appomattox to see just how highly regarded he was by the men who actually did the fighting.
He was one of the greatest generals this country ever produced.
He was a man of honor and dignity.
And, you know, General Grant recognized that.
His soldiers recognized that.
Lincoln recognized that.
Yet we today, in modern times, we cast him aside as a racist and a traitor.
You know, it took 150 years for us to decide that, oh, you know what, actually he was a total scumbag.
We can talk about the political causes of the Civil War, but it cannot be disputed that the men who actually fought did the fighting, they did so in their minds to protect
their countries.
You know, Southerners considered their states to be their countries. Now, we may not understand
that attitude nowadays, but that's the way they saw it back then. It's true that,
and you can, you should be able to understand that because, you know, these days we identify
ourselves as a country, we identify ourselves with the federal government,
and I'm not sure that that's really a healthy thing to do anyway.
But back in those days, before the information age, before there were phones and internet and highways connecting everybody, especially in the South, an agrarian society, You lived off the land.
You were tied to the land.
You lived in your own town.
You didn't travel far from it, most of the time.
And that was your life.
That was your country.
And that's how they saw it.
Now, it's true that one of the primary political causes of secession, and thus the Civil War, was slavery.
That is undeniable.
But it's not true that the war was a war over slavery.
You know, I think the phrase it that way would be an oversimplification, even though it is true that the South seceded politically in large part because of slavery, although not only because of slavery.
But if you look at why the northern soldiers were fighting, you look at the things that Lincoln said.
They were fighting to preserve the Union.
Not to end slavery.
And they were very clear about that.
Lincoln said himself that if he could preserve the Union and keep slavery, he would.
If he could preserve the Union by getting rid of slavery, he would do that too.
There's a reason why it took, you know, two years for the Emancipation Proclamation to be issued.
Because in the early going, this was not a war to free the slaves, this was not a war over slavery, and Lincoln didn't want the soldiers on the ground to think that that's what they were doing.
Because he knew that he wasn't going to be able to recruit hundreds of thousands of soldiers if they thought they were going off to die to free the slaves.
Now, that's a worthy cause.
It is a good reason to go off and put yourself in harm's way.
But the fact is, many Northerners were just as racist as the people in the South, and they weren't going to fight for that reason.
So for the people on the ground, this was about preserving the Union.
For the people in the South, you know, the political leaders of the South, they wanted to secede in large part because of slavery, but for the men that were doing the fighting...
They were not slave owners themselves, the vast majority.
They had no interest in slavery.
They considered themselves to be fighting to protect their homes from what they considered to be hostile invaders.
Ultimately, slavery stains everybody who fought for the South.
There's no way around that.
Even if they weren't themselves fighting for slavery, even if they didn't own slaves, you know, still, it does.
But the issue is far more complex than we typically make it out to be.
And when we look at it in context, with proper perspective, I think we can see why a man like Lee, a decent man, might choose to fight for the South.
Because to him, it was a decision between fighting against his home or for it.
That's the way that he saw it.
And that's the way a lot of these people saw it.
It shouldn't be difficult for us to make that concession.
It does.
Again, it doesn't mean that we have to be Neo-Confederates.
It doesn't mean that we have to support slavery.
It doesn't mean that we have to take the side of the South or whatever.
It's just about understanding the complexity of a of a war that resulted in 600,000 people being killed.
If you're looking for simple answers and simple, you know, sort of filters to look, to see it through, then you're doing the wrong thing.
All right.
So yes, great.
Certainly a great general and I would say great man as well.
Robert E. Lee.
All right.
How much time do we have?
Okay, I'll get to...
You know what, I guess we'll skip emails today and I'll do extra emails tomorrow because there's one other thing that I had to...
I can't let the show end before I show you this.
I have to show you two deeply troubling video clips, okay?
And they're related in a way that will soon become apparent.
So first, this is from the NFL draft.
It's a shot of a QB finding out that he was drafted, and he's sitting with his family and his friends, and then this happens.
Watch this!
Ouch!
That hurts.
Alright, now here's another video.
This is from a girl on Twitter who I guess was surprising her friend at college or something.
I don't know.
It doesn't matter.
But all that matters is this part.
Watch this.
Some great ya'll.
Ahhhh!
Dear Lord.
Ah.
And here's the thing.
I can really relate to the rejected people in both of those videos.
I mean, when you get stood up like that, when you get left hanging, it's hard to recover.
I remember in sixth grade, okay?
I still remember this.
I have not recovered from it.
In sixth grade, I was walking down the hallway of my school, and somebody who I thought was a friend of mine noticed me coming down the hallway, or so I thought, and he went, hey, what's up?
And he went for the high five.
And as I was walking towards him, and I went for the high five, only to realize at the last second that he was talking to someone behind me, not to me.
And so I went for the high five, but I got stood up and he went and it left me hanging.
So then, so that's embarrassing enough, but now in that split second where I was, where, you know, I realized that the error that I had made, I started thinking, okay, how am I going to, how am I going to play this off?
So I thought, okay, if I can play this off as if I was trying to high five someone behind him, then I can save face.
But as I, you know, I'm kind of, this is all happening in like a split second.
So I missed the high five, and now I'm desperately looking for someone behind him to high five, like someone that I know, who I can say, hey, what's up?
But I didn't really know anyone behind him.
So I just targeted this one random kid who I didn't really know that well.
Hey, what's up?
And he also left me hanging.
So I got, I got stood up on two high fives in a row.
It was an absolute catastrophe, and I still have not recovered from it.
And it may well have been the defining moment of my life.
I think, how might things have gone differently if I had landed that first high-five, or even the second one?
Because when you miss two in a row, you just can't.
Your life is over, basically, at that point.
I've been a walking husk of a man ever since that day, so I feel deeply sorry for and I sympathize with the people in those videos.
All right, we will leave it there.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening.
Godspeed.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, a new white supremacist terror attack targets Jews in San Diego, the New York Times reveals its anti-Semitic bias, and the media rush to defend Ilhan Omar.
