This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comIn the free sample, Richard Spencer expatiates on the recent melting down of the Robert E. Lee statue from Charlottesville, Virginia. Might there be a silver lining in its immolation? In the full conversation, the group discusses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Christian Zionism, and New Atheism.
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| I don't know if you've seen this. | |
| They have officially melted down the statue of Robert E. Lee. | |
| You know, this is obviously deeply symbolic. | |
| And there's even a burnt offering quality to these things. | |
| I mean, the fact that the Washington Post is showing these images It's almost like we're watching someone being sacrificed in a temple of Vulcan or something. | |
| I don't think I've got too much Brahmin on my brain. | |
| I think that's how it's being seen. | |
| And it's a melting down of an idol, basically. | |
| I think that is fascinating in itself. | |
| And it's obviously a kind of ritualistic humiliation, so to speak. | |
| That is what's going on. | |
| And so I definitely understand why a lot of people will be offended by this. | |
| But maybe it's my tendency to try to look on the bright side or see a silver lining. | |
| I do feel like this destruction of the monument is kind of liberating. | |
| And, you know, I don't think I would ever again engage in some kind of protest for Southern history. | |
| And also because, you know, those guys who want to hold on to the lost cause and etc., I think they can kind of defend themselves or not. | |
| But it's just not something that I would do. | |
| And I think a lot of things that were said around that time were true in the sense that, I mean, I remember saying this at one point, like, I want to see full iconoclasm. | |
| Let's not just take away Robert E. Lee. | |
| I mean, Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner. | |
| Let's go all the way. | |
| I want to see you do it. | |
| I want to see you have intellectual consistency and not... | |
| Pretend that all of these generations of Americans weren't all connected on some basic level. | |
| Yeah, George Washington, right? | |
| Our first president, yeah. | |
| So I have those thoughts as well. | |
| And the alt-right was right. | |
| We saw a series of iconoclasm that continued in 2020 with BLM. | |
| It was going on in 2016 post-Trump that continued in 2020. | |
| You know, paintings of Woodrow Wilson are being taken out of universities. | |
| I mean, it goes on and on, and it's a general trend, and it kind of ebbs and flows. | |
| I think it will slow down here and there, but it will always come back. | |
| And we've even seen it recently where some Palestinian protesters have attacked, you know. | |
| British architecture. | |
| Obviously, that doesn't make sense on some level, but it's a trope of fighting the system is taking down these symbols. | |
| But I think it's also important to critically examine the symbols themselves because the lost cause myth was a myth and it also was a kind of negotiation. | |
| as it were between Yankees and Southerners where you're going to We won this war. | |
| We are ultimately going to be a union in which Washington prevails, but we're going to let you have your cake and eat it, so to speak. | |
| We're going to, in fact, quasi-deify your generals by naming all these army bases. | |
| But also put those army bases in the South. | |
| So we'll get all these Southern whites to get gung-ho about the military and go fight in wars. | |
| And there'll be these army bases with Confederate generals. | |
| But they'll ultimately, let's be honest, be Yankee bases in the South, named after Jackson or Lee, etc. | |
| So I think there was that sort of negotiation going on. | |
| The end of Reconstruction and a national reconciliation, which I think is worthwhile, actually. | |
| But there was also a sort of lost cause, a kind of bad lost cause, where Southerners wanted to pretend that the Civil War wasn't, in fact, about slavery and was some kind of libertarian protest against an encroaching government. | |
| And, you know, it's good we... | |
| Alex Stevens was a good writer, and a very clear writer, and he made it very clear that this was about slavery, and it was even ultimately about race on some level. | |
| You can read the cornerstone of the Confederacy speech, and it even goes after Jefferson. | |
| This is based on the prospect that... | |
| Thomas Jefferson might very well have been wrong when he wrote those lines about human equality. | |
| And for Southerners to kind of live in this blindness of it was about libertarianism or the Constitution. | |
| As opposed to being a revolt against the Constitution, which it was. | |
| But it was about the Constitution of libertarianism. | |
| It wasn't about race or slavery. | |
| And they took this to just elaborate ends of talking about black Confederates and all of this just increasingly nonsensical propaganda to show that they weren't, in fact, racist and that they were the good guys, etc. | |
| I think in some ways these statues were blinders for Southerners, and in some ways they covered up realities, and in some ways they became false idols. | |
| The fact that these statues were given to an African-American institute that just melted them down demonstrates Who really has the power in this situation? | |
| And I'm not implying that blacks have the power. | |
| I think there are political football in this as well. | |
| But isn't there something good about just ripping the band-aid off and facing reality as opposed to engaging in this southern temptation of nostalgia and false nostalgia? | |
| Kind of imagining something that never really was. | |
| And maybe there's something that can be very positive about getting rid of those statues that gave Southerners a kind of false sense of security. | |
| And maybe all of that stuff was a lie, and it's a lie that the... | |
| The state doesn't find terribly useful anymore, and it's a kind of old lie that's outlived its usefulness. | |
| Maybe there's something to be said about this being good. | |
| Let's take down the Confederate flag in South Carolina. | |
| Let's not pretend that, first off, there isn't an inherent contradiction of waving a Confederate flag. | |
| That was a rebellion. | |
| Against the Union. | |
| And to be part of the Union while flying the flag is a bit oxymoronic and ridiculous even. | |
| And let's just kind of get rid of it and face reality and stop living in this dream world of the lost cause myth. |