CTM: An Interview with Dr. Boyd Cathey

Introduction to Dr. Boyd Cathey and His Background

Alright, welcome to the first episode of Conversations That Matter, and today I have with me Dr. Boyd Cathy, who is, it would take me a while to go through your pedigree here, but among other things, you studied at the Catholic University of Navarra in Spain, and I believe you said, you told me you did your dissertation there in Spanish, is that right?

That's correct. The University of Navarra is located in Pamplona in northern Spain. At the time I was there, it was one of only two private universities in Spain, and it had, and it continues to have a very high reputation academically.

And you also were a Richard... I did my dissertation there, and I wrote it in Spanish, yes.

You know what, four languages, I think, something like that?

I can speak fluently three, if you want to include Johnston County, North Carolina, that's four. But I can read, let's see, I speak French and Spanish, English, I hope, to some degree. I can read most of the Romance languages, like Italian and Portuguese, so yeah.

You're a Richard Weaver Fellow, Master's from...

I was a Richard Weaver Fellow at the University of Navarra, and that was a great honor and a pleasure. It paid my way for my research.

And you also studied at the University of Virginia as a Jefferson Fellow, and you were the assistant to Russell Kirk.

I got a fellowship, a Thomas Jefferson Fellowship to study, studied history under the late Merrill Peterson, who was the expert on Thomas Jefferson, along with Dumas Malone, who also was a mentor there.

After that, I took a year off to work with the conservative writer, author, Dr. Russell Kirk. I spent a year with him, working or assisting him on a book on T .S. Eliot, and also a second book, The Roots of American Order.

So when you came out with this book, The Land We Love, with essays from 1983 to the present, I mean, you're talking about things that you know a whole lot about, from your relationship with Kirk, to Eugene Genovese, to Paul Godfrey, I mean, you've just been around the conservative Southern, paleo-conservative tradition for years now.

And I like this book quite a bit. I wanted to start out with the essay I love the most, I think, and I liked a lot of them, but Paladins of Christian Civilization, your third chapter. I mean, this is a study that I had never seen done before on all these European Christians who came to fight for the Confederacy.

Can you tell me a little bit about that and how you came to this knowledge?

European Christians Who Fought for the Confederacy

Yes, I think most people in the United States who are in any way familiar with the war between the states don't understand that it had international ramifications and importance, and it was vitally followed by the press and the population in Europe.

What happened to me was when I went to Spain and then later Switzerland for additional study in theology and philosophy, I discovered that the ideas that percolated during the war between the states had caused great turmoil in some ways among the European population.

I discovered, for example, that there were volunteers from most of the major European countries who went and fought in particular for the Confederacy. These were volunteers, unlike many of the Irish, who were basically conscripted when they got off the boat to fight in the northern armies.

I discovered, for example, that there were a thousand or so at least traditionalist Catholic volunteers from Spain who entered by way of Mexico across the Rio Grande. I discovered that there were a number of Italians from the old Kingdom of Naples, for example, which had been defeated by their own set of Yankees.

The King of Tiedemont unified Italy in 1861, and a number of the veterans of the army of the Kingdom of Naples then sailed to New Orleans and formed the Italian Legion and fought heroically for the Confederacy.

They understood, if you will, analogously, that what the Confederacy appeared to be fighting for was what they had fought for as traditionalists and traditional Catholics in many regards. Of course, it wasn't exclusively Catholic.

There were also Protestants who came and fought for the Confederacy, but it's a story that has yet to really be told. What impressed me was I had some dear friends in Pamplona who were members of the minor lower nobility, if you will.

One of them recounted to me that his great-great-grandfather had been a soldier, a captain who fought with the traditionalist Carlist armies in their own civil wars in 19th century Spain, and then had volunteered, had gone to the Confederacy and fought there.

I was just amazed by the idea that there were people in those countries who kept up and understood analogously what the Confederates were fighting for, that they, in a sense, connected that rationale with their own circumstances and beliefs in Europe.

It's an amazing story. Now, you estimated at about 2 ,000 from Naples, and that's no small number. All the hardship of trying to travel that distance in order to fight. You talk about Johann Haraus von Bork, General Polak, right?

The Prussian. The Prussian, yeah.

Of course, there was the Prince de Polignac, who was one of the most noble families in all of France. A relative of his had been the prime minister for the last legitimate Bourbon king, Charles X, who was dethroned in 1830.

But he had been an expert in artillery, had fought in the Crimean War, and volunteered and came to Louisiana, which, of course, was in many ways very French with its traditions, and actually fought at the Battle of Mansfield, led one of the wings of Richard Taylor's army that was victorious.

And the funny story about General Polignac is that he inherited a division of Texas frontiersmen. And so the story goes, they could not pronounce his name, and they called him General Polcat. But they would have followed him to the gates of hell itself.

They were so loyal. And he was the last major general of the Confederacy to die. I think he died during World War I. But there are all sorts of stories of these men. The Neapolitans amazed me. And I began to do research on my own, and discover that there were descendants of those volunteers who went back to Italy.

And I had actually went to a cemetery outside of Naples. Chivitella del Tronco, it's called. And there are veterans of the war between the states buried there. And there is a third national Confederate flag flying in the cemetery.

And here, you know, several thousand miles away are several dozen, maybe a hundred or so Confederate veterans who spoke Italian who fought for the Confederacy buried on what is now Italian soil. I just find it kind of amazing.

You can look online. There are actually photographs. There are short histories, because some of these Italian veterans remained in Louisiana and Mississippi and other places, settled down after the war, married and had families.

And I've actually had correspondents from some members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who are descended from some of these people who still live in those states. So it's a story that I think, it's an amazing story, if you will.

It is.

And what strikes me about it, and for those who are listening in here, they did not have a dog in the fight as far as, I mean, they didn't own a plantation in the South. They certainly wouldn't be fighting for slavery coming that great distance.

So what was it that compelled them? I mean, I know you just mentioned they saw parallels in some of their own struggles and traditionalism, but if you could boil it all down, what did they see in the Confederacy that was...

Well, there is a motto that the traditionalists in Spain had, and that motto in Spanish is Dios Patria Fueros Sere, which God, country, our local rights, and our king. Well, obviously the last part, king, does not apply, but God, country, and our local rights does apply.

And if you look at what was happening in the South and the intellectual influences that were affecting it prior to the war between the states, there was indeed a Tractarian, an analogous Tractarian movement.

There was a theological movement that affected generally the whole South that made it far more traditional. Louis Hartz called the South before the war, he said it did not experience the same kind of, I don't use the word enlightenment, but he said it experienced a reactionary enlightenment.

And you find this in the writings of any number of Southerners that even before the time of the war, people like General James Pettigrew, for example, who went to Europe and actually understood European traditions.

But it is God, country, and our local rights. They understood the idea of federalism because European traditionists, they are federalists, they believe in a federal idea. They are also firm believers in a traditional Christianity.

Admittedly, the Christianity in the Southern states was mostly Protestant, but they understood the orthodoxy of it all. And of course, country. They had a sympathy for the South as an extension, if you will, of European civilization.

And so it was that more than anything else that compelled them, propelled them, if you will, to get on boats and sneak into the Confederacy or sneak across the Rio Grande to volunteer for the South. The South was considered cavalier as opposed to Puritans in the North.

And so that cause motivated them. And you see it in the European press. When I was in Europe, I read numerous accounts and many writers, not just in England, but in France and Spain and parts of Italy, even in Germany.

And they understood this. They saw this and they were able analogously to find this in their own beliefs and see it in the Confederacy.

Well, it certainly is an amazing story. I had not heard it and I'm very glad that you put it in this anthology, The Land We Love, The South and Its Heritage, out now. You can go on Amazon and get it.

Where else can you get it? Is it just Amazon, pretty much? You can get it at Amazon. It is available now for the copies that they originally got, they sold out. But it is available now from Amazon. It can be gotten before Christmas, but you'll have to hurry probably.

It's also available through Barnes Noble. And both Amazon and Barnes Noble do have marketplace sources where you can find it a little bit cheaper than the normal list price of around $28. It's a hardback book.

And then, of course, Scuppernong Press. If you look up Scuppernong Press, you can order it directly from the publisher and probably even get it within a few days. They're rather quick.

Neoconservatism and the Rewriting of American History

I wanted to get into another topic you talk about, and this is probably one that's more personal for me, but you say in Chapter 5, this is the title, how the neoconservatives destroyed southern conservatism.

And a little personal aside here, I got tired of hearing the term neoconservative because I looked at it as a pejorative. I had even been called a neocon, you know, the short form of it, by people before.

And I just got sick of it because I'm like, well, you're not really making any argument. You're just throwing a word out there. But as I read this essay, things started to click for me. And I think I understand now why neoconservatism, because you defined it, is such a problem.

And you talk about egalitarianism, equality in a negative sense, and then what individualism for southern conservatives meant, and then what it means for neoconservatives. So I was hoping maybe you could go into that a little bit, define neoconservatism, maybe give a few names for prominent neoconservatives, and then tell us what the problem with that is.

Okay, I think we have to start back in the 18th century, and basically the beginnings of what would become the United States. And my mentors have been the late Mel Bradford, tremendous intellect, and even before him, Richard Weaver, who taught for years.

He was a North Carolinian, taught at University of Chicago. The emphasis is this nation that we inhabit was a nation founded by families. It was founded on the idea of families who came largely from the British Isles, but also from France and Germany eventually, who came and settled and brought with them their religion, their beliefs, their customs, everything, their songs, their music, their ballads, their heritage.

It was a Christian heritage that they brought to these shores. They brought with them, they came in community. Now they came believing in a kind of individualism, but it was what Richard Weaver calls communitarian individualism.

In other words, it was a belief in communities, and each person, each family, I should say, had its own role, and that role was determined by, in large measure, its faith and the traditions that it inherited.

This runs completely against the current view that in one way distinguishes what we call neoconservatism. The neoconservatives, if you will, and I'll get to some of this in a minute, believe that America was founded as an idealization, basically on an idea.

And you hear that a lot.

You hear people say America is an idea. Yeah.

Bradford, and more recently Barry Allen Shane, who's a professor at Colgate, has done a fantastic study of this. Look at the writings of both the founders and the framers of the Constitution, and they don't talk about ideas.

They talk about family, land, blood, kinship, the inheritance they have received as Englishmen, you know, those basic English rights. And as Bradford talks about in his book, Original Intentions, when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, where the words, you know, equality, freedom, and equality show up, they're not talking about it here in the United States, in the new nation.

They're talking about it in reference to England. In other words, they're Englishmen, and they're protesting that they're not being treated as Englishmen. But they understood fully, and Bradford and Professor Shane have gone through, as George Carey at Georgetown did years ago, thousands of letters and correspondence and articles and diaries, et cetera.

These people were establishing a country which was an extension of Europe. Yes, it was different. To quote Richard Weaver again, it was a country of families and states, and these states were composed of communities, communitarian individualism.

This is what their freedom was all about. This is in contradistinction to the neocon idea, which basically I distinguish, and others have done before me better, as a kind of a leftist idea, an inversion of what America is all about.

Even before the war between the states, if you look at the writings of most Americans, including Americans north of the Mason-Dixon line, there is a continuation of the original belief that this nation is founded upon families, and that states come together to make this Constitution, each guarding its own traditions and the traditions of those families and those communities in those states.

After the war between the states, to some degree before, but after, you have this evolving doctrine which now has flourished with what we call neoconservatism, that America is a series of ideas, equality and democracy.

I think if you go back carefully and look at history, you'll find that those two terms are considered terms of a program. They are not terms that the people at the time used positively. I mean, yes, they do talk about democratic institutions, but they're not talking about it in the same way that we talk about it today.

And so what you've got is neoconservatism, which is, as a philosophy, as a general idea, is a left-wing thing that comes from, eventually came from, the Trotskyite version of Marxism. These, the neoconservatives, I can name some of the people like Irving Kristol and Norman Podoretz and others, the late Charles Krauthammer and others, were, originally they were what you might call Trotskyite Marxists who made the trek from the left to so-called right, but they brought with them these ideas of across-the-board equality and democracy.

And in a sense, they captured the conservative movement, so-called, of the 1950s. People like my mentor, Russell Kirk, who abhorred these things, the old National Review of the 1950s and early 1960s, they captured these and they recast the conservative movement.

And in a sense, they began to capture Southern thought as well. I mean, there are a lot of Southern political leaders who share these ideas now about democracy and inequality. The American nation was not based on equality.

It's a simple fact. It's a fact of history. When the founders and framers talk about equality, it is equality vis-a-vis the parliament in Westminster in England, basically. You know, I mean, you don't talk about equality if you're dealing with a country where each state, for example, had the right, which they guarded jealously, to have an established church.

I mean, Virginia, for example, had established the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church, until 1829. In North Carolina, for example, you had to be a Christian to hold office as late as 1868. In Massachusetts, the Congregational Church was the state church until 1820.

Obviously, the Constitution had nothing to say about that. The Constitution only talks about the establishment of a national church. It leaves untouched the traditions and customs and laws of the individual states that were established.

And so I think this is a realization about the foundation of our country that we have to understand. We've come a long way. And that is very important because what has happened in the last 20 or 30 years, basically the, what I call, what we call the neocons, the neoconservatives have to some degree taken over the conservative movement and displaced the older conservative ideas dealing with the founding and with what should be the beliefs expressed by the American nation.

Equality, Providence, and Human Gifts

Yeah, I think you do a really good job here. This is one of the quotes from your book. You say that, what you were just talking about, the philosophies from rationalists, they replace the legacy of kinship and blood and attachment to community and to land and a central religious core that annealed this tradition and continued to make it viable.

And so in reading that quote, I'm seeing a couple things jump out at me, the land, community, and religion and tradition, I guess, as well. So a fourth thing there. And you're saying the neocons, these things don't matter as much to them.

They're more portable with their principles. They would take American principles in their mind and they would go to a foreign country and say, well, they can sprout here and work just as fine in a different religion, different social context.

And you're saying that's not true and conservatives never thought that. Am I understanding you?

Well, what happened is they've gone back and recast terminology from the 18th and early 19th century to mean something that the individuals who used it and employed it at that time never intended. Okay.

So when they go back to the Declaration of Independence, they use it as a cudgel to destroy any and every type of difference. They even use it as far as feminism and sex and things like that, or race, for example.

I mean, the founders never intended the terms democracy and equality, for example, or even freedom to be used in the same sense. I mean, the founders were not, the framers were not, people did not believe in authoritarianism, but they believed in a Republican structured system, which was basically based on male household suffrage, individual communities that govern themselves with a certain autonomy.

But the whole point being is the states had rights to do certain things, to maintain their own traditions. What the neocons have done is they've gone back and recast and rewritten the history, and then they go around the world and they say, well, you have to accept American democracy and equality.

You go to a Muslim country, for example, which has been practicing the Muslim faith for 1 ,500 years with all of its traditions and ideas, and you go in and all of a sudden you tell these people, well, you've got to start voting in an election and let women vote and all this kind of stuff.

And whether or not it's a good thing or a bad thing is not the point. The point is that it offends the local, the culture. You go to Russia and you demand that the Russians who have a deep, deep belief against, for example, homosexuality should accept gay rights.

I mean, you have Americans going around to the rest of the world demanding that they accept beliefs which are totally foreign, but in fact are also foreign to the basic roots of the American system.

Now, to me that makes sense. And the American nation. A great deal of sense, and I think to an Orthodox Christian that would make sense. I know that we talk about the Imago Dei as being sort of this leveling field, that people are equal in the eyes of God, but that's not what we're talking about right now.

We're talking about an egalitarian equality, which is something completely different.

Yeah. Yeah, we have equality in the face of God in the sense that God judges us, but based on our own capacity as a human being. We're all created not the same. We face God in the sense that we each have an equal opportunity to do His will and His bidding.

But each of us, I use the parable of the talents in St. Matthew. You know, St. Matthew has three examples in that parable. The man with one, the man with two, or three, the man with five talents, okay?

And what's fascinating is the man with five talents, who is obviously more wealthy, is the one who complies with our Lord's will, whereas the man with one talent fails to do that. What that parable, in a sense, is telling us is that we are each judged not on the basis of what the other man does or has, but on the basis of our own particular gifts, which are considered as equal in God's sense, in the sense that we are equal to ourselves, if you follow what I'm saying.

Yes. We have our own potential, and that potential is ours and ours alone. And on that basis, we are judged. And that, if you look back in the great Calvinists like Robert Louis Dabney or James Henley Thornwell, for example, this is exactly the way they understand it.

This is not egalitarianism. This is not legislating across the board equality of wealth and status and position, which is antithetical to traditional Christianity, whether it be Protestant, Catholic, or what have you.

I think that's what I would say. Yeah, that's brilliant.

I think most Christians, perhaps, and I'm speaking more from an evangelical context here, but I'm sure it would go for all traditions of Christianity in this country, probably are not familiar with the argument you just made, because we've been...

Here's the point. The fact that a man is poor and raises a family but does it well, and a man may be a billionaire and squanders his money, the man who is poor and fulfills his God-given grace and gift well is going to be a better steward of the graces that he received.

Just as in the parable, the man who had five talents and doubled his talents is far to be praised and has done his duty faced to God more so than the man who sat on his. That is a parable that contradicts the idea of across-the-board equality.

Each of those men faces God. Each of those men has given different gifts. They're not the same gift. They're different gifts. And they are told, use those gifts and you'll be judged accordingly. And there's no comparison.

You can't... You don't compare the man who's a brilliant writer with the man who's a brilliant politician with the man who's a bricklayer. The bricklayer, if he does his job better than the other two, is going to be favored by God more.

It's just that simple. And this is what our ancestors, both Protestant and Catholic, understood fully in why the modern idea of equality is really, in a sense, a heresy.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Cost of Speaking Out

Welcome to part two of my interview with Dr. Boyd Cathy. Today we will be discussing the Southern Poverty Law Center, classic Hollywood, and having hope for the future. Chapter eight, you talk about, and this is, I thought this was fascinating, but the Southern Poverty Law Center, and you did a very extensive, I was actually surprised how extensive, search into Morris Dee and his organization and who he is.

And this got you more or less blacklisted from publishing in certain sources, you say in the book.

So I was hoping you could... Yeah, this was about 15 years ago, excuse me, about 15 years ago, I was commissioned to do a research study on Morris Dee's and his group called the Southern Poverty Law Center.

And my decision to do it, it's a long study, heavily footnoted. I decided to use only sources that were, you might call on the left, if you will. In other words, I used magazines like the Progressive, Harper's, there were a series of about 15 or 16 articles, investigative articles written by newspaper reporters, the Montgomery Advertiser, which is not a right-wing newspaper by any means.

But anyway, these were investigative articles about the operation. And what I found was that the operation of the Southern Poverty Law Center was a money machine. In other words, they would rake in millions and millions of dollars.

In fact, I think they sit now on, what, a couple of hundred million dollars. And the work they did to support efforts at social justice, et cetera, were very minuscule. Increasingly, they became an anti-hate machine.

They would label anybody that they did not like, and usually this was people who were conservative who did not share their socially liberal and left-wing views, they would find a label for them, call them racist or a Nazi or a fascist or a Holocaust denier or whatever.

Anyway, when I wrote the article, it came out and it was picked up by a number of different groups. Sam Francis, the late Dr. Sam Francis, had 100 ,000 copies made. It was published by a magazine called Culture Wars.

And what happened was, because the article had such an effect, it began to cause different organizations that had been using some of Morris Dease's information, his publications, to cancel subscriptions, and he began to lose business.

And he, in turn, attacked me as a hate monger, neo-Confederate, right-wing extremist, all these different things. And it did hurt. I mean, obviously, at that time, it was a very difficult cross to bear.

But it was fascinating. I think I may have recounted in an update article that I did, which I also included in the book, that what happened after that was there's a group called Skinheads of America, and they complained that I was on Morris Dease's list of 40 men to watch.

And they said, Dr. Cathy doesn't deserve to be on that list. He's not done anything hateful. I thought that was funny. In other words, I did not merit... I had done anything really hateful to be on that list of hate mongers.

But in recent years, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the SBOC, has extended its reach and begun to attack even more moderate and centrist conservative types. And I think they've lost a lot of stature that they once had.

They're still cited by some of the mainstream media. But for me, it was kind of like crossing the Rubicon, if you will, because once you get through that kind of critique and the kind of opprobrium that was cast on me, in a sense, it was liberating.

I got through it. I didn't lose any friends. My supervisor, the deputy secretary at the Department of Cultural Resources where I work, came to me and told me that he had faith and confidence in me, that I had done my work for 30 years, that he had never seen anything like what they were talking about.

He was interviewed by the local newspaper because they were interested. And he said, Dr. Cathy does his work. What he does on the outside is his business. But I've never seen anything like what the SPLC describes.

You know, he's a team player at work. He does his job. And I've never seen this kind of hate-mongering that you describe. So I got through it. I didn't lose any friends. I did understand that very likely, if I ever wanted to go back to academia to teach, that wouldn't be a possibility because of those headlines.

But... Well, you are brave. It's not an...

Go ahead. I'm sorry. No, you're brave. I just... I'm looking at this and just the extent to which you researched, I mean, I would get the book just for that one essay. It's excellent. I mean, talk about a takedown of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

And of course, they're the organization now, since you've published this, that they're going after Christian ministries. I think Family Research Council was on their list and, you know, organizations.

They have. They've...

Yeah. Yeah. They've attacked a number of different groups, and they've even inspired certain people on the far left to violence. The problem now... Well, the problem then was their research was shoddy.

I had a friend, an academic, tell me, he said, boy, you should write them and give them the right information about you. And I said, well, that would give them too much credit. But they did this little bio, and they had me seeing all these...

Well, for instance, they had me studying with Andrew Lytle, the great Southern professor who, I think, taught at Yale for a while, and it was, you know, they got it incorrect. It was Russell Kirk, not Andrew Lytle.

They had other, you know, different things that were wrong.

So with all the money they're pulling in, they can't even do a good research. Hit piece on you.

No. I should have done, rewritten the hate piece and sent it to them and said, if you're going to attack me, at least attack me for the right things. Yeah. Oh, man. Well, I thought that... It's not fun.

It's not fun to go through these things, but, you know, you either run and hide or you defend yourself. And I decided I was going to defend myself. And as I say, I did not lose any friend because of it.

Confederate Monuments, Historical Memory, and the Culture Wars

Most of your essays in here are about defending monuments, the history of the Confederacy of North Carolina in particular. You talk about figures of North Carolina and Confederate history and essays about them.

You have books and movies. So, I mean, there's so... We can't cover it all, obviously, but you have been involved in Sons of Confederate Veterans for how many years now?

About 35 years, 35, 36, maybe, let's see, 1982, thereabouts.

So you've seen, I mean, this whole... You sort of came into it right when the attacks were starting, the modern form of them, at least. And so you are in a perfect position to view this whole anti-monument debacle, anti-flag debacle, and see it from a kind of a bird's eye view.

Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about that? I mean, you don't have to go into great detail, but what's changed from when you first got into this in the early 80s to now with the tone?

Well, I can give you two examples, kind of impressionistic examples from television. In the mid -1980s, there were two crime mystery programs, sort of. One was Murder, She Wrote, the other was Matlock, and I enjoy watching both of them.

And Matlock takes place in Atlanta, Georgia, and in the courtroom there is a Georgia state flag, always. And at that time, the Georgia state flag combined the symbol of Georgia, I think it's the seal of the state, with the Confederate battle flag.

So that is present in every episode. In Murder, She Wrote, some of the early episodes, she travels to Virginia and Texas. And in Virginia, I remember one particular episode, there's a giant portrait of Robert E. Lee behind the judge, and then maybe Jackson and Jefferson Davis or some other, and then there's the Virginia flag and the Confederate battle flag.

And this is in the 1980s. Wow. Okay, these are on prominent primetime. I think both of them may have been on CBS. I know Murder, She Wrote lasted on into the 1990s with Angela Lansbury, who, by the way, I've been in correspondence with.

I collect autographs. But anyway. It's an interesting story in and of itself, I'm sure.

I collect autographs from all sorts of people. I even got one from Clint Eastwood, but anyway, that's a long story. What's fascinating is that in that period, at least, these particular symbols were not seen like they are seen today.

And as I tell people, I've not changed my view. I always understood that those symbols were, to some degree, controversial for some people, but they were accepted as part of our national history. Not everything that everybody believes is going to be the same.

Not every symbol that we see is going to be accepted and received in the same form or fashion. I might see a monument to John Brown, for example, and I might say, well, I'm not exactly a fan of John Brown and the abolitionists, but that's part of our history.

By the same token, over at the campus of the University of North Carolina, the most heated debates right now are over the monument to what is called Silent Sam, a monument to the University of North Carolina students who fought for the Confederacy.

It's a veterans' monument, okay? There's a Vietnam veterans' monument on the Capitol Square. I'm sure there are people, a lot of people, who oppose the Vietnam War, but I don't see them going over, at least not yet, that may happen, but I don't see it happening yet, going over to the veterans' monument and saying, well, we should take that monument down because Vietnam was a disgrace.

It was an imperialist war, white oppressors, colonialists, conglomerates were part of Asia. All of these monuments represent our history, the good, the bad, and the ugly, again, to quote Penn Eastwood, and so what I have been concerned about is a frenzied ideological attack upon our history, the symbols of our history, and that has taken the most prominent place, if you will, in the attacks on Confederate monuments, and I've often said that that's just the first step because you've also got attacks on monuments to Christopher Columbus, to Junipero Serra in California, the Franciscan who, or I think he may have been a Capuchin or Franciscan, who helped settle the missions in California.

You've got attacks on George Washington because either they were slaveholders or because they were white or because they were sexist or whatever. The problem is that we, by destroying these monuments, by expelling them from their places, from hiding them away, we narrow our historical knowledge, we skew it, we pervert it.

These symbols, even if we do not share exactly what some of the people who are honored by them represent, they do continue to offer us perspective on our history, a variety, a broadness of our history.

And to try to do away with them is to pervert that history. It is ideological, and the more we read of it, the more we understand the movement. We understand that it is a madness, if you will, a lunacy that will not stop until it is perverted, the very idea of what America is all about.

And to do that, you have to really rewrite the history. You have to completely undo the history.

When you say lunacy, the image that came to my head was the young man at Silent Sam when they finally did rip it down. He's kicking this statue with shouting, angry face, red, hot anger, and I think you captured it well with that word.