American Monument: The Quest for Cultural Amnesia

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Monuments have been important for not just centuries, but millennia.

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It is the way that human beings make permanent something that's important to us because people forget.

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Monuments are the ultimate example of a way that you can mark something or someone as important.

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We have to understand how central it is to our cultural memory. Cultural memory is something that some people are trying to erase that's incredibly dangerous.

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If you don't really understand history or you don't know history, you're at a tremendous disadvantage on a number of levels.

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Art, and particularly monuments, are a way that we remember. When somebody decides,

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I don't like that, let's tear it down, I think it ought to be a really, really high bar before we tear down something, even if we don't like it, because it's good to remember things, in some cases, particularly because we don't like it or because it's complicated.

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So when people start actually tearing down valuable, beautiful, expensive, ancient or venerable monuments, it's a bad sign in the culture that says that we don't value history, we want to rewrite history.

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You have people who don't really have a historical sense trying to tell you what they think is the only thing that matters.

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So by wiping away this stuff, they give you no reference points. And so you have to ask yourself, who are these people and what are their standards?

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Where do they get the right to tear down statues? The effort to take down monuments, the campaign to take down monuments, is organized almost exclusively by two communist parties.

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One is the Workers' World Party and the other one is Liberation Road, which was known up until 2019 as the

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Freedom Road Socialist Organization, now called Liberation Road. The Workers' World Party supports

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North Korea, Cuba and Iran, and it's a mixture of Maoism and Trotskyism and Stalinism.

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It's a very strange mix. The other party, Liberation Road, is

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Maoist. It's pro -China, works in their interests, and is the parent group to Black Lives Matter.

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You can see the statue itself is gone, as is the nameplate right out front. And people have been coming by here, just going about their business, going to work, and they see this and they're just saying, wow, oh my gosh, it's gone.

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And they're surprised. And they understandably have questions about this. This was very early this morning, right around 4 o 'clock this morning, when most of our viewers were still sleeping at that hour.

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I also want to go ahead and show you this other video. This is of the statue being towed away.

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This was shortly before 5 o 'clock this morning. So they came in, they did the job. JSO is here making sure things ran smoothly.

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They did it in a very meticulous, methodical manner, removing the statue. I am just so happy today.

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I feel like we're making steps in the right direction. Many of the people doing this, all they know in their minds is that these things represent some sort of oppression.

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They don't know exactly what they represent. They haven't studied the figures that they're trying to tear down in depth at all.

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They're just going along with the narrative that they've been fed. So they've been conditioned to have a negative reaction towards these monuments.

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In this whole area of Keechaw, this is where my family is from, from Keechaw. I think that people should fly their

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Confederate flags at their homes. They should wear their Confederate flag shirts. They should have a little something on their vehicles, you know, to kind of keep their heritage alive.

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When I heard that they were taking down statues, Confederate statues, and I used to be in the

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NAACP, and one of the leaderships in Oklahoma City told me that my family, who were already dead, who support the

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Confederacy, need to be dug up, and their bones need to be put in a pile with the rest of the white folks who fought in the

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Confederacy and burned again. And that's when I burned the NAACP card. You know, you're talking about my family.

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It's rewriting the past to suit the present and to then create something new on its ruins. If we can tear all this down, we can start history over.

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And I've said before, look, the left really wants, the progressive left in particular, wants American history to start in, like, say, 1975.

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They want to forget about all the other stuff because it doesn't work for their agenda. So it's about power, I think, more than anything else.

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If you look at the core of this ideology, if you can paint the past as being racist, as being detrimental to certain groups in society, well, then that gives you power.

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I think the key word in all of this is power. Power doesn't reason. It takes charge and wrecks.

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I think that there's something about the people who want to tear these statues down. There's such a frenzy to do it.

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It's almost, you know, a war dance that they take in the moonlight and they want to destroy.

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The monuments are one of the ways in which we memorialize, in which we remember where we came from and who we are.

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These are landmarks. If we're going to say only people who are perfect are going to get statues, we might as well not have statues, right?

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America's founders were not perfect, and they were certainly not 21st century progressive Americans.

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And so they hold views that we would consider to be dated, that we would consider to be wrong, and that we wish, perhaps, that they had changed at that era.

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Our history in the West, of course it's checkered, but it led to tremendous freedom.

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Ultimately, it's a beautiful thing. We need to preserve that history, and people who don't understand that, they don't understand how bad it can go when you don't appreciate your history.

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Well, even if there weren't craftsmen who could take rock and create beautiful monuments, rocks would be monuments themselves.

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We think of Plymouth Rock as being a good example of this. It happens to be a significant rock because it's the place the pilgrims first stepped off onto the

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United States, and what is today the United States, and settled. So there's a significance attached to these inanimate objects.

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Monuments to explorers tend to not just give us a sense of what happened, who came over, where they came over, time, place, names, dates.

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They also give us something to think about when it comes to the spirit that they evoked.

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Oftentimes an adventurous kind of spirit. They were hard workers.

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They were very brave people. And so when we look at a statue of, say, Christopher Columbus, oftentimes we're not just looking at the significance of the discovery he made, though we are doing that at the very least, but we're also looking at all the deprivations that were suffered and the sacrifices made to make that discovery possible.

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And Columbus represents not just himself, but many others who made the same kinds of sacrifices he made, and the people who even came after him.

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There's a place here in Manhattan called Columbus Circle. It's named after, can you guess? Yes, Columbus, that's right,

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Christopher Columbus. And there's a beautiful column with a huge statue of Columbus at the top of it.

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Columbus traditionally has been the hero of Italian -Americans. And I think with a lot of figures, and Columbus is one of them, they have been redefined by the radical left, mainly through books by Howard Zinn as some genocidal maniac.

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Now, I think anybody, if you study Columbus carefully, you would say that there are things about him with which you disagree, things that you'd say are not good.

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What happened here to the Indians was decimation. Ninety percent of the people died because the

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Europeans came here. The Europeans had diseases that the Americans had never experienced before, and deadly diseases as well, smallpox on down.

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It was that, diseases, that wiped out most of the

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Indian population north and south. He was a mariner, a navigator.

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He was the captain of a ship. He was good at that, but administering, he had no idea what to do.

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He had all these Spanish soldiers who were there running around looking for gold.

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It was shameful the way Columbus tried to rule these people.

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It was just beyond his competence, and he should never have been charged with it.

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He was a greedy man concerned with gold far more than he was with the souls of these people that he met.

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Much to dislike about Columbus, but that's irrelevant, basically irrelevant.

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We're not here talking about Columbus, the governor of Espanola. Columbus recognized that he had found an otro mundo, an other world, that Europe had never known about.

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Whatever you think about the person who did it, his achievement was monumentally significant.

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The Statue of Freedom on top of the Capitol building is based on Columbia, and Columbia was the symbol by which

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America honored Columbus, and it became the District of Columbia.

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But the idea that he is defined as the author of genocide, as the destroyer of indigenous peoples, that's ridiculous.

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Most people know that 500 years ago, people lived differently. It was a dramatically different world.

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So you take that context when you look at somebody like that. Like anybody else of the 15th century, you're going to find issues with Columbus.

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He doesn't mesh with modern American society. He doesn't hold our racial views. He doesn't hold our views on society at all.

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I mean, this is a man that we could say, well, I mean, he's got some real skeletons in his closet. But let's also remember that Columbus was an outgrowth of European expansion at the time.

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So Columbus, quote unquote, discovering America, if you want to use that term, there's no United States without Columbus.

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I mean, establishing that foothold here in the Americas was a benefit to Western civilization.

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Columbus certainly is someone that we should at least honor in that way, and Americans did for generations.

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You have cities dedicated to him, named after him. You have counties, I mean, Washington, District of Columbia.

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This was somebody that Americans recognized as being a pivotal figure in the establishment of the

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Americas. There's been a movement over the country to rip down statues to Christopher Columbus.

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And some of the Italian community fought back against that. That was completely done by the

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Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Liberation Road. They started that back in the 1990s.

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That is 100 percent a communist program done by American Maoists.

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Christopher Columbus is the symbol of the discovery of America, so he must be erased.

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He's one of the arch villains of history. He's such a hero to Italian Americans that they will not let somebody tear down his statue.

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But of course, as a symbol, he's a big target. Columbus's reputation was begun, really, by Washington Irving.

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Washington Irving wrote a half -fictional biography that had all kinds of stories that were enchanting to the audience in America, but weren't true.

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Samuel Elliott Morrison came along in the 20th century and wrote a biography of him, which was all about his feats as a mariner.

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It did nothing to talk about the real man and his real achievements, yet that was part of the hagiography that was growing around Columbus.

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And that's what I confronted when I wrote The Conquest of Paradise, Christopher Columbus and the

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Colombian legacy. And I wanted to emphasize the point about his failure to appreciate the

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Indians and the nature of the New World. And so this book came out in 1990, and the kind of academic people who want to tear down the patriotic, rah -rah attitude of much of the conventional world, those academics grabbed this and began doing their research to prove how bad

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Columbus was. So they haven't been as successful with Columbus as with the

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Confederate, but that still may be happening. The United States of America would not exist without America's founders.

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Great Britain, of course, is the most powerful nation on Earth. And the patriots, particularly, were signing their death warrants when they signed the

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Declaration of Independence. It was not a foregone conclusion that the patriot side would win.

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And yet they believed so powerfully in the principles of liberty that they could not stand by and let the crown and parliament engage in what they considered to be acts of tyranny.

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They tried everything they could do short of violence until eventually they declared independence and fought for that independence.

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Monuments to the founders are important because the founders exemplified the kind of character, the virtue, and also the kinds of ideals that Americans have been trying to strive for since the inception of the country.

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And so it's a reminder to people of where we came from. These were men who risked everything to secede from Great Britain and to form a new country.

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And that's something that is taken for granted often today for people who don't understand how difficult that was.

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But these men would have been tried for treason and convicted and killed if they lost.

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And so it was an incredible sacrifice that they made. And many of the important founding fathers, the ones that we consider to be significant, had many valuable character traits that we want to try to keep in our public discourse.

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We want to pass them down. We want people to be like them and have the same kind of courage. If there was an individual who

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I could say was the most important man in American history, it would be George Washington. And I think 500 years from now, it's still going to be

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George Washington. His contributions to American history surpass anyone who we could talk about in this particular documentary.

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Washington was the quintessential man. He was a man that was admired by everyone in American society.

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It didn't matter your political leanings. Everyone loved George Washington. He was the glue that held everything together.

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It's why he was chosen as the president of the Philadelphia Convention. It's why he was elected first president of the United States.

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People trusted him. They trusted him because of his character. Washington has been called, and I think accurately, the indispensable man.

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He is central to America winning its independence from Great Britain. If he didn't show up at the

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Constitutional Convention, probably a document would not have been produced that would be ratified by the states.

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His support of the Constitution, his willingness to serve as president for two terms, utterly critical.

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I think everyone agrees if you have to make a list of who is the most important founder, everyone would put

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Washington at the head of that list. This is a man that willingly turned down power when the war was over.

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He could have marched right into Philadelphia and just taken over the government as a military dictator. Others had done it in Europe.

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Washington went in and resigned his commission to the Congress. I give this up. He also went back home to Virginia and gave up every political position he could think of, including vestry men in his church.

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He did not take the kind of power that would have been expected for a conquering general of his stature and his status.

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So there's a monument in Washington, D .C. to him, Washington Monument, and many monuments across the country to him because of the character that he exhibited, the sacrifices that he made, and the ideals that he fought for.

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He wanted to be the American Cincinnatus, the man who went out and fought, saved the republic, and then went back home to his plow.

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He loved his life at the farm. And so I think that character of Washington, this honesty, this integrity that Washington had, is something that Americans need to know about.

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It doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum we're on today. Now, of course, on the other side of that, you're going to say, well, the man was a slave owner.

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He was. He held racial views that were not in line with what we think today. That's true. All the things that Washington did far outweigh that.

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This is a man who saved the United States. There's no United States without George Washington. There's no Constitution without George Washington.

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I think that if you're going to say that anybody should have a statue, it should be George Washington. The Washington Monument at Washington University, just north of here, it's been targeted for taking it down and stuff.

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What do you think about that? Do you think George Washington should stay or go? And if so, why? I think he should leave.

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Like I said, f*** the colonizers like him. So that's all I have to say.

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That's it? So the founders were influenced by certain ideas, notably that we were created in the imago dei, the image of God, and therefore we're capable of acting rationally to govern ourselves.

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We don't need to govern ourselves simply by force and violence. The idea that humans are sinful, this was critically important.

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James Madison writes in Federalist 51, if men were angels, government wouldn't be necessary.

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But men aren't angels, so we need government, and we have to be very careful with this government. We don't want a lot of concentrated powers.

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So we want separation of powers, we want checks and balances, we want federalism, in order to assure that this national government will not become tyrannical.

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Enlightenment political thought at this time was going exactly the opposite direction. They wanted a strong central government run by the experts.

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America's founders would have nothing to do with that. Jefferson is someone who has always been attached to different elements of American society.

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If you're on the left, you could say Jefferson's your guy. If you're on the right, you could say Jefferson's your guy. Because Jefferson was something to everyone.

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And in fact, I've said before, we're really all Jeffersonians in America. Whether it's our critique of Wall Street, that's a very

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Jeffersonian thing. Whether it's our love for the environment, that's a Jeffersonian thing. Whether it's our love, if you're on the right, for small, for local communities, for federalism, that's a very

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Jeffersonian thing. So Jefferson can mean a lot to a lot of people. And he was, in so many ways, the most brilliant man that America has ever produced.

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The only other person you could say, or two other people in that regard, would be Hamilton or Franklin. But certainly Jefferson is right there.

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And the earliest factions, political factions, were both essentially off -suits of Jefferson. The Whigs and the

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Democratic -Republicans. So I think to tear Jefferson down is tearing down America. When Jefferson's memorial was put up in the 1930s,

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Franklin Roosevelt was certainly an admirer of Jefferson. And I think if you go back throughout history, you can find that through many political figures.

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They really admired Thomas Jefferson. Again, some on the left, some on the right. You know, the man was one of the greatest political philosophers the world has ever seen.

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He should be revered. The charge of slavery is a very serious one, right? This is an evil, horrible institution that we rightly condemn.

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I think it's important to note that slavery is going on throughout the globe. Of the 12 .5

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or so million Africans stolen from Africa, about 3 or 4 percent were brought to the

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British North America. All the rest went down to South America or the Caribbean. And I say that not to defend the

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British North Americans, but just to say, look, it's not as if America's colonists were doing something uniquely evil.

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This was something that was practiced just literally everywhere. It was practiced in America before white people showed up.

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It was practiced in Africa. So we have to understand the context of the times. By the time we get to the late 18th century, fortunately, many founders are coming to recognize that this is an evil, pernicious institution.

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And here's where I think sometimes those who protest the founders are profoundly mistaken. They believe that all founders are the same, but they aren't.

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You have plenty of founders who never owned an enslaved person. People like Roger Sherman, John Adams.

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You have founders like John Dickinson, who was at one time the largest slave owner in Delaware, who voluntarily freed all of his slaves at great personal cost.

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You then have founders like George Washington, who owned a lot of slaves and freed them in his will. And then you have the harder cases of those founders who owned slaves and did not free them.

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And I think it's not unreasonable to critique someone like a Thomas Jefferson. He did not make every effort to free as many of his slaves as he could have.

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And that's a fair critique that we can make. Let me also point out that he hated slavery in many respects.

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He drafted what eventually became the Northwest Ordinance, banning the expansion of slavery into the old

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Northwest. He didn't want to see slavery expanded. He encouraged Congress to ban the international slave trade.

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He, in multiple instances, spoke out against slavery. So even on slavery, he's not maybe as dark and evil as we would think.

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It's pretty hard to turn young Americans against their own country if they regard

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Thomas Jefferson and George Washington as heroes. But if they regard them as scumbags who exploited black

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Americans and were just horrible people, well, that basically brings the whole country into disrepute.

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And if you want a revolution, you have to demonize the old order. The mark they made upon this country is still with us today.

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And it's important that we understand that. If we don't understand that, we don't know how to properly steward the country that we have.

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And we will be easily taken over if we don't understand what they were fighting for, what kind of government they set up.

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Understanding these things is very important. I think we always have to be honest that people in our past, they lived in a different world.

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When you look at somebody like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, you know, these were wealthy landowners living in the

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South in the 18th century. So to judge them by that, I mean, we can all condemn slavery.

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Obviously, we do. But you don't look at somebody through a single lens.

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You say this defines them. What Washington did and what Jefferson did enabled us as a nation to end the slave trade, to end slavery, ultimately to blow that off and to say, we're only going to look at this thing about them with which we disagree.

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That's the sort of thing they do in places like in China in the Cultural Revolution. They try to ferret out one thing.

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Stalin did this. It's a profoundly graceless, cruel way of looking at human beings.

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Stalin said, show me the man and I will show you the crime. In other words, everyone, if I dig deep enough,

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I can find something. That ultimately is a very dark, destructive way to live.

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If you're holding anyone to that kind of a standard, nobody can stand. There's none of us who doesn't have some sin or some mistake that we made.

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And if you allow a culture to slide in that direction, ultimately it will come for you. Well, look in South Africa, you know, just ripping down statues of Cecil Rhodes.

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Anything to do with that colonial history after the Cuban Revolution, the

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Khmer Rouge, they just erased everything. They started a new calendar from the day the communists took over, the

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Khmer Rouge took over. All links to the past were wiped out as much as they possibly could be.

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You look in Afghanistan, the Taliban, which has a very strong Maoist component.

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It's as much Maoist as it is Muslim. One of the very first things the Taliban did when they took over Afghanistan was to rip down to dynamite those famous Buddhist statues.

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This is nothing unusual about what's happening in America, and we have to see this in the context of a communist movement.

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Russia, during the Soviet Union, the czarist statues and things commemorating the czar were taken down and replaced with almost godlike statues to heroes of the revolution.

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You can look at other communist countries. I think of Maoist China during their cultural revolution.

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Mao took down around 80 % of many of the historical artifacts, which included monuments.

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He took down the majority of ancient Chinese cultural markers, and this was by design.

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This is because communist countries want to try to create a separation between people and their past.

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It makes them more controllable. People who don't understand where they came from don't necessarily know where they're going.

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There's an obligation towards their ancestors and towards the past in defending the things that were true and valuable.

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Their ancestors believed that they've tried to continue, and if you can separate them from that, then they won't have those virtues.

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They won't have inspiration to draw from. Take away their cultural heroes, and they're much more docile, and they don't have the identity that makes it hard for totalitarian regimes to control a population.

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You can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail a revolution. In the early days of the taking down of monuments,

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I think of there was a monument to Confederate soldiers, kind of a general monument in Durham, North Carolina, and the groups that were invested in taking that monument down, it was one of the first ones taken down, were funded by outright

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Marxists. No KKK, no fascist USA! The protesters say they stand by destroying the statue.

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Will of the people in Durham and Charlottesville and across the country is that we need to tear down these Confederate monuments.

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We need to tear down every vestige of white supremacy. The first three protesters were released on a $10 ,000 bond.

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Now that they're out, they say they'll keep organizing until all of the Confederate statues get torn down. There's revolutions taking place all throughout the country right now, and the revolution won't be stopped.

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They were acquitted or the charges were dropped, but I know them all. I read the

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Workers' World paper. They boast about their members being involved. They name them.

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They name the people who are arrested. And if you Google their names with Workers' World, they're all members of the

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Workers' World Party. And there are numerous articles in Workers' World about the campaign, about why they're doing it, about where they're doing it, and the leaders of the campaign.

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There's no argument about this. They're very proud of it. When you have people doing things like ripping down monuments, you have mobs which are not noted for their rational thinking.

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No KKK, no fascist USA! It's just a bloodbath.

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It's almost like a demonic spirit takes over the mob, and they just go after one thing after the other until they collapse.

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This is a mob mentality. It's not being reasonable. It has no sense of history. It is really anti -history.

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It wants to destroy history and memory and our civilization. The ideologues are engaged in trying to rip down the identity and the memory of a country.

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And this is no different than other regimes throughout history that have been Marxist. This is what they do.

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They want to separate people from anything that would confer some kind of a familial or national obligation.

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Anything that they could draw inspiration from, any heroes that they could look to. They want to take all that away because that could stand in the way of the revolution.

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A lot of these monuments that have been taken down recently, many of them, are essentially gravestones.

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They're memorials to people who died, who often sacrificed greatly, suffered greatly, and then died to defend hearth and home, family, region.

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And these kinds of virtues of bravery, duty, allegiance to home, fulfilling one's obligation, these are the things that these monuments are representing.

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And it's a reminder to people as they pass by a monument like that, that the land on which they live came at a price.

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We should not take for granted the blessings that we have. I first moved to Pensacola in 1995.

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Pensacola being the first permanent European settlement, you know, is quite historical, and it's reflected throughout the entire city from various churches that are hundreds of years old and other historical buildings that we have in the area.

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When we saw the Antifa and Black Lives Matter come here, I think their whole goal was just to disrupt, to cause confusion.

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When they did certain things like blocking our bridge, we have a bridge that connects

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Pensacola and Gulf Breeze called the Three Mile Bridge, where they stood on the bridge blocking people from getting to work, getting to the hospital if they needed to, or whatever was there, they stood there just blocking it.

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So at that time, it was a time of anger for me that they would have the audacity to bring that nonsense here to Pensacola.

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What was here was what was called a Confederate monument. It was a 30 -foot tall solid granite monument that was put in place in 1891.

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It was privately funded, and the reason why they raised that monument was because during the

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Civil War, oftentimes soldiers would leave for a battle.

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A son, a father, a brother would leave for a battle that would never be heard from again.

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They don't know what happened to them. If they had passed away, if they deserted, what?

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They didn't know what had happened to them. So as a way of closing the wounds of their loved ones who were lost, they erected a monument.

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There was no name on it. It was for the Confederate soldier, and it was a way of bringing closure to that war where they can say that those who left and we've never saw them again, this is how we're going to honor them.

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And what that Confederate monument was doing was bringing closure to the families who were living here who lost loved ones during the

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Civil War. It was not a statement of the South will rise again or nonsense like white supremacy.

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It was simply to help those families bring closure to a war that was very devastating to our entire nation.

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Over 600 ,000 people gave their lives on the North and the South, and this was a way of bringing closure to that war.

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People were cognizant of the cost of that war and the cataclysmic effect of that war on American society,

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North and South. You had sons that never came home. You had brothers that never came home, fathers that never came home.

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Whether it was the transformation of the government, the transformation of society, the loss of loved ones, the transformation of the economy, all these things are going on at this time, and people wanted to remember.

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The statues of Confederates did not go up until mostly after 1898, which was the

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Spanish -American War. That's when Southerners showed that they were at least equally willing to fight in the

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Spanish -American War along with the Northerners. It had nothing to do with racism. If you look at the inscriptions on the

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Confederate monuments, an overwhelming majority say nothing about racism or slavery. They were largely for purposes of reconciliation.

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Plus you had people with some money by the late 19th century. You didn't have any in the South right after the war, and there was some discussion about putting monuments in cemeteries to remember the dead, but they had no money to do it.

33:36

So by the time you get to the end of the 19th, early 20th century, you start seeing a situation where there is an ability to fundraise.

33:42

You didn't have that before, so now you have monument construction. But there were other monuments too. It wasn't just to the

33:48

Civil War. You also had monuments being built to the American War for Independence. You had Europeans building monuments at this time, and these were works of art, and I think that's something that people lose out of this.

33:57

You had prominent sculptors being hired all over the United States, and it wasn't something that was racially driven.

34:04

It was simply a remembrance. These are great Americans, or you had monuments being built to the Founding Fathers or other people.

34:10

I mean, this was a certain concerted effort to try to remember our past in a way that was constructive for future generations to emulate.

34:18

So war memorials are part of the grieving process. People who fought against Southerners or Southerners who fought against Northerners would attend the dedications to monuments to the enemy they fought against, and this was part of the reconciliation process.

34:33

And so there are monuments also to reconciliation, and taking them down is a sad thing because what it means is that we have forgotten about that reconciliation.

34:43

Resident DeJuan Knight thinks the statue should come down. I question why a city that is a

34:50

United States city would actually have a statue of a person who was rebelling against the

34:55

United States of America. Virginia Byers just thinks it's a symbol of racism. It was intentionally designed to make people of color feel afraid.

35:07

We don't need that. We all need to get together and love each other because a piece of stone or whatever it's made of, it's not helping.

35:19

Venus Washington says it just makes race relations worse in this community. No one wants to see, obviously some people want to see it, but no one needs to see that to be reminded of people who fought for racism and to keep slaves.

35:32

It's completely racist, and it needs to be removed. What we have here are the steps that were leading up to the

35:39

Confederate monument. And as you can see, what the cancel culture has done has erased what was written on these steps.

35:47

Each Confederate state's name was a part of the entire monument. So it wasn't just the monument across the street, this was also a part of it.

35:57

And the cancel culture went so far as to erase the names of states, which were at one time a part of Confederacy.

36:07

So what my emotions are as I see all this is an incredible sadness that there are people who think that you can erase history by tearing down monuments to history.

36:24

History happened. You cannot erase it. And so it began with a number of protesters, most didn't even live here, came to this area and started protesting this monument.

36:39

And in fact, it was defaced. Pink paint was thrown on it at one time.

36:45

And then they began protesting, becoming more vociferous after George Floyd's death.

36:52

They used that as a catalyst to say, we need to defund the police. We need to get rid of these racist monuments and so forth, which is not what it was, but they used that as a ruse.

37:05

They believe that the Civil War was fought by the Confederate simply to preserve slavery.

37:13

And it was not. The Civil War was not solely about slavery. It was a very complicated war, as most wars are, that covered a variety of issues, including trade and economics.

37:27

And slavery was a part of it, but it was not the prevailing issue. They were fighting to protect their homeland.

37:34

They were fighting to protect their houses, their families. The vast, vast majority of them were not even slave owners.

37:42

They couldn't afford it. They had to stand to defend themselves, their families and their property.

37:49

They really had no choice. And many blacks did fight because they saw it was a cause to protect their homeland, their houses and their families.

37:58

But for so many who do not study history properly, they saw the word Confederate and immediately equated that with slavery and were offended by it.

38:08

They then went before the Pensacola City Council. They actually didn't go before the council because during the

38:14

COVID situation, city council closed. You couldn't even appear before them.

38:19

You had to call in and they would give you three minutes. And I called in with my three minutes of why you should leave this monument alone.

38:26

But they listened instead to the council culture and they voted to remove this statue.

38:33

They paid over $300 ,000, money they don't really have, to remove this monument.

38:42

You did not see counter protests from the right pushing back.

38:48

In fact, none of us believed they would get as far as they did get, actually tearing down the

38:55

Confederate monument. We didn't believe it was going to happen. And the Pensacola City Council were oblivious to what we were saying.

39:04

It had no effect on them whatsoever. And they didn't care. They had their mind made up before public comments were even taken.

39:14

I think it was almost like they felt like they had to be a part of this movement and kowtow to what the leftist anarchists wanted to bring to this fair city of Pensacola.

39:29

I think that the kind of people we see wanting to tear these things down, like Pol Pot, you just raise everything to the ground.

39:36

They bought into an ideology which makes you simply wrong and it makes them simply right.

39:42

I think these people live in a great deal of despair. There are two ways to think about critical thought.

39:49

The normal way is to see critical thinking as a matter of reform.

39:55

You see this in science. The Ptolemaic system of the universe was a great system of astronomy.

40:04

It predicted eclipses and all the rest of it. But Copernicus found some incoherences in it, so he had to ask some pretty deep questions.

40:13

Well, for example, one would be, we are assuming that the Earth is the center of the universe.

40:18

And he said, well, if you assume that the Earth is going around the sun, rather than the sun going around the

40:25

Earth, we could resolve some of these incoherences. Well, that's pretty wild.

40:32

But he began to make observations at others. And the long and short of it is that after a century or so, people came to accept that.

40:40

It wasn't obvious. So here you have an example of critical thinking by a

40:46

Ptolemaic astronomer who goes deep into the resources of his science and finds a way by making an adjustment in his thinking to solve the problem.

40:57

We talk about Copernicus as if he carried on a palace revolution, as if he were a

41:02

Marxist that came in and overturned the whole of the science. But you see, he didn't.

41:08

Copernicus was not a revolutionary. He raised the hard questions that eventually led him to challenge one of the fundamental axioms of the science.

41:16

Let's call that reformist thinking. And a good society with thoughtful people usually can come up with ways of remedying the situation.

41:27

Now let's look at another kind of criticism. Marx looks at the world and he sees a lot of injustice.

41:33

And he thinks he's hit on the key. So he says in the Communist Manifesto that all history is the story of class struggle.

41:41

Not most of it, all of it. What he's done is he's stepped out of the tradition he's inherited, completely outside of it.

41:51

And he's spiritualized the whole into an order of class struggle. Religious principles are just the result of class struggle.

42:00

Moral principles are the result of class struggle. Legal principles, art, it's all class struggle all the way down.

42:07

And this attracts a certain kind of person who is alienated from tradition for all sorts of reasons.

42:12

There's become kind of a rage, I think, against the generation preceding them and perhaps the generation preceding their parents' generation.

42:21

So their parents and their grandparents. And oftentimes when you look at someone who's a social justice activist engaged in trying to take down these monuments, you'll often find that there's a bitterness that doesn't seem to make sense because these people that they're usually against have been dead for a long time.

42:43

Why are they so bitter against people they've never met, that they don't know much about? And really it's a bitterness against present circumstances.

42:51

It's a bitterness against perhaps their families. It's a bitterness against the country that they live in. It's a bitterness about the fact that they aren't getting what they want out of life.

43:00

And so it's easy to blame something else. And so this is one of the things that's been blamed.

43:06

These historical monuments. That there's forces outside of their control that are making them suffer in the lives that they currently are living because of some kind of decision or decisions that were made before they ever came along.

43:21

But this is an irrational form of criticism because it inverts tradition.

43:28

It eliminates tradition completely. But if you eliminate tradition, you do not have the resources, that tacit dimension of potentialities and powers, legal, moral, and otherwise.

43:39

You don't have those resources to make the correction. Let's call that total criticism.

43:45

Total criticism leads to the desire for total dominion, and that requires total power.

43:54

If people think this way, then the monuments have to go. Not only the monuments, but whole classes of people have to go.

44:07

You can see it right now. It has fallen. There it is. Let's go. Breaking news here on News 4.

44:15

We were right here. They have taken down the Confederate statue. Albert Pike here.

44:22

Come over here, Brooks. Let me move out of the way. This is history in the District of Columbia. You can see they are now standing on top of the

44:29

Albert Pike statue. This is a Confederate officer. Excuse me, sir. This is a

44:35

Confederate officer, and you can see them hitting it right now. We were here when this happened.

44:49

I'm a Floridian. I'm a seventh -generation Floridian, and my family immigrated to Florida when

44:55

Spain owned Florida. So we've been here way before Florida was a state. And when I grew up,

45:01

I knew I had Confederate ancestors. My grandmother had Confederate money in the garage, and my brother and I used to play with it like Monopoly money.

45:09

And my grandmother had over the mantel the iconic portrait of General Leon Traveler, and I was told

45:14

I had Confederate ancestry, and I knew that they fought for freedom. In graduate school,

45:20

Dr. Ron Paul was a big influence on me. He had quoted an abolitionist.

45:28

He was a Yankee. But on the side of the war, he supported the Southern states because he basically said if you invade free people and at gunpoint submit them to a government that they do not want under the pretense, and I'm paraphrasing, under the pretense of freeing slaves, instead of freeing anyone, you have enslaved every single man, woman, and child in that state.

45:51

And that message when I was in graduate school was very profound to me. Lee believed that if a state invades another, or if the central government invades a state, the union is dissolved.

46:04

That's very important. When the invasion took place, it's over. There is no union any longer.

46:11

It's held together by no power but the agreement by which they meant honor. They didn't think they were breaking with another country.

46:17

They just thought that they were going to form another union, that they were free to enter it and they were free to leave it.

46:22

And when he saw a war between the states, he had to defend his way of life.

46:29

He had to defend his country. He had to choose a side and he chose his homeland.

46:35

If I was in the war today, I would have fought for the union. I would have fought for the North because I would want to preserve this great experiment.

46:44

But Robert E. Lee was a patriot and a Christian gentleman who fought for his beliefs.

46:50

And even if you don't agree with all of his beliefs, you've got to admire that man's courage.

46:56

I'm 73 years old and during my boyhood, I did have an interest in the American Civil War and I read about it.

47:02

And soon I started realizing I needed to write books that corrected the critical history of the

47:08

Civil War and Reconstruction, as it is told in academia today. What I mean by critical, primarily biased against the

47:16

Southerners, as though white Southerners had nothing to do and were not interested in doing anything except abusing blacks and lynching them.

47:24

If you look at the inscriptions on the Confederate monuments, an overwhelming majority say nothing about racism or slavery.

47:31

In the rare cases that they do, during the Reconstruction era, some of the states, they were taken over by renegade, vassal regimes of the

47:40

Republican Washington government. And they were crooked. They used black vote to get into office there.

47:46

That led to higher taxes. And the people that paid taxes were the property owners.

47:52

And the property owners were typically overwhelmingly white. Many of them ended up losing their homes because of that.

47:59

So there was a bitter aftertaste of what they called Negro rule. Although it wasn't really

48:04

Negro rule, it was carpetback rule. So in a few instances, you will find monuments that celebrate a return to what they called white supremacy.

48:15

But the misconstruction of that is it was all about race. In some cases, maybe it was.

48:21

But there was also this secondary factor. We live through misrule.

48:28

There was a hit piece written by the Atlantic entitled The Myth of the Kindly General Lee, which has become the boilerplate piece that anybody on the left cites to say that Lee was a terrible guy.

48:38

There was also a book by a woman named Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Reading the Man, where she had access to a trove of documents that had never been seen before that supposedly shed light onto the real character of Robert E.

48:49

Lee. It theoretically debunked Douglas Southall Freeman's multi -volume work on Robert E. Lee.

48:55

The problem with all of it is that it's shoddy research. Even Pryor herself admits at times that she doesn't really have enough evidence to say the things she's saying, but yet she says them anyways.

49:06

Lee took a job as president of Washington College. He turned the school around. It was in financial ruin. Pryor brings out some accusations that were made against Lee there that he somehow condoned a

49:16

KKK chapter forming there. He condoned violence against blacks in the community where Washington Lee is located.

49:24

But if you go back and look at the faculty minutes, there's no evidence of that. In fact, it's explicit that Lee was against these particular things.

49:31

So who are you going to believe? Some hearsay, are you going to believe the faculty minutes which were published to Pryor? Pryor Lee is nothing more than a middle -class

49:38

American who really doesn't deserve our esteem. He was simply a guy with a foot fetish who wasn't a great

49:45

Christian. I mean, these are things that people are trying to say. You even look at the church that's saying, Robert E.

49:51

Lee is taken down because he wasn't a real Christian. You know, we finally got the statue of Lee taken down in Lee Park and have gotten the name of the park returned to its original

49:59

Oak Lawn Park. We still have massive monuments to white privilege and supremacy in Pioneer Plaza downtown, and they need to go.

50:08

Robert E. Lee was one of the most devout men you'd ever meet if he was walking around today. There was nobody in America after the war that could impugn

50:15

Lee's character. This was a man that they considered to be the highest level of the American ideal. Christmas Day, 1862, in the middle of the

50:23

Civil War, he writes his life. I commence this holy day, dearest Mary, by writing you.

50:29

My heart is filled with gratitude to Almighty God for his unspeakable mercies.

50:35

What should have become of us without his crowning help and protection? I've seen his hand in all the events of the war.

50:43

Oh, if our people would only recognize it and cease from their vain self -boasting and adulation.

50:50

How strong would be my belief in our final success and happiness to our country. For in him alone

50:57

I know is our trust and safety. Robert E. Lee himself was modest.

51:03

He said, I don't make a statue for me. People made a statue of Lee because they wanted to honor

51:09

Lee, but it wasn't done right after the war. The war ended in 1865. There had to be some reconciliation before that could be done.

51:17

They might have disagreed with his stance on the war. They might have called him the enemy. But after the war was over, Lee was magnanimous in defeat.

51:24

This is a man that said, look, let's put down the sword. Let's reconcile. We're not going to say anything bad about Northerners.

51:30

Let's get back together. Let's actually put the union back together and move forward with our lives. He didn't make any money on his name.

51:37

Lee's actions as a slave owner, he worked hard after he did free many of them with his own money during the war, which, by the way, was illegal.

51:45

He did it anyways. He worked very hard to ensure these people would not be re -enslaved. So Lee was complicated.

51:52

I mean, he's a man of his time. He didn't hold views that we hold today on race. There's no doubt about that. He certainly didn't really care for slavery, but he also lived in a slave -holding society, so he knew that there was all these contradictions.

52:04

And I think Lee's actions speak louder than his words. As far as there's another attack made on Lee about whipping slaves and causing great damage, there's no evidence of this.

52:13

It's, again, hearsay. Virginia's Democratic Governor Ralph Northam said the bronze statue of Lee should be removed from its pedestal as soon as possible.

52:21

Yes, that statue has been there for a long time. But it was wrong then, and it is wrong now.

52:29

He's a traitor. That's the other image you get. People, even conservatives, people like Alan Gelso, who's made a cottage industry out of calling

52:35

Lee a traitor. Lee commits treason. What you're looking at is someone who raised his hand against the

52:43

Constitution, against the flag he had taken an oath to serve under. How do you write a biography of someone who does something like that?

52:53

That's a challenge in its own right. Can you imagine Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stevens, treason?

53:04

They committed treason against the United States of America, and their statues are still here because their states put them here.

53:10

If you're going to say Lee's a traitor, well, then you have to say the founding generation were all traitors. George Washington's a traitor.

53:15

Thomas Jefferson's a traitor. The British would have called him that. So if we're going to take down monuments to traitors, well, then we should take down monuments to those men as well.

53:22

And I consider Lee, and I wrote a chapter on Lee in one of my books, a real American hero. I mean, he was. This is a man who we should all respect, particularly in his actions after the war, to try to heal the wounds of the war and move forward.

53:33

He didn't ask for any clemency, but he certainly should be granted that today.

53:39

All those neo -Confederates down in the South who were flying the flag for the lost cause are wrong.

53:48

We'll tell you what the war was really about. It was about slavery. It was about saving the Union. I'm a member of the

53:57

United Daughters of the Confederacy. The local chapter, they were given permission in 1903 to erect a monument to their dead.

54:04

It's beautiful. It's about 19 feet tall. It's granite and bronze. It's a work of art, and it says,

54:11

To the memory of the Confederate dead, 1861 to 1865. So he is not site -specific or battle -specific or person -specific.

54:21

They dedicated him on General Lee's birthday in 1904. The stores in Gainesville closed, and it was a patriotic event.

54:30

There was food, and it was just a very patriotic, wonderful American history moment that these women had.

54:37

When he was erected, they didn't have the right to vote, and they raised the money for a monument to their dead.

54:48

It was such a beautiful tribute. The county commission decided that they wanted to remove him, and they decided that they voted to send him to a museum.

55:02

The museum said no, and I spoke at all of the committee meetings and the county commission meetings. He must stay.

55:08

He must stay. If you want to do anything, then erect a monument right beside him to the veterans of World War I that didn't come home and the

55:17

Korean veterans that didn't come home. They finally sent the question to the Alachua County Veterans Group.

55:25

I don't remember, Veterans Council, Advisory Council, something. And I kind of felt better about that because at least they were asking veterans what should be done with a monument to veterans.

55:37

They voted unanimously that he should stay. And so the next county commission meeting, that was completely disregarded, and they voted to scrap him because he was, quote, a monument to white supremacy and he must be destroyed.

55:53

He had no value. C .S.

56:08

Lewis found that as words die, they take on a halo. They don't point out to the world, but they point in to me.

56:15

You know, somebody who talks about a radical dude probably does not know what radical really means. These words become things that just move their heart.

56:23

They don't point to the world anymore. They don't point outward. And race has certainly become that.

56:30

If you ask them who's Lee, they would say he's a racist. They know nothing else because they don't know a thing about him.

56:37

They just know the bad word, racist, you know, or fascist.

56:42

They don't know what a fascist is. It's just a bomb that they throw at you. It's just the last thing that you want to be called.

56:48

And it all has to do with their violence, with their emptiness. They don't mean anything. I don't know how you can disrespect someone's ancestor and not have more division and create more division and more strife.

57:01

If a state calls you and you serve, and then at any moment in the future, the state decides we might not ought to have done that, and so we're going to just erase, you know, all those men that gave their lives when we asked them to.

57:17

If the state asks you to give your life, and you do, so let's take all of them down like they didn't go, like their lives meant nothing.

57:26

That's obscene. We don't disrespect veterans. These men did their duty, and many of them fell, and they did give their lives.

57:34

And those mothers didn't get their darling sons back. And those wives and sisters and nieces, they didn't get their ancestors back.

57:43

And it's not a race issue. You know, there were distinguished men of color that served the

57:50

Confederate, free men that served the Confederacy. There were Asian Confederate veterans. There were Native American Confederate veterans.

57:56

There were African American Confederate veterans. So it's not a race issue. It's a service issue.

58:02

To me, it's a veterans issue. The military is, you know, dear to my heart, is what we do to serve, to honor this country.

58:11

I served active duty 10 years in the Air Force. My father before me served 26 years in the

58:19

Air Force and served in Vietnam. And my grandfather was four years in the

58:26

Army and served in World War I. My youngest son was in the

58:31

Marines and was deployed overseas on a ship off the coast of Libya and saw some action there.

58:39

Pensacola is not only a historical city, it is a militarily historical city.

58:47

And even to this day, the naval aviators are trained here in Pensacola. This memorial reflects the different branches of service which fought during World War II and also the many very significant battles that are listed here.

59:03

I sponsored a bill to protect soldiers' and heroes' monuments, beginning with the

59:10

Anglo -Spanish War, the French -Indian War, our Revolutionary War, the

59:16

Battle of Fort Mose, which a lot of people don't really know what that battle was all about.

59:21

Fort Mose is actually in St. Augustine. And so the British were coming to attack that fort, and a call went out to the

59:29

African slaves. If any of you come here and help us defend this fort, you will be free men.

59:37

And that call went out way up to North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia.

59:45

They called it the Gullah Geechee Trail. And they came down to Fort Mose and fought as if their freedom and their life depended on it, and it did.

59:55

And they defeated the British. It was the British Army's first defeat on this continent.

01:00:02

And because of that, in St. Augustine at Fort Mose, the black

01:00:09

American community there were never slaves. And there's a monument erected there for them.

01:00:16

So what my bill did was to protect that monument. It would protect this monument.

01:00:22

It would protect the Confederate monument, protect it from any vandalism, protect it from being removed or being covered up.

01:00:30

If that was done, it was going to be a third -degree felony. We wanted to make it a felony for two reasons.

01:00:38

One, to show the seriousness of what these monuments mean to us and to our nation.

01:00:46

And also because oftentimes those who come in and want to cause a destruction come from out of state.

01:00:54

If it's a misdemeanor, you cannot extradite them back to the state. But if it's a felony, we can.

01:01:01

So we wanted to make it a felony to protect our monuments. Well, at that time, 2019, when my bill was supposed to be heard, that committee chairman refused to hear the bill.

01:01:16

And so the bill died. The next legislative session, same thing happened. It was a repeat.

01:01:21

Would not give the bill a hearing. It was a Republican committee chairman who blocked it at the time.

01:01:28

He was following the leadership of the Republican caucus at that time. In other words, the

01:01:34

House Speaker and the Senate President. They didn't want their important bills to be overshadowed by something that they thought was less important, even though their important bills were still going to pass.

01:01:47

They did not want that particular issue to bring attention to themselves and also to the state of Florida.

01:01:56

And my address was doxed. I did receive some threatening statements, of course, the various name calling that goes with that.

01:02:08

None of that affected me. None of it deterred me at all because I knew what

01:02:15

I was doing was justified in trying to protect the historical monuments that are here.

01:02:23

Our Purple Heart Memorial was even vandalized. And so what that shows you is the senselessness of wanting to just be an anarchist and tear down and destroy for no good solid reason at all.

01:02:39

Critical race theory holds that America is systemically a racist regime.

01:02:45

And that means that anything you might seem to find good in it is not good because it supports the regime.

01:02:52

The whole of the American political tradition is racist all the way down.

01:02:59

Lenin did not say that systemic racism was the whole problem.

01:03:06

He talked about class struggle. And so these people are interested only in the spiritualization of America as a systemically white racist regime.

01:03:19

So they don't too much care about Lenin. A lot of these people would buy into class struggle.

01:03:25

We're just advancing class struggle further. Gloria Steinem once said, if you're interested in reforms for women, that's one thing.

01:03:34

If you're interested in the total transformation of society, that's feminism.

01:03:41

You see the difference? The total transformation of society. Total transformation.

01:03:47

We think of transformation as reform. You know, America has three main institutions to govern this country.

01:03:56

You have the church, you have the family, and you have civil government. What is revolution?

01:04:02

Revolution is overturning the natural hierarchies and institutions of life. This is what you have to understand.

01:04:09

This is alchemy. It's like trying to turn a base metal into gold. Except in this case, we're turning gold into base metal.

01:04:16

I think of the Robert E. Lee monument before it was taken down in Richmond. I went and visited that just to see it before it was taken down.

01:04:24

And there were anti -police slogans all over the place. Spray painted on the base of the monument.

01:04:29

And this is the kind of thing that you wonder, how in the world are those two related?

01:04:34

But they are, in the minds of those who are taking these things down. Monuments represent a past that is bigoted.

01:04:40

Because in the Hegelian dialectic is progressing society, and society is going to eventually arrive at some kind of a utopia.

01:04:47

And so things that came before us, those are the dark ages. We're looking at relics of an oppressive and bigoted past.

01:04:56

And so these things can't have any place in the brave new world that's currently being set up.

01:05:02

And if they do have a place, well, we haven't reached utopia yet. And so we have to knock down anything that would be associated with them.

01:05:10

When they look at these monuments, they're not just seeing the positive qualities, like defense of home, or exploration, or bravery.

01:05:19

What they're seeing is oppression. They are ideologues, and so everything in their minds is oppression.

01:05:27

They can find it pretty much everywhere they look. And so when they look at a monument, they're immediately thinking of all the connections in their minds that would relate to some kind of an oppression.

01:05:36

And they ignore the actual purposes behind them, the reasons that the erectors of these monuments put them up in the first place, which you can see on the plaques surrounding the monuments, or on the monuments.

01:05:48

They tell you, they interpret what the monuments are there for. But ideologues ignore that.

01:05:54

Well, let's interpret these artifacts of history according to a present egalitarian standard of some kind.

01:06:00

And so they engage in what's called presentism. They take a standard from the present, and then they impose it upon the past.

01:06:08

And so they're not looking back to gain inspiration. They're looking forward, often. I think that Confederate monuments are the low -hanging fruit.

01:06:15

They're easy to attack. I think the attacks are unjustifiable. But there's another agenda, a man behind the curtain.

01:06:23

There's something else going on, and it's nonsensical. It was well past time for it to come down.

01:06:29

I'm glad it has come down. I don't think that we should be celebrating this oppressive history that we've had.

01:06:36

It's just a constant reminder of an oppressive history, and it's a constant reminder of what minority groups had to go through.

01:06:45

It's too divisive of a symbol. I don't think you can have unity when you have symbols like that.

01:06:52

And I said, documents I could find said that we were given permission to erect this monument, which means you don't own him.

01:07:01

I think we still own him. So I don't think you can scrap him, and they kind of laughed at me.

01:07:06

But finally, I think just to cover their bases, they said, Then you've got 60 days.

01:07:13

You have to move him at your expense to a location that you can find. The people who wanted him destroyed moaned and groaned at the decision.

01:07:22

No, no, they didn't even want us to have an opportunity to have him back, to rescue him.

01:07:28

Members of the County Commission openly reassured those in attendance that we did not have the money and that there was no way that this could happen.

01:07:38

And certainly that's what it looked like. I mean, we had no money and no place to put him in 60 days.

01:07:57

So I put it in the Lord's hands, and I would walk and just pray and say, Lord, you know, not my will, yours.

01:08:05

Make me an instrument of what you want to happen. You know, use me.

01:08:10

I put everything in my life on hold because I felt like this was my duty.

01:08:16

My duty to these veterans that the monument represented. And there were threats and things, certainly in the periphery, but I didn't look from side to side.

01:08:26

I didn't have the luxury of looking from side to side. And I started receiving calls and emails, hundreds, veterans,

01:08:34

I mean, from all over, Ohio, New York, California. But they were veterans, and it was a monument to fallen veterans.

01:08:42

And that touched a lot of people, and it just kind of got out there. And I started getting donations in the mail, and money started coming in, and people started donating their services.

01:08:55

I did not rescue this monument. The Lord was the choreographer of this.

01:09:00

This was a miracle. He was the choreographer. I was just the dancer. It takes some maturity and some real leadership to say no to spoiled adolescents that are just screaming because they're mad at daddy or something.

01:09:14

That's kind of what this is. It's not rational. It's just a lot of angry emotion. We have an opportunity to stand against it, and if we don't stand against it, we are to blame.

01:09:23

And in history, let me just be a little bit depressing and say people typically haven't stood against this. But I would think that people in the

01:09:30

West ought to have no excuse. We understand the value of these things. We know these past histories.

01:09:36

We've seen it. So we kind of have an obligation to stand against it and say absolutely not, this is wrong. We know where you're coming from, but no.

01:09:44

Charlottesville City Council voted to take Lewis and Clark and the Sacagawea down.

01:09:49

I'd seen that statue every time I went downtown when I was growing up, and it was perfectly obvious to all of us that the

01:09:57

Sacagawea was kneeling. She was looking at the ground with her eyes forward, and she was scouting, which is what she did.

01:10:04

That's why she was leading these men to the West. But then people started saying no, that's not what she's doing.

01:10:11

She's cowering before them, and the whole thing needs to go. When they decided to take them down, it was entirely a vote of city council.

01:10:22

Unless you have people say absolutely not, over my dead body, this is ridiculous. People in leadership a lot of times just don't have a backbone.

01:10:30

Corporate leaders, municipal leaders, they lack courage. They've got their finger in the wind.

01:10:35

Which way is the cultural wind blowing? What do I do so that I don't get canceled or people don't start criticizing me?

01:10:41

Unfortunately, conservatives have dropped the ball on this. In 2015, there were two things that happened I think were significant.

01:10:47

One was same -sex marriage was approved by the Supreme Court in the Obergefell decision, and the other one was a

01:10:54

Confederate battle flag taken down over a Confederate memorial in South Carolina at the state capitol.

01:11:01

After that point, political conservatives that had some mainstream influence did not think it was necessary anymore to defend marriage or to defend monuments to Confederates in particular.

01:11:14

And what this did was it created a situation in which the principles that were important for keeping marriage in place and also keeping monuments in place in general were abandoned.

01:11:27

And so it was like handing the left a blank check. We're not going to defend these things. And then the left kept using the same arguments they did in those particular two cases to push further and further left.

01:11:39

So they pushed for transgenderism. When it comes to the monument issue, they started going after the founding fathers,

01:11:44

Christopher Columbus in California, some of the figures that were instrumental in setting up some of the missions out there,

01:11:50

American colonialism, William McKinley, these kinds of things, they were all targeted immediately.

01:11:56

Even Abraham Lincoln was targeted. There was a statue of his that came down in Boston. Frederick Douglass' monument was even attacked.

01:12:05

Humans have been memorializing and creating statues for at least as long as recorded history, and I think it's central to who we are.

01:12:14

I think by and large, Idahoans are very proud of America and being

01:12:19

Americans. And we're proud of our veterans, particularly because they're the ones who have helped us maintain this country in the state that we've been able to keep it for as long as we have.

01:12:31

In Idaho, we have a Western tradition here. Idaho didn't become a state for 25 years or so after the

01:12:36

Civil War ended, so we don't really have a Civil War influence so much in our public spaces and that sort of thing.

01:12:45

But what we do have is a lot of Western traditions, a lot of ranching, a lot of Native American influence.

01:12:53

We have a number of statues and monuments that honor tribes and tribal members. In Boise earlier this year, we have a monument of Abraham Lincoln that was defaced with feces and blood or something that mimicked blood, and it had a placard on it, essentially a manifesto.

01:13:14

The perpetrator was the self -professed leader of the BLM movement or chapter in Boise.

01:13:21

That to me is an example of pressure that's being applied. These folks feel strongly about their position, and one of the things they want to do is to remove monuments of people like Abraham Lincoln.

01:13:40

My feeling, and I think it's shared by most of the people in our state legislature, is that we need to add to history.

01:13:49

I don't have a problem with BLM or any other organization trying to add to a story, but when they start wanting to tear things down, that troubles me.

01:13:58

I fear that that type of pressure will be felt by local governments, and we've seen that in other states and other localities.

01:14:07

One of the examples that I draw from, actually I drafted the bill before this, but it happened this year, was the school district in San Francisco unilaterally decided to remove something like 40 names of schools that were mostly

01:14:26

Washington, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson. I think there was a Paul Revere in there as well. They just wanted to pull them out and get rid of them, and they wanted to do it on their own.

01:14:36

To me, that's a bigger question. I think that's something that every resident in the state cares about.

01:14:42

You're impacting how that state presents itself and its core beliefs.

01:14:48

To me, there should be another check or an opportunity to pump the brakes on something like that and make sure that a permanent removal makes sense.

01:15:02

As you build new schools, name it whatever you like, but we shouldn't be deleting the names of our founding fathers, in my view, at least not without broader input from the rest of the population.

01:15:12

The last iteration of the bill was House Bill 90, and that came out of the

01:15:18

House. It came through committee and out of the House and went over to the Senate. It didn't get a hearing last session, though I believe if it had, it would pass and go to the governor.

01:15:26

I think it will be relatively popular. It essentially just is still sitting there, but we'll pick it back up this coming session.

01:15:36

I think if you have courage, you have an obligation to stand up and to say, no, we're not going to let this happen.

01:15:43

A real New York hero would be Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt is from New York.

01:15:49

My parents, who came from Europe, my dad came from Greece, my mom came from Germany, their first date, they met in an

01:15:56

English class here in New York City, their first date was to the Teddy Roosevelt House on East 20th

01:16:03

Street here in Manhattan. He's a guy that grew up in New York and in many ways is the best of America.

01:16:09

Theodore Roosevelt, a great American, a laudable individual in so many respects, ironically a political progressive, right?

01:16:17

He's not a conservative. And yet again, he's a man of his times. We should recognize that he's not a 21st century egalitarian, but I think on balance, he made a lot of important contributions before he was president, while he was president, after he was president.

01:16:30

There's a statue of him in front of the Museum of Natural History, beautiful statue.

01:16:36

He's riding a horse, and as a message of inclusiveness, imagine this is more than 100 years ago, they showed him with a black

01:16:46

American and a Native American walking with him. But now that we've decided everybody's bad, they've decided to come after that statue because they don't like the idea that he's on the horse and that these two other figures are walking.

01:17:01

I get that, but it's a gorgeous statue. You have to take it in the spirit in which it was raised.

01:17:08

It was actually way ahead of its time in wanting to include members of what we today would call marginalized groups.

01:17:15

But instead of taking it in that spirit, people take it in the worst way they possibly could. But if you're trying to cancel somebody like Teddy Roosevelt, you are so past rational thinking and common sense.

01:17:27

I mean, it makes no sense. It's preposterous. I really do think that a lot of the people in leadership in this country, they haven't seen how bad things can go.

01:17:38

They kind of think like, you know, we'll be fine if we tear down some statues. You know, Portland has always, since I've been in Oregon, been a very progressive city, but it also has been a great city to go down to.

01:17:50

I'd go down there with my children, we'd walk around, we'd go out to eat. It's great. It just is a war zone in parts now.

01:17:56

And it's violent sometimes, right, even during the day. Businesses are fleeing. There's a haberdashery that I understand has been around for like 90 years, and they're leaving

01:18:05

Portland because they just can't stand the violence. Customers aren't coming down and this sort of thing. Yeah, so Portland has changed.

01:18:11

It's changed for the worse. And again, the government of Portland must be condemned for its lack of action.

01:18:16

I just utterly hate the idea of mobs going around, tearing down statues. It seems to me reasonable for communities to discuss, should we have a statue, we should have a discussion, and the community should decide.

01:18:28

And I would emphasize this, that mobs should not be going around tearing down statues, acting on their own authority, which they don't have, right?

01:18:34

That's just completely wrong. We should let the political process work itself out. What is my race?

01:18:43

What you may see is a woman with dark and complexioned skin, some people call her black.

01:18:48

But what makes me is not only African, but Irish, Scottish, also

01:18:56

Norwegian. I mean, there's a bunch that makes me being what

01:19:02

I am. I had a third grade grandmama who was in Townley, Alabama.

01:19:08

She was a slave to Mr. Nelson, who served in the Confederacy. When the

01:19:13

Union came in and they invaded Townley, they burned it down. And they killed my third grade grandmama.

01:19:20

But they didn't kill the child she was carrying, the two -year -old, who was my second grade grandmama.

01:19:26

And she had her in the blanket and dropped there at the edge of the woods. And they killed every slave that man had.

01:19:33

He ain't had but three of them. But she was one of the three that the Union killed.

01:19:38

Probably raped her, I don't know. But she did. Well, when the slave owner and his wife's family, when they had saw all the smoke, all the livestock dead, all the farms and the ground was all burned up, and they saw something kicking at the edge of the woods, and that some hogs were trying to drag it off.

01:20:01

And that was the two -year -old. Her name is Candace Nelson. She survived, and he had her raised by a family called the

01:20:10

Nelsons who were related to him. So, am I traded to my race? Well, what is my third grade granddaddy?

01:20:17

Is he not my race, too? He's white. He's Irish and Scottish. Is he not my race, too? His blood run through me.

01:20:25

He served in the Confederacy, but he saved a life. Because had it not been for him saving my second grade grandmama's life,

01:20:31

I wouldn't be here. You know, I'm sticking up for my heritage. I think that people should fly their

01:20:40

Confederate flags at their homes. They should have a little something on their vehicles. I'm not from the

01:20:45

North. I'm from the South. And it represents where I come from. This was a country, too.

01:20:51

When they seceded, it became its own country, had its own government, had its own military, had its own currency.

01:20:58

This was our home. This is my culture, my home, my heritage, my history. My activism was really to save the

01:21:05

Confederate monuments and anything Confederate -related from being torn down, taken down, or just erased from history.

01:21:14

And, you know, the society was trying to make it all about racism. But what they failed to realize is that there were black people who were also involved, that they didn't want to see their house being burnt down.

01:21:25

If you burn the plantation down, then where were the black people going to stay? You burn a crop down, what are the black people going to eat?

01:21:31

I mean, this was a home, as well. And another thing, too, people think that if you don't have any high rank, that means you must not be a

01:21:41

Confederate veteran. They don't want to pay attention to the teamsters or to the cooks or the ones that had to tend to your wounds, the ones that had to do the horseshoeing or the ones who had to dig the graves and bury the

01:21:54

Confederate veterans. I mean, they were contributors to helping the South, as well.

01:22:00

Not only that, even your other civilians. What do you call an American? You know, somebody who's born in America, then what do you call a

01:22:08

Confederate? Anybody who was born or living in the Confederacy, to include the black people.

01:22:14

There's a whole bunch of them. I mean, where do you think most of the blacks come from? The South. And they should be recognized as Confederate veterans, as well.

01:22:22

This cemetery commemorates those who had died in the Battle of Mansfield, in this whole area of Keechaw.

01:22:29

This is where my family is from, from Keechaw, from grandparents and before them.

01:22:36

And when the Battle of Mansfield had hit off, that's when the Union came in and started attacking this area because they were trying to get to Shreveport.

01:22:44

But the citizens and the Confederates had stopped them, and they wanted to keep them from getting to Shreveport to burn it down.

01:22:53

There was a lot of casualties, dead bodies. So the slaves, one of which was my third -grade granddaddy, he's buried in the slave portion over here, next to it.

01:23:03

And they took the bodies from the makeshift hospital, and they brought the bodies here, and they buried them.

01:23:10

They did not have headstones at the time, in 1864. So they just dug a hole and just put the body in.

01:23:19

Next, put the body in. You think that the Union was going to let black folks live? No, they were going to burn it all down, black folks and all.

01:23:27

So it was a good doggone thing that we won up here in the Keechaw and Mansfield to save the day because they saved

01:23:34

Shreveport. And I think that when you take down a statue, that's putting a finger to the soldiers that died because they risked their lives to save Shreveport.

01:23:45

My third -grade granddaddy's buried over there. He had buried all these guys up in here. Is that the things he get?

01:23:52

Take a statue down? He was a slave. Is that the things he get?

01:23:59

I mean, ungrateful. Just like they did with the Vietnam soldiers. They're just ungrateful.

01:24:06

To save the Confederate monument in New Orleans, that was the most harrowing experience. I mean, it was just a threat to our very lives.

01:24:14

I went there, and we went to the state capitol in Louisiana to speak with the lawmakers there to see if there's anything they can do.

01:24:23

They said, well, we're trying. We're going to get something rolled up, but I don't see where they had done anything. They got three monuments over there, one of General Lee, Beauregard, as well as Jefferson Davis.

01:24:36

So I went there to save that monument, to keep them from taking down because the mayor at that time wanted all things

01:24:43

Confederate removed. These statues are not just stone and metal. They're not just innocent remembrances of a benign history.

01:24:51

These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy, ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for.

01:25:00

We stood there all day, all night. I camped out there for over a month.

01:25:06

But I wasn't going to see the president of the Confederacy being taken down in the middle of the night without somebody at least putting up a fight for him.

01:25:14

And then one night on May, we call it May Day, the Antifa showed up.

01:25:20

And, I mean, about 500 of them. It was a whole bunch of them. So I told the guys that was with me,

01:25:26

I said, look, y 'all don't have to be here. You really don't. You can leave. I understand some of y 'all got families. I ain't got no kids.

01:25:32

I ain't got no husband. And I'll take this. And I was armed. All of us were armed.

01:25:38

And they said, no, we're going to stay. I said, if you do, get behind the monument to save the president. And they were just closing in.

01:25:44

And I had to stay to the rear to protect our vehicle in case somebody came in. And then I had guns drawn and everything, you know, to protect ourselves.

01:25:52

Because it wasn't but a few of us, like about seven of us and 500 of them.

01:25:59

And then the fight was on. The fight was on. And the cops was there and didn't do nothing.

01:26:05

Hey! Hey! Y 'all do something! Do something!

01:26:13

Then I got a phone call from Oklahoma. One of the Confederate leaders had said, please, we're begging you.

01:26:20

Tell your men to stand down because they're going to kill y 'all. I mean, I was not going to abandon my position. I was there for a purpose.

01:26:27

And I wasn't going to leave. Well, they talked me into standing down.

01:26:34

Have the guys to stand down to leave the things cool off. And the cops had to escort us from the area.

01:26:40

And they slashed tires. I mean, it was just horrible.

01:26:46

We will no longer allow the Confederacy to literally be put on a pedestal in the heart of our city.

01:26:59

We saved the one that was in Paris, Texas. One up there, they were talking about a judge was trying to be like a thief in the night, but took the statue down.

01:27:10

Because he was just about that close and getting it removed. Somebody gave me a call and said, get down there as soon as you can.

01:27:16

So we showed up there in big numbers. That's one success story that I can say that we had.

01:27:23

Whether you win or lose, you have to just go down fighting. Some people who are on the

01:27:28

Republican side, they're supposed to have been for the right of preserving history.

01:27:34

Some of them kind of cowered out. It wasn't politically helpful to them, especially during election season.

01:27:42

And when I was out there in New Orleans, I went to the state capitol. And one of the

01:27:47

Republicans supposed to have been on our side, he told one of the leadership of the

01:27:53

SCV to talk, to have a little talk with me. And for me to kind of stand down and don't be flying the

01:28:00

Confederate, you know, this type of flag. So if I would just sit tight, stand down for a little while, they're supposed to have made a bill that was supposed to protect all statues, all monuments that were military and veteran related and to include the

01:28:16

Confederate in there. They haven't done that yet because they're afraid that if it's talked about, then it would bring in opposition from outside the state.

01:28:26

So the Republicans stood down even on that. And that's in Oklahoma. Because they were perpetually running for re -election for their office all the time.

01:28:37

So I was kind of like, when is our day coming? You know, I mean, when? Political conservatives today want to defend the

01:28:44

Republican Party. They're looking at short -term political goals. They're not thinking long -term as much. They're looking at what's going to help the

01:28:51

Republican Party the most. And so they have decided to engage in the same kind of identity politics that the left was engaging in just a few years ago and still is engaging in.

01:29:00

Playing identity politics with our ancestors. Using them as political pawns.

01:29:05

And so if it helps the Republican Party, they think that, well, we'll just accuse the Democrats of being the racists since most of the

01:29:12

Southern soldiers would have been Democrats. Then we can use that and leverage that to make out like the

01:29:19

Democrats are the bad guys. They're the racists. They've always been that way. Part of the problem with this is it's an incomplete narrative.

01:29:26

It's very narrow. And it cherry -picks the historical record to make it work.

01:29:32

And if you have someone who knows history well enough, it doesn't take a lot, they can see all the holes in it.

01:29:38

There's so many holes it's like Swiss cheese. Thomas Jefferson, he would have been in the lineage of what eventually became the

01:29:46

Democrat Party. So are we going to take down Thomas Jefferson? You look at the Republican Party.

01:29:52

The Republican Party isn't pure as the driven snow at all. Oftentimes, especially the early Republican Party, they were very much in favor of keeping the

01:30:01

Western territories for free white labor. That's the main reason they didn't want slaves going into those areas.

01:30:07

They didn't want black people in those territories with them. Also, it was on the Republican Party's watch right after the

01:30:14

Civil War that the military went out West and committed some horrible atrocities against Native American tribes.

01:30:22

But the Republicans today want to act like they were the ones that were anti -slavery, the Democrats were the party of the

01:30:27

Klan, and these kinds of things. But it's just not a fair representation. And so if we're going to be honest with the historical record, we're going to have to look back and say there's good and bad things in both political parties.

01:30:40

If we take this logic to its logical conclusion, then we rip down all of American history.

01:30:46

Let me give you an example. And this is a Democrat, by the way. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the president of the

01:30:51

United States during the beginning and most of World War II. He is the one that implemented policies that led to the internment of Japanese in the country.

01:31:01

He also sent Americans off to war in segregated armies. It was right after him that you have two atomic bombs dropped on the

01:31:11

Empire of Japan. This had never happened in world history. Why not take down statues of Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

01:31:17

Why not take Harry Truman statues down? Why not take World War II statues down? I think the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, why don't we take it down?

01:31:25

Isn't this something that is clearly racist? Well, no. There's a very good reason for having these monuments around, but ideologues will look at those and connect them to oppression of some kind.

01:31:37

And it comes as no surprise that if we take down monuments to other soldiers who are simply in their minds defending their homes from the

01:31:46

Civil War, then that logic is going to extend outward. And anything that the left can connect to oppression, they will target.

01:31:55

So the floodgates are open. The Republican Party doesn't really have a leg to stand on now because they've given up that logic.

01:32:01

Black folks are like, but we want reparation, we want reparation. Well, we took down a statue, so is that good enough? You know damn well it's not going to be good enough because there's going to be more and more and more.

01:32:09

They're just buying time. In other words, one white group against another white group and all they're going to use to color my skin is the way to stick it in the eye of the other white people.

01:32:21

That's what's happening here. Some white people are liberals against the white people who are conservative, but they use the black people as a, you know, they weaponize them so that they can just stick it to the white people who are conservative and say, see, they want to put y 'all back in chains.

01:32:40

See, they got that big old Confederate statue. When you had most of the Confederate statues in New Orleans was introduced and supported by the black mayors because most of the mayors they had over there were black.

01:32:51

They're just doing it in order to appease black people so they can live to see another day until you run out of statues.

01:33:02

Then they're going to start taking down Abraham Lincoln statues, which they did. And you know darn well he ain't

01:33:08

Confederate. I don't even like him. Abraham Lincoln was not the president of my family because they were in the

01:33:15

South and the South had its president. His name was Jefferson Davis. They didn't know nothing about no

01:33:21

Abraham Lincoln, but I would not have supported them to remove his statue, but they did.

01:33:26

And he's supposed to quote -unquote save the slaves, which he didn't do. He didn't save any slaves.

01:33:32

He didn't free them. And then they take that down. They're going to take Martin Luther King next because then they're going to say he abused women.

01:33:41

They were out here saying that he was a sadist and was taking women and beating them up in the hotel rooms.

01:33:47

You know well that they're going to use that against him. The Confederacy is a low -hanging fruit for now.

01:33:58

We are taught to think ideologically that America is an idea. I used to believe that.

01:34:04

America is an idea. It's not a culture. It doesn't have to speak English. It doesn't have to have a cultural inheritance.

01:34:12

It doesn't have to have monuments or heroes. What it must have is everybody subscribing to the proposition that all men are created equal.

01:34:19

And then you're an American. But it's absurd. No country is or could be an abstract idea.

01:34:25

Take the idea all men are created equal. What does equality mean? The proposition doesn't tell you what equality means.

01:34:32

Does it mean we're equally created by God in his image? A lot of people believe that.

01:34:37

That's what they think equality means. But that's not what Marxists think. That's not what

01:34:43

Thomas Hobbes thought. He thought equality meant that everybody has the equal ability to kill each other.

01:34:49

Kant meant something different by equality. Mill meant we're all equal in the sense that we can feel pain and pleasure.

01:34:56

And that's it. Everybody believes all men are created equal.

01:35:01

And they have a pious regard for the Constitution. All Americans say this. Black Lives Matter says it.

01:35:07

Neocons say it. Conservatives say it. Christians say it. But they mean incommensurably different things.

01:35:15

We no longer can accept tradition as a guide of inquiry. There are some monuments being erected.

01:35:20

In Richmond, there was just recently, probably about two miles from where the Robert E. Lee statue was ripped down, there was erected an emancipation monument, which, among other things, honors

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Nat Turner, someone who was basically a terrorist, someone who did horrible things.

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The monuments that are being produced, I think of the Stonewall Memorial, things like this, what they are doing is they're trying to honor those in the past to the detriment of leaders of their societies.

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This is actually a way in which they can hate society. They can look back at the

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United States. They can hate it. They can say it was all bad, it was all wrong. But this one person over here, this one person over there, they can see how wrong it was.

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And so these are actually monuments to hating America, to hating the country that we come from.

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And if that's all we're left with, if we take down all the monuments to people who loved the land, loved their people, and were willing to sacrifice for them, and all we're left with are monuments to those who fought against oppression, fought for egalitarian equality, fought for the next rung on what the social justice activists think of as the revolution, then we're just a hollowed out shell.

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We don't actually have any solid virtues worth preserving or fighting for. Because monuments to the revolutionary figures are actually, they're negative monuments.

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They're looking at the past, and it's a negative. It's not positive qualities necessarily. There could be some positive qualities associated with some of those people, respectable traits, but monuments are being set up to how bad it used to be.

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And instead of focusing on the good things, the things that we can take pride in, and the things that we can actually gain an identity from, the things that actually are the glue that keeps culture together, and makes you want to preserve and defend a piece of land, and make your town square look nice.

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Those are the kinds of things that are going the way of the dodo bird, unfortunately. There's a signal that's being sent to people that this is not your land anymore.

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This is not something that you're invested in if you're a traditional American who honors your ancestors.

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So monuments are very important because they do confer identity, and we're seeing that play out right now. If you do what maybe is the path of least resistance is people sort of let it go for a little bit, and just hope it goes away.

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That's typically what people do. But I think we need to use this as a moment to say why monuments are important, why history is important, why remembering the good and the bad together helps us to go together forward, learning from our mistakes, understanding that history can help us.

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If you hate parts of history, really the best thing you can do is remember them. The best thing you can do is say, do you see that statue?

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Let me tell you about that man. Let me explain to you, this is the good, this is the bad.

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If you wipe this stuff away, ultimately you're simply opening the door for people to kind of hijack your culture.

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And so people have to step up. I wrote a book called If You Can Keep It, where I talk about how every person in a free society has an obligation to stand up and to do your part.

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And your part, you know, sometimes you have to march off to war, you have to pay your taxes. There are things that we have to do, but in a time of relative peace, the least we can do is step up, be a part of our communities, speak out on these kinds of things, because if we don't speak up, nobody will, and we'll lose some of the most beautiful things that we have.

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This is not some insignificant issue, because it won't stop with ripping down statues.

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It'll only stop when the left have control over every single aspect of your life, from birth to death, and probably before birth, because they won't even allow people to be born that come from the wrong kind of families.

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It is important to fight these things on the principle that history matters, that truth matters.

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Don't let them change the name of a street. Don't let them change the name of a school. All your history, good and bad, is your history.

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And you've got to fight to preserve your history, because if you lose your history, you lose your future.

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Today was actually the first time where I physically came to this spot, where at one time, a more than 30 -foot -tall granite monument was here that was giving honor to those who passed away in a horrible war.

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And it brings me incredible sadness and grief that this monument was here, amongst these beautiful magnolia trees and live oaks and crape myrtles, that they surrounded a beautiful monument talking about our history and what it means to be

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Americans. And it brings me a great deal of sadness, I'll have to say.

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I won't say anger, because it's beyond anger. It's just, it's incredibly sad what the cancel culture has done to this historical city and the people who live here.

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It's incredibly sad. You can't find a good private school that's going to teach the children about the history.

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Homeschool them, like they used to do. Homeschool them. A long time ago, after the war, the

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Daughters of the Confederacy, they were on the school board. They made sure that what was put into the textbook was not disparaging the honor of the

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Confederacy. And so they had input on what was in the textbooks. What songs were you singing?

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Was it anti -Confederate, anti -Southern? Nope, not going to have that. But now you've got people out here now, they're not getting involved in politics with the school board.

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So another choice you've got now is just to homeschool them. Because you're not going to have them to rewrite history on them.

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I would say to a town council that wants to tear down a monument, you think very carefully about that and what that means for future generations.

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You're adopting a principle of revolution. And who's to say that if you tear these monuments down now and erect a new one, that those monuments won't be torn down in 50, 100 years from now?

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Who's to say that future generations won't say what we say is also backwards and archaic and those things need to go away?

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And so I think we can say that we can critically examine these monuments, and we can critically examine people and say there are definitely things that we may not like about them, but certainly they're an anchor to our past.

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They're an anchor to what is good and true and valuable about our society now. And when you're talking about a simple monument to a common soldier in a cemetery or in front of a courthouse, it's not

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Robert E. Lee, it's not George Washington, it's someone's great -great -grandfather. What these people are saying to someone is that their ancestors are evil.

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It's corruption of blood. This is not something we do in America. So that in itself is evil, to say that you have to denounce your ancestors.

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This is something you just don't do to people. Where do we draw the line with that? These monuments will not be preserved if people in their local communities don't fight for them.

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People need to actually get busy getting involved in their local community, their town hall, their seat of their county government, wherever it is, to ensure that valuable historical artifacts, including monuments, that convey identity, that teach us lessons, that mark out historical things that took place that are significant, that let us know a little bit about who we are, our identity, and our obligations.

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People need to get involved in protecting those things. And if they don't get involved, someone else will get involved.

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When good men fail to do something, someone else will do it for them. And their intentions are to take these monuments down.

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Nothing beats going to your town hall and actually being a presence there, letting them know what you think.

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And if a monument in your community is under threat, you need to go and make your voice heard with the people that represent you.

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And that's the only way that they will be preserved for future generations. A world without monuments, memorials, is a world without morals, without integrity, without duty, without service, without love, love of family, love of country, love of duty.

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The monuments represent love. The things that matter are invisible.

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Service and sacrifice. And, of course, that's the Christian message, isn't it?

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One of the main places that I learned about why it's important to remember is actually the Bible.

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It's sort of funny. Over and over again, God says to the people of Israel, like, stop.

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Do this now. Make a monument to what just happened. And you think, why?

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Why would God say that? He says it because he knows it is our nature to forget.

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And we have to actually take steps not to forget. You know, sometimes somebody says, I'm going to tie a string on my finger so I remember to pick up dog food on the way home.

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God tells the Israelites, build a monument. When they cross the Jordan River, they make a monument on the other side of the river to mark what happened here, this miracle that happened.

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Because as time passes, people will say, did that really happen? I don't know. It seems it's so long ago now.

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Maybe we imagined it. Maybe people are exaggerating. It's really important to remember and to understand that if you do not remind yourself, you will forget.

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It's our tendency to forget. It's why people hear a sermon once a week. You could say, well, I know all that stuff. Well, you might know it, but you're in the process constantly of forgetting it.

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In Scripture, you see Joshua and the children of Israel cross the Jordan. They set up a pile of stones to remember an event.

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It's more than an event, but an event is the main occasion for erecting the monument.

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You see Samuel also. In the book of 1 Samuel, when Israel is chasing the

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Philistines and they defeat their enemies, Samuel sets up what's called an Ebenezer.

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But it's a monument to show people who they are, where they came from, who their ancestors are, what's happened on the land that they inhabit.

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One of the objections that sometimes arises from evangelicals on this issue is that they think monuments are wrong because they promote idolatry of some kind.

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People worship these statues. They worship men from the past, and we don't want monuments around. The thing

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I'd say about that is that there are monuments that probably do represent that, that probably should come down.

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There are monuments, I think, of especially the former Soviet Union. They made huge monuments that were almost godlike in their human scale.

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You're not looking at someone who looks like a human anymore. They're towering over you. The monuments here in the

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United States are mostly on a human scale. There are some exceptions. The Lincoln Memorial is an exception to this, obviously.

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Mount Rushmore, perhaps. But for the most part, they were set up specifically on a human scale that signified that they were humans.

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There may be reasons to look at some monuments and think that that's actually an idol. But there's no reason to think that monuments to particular events, especially a general monument to soldiers or something like that, is intended for worship.

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The monument to Washington is to his achievements. His achievements were so large that we need to put this large monument up.

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But there was never an intention to deify Washington, nor was there an intention to deify soldiers or explorers or any of these people.

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So they weren't set up that way. That wasn't the authorial intent. Evangelicals should be about authorial intent. That should be something that they care a lot about.

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The Bible, when we interpret Scripture, we want to know what did the author say to the audience. But unfortunately, many

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Christians today have thrown that idea out the window when it comes to interpreting historical artifacts, including monuments.

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They're looking at present interpretations and they're imposing them on the past instead of letting the past speak for itself.

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And the past is perfectly capable of speaking for itself. We are left with the interpretive plaques and writings that show us what these monuments actually meant.

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And they weren't to deify anyone. You may not be able to have your Confederate and Union type of reenactment like you used to.

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Just have it on private ground. Because I like doing reenactments, but I can't do no reenactments the way

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I want to being a slave. Because somebody in the audience may get offended and say, Look at them, you're that poor black woman.

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So I say, so who's going to play the slave part? I just think that we need to just do it ourselves. To take it upon ourselves to keep the heritage alive, otherwise it's going to be all gone.