This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comIn the latest episode of Thursday Night Lights, Richard, Mark, and the gang discuss Richard’s recent appearance on Milleniyule, Trump’s removal from the Maine Ballot, and the shockingly unappealing pin-up girls that “Conservative Dad” scrounged up to put on his c…
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| I talked about this a number of months ago. | |
| I usually posted that publicly. | |
| I mean, I kind of have a lot of ambivalence about this because, you know, I can remember that statue, the actual one, because I went to school there. | |
| And I, you know, there was Lee Park in Dallas, Texas, where I grew up. | |
| Parents and grandparents have connections in Louisiana, and I can remember these major statues in New Orleans and so on. | |
| I think some of those have been taken down as well. | |
| What was the one? | |
| I can't remember who it was, but he was facing north. | |
| He was still facing off against the Yankees or something. | |
| Look, I have a lot of this did reflect power structures. | |
| There's no doubt. | |
| But then a lot of it was also a little bit whimsical and nostalgic and so on. | |
| And so I, you know, it's. | |
| I think everyone should be a little bit ambivalent about it. | |
| There is something about the Confederate flag that is nostalgic and sentimental and even whimsical of, you know, play Freebird and, you know, the guy in the pickup truck with the Confederate flag. | |
| Kind of a decent guy, but, you know, had some hard luck and et cetera, et cetera. | |
| And it is just this, like, also, like, if I were a leftist, I would almost hate this because you're getting rid of something that is just entirely sentimental and symbolic, and you're not actually changing anything about South Carolina. | |
| You know, nothing... | |
| You are not addressing poverty. | |
| You are not addressing inequality. | |
| You're simply being like, ooh, the South, the old South. | |
| That was so icky. | |
| We used to like Gone with the Wind to watch that every year. | |
| Now we don't watch that movie anymore. | |
| Wow, what an amazing transformation you've undergone. | |
| It's just a joke, basically. | |
| It's merely symbolic and so on. | |
| You know, anyway, I do think that there is a kind of, like, lie to those statues. | |
| And I'm not against them, and I have some even personal nostalgia for them. | |
| But they were erected, many of them, if not most all of them, in the late 19th and 20th century, in fact. | |
| And, you know, to some degree, they were part of that reconciliation process of... | |
| And you saw this. | |
| I mean, I remember Dwight Eisenhower, who, of course, was a general at Normandy during the Second World War. | |
| He said, you know, the greatest general of all time, the one I would want to learn from was Robert E. Lee or something, which is in itself a rather... | |
| I mean, obviously, he's a brilliant and fascinating guy, but he's also kind of a strange general to learn from because he presided over debacles as well as victories. | |
| He was outnumbered, but, you know, it is what it is. | |
| But there was this reconciliation where, you know, Lincoln was great, but then Robert E. Lee was great, and Stonewall Jackson was great, and we just won't talk about Sumner's March because that was pretty brutal. | |
| And we can kind of all have our heroes, but the overriding assumption was that the South won't rise again. | |
| And that you're allowed, I mean, it's a very, I think, an important and successful negotiation process, which is that you're allowed to have your heroes. | |
| We're not going to just annihilate you. | |
| But then we all know that you're going to be under a federal structure. | |
| So it's a bargain. | |
| And it worked until it didn't. | |
| And it becomes outmoded and it becomes a symbol of... | |
| Reaction and Trump and racism, et cetera, et cetera. | |
| But again, it was covering over the truth. | |
| And I think the whole lost cause myth was covering over the truth. | |
| The truth is that the Civil War was entirely about slavery. | |
| Period. End of statement. | |
| You can't discuss it without slavery. | |
| It was a collective freakout over a precipitating cause, which was the election of Abraham Lincoln. | |
| And a notion that might very well not have been based on reality that he was going to free the slaves and they were going to run roughshod over the South, etc. | |
| And that we need to get out of this system in order to maintain our peculiar institution. | |
| And Alexander Stevens, in the cornerstone of the Confederacy, laid it out. | |
| Like, Jefferson was wrong. | |
| We are basing a society on the notion of human inequality. | |
| We are going to perpetuate this forever. | |
| Alexander Stevens was actually honest, and he was a philosopher of sorts. | |
| The Hegel of the South, you could even say. | |
| But he laid it out and made things very clear, and it was about that. | |
| And it wasn't about individual rights or the tariff or government. | |
| Those are all dispensable causes, if they're causes at all. | |
| I think that, this is me being generous to her, I think that what she was saying, to someone who doesn't know a lot, it sounds like she's saying the CSA was about freedom, so it sounds like she's doing Confederate apologism to someone, | |
| but in a way, she is actually rebuking George Fitzhugh, who Published a book saying that slavery was good and should be expanded and is superior to freedom. | |
| And he was one of the first anti-capitalist reactionaries who said that to free someone is one of the cruelest things you can do, to send them into the world of raw competition. | |
| and she is saying no capitalism is better than slavery american hustle culture forever um | |
| Yes, that is basically what you say. | |
| Every American at MLM employee. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Capitalism today, capitalism tomorrow, capitalism forever. | |
| And it seemed like she was doing that and not doing a good job at it. | |
| Yes. We are basing our society on our peculiar institution of the multi-level marketing scheme. | |
| It makes no sense. | |
| It's clearly a pyramid. | |
| However, it is our pyramid. | |
| And we will fight and die for its sustenance. | |
| Yes. Do these statues serve as reconciliation, or are they more quasi-inclusivity? | |
| It's like a powerful lullaby. | |
| It lulls you to sleep. | |
| It makes you feel like you're a part of something when you're not really even a part of it. | |
| It gives you a false... | |
| It's like a lullaby of you're a rebel. | |
| At the end of the day, you're in a federal system. | |
| There's a supremacy clause, as someone mentioned earlier. | |
| But, like, you can kind of, you know, after work, once you crack that beer, you can be like, you know, we're rebels down here. | |
| You know? | |
| We don't, we're not a part of that Yankee system. | |
| No. Different down here. | |
| You know, but it's not different. |