Sept. 7, 2024 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the Political Cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
Ladies and gentlemen, the calendar continues to turn.
Welcome to the first broadcast of September, this election year 2024.
Happy birthday, Dad.
It's my dad's birthday.
We spent the day together.
And yesterday was my brother's birthday, my younger brother, my only sibling.
And so it's a busy week this first week of September, always is in the Edwards family, and thank God for that.
But work does intrude tonight, and we have got a veritable variety show for you this evening.
Coming up in the second hour, our friend Rick Tyler, who gave an eerily prescient set of predictions on TPC's New Year's Eve show, the last show we did in December.
And a lot of what he said has come to pass.
And he's going to come back on and talk about that as we are now just a couple of months away from the election.
And he's also going to be giving a live report from the field.
He is at an interesting event in central Florida tonight.
And he's going to be telling us all about it live from the floor.
That's coming up hour number two, Rick Tyler.
In the third hour, Keith Alexander and I are going to zero in on this week's news and current events that have particularly interested us, and we're going to offer our commentary on that.
But first, but first, we are going to bring on Warren Baylock, who's been a real star of the show this year, to be sure.
Warren had a very interesting weekend right here in our backyard in West Tennessee last week.
And it was, Warren, I got to tell you, first of all, welcome back to the show, brother.
But I got to tell you just still how ridiculous I feel.
You were about 40 miles away.
And because of the scheduling and all of that, we just couldn't get together.
But I really wanted to be there.
And I appreciate your understanding.
But man, you had a weekend that I really, that's why you're here tonight.
I was so interested by it.
I thought the audience might be as well.
So we'll start right there.
And welcome back, Warren.
Well, thanks, James, and welcome.
You know, appreciate having me back on the show.
Yeah, I got to say, well, first of all, thank you for pointing me out to the places that I went.
And the person that I met, Gene, that we're going to talk to here in a second, was just amazing, an absolute font of wisdom.
I mean, we had an incredible day together.
But yeah, I was down in your neck of the woods for a meeting of some comrades of mine.
You know, Tennessee is so many great people in Tennessee.
It was a private meeting, so I won't say more than that.
But some people that I knew in the NJP and others.
And it was a great meeting.
My dad and I were both down there for that.
And while I was down there, I thought, okay, well, this is a great opportunity to see some sights.
I've been, you know, I'm a big European history guy.
My focus always has been the Third Reich and the period leading up to that, the Weimar period, the First World War, the Second World War.
And in the last few years, I've been getting much more into American history and learning more about the history of this country.
And so I'm taking an interest more in that.
Now, my dad always had a real connection to the Civil War because The father of his childhood best friends was a fellow who was a big Civil War collector.
This was back when you could still get the stuff, you know, on the market.
And he had a huge collection of uniforms and weapons and everything.
And my dad actually used to play with them with his friends when they were kids.
They would be out in the woods playing with like real sabers and stuff.
But he and he used to participate in the North South Skirmish Association, which I'm sure many of your listeners are familiar with that.
And one time when I was a kid, I remember we went to the Nationals and it was great excitement.
And it was where they would get dressed up and shoot the do competition shooting with the old weapons.
I was never that interested in the United States Civil War.
I was not, I just, I didn't have a link to it.
To me, I didn't really identify with either side.
I'm not a southerner.
I'm from Pennsylvania.
That's where my family goes way back.
But I didn't, so I didn't really identify with the South.
I also didn't identify with the Union either, though, because of the cause they were fighting for, Lincoln and everything.
And I'd always heard it was northern industrialists fighting a war against the South for reasons other than what they said to free the slaves.
So I never really took much of an interest in it.
But dad was always very interested in it.
And of course, my dad always admired Nathan Bedford Forrest very much.
So he named me after Forrest.
My middle name is Forrest.
So I had always known.
Yeah, so I always knew about Forrest.
And my dad named me that partially because not only his cavalry achievements, but also because of his association with the Klan.
And so I had always seen his picture on the wall, you know, that very striking, famous photo of him.
And so this was, you know, dad said, hey, we're going to be close to Fort Pillow.
We should check this out.
So then when I talked to you, you said the Shiloh battlefield is very close to where I was going to be staying.
And I'd always heard the name Shiloh.
I didn't know anything about it.
So Dad and I, the day after our meeting, which was a Sunday, we went and we spent the whole day, just him and me at Shiloh.
And Dad's exactly like me.
We're the type of people that when we're in a museum or a place like that, we will stop to read every single plaque, every single page.
We really take our time.
And we were there from about noon to 8 o'clock at night when it was getting dark.
And it was a day I will never forget.
I learned all about the battle.
I was right there.
You said it was sort of the way Gettysburg is.
The whole battlefield is preserved.
And it was a profoundly moving and eerie experience and just greatly contributed to my knowledge of the Civil War and our history and everything.
And then it was the next day we met up with Gene and visited the Forrest boyhood home.
So that was the overview.
And if you want me to dive into anything specific, I can.
I do.
I just want to say again, our guest, our friend, our comrade, Warren Forrest Baylog, named after the general, even though they were not southerners.
His dad had such an ideological connection with the great general, our hero here in the South, no doubt about it.
And yeah, Warren, I knew, you know, obviously you were going to be down here, and Gene Andrews is right there and can get you that, you know, backstage pass to the boyhood home.
We're going to be bringing Gene on in the next segment.
But yes, I mean, going to Fort Pillow.
And by the way, you know, we had Gene lead a tour.
We did a chartered bus up to Fort Pillow for some TPC friends and donors a few years back.
And I mean, that was something.
That was a day certainly I will never forget for a lot of reasons.
But knowing exactly what part of West Tennessee you were going to be in last week, I knew that Fort Pillow was too far in the wrong direction for you to be heading back to Pennsylvania.
Shiloh was much closer in the boyhood home on your way home.
And so that made a little more sense to me.
I appreciate that you considered what I had to say and that it turned out to be a memorable day for you and your father to share because as a son who loves his father, my dad turned 70 today.
I mean, those days.
He's listening.
If we have one listener every week, it's him.
But tell us about the conversation.
We're going to bring Gene into this conversation.
But being at Shiloh, which is, you know, really one of the most pivotal, one of the biggest, one of the most well-known battles in the whole war, if not at the very least, the Western theater, what was it about Shiloh that struck you, being a first-time visitor?
Well, three things.
First of all, learning about how it was the first of the really big battles of the Civil War, how prior to that point, there hadn't been a gigantic, you know, I'm big into Napoleonic history, and there hadn't been that type of battle in America yet, where two huge armies come together and fight for two days, and there's massive casualties.
I think there were 110,000 guys involved on both sides and 20-some thousand casualties, like 3,000, 4,000 killed in the battle.
And it was something that Americans had never experienced before, ever.
It was the bloodiest battle in the whole history of this continent, North America, up to that time.
Now, you know, the next few years sadly would see much bloodier battles.
And I think Shiloh ranks like fifth or sixth now, or maybe even seventh in the order of battles, of bloodiest battles of the Civil War.
But just that there's a great video in the museum.
It's this tiny little museum there, but it's a great video showing, describing the whole background of the battle.
Then the second thing that really struck me was being in all the places where the heaviest fighting was, because the battlefield is filled with these plaques.
The Confederate monument there is beautiful.
And there's this section, they called it the Hornet's Nest, where there was the heaviest fighting, where the Confederates actually got a Union group to surrender.
But thousands of guys fighting in these woods.
And it's just so strange and eerie to be there with my dad, us just walking these, you know, it's beautiful.
It's a beautiful preserved area, but there's just the sense of what took place there.
Another place was this Mississippi regiment, the Fighting Sixth, where they charged into a Union, a federal, like a crossfire.
And out of 450 guys, I think 300 fell in this crossfire.
And I was at that spot right as it was dusk.
Had sort of a strange experience.
I'm not someone that believes in ghosts and things like that, but there was this kind of eerie moment where there was mist rising from the ground in the exact spot.
I'm looking at the plaque in the exact spot where these guys fell.
Hold on right there.
Hold on right there.
That is a great place to push pause.
We're going to continue this with Warren Braylog.
We're going to bring in Gene Andrews, caretaker at the Nathan Bedford Force Boyhood Home, who spent time with Warren last week and his father.
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You may be asking yourself, ladies and gentlemen, James, it's September.
The election's two months away.
You're talking about Shiloh?
This is important.
Conversations like this are important for a lot of reasons, because as we say again, you have to be rooted to the eternal.
What are we fighting for if we're not fighting for our ancestors and our heroes?
And as I always say, our past, our present, and our future.
We fight for it all.
And yes, we do have Confederate History Month.
April is heavily dedicated to all things Southern here on this program.
It always has been.
But this is a foundational pillar of this show, talking about our Southern heritage, talking certainly about our racial patrimony as whites worldwide and all of the other stuff and all of the other issues that make this show exactly what it is.
But when I heard that two of our favorite guests were together, and I heard Warren tell me a little bit about it over some voicemails and some text, and I talked to Gene on the phone, and they were just, you know, effusive with their experience on that weekend.
I said, guys, you know, I think if I'm enjoying listening to the tale this much, I think the audience will too.
And it is important for everyone to understand and to know and to realize and to remember that we're real men.
We have real things that we are fighting for, much more real than what our enemies are fighting for.
We are fighting for our people, not ideals or principles, but for our very flesh and blood kinsmen.
And we enjoy each other's company.
We go out and we do things that are healthy and wholesome activities.
We spend time with our family and our friends.
Warren, I'm going to let Keith ask a question, then we're going to bring Gene on.
But yes, you mentioned the Mississippi Monument there.
It was almost 100% casualty rate for that particular unit.
And that was the very last monument to get put up.
Some of these southern states never had the money to put monuments up.
The Mississippi Monument only went up very recently.
I think within the last couple of years.
And then there was a beautiful Confederate monument that you mentioned.
And United States Senator, it went up in the early 2000s.
And Senator Marsha Blackburn actually was there for the ribbon cutting, if you could believe that.
But it is a majestic battlefield.
I don't know if that's the right adjective.
I mean, it's a tragic battlefield, obviously, but you certainly will feel something when you go there.
It will move you.
And I was last, I've been there many times.
I was last there year before last.
And of course, we always have a great and reflective time going there.
If I might just finish what I was saying before the break, after that spot, because right near where that spot was, there's a series of Confederate mass graves that are just basically trenches where guys were buried.
So, I was thinking some of those guys died there.
And then I had read the night before about, because I read as much as I could about the battle and about Forrest's role in the battle and everything right before we went there, the night before.
And I read about a man that I had never known about.
I didn't even know his name, Albert Sidney Johnston, who was the highest ranking American officer ever killed on the battlefield.
And I had read about his death in battle and how he was a very bold plan, actually caught Grant and Sherman by surprise with this attack, launched this bold attack on them on the morning of, what was it, I think April 6th, I believe, of 1862.
And just a great man, a noble man, a great general, and died from a bullet that hit an artery.
It must have just winged him, but it hit an artery in his leg.
He didn't even, I don't think, realize he was hit.
But his boot filled up with blood and he's teetering on his horse.
And I read the story, it was a very moving story about how his aides got him off his horse and they carried him off.
And he died shortly after that.
So we looked at the whole battlefield and we were running out of time, James.
You know, that's the way it is with my dad and I. When we see him, we all, yeah, we were running out of time.
And they said that the park closes at sunset.
It was past sunset.
It was dark.
There was mist everywhere.
The sun had gone down.
There was just a thin little trail of light on the horizon left.
And I said to Dad, we got to see the spot where he died before we leave.
So we're going through the park.
There's no one in the park.
It's just us.
And it's like a haunted woods at this point.
I mean, it's just a black, dark woods.
And we found the spot.
And there's this beautiful plaque.
And then it said there's a path down in the woods in this ravine where he actually died.
So I had to use my cell phone flashlight to see because we're in the woods at night.
And we went down.
And there's the spot where he died.
It was just, it was a profoundly moving experience.
And yeah, and then earlier seeing the Union graves, because there's a huge cemetery with like 500 guys, I said to Dad, it's weird.
You know, you get a strange feeling when you're in a house or a thing where a murder took place.
It's not like a place where someone just died of natural causes, but where someone was killed.
If you've ever been in a house or in a spot where someone was killed, there's a strange feeling.
When you're in this cemetery, every single one of these guys died a violent death.
I'm just not used to being in a place like that.
And one thought I had was: I wonder if the Union troops, the federal troops, these 500 or so guys buried here, if you could bring them back today and turn on the television and show them the ads that are on TV, show them what's happening to their country.
The flag that the same flag that they fought under, that they died for, what's happening under that flag today, what would they say?
What would they think?
But yeah, it was a tremendous experience.
And I want to thank you.
Dad and I both, we saw each other the next day.
You know, we came back and then we saw each other like the next day.
And he felt he was still sort of moved by the whole thing.
And of course, our next day with Gene, which we can talk about, but it was just, it was amazing.
It was an amazing trip.
I want to thank you, Warren, for that testimony.
I don't know what other word to use to describe it, but for sharing that.
Keith, a quick question for Warren.
Then we've got to get to Gene.
We're very late for Gene.
We always want to be the ones waiting on Gene.
We never want Gene to wait for us.
One quick question, though.
Okay, Warren, good to talk with you, by the way.
And I'm glad you got to see Shiloh.
Your namesake played a pivotal role that didn't really happen.
He got behind the enemy lines and was asking for permission from Beauregard, who took Albert Sidney Johnson's place as the guy, the Confederate in charge, and asked him for more troops so he could capture Pittsburgh Landing.
And if he had captured Pittsburgh Landing, he would have prevented Union General Don Carlos Buell's troops from landing.
And the Confederates probably would have won the battle.
And see, that's something that's repeated throughout Forrest's life as a soldier in the Confederacy.
He was always having great ideas, but didn't have the authority to carry them out.
He had the same thing happen in Chickamauga.
I think Gene Andrews, who is, for my money, and I told Warren this, probably the greatest living Forrest historian in the world.
Gene, would you agree?
And I would ask you two questions.
Number one, what did you think of Warren's introduction here for this hour and his time at Shiloh?
We'll get into the time that y'all spent together at the boyhood home in the next segment.
But your response to anything you heard Warren say?
And also, does the war turn out differently if Forrest could have just had his way running it?
Well, I do have to disagree with you on one thing.
I don't know about that Gene Andrews being the greatest Forrest historian.
I would have to disagree with you on that.
I don't know about that.
So far, the program's been great up to that point.
No, I appreciate allowing me to be on with Warren.
We had such a great time with Warren and his dad.
It was just a tremendous day the next day, actually Labor Day, when we went over to Chapel Hill and the Forrest home.
But back to your question, there were so many times that Forrest advised his commander on the field about the course of action that he thought should be taken, he was ignored because he wasn't a West Point graduate.
And so these other hotshot professionals, you know, just ignored this guy, and we wound up losing at Shiloh, at Fort Donaldson.
Didn't finish off the Federal Army at Chickamauga.
And there's a great book on Forrest called Bust Hell Wide Open by Dr. Samuel Mitchum from Louisiana.
And in his introduction, he says, in the Western theater of the war, the professionally trained West Point generals hardly ever won, while Forrest, the untrained amateur, hardly ever lost.
And that's exactly at that point.
And it wasn't because he had superior numbers contributing to his win.
No, never did.
Never did.
And actually, during the war in August of 63, he wrote to President, well, he wrote to Samuel Cooper first, Adjutant General, with a plan to stop the invasion of Grant and Sherman.
And he had proved it.
He had done it before.
Forrest was the only general in the Confederacy that had defeated Grant, Sherman, Buell, and Rosecrans.
Nobody had that kind of record.
And he never fought them head to head.
He simply just swung around behind them, cut their supply lines, and Grant retreated from an overland route to Vicksburg, back to Memphis.
Sherman retreated from his attempt to take Selma, Alabama, and went scurrying back to Vicksburg.
And then he stopped Buell and Rosecrans before they could get to Chattanooga and cut the railroad line there.
I know Warren did.
It wasn't theory.
It wasn't theory.
He proved it would work.
He proved it.
He proved it in practice.
And Warren, I know that you know this, and I'm sure you and Gene probably even talked about it, but this was a man who had no military training.
I mean, not only did he not go to West Point, he didn't go anywhere.
He was a private citizen and he became the greatest tactician in the history of London.
He was just an instinctive fighter.
He's a guy you want on your side if you were in the Battle of Gettysburg or in a ballroom brawl.
Yeah, you know, on the field of Shiloh, I mean, he basically, and Gene, you can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but he basically was responsible for the rear guard and prevented them from the Union Army from following up because he attacked and got very close to actually coming to contact directly with Sherman, which, boy, would that have been wonderful.
I tell you what, Sherman never, you know what Sherman said about Forrest?
Very famously, I mean, he recognized Forrest as the greatest leader of either side of the war.
And that was Sherman.
Good versus evil.
The clash of the family.
It was.
What a great film that would have made.
You know, I mean, that's really like a hero versus an absolute villain of history.
I want to pick it up.
You're absolutely right.
I want to pick it up right there very quickly when we come back with Gene Andrews and Warren Bailough.
We're talking about the time they spit together last weekend.
Stay tuned.
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U.S. health inspectors still struggling to address a massive backlog of pharmaceutical plants that were not inspected during disruptions caused by COVID.
According to an analysis of government data by the Associated Press, roughly 2,000 drug manufacturing sites around the world have not had a food and drug administration inspection for quality since before the pandemic.
The FDA considers plants that have gone more than five years without an inspection to be a significant risk.
Agency officials say their work has been hampered by difficulties recruiting and retaining inspectors who face a grueling schedule of overseas travel.
Let us correspond to Jeremy House reporting in New York City, Mayor Eric Adams facing mounting questions over his ability to govern that after federal investigators seize phones from a number of officials within his administration.
That includes a chancellor and two deputy mayors.
Breaking news and analysis, townhall.com.
Needless to say, it will be one huge auction.
Here's Ron Taylor with that story.
A rare copy of the U.S. Constitution that was signed and sent to states to ratify is up for auction later this month in North Carolina.
The document was found inside a filing cabinet at a property once owned by a former North Carolina governor.
The copy was made after the Congress under the Articles of Confederation approved the new Constitution in 1787.
Secretary Charles Thompson signed two copies for each of the 13 states and sent them away.
Only eight are known to still exist, and the copy being sold September 28th by Bronc Auctions in Asheville is the only known privately held copy.
Happy bidding.
Ron Taylor reporting.
Wisconsin Health Officials initiating an egg recall.
That follows an outbreak of salmonella infections among 65 people in nine states.
More on these stories at townhall.com.
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Hey, everybody, it's Courtney here to remind you that TPC's third quarter fundraising drive is officially underway and will run through September 30th.
As longtime listeners know, the work of this radio program has both groundbreaking and essential.
It has been a very busy year, highlighted by powerful weekly shows and an aggressive tour of several states where we have worked to reinforce our tight-knit community at conferences and lively remote broadcasts.
Your support makes the work of James Edwards and our entire team possible.
Whether you are a longtime or a brand new contributor, we would appreciate your thoughtful consideration.
As always, we have some great incentive gifts for you, and established donors can learn more by reading the quarterly newsletter that has been mailed to you.
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I was telling our friends in the break, this is an hour that I just could do all night long.
I'm so passionate about this topic.
It's emotional and it's something that is a core part of not just my identity as a southerner, but part of the DNA of this program.
We will get to current events.
We will get to other things in hours two and three.
Rick Tyler standing by in Orlando from a very special event.
He'll be reporting live from the scene.
And in the third hour, Keith and I, we've got all the news that is news this week.
We're going to be offering commentary on that.
So we will get to those current events and the headlines.
But continuing right now with a very special installation of an hour focused on the South with Warren Bailog and Gene Andrews.
Gene, Warren was talking about the Fallen Timbers action when we ran up to the wall of that last segment.
And this was something, this is actually one of the most interesting things of the entire event at Shiloh.
It's one of the things that Forrest excelled at was covering retreats.
Unfortunately, if he had been given more authority, they would have been retreating.
They wouldn't have been retreating.
Yeah, but Braxton Bragg and then Beauregard both undercut him.
Well, that could have definitely looked, that was a very, I mean, you could say this about a lot of them.
They turned on a razor's edge, on a knife's edge.
That was a very winnable battle.
And if we win that battle, you know, the Union doesn't gain control of the Mississippi Valley, and it's a totally different battle.
And Buell's army would have been on the other side of the Tennessee River, and being on the other side of the Tennessee River, they couldn't have effectively reinforced Grant and Sherman, and Grant and Sherman would probably have lost.
Well, I know one thing for sure.
My great-great-great-grandfather was on the field that day, and I'm probably not the only one.
Yeah, I was going to say it.
I had two colorful names, IES Alexander, Independence Ellen Schuler Alexander, and his brother, President Washington Alexander.
You know, there was a general out of South Carolina named States Rights.
That was his name.
States Rights Gist was his name.
And so they had some great names back then.
But, Gene, tell us just 60 seconds on the Fallen Timbers maneuver.
Forrest was injured there, and he was basically taking on a whole platoon of Yankees pretty much by himself.
Well, he was.
And Warren gave us a headline on that or gave us an introduction to that.
And like y'all said, Forrest was covering the retreat of the Confederate Army heading from Shiloh back down to Corinth, Mississippi.
And he saw the Federal Army get into a sticky place at a swampy area called Fallen Timbers.
And there were a lot of stumps and trees, different sized trees that had been cut down because they'd cut the trees there for timber for iron furnaces.
And so it was a pretty rough area.
And he saw this Union regiment trying to cross this swampy area.
And he thought, well, this is a great time to take them out and gain a little time for the wagon train back behind us there to get on further down the road.
So he ordered his battalion.
It was only 600 men.
He was just a lieutenant colonel then.
And so he ordered them to charge, and they did.
They overran the skirmishers out in front and came up over a hill.
They scattered them and came up over a hill.
And here was a whole regiment drawn up across the road on either side of the roads.
And the soldiers that were with him, they reined in their horses.
They go, whoa, that's more than we bargained for.
And Forrest, he never slowed up.
He just kept going, rode right through him, got in behind him.
And then all of a sudden, he realized there's nobody else with him.
He was surrounded.
So he's slashing with his sword, firing with his pistol, and trying to cut his way out of there and get back to the Confederate lines.
And he had a shot at William T. Sherman.
And had Forrest's pistol not misfired, the cap didn't go off.
And that's what you had to have back then, you know, a little percussion cap on each one of the cylinders on a pistol.
And that's what you say, you're going to pop a cap on somebody.
That's what it meant to shoot somebody back then.
So the cap didn't fire.
And otherwise, we would never have heard of Billy the Torch Sherman the rest of the war.
So Forrest got wounded.
A soldier ran up to him, put his rifle up against his hip and fired and shot him right through the hip.
But it was so rough that it couldn't, anybody, they were trying to grab the reins of his horse and everything to try to pull him off of there.
He fought his way out and got back to the Confederate lines, and then they dismantled him.
What about that story about him grabbing a soldier by the scruff of the neck and throwing him over his?
We've all heard that, Keith.
And there are a couple of historians, Dr. Michael Bradley that taught at Montloe State University said that is one of the many, many stories that have come up about Forrest, that he actually grabbed a Union soldier and yanked him up behind him, sort of as a human body shield or human bulletproof vest there behind him and rode back.
But there really aren't any accurate descriptions of that from any of the historians there at the time.
And Dr. Bradley said it's not in Jordan and Pryor's history of Forrest Campaigns.
And that's the only book that was written about Forrest while he was still alive.
And he proofread that book to make sure that everything is over.
I think there's a part in, excuse me, Gene, I think there's a part in Total Recall where Arnold Schwarzenegger grabs a guy and pulls that move.
Maybe he learned it from Forrest when they're shooting at him.
He grabbed the guy.
Well, now that's a story that hung on Forrest.
And there's so many stories about Forrest and some of the things that he actually did do.
And something like that is not that impossible to believe.
I mean, he was a strong man.
And you know how your adrenaline is flowing when you get in a situation like that?
He could have done it.
There's no doubt about that.
That was a possibility.
You know, actually, when he was injured, he recuperated at a home near Nashville that was bought by one of the Everly brothers.
And the Everly brother, I can't remember if it was Phil.
It was Phil Everly.
He said he bought it because Forrest recuperated there and that he thought there would be a song in there.
So, yeah, more history in Columbia.
More history way on down the road there.
But here are some facts about Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Here are some facts that we know for sure.
Became a self-made millionaire despite being born into poverty.
He had no formal education, rose to that level of success.
He invested a great deal, to say the least, of his personal fortune to aid the Confederate cause.
So it'd be like a guy like Fred Smith today just giving away his fortune to aid a cause.
They would never do that.
No Titan of industry would do that today.
He did it.
And despite being one of the wealthiest men in the South, he enlisted as a soldier of the lowest rank, a private, to further serve his country, the Confederate States of America.
And as a major planner, he was actually legally exempted from even having to serve at all, but he chose to serve anyway, and as a soldier of the lowest rank, he had no formal military training, but he went on to become the greatest tactician in the history of mobile warfare, retired as a lieutenant general.
His maneuvers are still studied today.
Personally, he killed 30 enemy combatants.
Warren, that is a man's man.
And, you know, those exploits, you know, those, all of that actually did happen.
And it rivals, I think, that of mythological figures.
He is worthy of our respect, our remembrance.
He is worthy of middle names.
These are the people.
This is the man we need to emulate going forward.
Absolutely.
And, you know, just reading his, because I have a book that I brought with me there called First With the Most by Robert Henry.
And this book is one that my mom got from my dad many, many years ago, 1991.
She's inscribed on it when she got it for him.
And I actually had Gene sign it when we were at the boyhood home and date it, which was really nice.
But I've never read the book.
I was reading, I was trying to get the whole thing read before we went there.
And I was just so busy with traveling.
And so I'm picking my way through it.
And I was reading some of it aloud to dad while we were driving.
You know, my father's a truck driver, had been an over-the-road driver for decades.
So whenever we take these long road trips, he just gets in the driver's seat.
And I, you know, I talk for a living, so I can just read stuff and we talk.
So it's good.
We have a good thing going on.
But I was reading him just about, we were reading about Forrest's boyhood and up to, you know, because he didn't really get see active service until he was in his 40s.
So we were reading about his whole early life.
And this guy had a life that was, I mean, a real frontier life, hardship, unbelievable hardship.
You know, that if someone today just lived his peacetime life up to even before he got into business, even up to his like 20th or 25th year, it would be no one lives like that in America today.
No one lives like that in the world.
I mean, you would be hard-pressed.
You'd have to go to Gaza right now to find someone that lives as tough of a life as he lived, you know, burying siblings, bearing children, just fought basically a duel.
I mean, Gene could tell you the details with some guys that killed his uncle.
I mean, just frontier stuff like you can't believe.
And just an incredibly tough, hard man from a hard time, but also a natural genius, just an absolute genius and a born leader of men.
So, yeah, an amazing character.
I have a new appreciation of him.
And to visit the home with Gene, I got to say, Gene, we haven't really talked since that day.
I've been meaning to text you all week.
I've been very busy.
But I was as moved by being in the place where Forrest was as much, if not more moved, by the fact that it has been so well preserved, that such a fine gentleman like yourself is there dedicating your life to preserving it, to keeping it going.
Gene told us, James, about all the work that the sons of the Confederate veterans and the various people that have contributed and helped to preserve this, to keep it going.
And just I got a sense on that day that you all in the South have a blood and soil connection that is to your land that is just something that the rest of the United States, it's hard for us to understand.
It's something that you have to kind of go to Europe to find it.
Because all the rest of America, I think the population has been more mixed up.
We were joking.
Gene was joking a little bit how air conditioning is what allowed Yankees to colonize the South in the second half of the 2020s.
It's rather the summer down here now.
I'm not going to kid you.
But I mean, you're talking about where your folks come from, James, and how far back your people go in that sort of southwest corner of Tennessee and the fact that you had family at Shiloh.
Yeah, that is just not something most Americans in the Yankee in the North or anywhere else.
Most Americans don't have that blood and soil connection.
Again, as a National Socialist, that's how I interpret it.
It's a very deep, deep thing.
And it's wonderful to see just the fact that folks have, ever since that war, have been dedicated.
There's like a the sense I got actually, Gene, when we were in that room where you have all the pictures where there's all the photos of Forrest, I felt like I was in the inner sanctum of a sort of underground, a strain of like an underground southern something keeping it alive, that there's just men and women who have been keeping this alive ever since the Civil War.
Hold on right there, Warren.
And Gene.
I want to say this very quickly.
First of all, just going back to Forrest again, you cannot overstate this.
He personally killed 31 or over 30, at least 30 enemy combatants.
If every Confederate soldier could have gone 30-0, you know, that's a different dynamic.
But I want to read the inscription on Forrest.
He's an excellent private as well as an excellent general.
He was excellent at everything he ever did.
And he was the living embodiment of a man's man.
Those hoofbeats die not upon fame's crimson sod, but will ring through her song and her story.
He fought like a titan and struck like a god, and his dust is our ashes of glory.
That is on his statue on the basement.
That statue in Memphis.
That's the poem that's worthy of someone.
Not like as Michael Hill called it, that doggerole that Emma Lazarus wrote on the Statue of Liberty.
Give us your huddled masses.
Wretched refuse, which is exactly what we got.
But the thing is, you know, Gene, I echo everything Warren said about you, brother.
I mean, what you've done there at the Forest Home all these years, day in, day out, toiling in that vineyard.
But I got to say again, one of the memories of my life that I will never forget is standing.
How far away from you am I right now, Keith?
Five feet?
Five feet, maybe.
Five feet.
I was five feet, maybe less than that, from Nathan Bedford Forrest's casket, the casket that carried his remains.
Gene was a pallbearer for the reinterment.
Yes, indeed.
And to have been right there in that home where Warren was last week, it's incredible.
Warren, I want to ask you this.
Let me tell Warren one thing first before we get off of it.
Another thing on Albert Sidney Johnson, he was the Secretary of War for the Republic of Texas in that period of time between 1836 and when they were admitted to the Union.
Yeah.
Amazing career.
These guys were just, you know, what is the movie called Gods and Generals?
I've never seen it, but you've got to watch that.
There's a little bit of a sappy narrative, you know, some parts.
I love that movie.
And I tell you this, there's a both Emily and I. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I made Emily watch Gone with the Wind with me when we came back.
And it was funny because that film is so, it's such a powerful.
Now, I see it as, you know, what Gene was talking about in the first hour.
I see it as, okay, like the Air Force base or the military base naming.
I'm like, all right, in 1939, you know, Jews in Hollywood were very keen to suddenly now solve the lost cause, you know, and then as soon as the war's over, then it goes back to the Southerners being devils.
But it's not.
That's right.
It's funny in that film, though, which is really a work of art.
I mean, it's a masterpiece.
The way they show the Reconstruction, you know, there's a lot of truth to it.
One of the things I did was I cleaned out.
That's why they don't show that movie anymore.
That's why that movie is banned.
Yeah.
Another great movie is.
Yeah, Warren, there's another great movie that I want to recommend to you.
Santa Fe Trail with Errol Finn and Arnold Reich.
That's right.
I got to say this very quickly.
I got to say this very quickly.
I've got to get to the Gene, actually, for the portrayal of John Brown.
I said, Gene, you've got to watch Santa Fe Trail for how they showed John Brown in that movie.
Anyway, I'm sorry, James.
Go ahead.
No, no, no.
Listen, guys, I mean, the whole thing is I'm about three segments behind tonight because everything's been so riveting to me that I couldn't fast forward.
And I want to talk a little bit more about y'all's experience at the Forest Home.
We actually skipped a break there to buy more time, and we're already running out of it again.
We only have about six minutes left.
But I will say, do watch Gods and Generals.
You can buy it on YouTube for like three bucks.
You can stream it.
Robert Duvall is great as Robert E. Lee, but there's a Jewish guy from New York, Stephen Lang, who absolutely nails Stonewall Jackson in a way that you could never believe.
And he said in studying Stonewall Jackson, he became a believer in the Southern cause.
And this is a Jewish guy from New York, Stephen Lang, great character actor.
He played Ike Clanton in the movie Tombstone with Carlos.
Oh, I know exactly who he is.
Yeah.
He is a fantastic actor.
And I don't think Stonewall Jackson could have played Stonewall Jackson better than he did in that movie.
You've got to watch Gods and Generals.
Please watch it before I see you in a few days.
But anyway, let's go back now to the boyhood home.
So you're there with your father, Warren, and you're there with Gene.
And by the way, I got to tell you, when I told Gene that, you know, do you remember Warren Balog from our event in South Carolina?
Boy, do I ever.
You know, I loved his speech and this, that, and the other.
And Gene always speaks at all of our conferences, but he didn't at this one.
We always have our conferences in Tennessee, and we were thankful to have Gene as a VIP guest of honor.
But nevertheless, he remembered your speech, and when I said y'all were coming.
Anyway, the rest is history.
Y'all got together.
You're there at the boyhood home.
Gene, what did you tell him?
What did you show him?
How did you do it?
What was that day like?
Let's fast forward past Shiloh to the day of the day.
I was lunch for getting me together with Warren and his father.
They're just super, super great people.
And first thing we met for lunch about 12.30, and we were just going to eat lunch and zip over to the Forrest home about 30 minutes away.
We were there for two hours for lunch, telling stories and laughing and carrying on.
Y'all found out y'all were all at Charlottesville together.
Y'all didn't know y'all were at Charlottesville together.
We were.
We were combatants at Charlottesville.
Yes, we were.
And we even took a picture when we got over to the Forrest home standing on the hearth where General Forrest's casket was when they had that visitation as combat from Charlottesville.
Too bad that we didn't have General Forrest there at Charlottesville.
Yeah, well, it had been a different story.
They'd have cleaned out all the Antifas and the Black Lives Don't Matter to other Blacks.
We'd have gotten rid of that.
So then we drove over to the Forrest home and let them take their time coming up the driveway and stop at the monuments and take pictures and then went to the home itself.
And Forrest wasn't born in this home.
He was born over in the little town, frontier town of Chapel Hill.
But when he was nine, his father bought this house from the Mayfields, the Mayfields, who actually built it, and moved the family out there from Chapel Hill.
And they only lived there for three years from 1830 to 1833.
And then they moved down to northern Mississippi.
And then the rest, as they say, is history down there.
But we certainly had a great time and talking about Forrest and some of the things that he did during the war and getting rid of some of the myths and lies and propaganda that have been dumped on Forrest down through the years about the so-called massacre of the black troops at Fort Pillar, which is a lie and war propaganda.
And then that he started the Ku Klux Klan.
And I said, no, the Klan was started just down the road from us down in Pulaski, Tennessee.
And Forrest was living in Memphis then.
And I always ask these Forrest critics, if he was in Memphis and the Klan was in Pulaski, how did he start the Klan?
What did he use?
Spotted Al Gore's internet that he claimed he invented and then started it all the way from Memphis to Pulaski.
So, you know, I think it was a good day to have history.
And like Warren was talking about, just feel that presence of being there and almost like being on holy ground to walk on the floor and the front porch and the sidewalk and the things where Forrest was and where he grew up and where he came back there during the war.
After the Battle of Murphysboro, the Confederate Army fell back to a line along the Duck River.
And Forrest was stationed over in Columbia.
And so he came through there to recruit and feed his troops.
And he had a cousin that had a mill down on the Duck River so he could get corn ground for cornmeal.
And so he spent a lot of time in that area, even during the war.
So I was so glad that they got to come there and see that.
And I hope they enjoyed the time that we took there.
And I, as usual, talked too much and made them late on leaving and getting on the road back up to West Virginia.
But I was glad they got to come.
Well, we got home around 3 a.m.
It was fine.
We just drank a bunch of coffee.
No, it's typical for you guys.
When we were driving back, Gene, Dad was just like, you know, this was just one of those days where you got to just take the time.
I mean, you're there and you're not there with other tourists.
Gene's giving you a private viewing of this home where one of the most iconic figures in American history spent part of his life.
He was right there.
This wasn't an approximation.
That was where he was.
And one of the real experts on Forrest was your personal guy.
That's exactly right.
Now, Warren, we got two minutes left.
I got to ask you this.
I got to ask you this.
Why is this hour important?
With all the things going on, we're in an election year.
It's all coming up.
We're on the home stretch.
Why is it important to present this hour on the radio?
Answer that.
And then also, I believe, and I don't know if it was you or Gene who told me this, but that you were fascinated by the fact that an officer would have taken the Fort Pillow action on behalf of the defense of the women civilians.
And those two questions to you.
Yeah.
I listened to your segment.
You recommended, we listened to that on the way down where Gene told the story of Fort Pillow, and I didn't realize that.
That really he took it to, you know, why would cavalry attack a fort?
It just didn't make any sense.
And he didn't need to attack it.
It wasn't part of some larger strategy.
And that's something conveniently left out of the horror stories about Fort Pillow on Wikipedia.
And you search, they don't say why Forrest attacked.
And it was because there were these people, these particular people that were rampaging through the countryside there and terrorizing the women and everything.
A lot of them were black.
And, you know, I find that very easy to believe.
But to answer your question, part of what made this whole, part of what made this so special this day, I mean, Gene and I, as he said, we were standing at the hearth in the spot where Forrest Casket was when they're reburying.
Why were they reburying him?
Because of these Marxists and leftists and Jews that are trying to iconoclasm, they're trying to destroy the symbols of our heritage, Southern heritage.
And while we were standing there, that's when we got talking a little bit.
And I mentioned that I was at Charlottesville, and then he said I was too.
So it was amazing that we discovered we were all three at Charlottesville while we're standing there at the hearth of Forrest's home.
I picked up a bunch of books there.
One of them is American Terrorists, Lincoln's Armies in the South by Michael Andrew Grissom.
And then The Unholy Crusade by Lachlan Seabrook.
And this is, I've been, we read it the whole way home while we were driving.
I had my little car light on and I was reading some of this to dad.
And yeah, the South got the treatment by this, you know, I use the term Zog.
I don't know if you guys use that term.
The South got the treatment by this system, by this American government, that it later meted out to Germany and so many other places.
The treatment that Gaza is getting right now at the hands of Israel, I don't think people realize to what extent.
Certainly, you know, they say it's lost cause myths.
It's all this lost cause mythology.
Well, reading these books, reading, just getting into them, it makes total sense to me that this history has been completely buried, particularly outside the South, that people don't know.
We've all heard about Sherman and his march to the sea, but we don't realize the extent to which they waged a war of blockade to starve people, to burn out their homes, kill civilians, and then a racial occupation, an occupation of black troops and of racial tyranny.
I want to thank Gene Andrews again and you, my friend, for coming on.
We got 20 seconds left.
Why was this hour important to present tonight instead of current events and all the other stuff we could have done?
20 seconds.
Because it's the same force, James.
It's the same force.
We got to learn the lessons of history.
It's the same people with the same agenda trying to do the same things.
You know, it's an active issue, them trying to tear down all the symbols of our heritage.
It's the same struggle.
So that's why it's important to realize that other people have fought this.