Preserving History with Bev Sullivan and Rebecca Dillingham

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We're gonna talk to two guests today about cancel culture and what it's doing to history.

Two people, Bev Sullivan and Rebecca Dillingham are trying to preserve what they believe is true and valuable in history.

And they have good information. And I wanna introduce you to them because you know what? They're just average ordinary people.

They're not making a living off of this. They're not experts in their field because they have a degree or anything.

They're just average people like you and me. And they've taken it upon themselves to try to prevent the revolutionary tidal wave that's coming their way.

And so I want you to listen to Bev first and what he's doing is producing curriculum for small groups and homeschool groups.

And then Rebecca, who's doing a lot of blogging and she's calling attention to places and actions that are usually often illegal, but where statues are being taken down and these kinds of things.

She's got a lot of information on that. So without further ado, Bev Sullivan. And Bev Sullivan has been a friend of mine for a few years and he's been producing basically curriculum.

Maybe he blogs, but he decided to start to format his blogs in a way that they're very orderly, but you can actually work through them kind of like you would like a school textbook or something like that.

And Bev, thank you for joining me to just talk about some of the work you're doing because I think this is something, you don't get like paid for it, you don't make a living off of it, but this is something you're doing to move the needle where you are and people have used your material and you're very thorough, so I appreciate that.

So I just wanna say thank you for sharing with us a little bit about what you're up to. Sure, thank you for inviting me.

Yeah, my pleasure. So yeah, so tell me a little bit about yourself and then what you're up to as far as producing material on the

Founding Fathers. I know there's a bunch of other stuff. Sure, I'm from North Carolina originally and after college and seminary,

I went to seminary twice and earned an MARE and then an

MDiv. I had a couple of church experiences in there, but I eventually went to Lifeway Christian Resources as an editor and I was there as an editor for 17 years.

And then in 2012, I was laid off and that was not something that I would have chosen, but it sent me on a detour that has opened some real doors that I'm very grateful for.

I began to work part -time and I did some editing work for a friend of mine who had been at Lifeway and was launching his own

Bible study curriculum online. And also one of the organizations that I had been in touch with and that my wife and I contributed to was

Alliance Defending Freedom. A friend of mine at Alliance Defending Freedom knew of my interest in writing and he had seen some of my work and he suggested that I become an

ADF ambassador and write a post each week that I could post on the

ADF Ambassador Facebook page. And so I began to do that. The material is mine and it remained mine, but it was a way to be supportive of Alliance Defending Freedom's work, their coalition of lawyers that come together to defend religious liberty clients pro bono, the clients who are involved in religious liberty cases.

And so I wrote a lot about that and this was in 2015 and I had done that for about a year.

And then one of my other friends at ADF challenged me to look into Clarence Thomas' dissent in the

Obergefell case and to write a series of articles or an article on rights based on Clarence Thomas' dissent.

And so I dove into that and explored that and I have learned so much through this process.

I have made some discoveries that I never knew I would be able to make and never imagined making.

And the article that I attempted to write became an eight -part series and I explored

Clarence Thomas' dissent, what he said in objection to the court's decision to make same -sex marriage legal in every state.

And Clarence Thomas in his dissent contrasted the founder's view of rights with the modern view of rights.

It's something that you've explored on your podcast as well. In fact, most recently, a couple of podcasts ago, you introduced the series on terms that are often abused and misused by woke evangelicals by talking about the founder's view of rights and how their view of rights was that rights are

God -given and government's job is to protect them. And so the term negative rights is often used to refer to those because government has to stay out of an individual's way to allow that person to exercise his or her rights and pursue what he wants to do or what she wants to do.

But the modern view of rights in America is what we would call positive rights.

And that means that government has to create or manipulate the playing field so that people who are deemed deserving of certain rights, they're demanding, get those rights.

And so I can't think of a better example of positive rights run amok than same -sex marriage.

And so I explore this in the series, and that was in 2015.

And one of the ways I explored this was with FDR's Four Freedoms speech.

In his Four Freedoms speech, which was his State of the Union Address in January of 1941, he talked about four freedoms that we all must protect around the world.

And they were freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

Well, the first two rights are guaranteed by the Constitution. The second two are positive rights that there is no end to what the government would do to establish freedom from want and freedom from fear.

And so it hit me that if we are going to win this battle, if we are going to make progress in this battle, people are gonna have to come to understand and embrace and reassert the founder's view of rights.

Well, tell me a little bit about what you've done, because that's the great information, to distill this and put it into a manageable document or a series of documents for people to understand and where they can get it.

The series that I did in 2015, I kept writing and one of the things

I discovered with that series was that history is important. And in 2019,

I began to write a series in connection with Independence Day that explored 10 truths that are embedded in the

Declaration of Independence. That became a three -part series.

And I explored looking at the most quoted portion of the declaration, 10 truths that all align with biblical principles that are there, but we often do not understand that they're there.

For one thing, our view of rights, for example, or equality or the law or some other themes, we've departed from the founder's view.

And the founders had a biblical view on so much. They held a biblical worldview and because we've departed from that in modern

America, we fail to understand where they were and what they were trying to accomplish.

And so later in 2000, a year later,

I worked to try to create a Bible study based on this series.

And it's a five -session series that explores two of the principles in each session.

And it dives in, looks at the biblical principles and ties it into what the founders upheld in the declaration.

Yeah, that's awesome, Bev. I mean, this is something that would get you probably accused of Christian nationalism in the main, the elite parlance of the dailies.

That's what they'd say. But I wanna commend it to people so they can go to where? Bev Sullivan .com, what's the website?

No, I have two websites. One is wordfoundations .com where I publish my articles.

And then I've established another website for Bible studies and that's discoverbedrocktruth .org.

And if you go to discoverbedrocktruth .org, the homepage lists the

Bible studies that are available and provides access to them. Okay, so discoveredbedrocktruth .org,

you can get the studies you've produced on rights and you'll find out what the founding fathers believed about that and what the

Bible says. It's actually, the first study listed is this 10 biblical truths embedded in the

Declaration of Independence. That's the first study. It's a five -session study. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but.

You're good. The second one is a Bible study series, a six -session study that upholds the free enterprise system and helps people understand how this system as opposed to socialism is biblical and how socialism is contrary to biblical principles.

Yeah, so this is something that people can use if they're what, if they're Sunday school, if they're going to a

Bible study, homeschool curriculum, what's all of the above? Yes, well, it's created and designed to be used in a group setting.

But an individual can explore that on his or her own and interact with the material that way.

There's a third series. Oh, go ahead. Talk about the third one. Yeah, there's a third series that I recently did based on an article that I had written at Word Foundations.

And I took just by exploring some of the things that Karl Marx had said and highlighting those themes as Marxism and contrasting what

Marx said to biblical principles to show that Marxism is anti -Christian and anti -biblical.

And then there's a epilogue to that where I explore what the founder said about these particular themes.

The last study that's available on Discover Bedrock Truth is a study that explores the question, could

Jesus have been God? If Jesus was, could Jesus have been a good teacher without having been

God? And so that was prompted by a study that said that 30 % of evangelicals are saying that Jesus could have been a good teacher without being

God, but yet he claimed to be God. If he claimed to be God, then, and what he said was not true, he could never have been a good teacher.

Yeah, very true. So I wanted to ask you, what kind of an impact has this made?

I don't know if you know how many people have downloaded your studies or study on the Declaration and Rights, but are people using this in these group settings?

Well, I've gotten some positive feedback about it. Although the first major study, series of studies, the 10 principles embedded in the

Declaration of Independence, I couldn't release that until, we were right in the middle of COVID for that.

And so it's been - It's a good time to release it, actually. In a way it is.

People aren't meeting, especially at the time, people weren't meeting in groups, but it is something that could be used online and in a

Zoom setting. Yeah, the purpose of this is just to kind of expose what you're doing and inspire others that, look, this is something you can do.

You may not have a degree in history or whatever the field is you think that needs to be addressed or you want to write about, but Bev is just pursuing his interests here.

These are just things he sparked his curiosity. So he started going down the rabbit trail and then he found all kinds of things, kind of like lost treasures in an attic and he wants other people to know about it.

So he's written about it. So Bev, you're an inspiration because you're doing this.

And I hope a lot more people do this. The more educated we are on what the Bible teaches, what our country actually means, knowing history, knowing how those things integrate, the better we're going to be able to fight what's happening right now.

This takeover by Marxism really, but a version of it that's postmodern and hates truth, hates the word of God, hates the founding, all those kinds of things.

So God bless you for what you're doing. Any final thoughts for us? Well, yes. In the series that I most recently did on how

Marxism contrasts with biblical truth, one of the ninth principle, there are nine principles

I explore and contrast that to Marxism. And the ninth principle is that remembering a godly heritage and God's redemptive work helps individuals and nations, keeps individuals and nations from straying away from the truth and from right living.

One of the things that Marx realized is that to stir up a nation conflict within a nation, to create a revolution, you have to divorce people from their history.

You've explored this in your podcasts. Marx said, if you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded.

And it's interesting, the Bible passages that we explore in principle nine include

Exodus 12, one through 28, where God establishes the

Passover for the nation of Israel. And then Deuteronomy 5, 12 through 15, where in the

Deuteronomy's listing of the 10 commandments, the Sabbath is upheld, observe the

Sabbath and remember that the Lord God brought you out of Egypt. And then another passage that we explore is

Deuteronomy 6, four through 25, where God tells parents to take these principles and think about them and teach them to your children when you rise up, when you lie down.

And so on an ongoing basis. And so we see there, annual observance established to remember your godly heritage.

And then in Deuteronomy, a weekly observance established. And then in the

Deuteronomy 6 passage, an ongoing observance established.

And so these are biblical principles that tell us we need to remember our godly heritage.

In America, our heritage is a godly one.

And a lot of people don't realize that. And I just wanna share some of the things that a few of the founders said about remembering the truth of a godly heritage.

Roger Sherman, who was the only founding father who signed all four founding documents in the

United States, said, sad will be the day when the American people forget their traditions and their history, so longer remember that the country they love, the institutions they cherish, and the freedom they hope to preserve, that these were born of the throes of armed resistance to tyranny and nursed in the rugged arms of fearless men.

John Adams said he was writing a letter to his wife Abigail and he just expressed his passion for all he had been through.

This was in 1777, a year after they had signed the Declaration of the Revolutionary War was still going on.

And he said, posterity, you will never know how much it costs the present generation to preserve your freedom.

I know, I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.

And Noah Webster said, every child in America should be acquainted with his own country.

He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice.

As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country. So the founders held a biblical view of remembering a godly heritage.

And it's so important because the founders understood clearly that liberty is fragile and that you cannot have or maintain liberty without a virtue.

Francis Schaeffer talked about this in his last book, The Great Evangelical Disaster.

And he said, in our own country, we have enjoyed enormous human freedom, but at the same time, this freedom has been founded upon forms in government law, culture, and social morality, which have given stability to the individual in social life and have kept our freedoms from leading to chaos.

There is a balance here between form and freedom, which we have come to take as natural in the world.

And this is the problem in modern America. We tend to take our freedoms for granted, but when we've departed from God's law and from virtue, people use their freedoms, abuse their freedoms, and invade the rights of others, and it creates a societal instability.

But the balance between freedom and order, we take it as natural in the world.

But Francis Schaeffer said, it's not natural. We are utterly foolish if we do not recognize this unique balance, which we have inherited from the

Reformation thought forms, is not automatic in a fallen world.

This is clear when we look at the long span of history, but it is equally clear when we see the daily newspaper, read the daily newspaper, and see that half the world is locked in totalitarian oppression.

These are the front lines right now in America. And these are issues that the church needs to be talking about.

And I hope that what I've put together can provide a way for a church to address these issues in a practical sense.

These are not political studies, they're Bible studies. And so a church could, a

Sunday school class could use it, a Bible study group could use it, and a pastor could draw from that material and use it in his presentation and find a great deal of help.

And it will help address some of the things that we're facing today.

One thought I had is that in contrasting negative rights to positive rights, you think about the freedom from fear and freedom from law that are positive rights or rights that the government has to create.

Often the government will exacerbate the problem in its efforts to alleviate it.

And I think we see that with welfare. I think we see that with the current pandemic, trying to eliminate fear and what is happening.

Fear is snowballing here. Government's job is, biblically speaking, government's job, and people need to understand this, and you get it from the

Bible, you get it from scripture, and people need to be talking about this at church.

Government's job is to maintain order by rewarding or commending those who do good and by punishing those who do wrong.

And the good and the wrong are defined by God's moral and ethical standards.

That is government's job, and our founders understood that too. Yeah, well, that's excellent,

Bev, and I appreciate you creating some, or I should say, digging up some of these illustrations that help really exemplify some of these biblical principles you're talking about, and I hope people will take advantage of it.

So go plug the website one more time, and then I'll let you go. It's discoverbedrocktruth .org

for the Bible studies and for the articles that I've created and written, and the series that are related to the

Bible studies are there, and there are clear links to those, but that's it, wordfoundations .com.

I have a gift for all your listeners. Oh, please. They can go to discoverbedrocktruth .org

slash 76 and download a PDF file that is a list of 12 books of characteristics that were true of the founders in the revolutionary era, and I think it'll be helpful to them, and there's a link as well down there to an article that I wrote in connection to that.

Well, thank you, Bev. Hey, God bless you. You're an inspiration, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day, all right? Thank you,

John. I appreciate what you do. You know, Bev is absolutely right. Our history is under attack. This is happening throughout the entire country.

Some regions, it's worse than others, but what Bev is doing needs to be replicated all over. People need to understand the significance, the importance, the achievements, the virtues connected with people of the past, symbols of the past, and ideas that are no longer in vogue, but are virtues, really, that exemplified much of the past, but do not have a place as much, unfortunately, in our culture today.

We need to recapture these things. We need to remember these things, and we need to practice a lot of these things.

It doesn't mean the men of the past were perfect, or women of the past. It doesn't mean that people living in the past were always in the right, and they always had better ideas.

They always executed better judgment, but it does mean there's something that they had that was valuable that we're missing, and C .S.

Lewis, I remember this often, that he talked about the importance of reading older books because it's how you gain perspective on your own time, to compare it to the way people thought and lived in previous times, and we need a big chunk of that today because people today, the modern modernity, the modern mindset is that there's really nothing of value in the past.

It's kind of like, everything's kind of like technology. Technology increases. It gets better over time.

Well, the same thing with morality, right? The same thing with every other facet of our world, and that's just not true.

That's just not true. Things are actually, in many ways, getting worse, and I think it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out.

Cancel culture is like a tidal wave, and as it approaches us, right, and it takes out certain things.

There goes John C. Calhoun. There goes any person connected with the

South, with the Confederacy, even if that wasn't even the main thing they were known for.

We're gonna rename birds, you know, who were named after people who fought for the

Confederacy at one time. We're gonna get rid of a gavel, right, used at the Southern Baptist Convention because a slave owner touched it, you know?

I mean, this stuff, it's a tidal wave moving forward. You know, there goes Christopher Columbus. He's canceled now.

He's gone. His statue's ripped down. Keeps coming, keeps coming, and now some of the founders are starting to topple.

Abraham Lincoln was just taken out of a park in Boston, and I believe it was.

This is, it's happening right in front of us, and the Republicans can hardly do a thing about it, and that's the sad part of this.

They don't, they can't see how this is all connected, and it parallels in many ways what happened in the Cultural Revolution of China.

This is the same kind of thing. I think I read in a book recently, it was 80%, 80 % of the monuments and statues and things that existed in China, gone because of Mao Zedong, and his wife was really the one that led that effort, but this is what we're experiencing right now.

We have a communist revolution right in front of us. Yeah, it's different than some of the other ones. Every one's a little different, but people don't wanna admit this.

A lot of people, I think, would rather have their heads in the sand, and we do have a little bit of freedom. Yeah, I know social media's clamping down.

I know it's hard to get access to things, but we do have a little bit of freedom to still try to get the word out, and people like Bev are trying to do that, and I would encourage you.

Use his material. Create your own material. Whatever platform you have, even if it's just your own kids or grandkids, talk to them.

Learn, and if you don't know how to talk to them, learn first, and there's plenty of resources out there. Bev has resources.

I've often, when it comes to history, I've often plugged Brian McClanahan's stuff, Learn True History.

Actually, learntruehistory .com is another place you can go to get some of his stuff, but I think it's called McClanahan Academy. If you use, it probably still works, the promo code

Harris, you'll get a discount on that. There's all kinds of other places you can go. There's a lot of great resources.

Unfortunately, there's so many bad resources out there that it's hard for people to kind of whittle down, if they don't know what they're looking at, what the good ones are, so that's why

I'm trying to help. I'm trying to steer you towards some things that'll be helpful. I want to highlight someone else as well, because Bev is a guy who we can gain inspiration from.

This is not his field. This is not something that he's gaining money from, he's making a living off of.

It's just, it's a passion of his heart to study and get this material out there. I want to introduce you to someone else.

Rebecca Dillingham is doing the same kinds of things, and what she's doing actually connects to what

Bev's doing, because Bev is trying to recuperate and help us to remember some of the valuable things, true and valuable things from our own history that we can take inspiration from, and Rebecca is trying to do the same kind of thing, but she's also tracking with kind of where cancel culture is right now, what it's taking out, and just recently, a big, giant

Robert E. Lee monument was taken out of Richmond, and Rebecca grew up in Richmond, so I'm gonna have

Rebecca talk about that with all of us. How did this happen? Were laws ignored?

What's the strategy being used? Is there a way to fight this? Dissidentmama .net or .com will take you to Rebecca's website, and Rebecca is born and bred in Richmond, Virginia.

She has taken it upon herself to fight the cancellation of monuments, especially southern monuments, and the reason

I want to talk to her now and for everyone to hear what she's saying is that there's really two things. One, she knows better what's going on there in Richmond, which, to be honest with you,

I think the tactics that are being used in Richmond are going to be used and are being used already in many other places around the country.

Secondly, Rebecca is a homeschool mom. This is not really her, you wouldn't expect someone as busy as she is with all the responsibilities she has to have a podcast or to be trying to be involved as politically active as she is, but she is involved, and I want you to hear from her because there's a lot of people around the country just like her fighting local battles, and this is where we're gonna win.

If we put all our resources into national stuff, we're not gonna win. It's gonna be the little people at the local level fighting these local battles, rallying support, and all politics is local.

So Rebecca, welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast, and thank you so much for giving us some of your time. Thank you for that nice introduction.

Yeah, well, tell us a little bit more about yourself. Did I leave anything out? I think that's about it.

I was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. I left there about 1994, around age 24, but most of my family still lives there.

I now live in North Carolina, but yeah, that's about it as far as bio goes.

So recently, as you know, there's been a, I believe it's a court ruling that I was surprised to see because I knew this was illegal.

I knew there was already a law in the books in Virginia. You can't take down monuments to soldiers, and this particular ruling said that they can take out this huge, and I don't even,

I don't remember how big it is. I've seen it though in person. It is a big statue of Robert E. Lee there in Richmond, and very prominent.

It's been popular for many years, and now all of a sudden, it's gonna be taken down. I'm not sure what the date is, but can you tell us a little bit about, number one, what does this mean to you as someone who was born and bred in Richmond?

I mean, is this, do you feel like you're living in clown world? And then number two, how did they accomplish this?

How did the left get around the law and rally enough people to, and I don't know if they did rally people, but at least get enough politicians to support this?

Right, it's a 12 -ton statue, and they haven't taken it down, and one of their big talking points is that they're very concerned about public safety.

So I think they're going to take it down in sections, leaving up the pedestal. They're gonna, the first section is gonna be

Lee from the waist up, and then the second section is the horse's body and head, and then

Lee's lower body, and then the first section, the third of which, is the base and the horse's legs.

So I think they're gonna leave up the pedestal for now, because it's all spray painted, and actually, a lot of BLM activists and Antifa people up in Richmond want that up, because it's spray painted, and it's kind of the whole, if I can say this on your podcast, but like revenge porn.

That's kind of what I call it these days, that it's like salt in the wound. It's not just erasing a part of Richmond and Virginia in American history, but it's just death by a thousand cuts.

So that's kind of my segue into what this feels like. I used to cry when the monuments came down, but you have to get a thick skin with these things, and just know that they probably are going to keep coming down.

So the question would be, the big question is what we're going to do about that, where we're going to put those monuments, how we're going to battle getting them, and legally,

I'm not sure if there's much that we can do, because these decisions, it was two cases against Governor Ralph Northam, and the

Virginia Supreme Court was unanimous in saying that he was fine and doing these illegal acts, because what it was, was

Virginia had promised to forever maintain the statue with two deeds of ownership to the state back in 1887 and 1890.

And the deal was, okay, we're deeding it over to Virginia. You just have to keep it clean and maintain it and make sure that it's fine in perpetuity, right?

But their whole thing is, well, we don't need to do this in perpetuity because the message has changed.

So the General Assembly back in the 1800s, what they were saying and agreeing to is something that the people of today's

Virginia Assembly, many of which aren't even from Virginia, are saying it means something else.

So lost cause, white supremacy, all that kind of thing. So they're just simply saying, we don't agree with the past law, so we're going to change the law because of our feelings and our reinterpretation of what equality means and the rights of the people of Richmond.

And the two lawsuits, one was brought by some of the people who lived on Monument Avenue, and one was by an heir to the original people who had deeded it to the state.

And he fought it on property grounds. So I'm not sure if that was the right way to go.

And maybe this could have turned around if he did something else, but I guess his lawyers thought that that was the best thing, that he had a property right to it because he was an heir of the people who had originally deeded it to the state.

But I don't want to be super blackmailed, but I'm not sure how you would fight this because I do believe most of the monuments for Monument Avenue and the other ones they've taken down in Richmond, I believe

Richmond has taken down the most Confederate monuments since the whole George Floyd hoo -ha. But they're in a, not a landfill, what is it called?

A storage facility of some kind? It's a storage facility, but it's like a septic storage facility.

Oh, goodness, okay. I'm spacing on the word, but again, it's like this revenge porn thing. They're being kept at a place that's like a water treatment plant for like toilet water.

So I'm spacing on the word, but that's where they're being kept now. So how do we get them? Where do we put them?

Because I'm not, you know, Brian McClanahan has said this for years, but they're going to come down.

It's the question is, what do we do with them? And how do we deal with keeping in touch with history and roots since they're down?

On one hand you have, if they're up, they're going to recontextualize it. They want to put like a new time capsule in it.

Supposedly there's a time capsule somewhere maybe in the pedestal. They're going to take it out, probably not let anybody read it and put anyone in.

So on one hand, having them up can be problematic too because you have these scalawags and left -wing crazy people running

Richmond and Virginia and a lot of Southern cities. So even where I think you're right, localism is the way to go.

But I mean, there are, you know, nut jobs in localities too. So the mayor and the governor have allowed all of this to happen.

So I guess the question is, what can we do that doesn't entail the courts, that doesn't entail politics, that entails something else?

Well, I do have a question though, because it wasn't this, okay, so maybe this is a different situation, but I thought there was a law in Virginia on the books that was passed just a few years ago that you could not take down any war memorial of any kind, that that was illegal.

And maybe they're not considering this a war memorial. Does that have anything? I mean, did they just ignore that or does that actually not have any teeth?

To my knowledge, they just ignored it. I mean, North Carolina has one too and they take down confederate monuments all the time.

So again, you know - So what's the point of having a law? Yeah. Exactly.

Right, people just ignore it. And so in local, like smaller towns, right? I've heard examples of these battles being won at times.

In fact, there was one, I wanna say it was in Tennessee where they had watched a five minute, like short video that the

Abbeville Institute had put out and the town board said, you know what, after watching this video, we're not gonna take down our monument.

And that's what I'm trying to evoke to some extent. There's a multiple reasons I have for making American monument, which will come out, we're thinking about a month and a half.

We want that to be a tool people can use to show that these things are valuable, that these things instill character qualities and virtues and without anything to replace them of value, then you're just have a naked public square devoid of virtue and rootedness.

And those are some of the things that are contributing to the sense of insecurity and just all the other problems that we have in society right now.

There's no example to look to. So anyway, that's my spiel, but for you and for what you're doing,

I know it's discouraging at times, but these metropolitan areas that are so large, it seems like they're more playing to a national audience and the people who live there now more often than not, they don't reflect the local area.

Like if I go to Raleigh or if I go to Charlotte, I think there should be a sign saying like, you're leaving

North Carolina now. Like this is not, it's not even really national. It's almost like an international community in some ways.

So that's why I think that in some of these major cities, it may be inevitable that they come down, but I mean, have you seen successes on the local level?

I haven't. And I would say your point about the Tennessee monument would be good. That would be one place where maybe the politics could make a difference if you could get the locality before it gets to the courts, before it gets to the governor.

Now a governor could come in and just supersede a locality and say, make up some law or change some law or ignore some law.

But if you could possibly change the hearts and minds of the locality, but in a place like Richmond that has been reconstructed forever, it's a very social justice -y city.

It depresses me going there. But in small towns, you could maybe do that.

When did this change in Richmond? So, because I wouldn't have seen this happening 10 years ago.

So when was the tipping point? Or what can you point to to say, okay, that's the thing, or this was the moment that everything changed and someone like Robert E.

Lee, who would have been a hero in Richmond, went from being a hero to a villain? There were probably many watershed moments, but I guess when probably

Charlottesville, everybody's so concerned with being called a

Nazi or a white supremacist or a racist, when anti -racism becomes something that has absolutely nothing to do with just mutual respect of other people, when it becomes this bludgeon, well, there has to be,

I call it the archetype, there has to be someone to blame. A scapegoat is a very historical thing to have.

And the scapegoat has become the Southern white Christian man. Now that can envelop a lot of people.

That could be some down -home guy in Indiana too, but what it represents is we are the ones keeping everybody from progressing forward.

It is us, this archetype, and people that fall within that purview that are keeping everybody else from having their kumbaya moment.

And Charlottesville, I think, was the watershed moment because it did center around a

Lee monument. And there were a diverse group of people there, but you saw the state, the locality, the county, every arm of the system to stop people from just going out there and saying, hey, we don't like cultural

Marxism. Hey, we like the statue. Hey, we believe in free speech. Sure, there were some people there probably saying, yay, white supremacy, but they have rights too.

And that was definitely not the majority of people. And so I think Charlottesville was the watershed moment.

And January 6th is just a mirror image of that.

I mean, it's been happening for decades before that. This could get really deep, but I think that was the big one that made everything national.

So George Floyd happens in Minnesota. 20 years ago, if that had happened, okay, some dude got killed in Minnesota.

It wouldn't have been everything's this national conversation and this national issue, which is part of the problem.

And then when you have opportunists like Governor Northam and Mayor Stoney, all they have to do is talk about inclusion and a just future and the lost cause and systemic this and systemic that, and it's a done deal.

And you have some people, I've seen some polls that say still the people of Virginia didn't want the monument coming down.

But even if that's the case, it doesn't matter. Cause all they have to do is say democracy and then the oligarchs to do whatever they want.

So I guess, yeah. To me, I think Charlottesville would be the watershed. I knew there was a

Christopher Columbus statue destroyed. And I think a bunch of other statues even unrelated to the Confederacy in Richmond destroyed is bigger than that.

And the concern that I have is also that this will eat into other symbols.

I know Lewis and Clark was just taken down what a month and a half ago, their monument in Charlottesville.

It was in Charlottesville, yeah. Right, and I talked to someone recently, I was doing an interview and I said, do you think they'd take

Jefferson down? I mean, they're taking everything else down in Charlottesville and of course Jefferson's statue is at the university.

So it's probably a little more protected given that the town really doesn't have any jurisdiction there, but this person's, oh no, they wouldn't do that.

And I'm thinking like, yeah, but they would have said that about Lee maybe even 15 years ago that I would never read 10 years ago.

That'll never happen in Charlottesville. So it's moving fast. And I guess my concern is within the next five years, another moment similar to George Floyd and do we now erase the founders?

Is that the next leg of this? Because some of them have already come down, but then on a mass scale, they're gonna be stored at some water treatment facility.

So that's the concern I have is where this train is going. And are we gonna be just devoid of any identity, any positive example to look to except for some kind of activists?

I mean, they don't seem to have a problem even though they're not erecting statues as often, but they don't seem to have a problem looking to activists from the past as a positive examples.

But if all you're looking to are activists and people who kind of tried to beat the system or rip down the system or tried to change the system of some kind, it's like, okay, maybe there's a place for that.

But if it's only vilifying the place that you live and the people that you come from, then there's no identity left in that.

There's nothing to reach back to and gain inspiration from in the past to say, I'm kind of,

I wanna take ownership because I'm proud of my people and my place and I wanna defend them. I mean,

I'm seeing this even with people in the US military, some of the younger ones going in, they just don't have a sense of like what they're actually, why are they doing it?

Is it to get the free stuff that the military is offering them or they're stuck, they don't have another option or is it because they genuinely really are invested in the

United States and really want to protect the people. And I'm sensing a shift.

I don't have any number to point to. I'm just saying I'm sensing this in the air and the water. Are you sensing the same thing, Rebecca?

Yeah, as far as the military goes, all you have to do is watch the recruitment commercials. I mean, it's very global homogenized, right?

And the whole point is, this is what I try to impress upon. I've been trying for years to impress upon like my libertarian friends or people who are like, oh, it's just some rock.

Oh, it's in the public square, whatever the taxpayer shouldn't be paying for it, all this kind of stuff. It's the same thing.

It is the rootlessness that's trying to atomize people. So when you take down Robert E.

Lee, you're not just taking down a guy who owns slaves, you're taking down someone who actually fought the system, right?

They say, oh, the war was about slavery, right? Well, yes, it's about the enslavement of me and you.

That's why Lee said the consolidation of states into one vast empire will sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home.

It is the precursor of ruin. This is what we're going against right now.

So I also try to touch on the hearts of Christians that say, you know,

I don't even think they care about the slavery that much. They just use that word because they know it's extremely powerful and effective.

I think they're taking it down because he was a Christian. You know, I don't think that's why they went after Lee and Jackson first, because,

I mean, Booker T. Washington would agree with me that they were extremely good

Christians and very good influences Christian -wise on black

Americans. This was basically just assumed for many years. Even someone recently sent me, it was from Saddleback Church, which is

Rick Warren. It's a seeker -sensitive church out in California. And they sent me one of their curriculum.

It was a Bible study curriculum from like 10 years ago. And it was using,

I believe it was Stonewall Jackson, as a positive example. You have

Moody Bible Institute, up until very recently, publishing books, Bible study material and stuff, using people like Robert E.

Lee and Stonewall Jackson as positive examples. This was something that even evangelicals were totally fine with.

And now they're pariahs. No one wants to be associated with them. It's like someone turned a light switch.

It was very, very quick. And it's really, though, in elite circles. That's where it's happening. It's not like the people all changed overnight.

And I still don't think they have changed. I think there's a lot of regard for Robert E. Lee. But if you let this go for too long, it does shift the opinion of even your regular ordinary people.

And Robert E. Lee, I pointed this out many times, that he, you know, this was one of the probably, there's a whole list of people that if you really wanted to fight racism or slavery or something, you would be targeting before targeting

Lee. He would have been the example of someone who did not like slavery himself, was against it, manumitted his slaves.

Well, you know, he's the one that set the ground is level at the foot of the cross right after the war and was in favor of basically a sort of an integration in the church.

I mean, he was an honorable man to pretty much everyone who knew him North and South. And he modeled himself after George Washington.

He thought he, you know, he wanted to be like George Washington. You take him down, it's not a far step to taking

George Washington down. George Washington wrote the British commander of New York when he left and said, you got our slaves, bring them back, they're our property.

George Washington owned slaves himself. I mean, he's on our dollar bill, but I don't know how much longer he can be there if you really want to apply the same logic you're applying to Lee.

There's actually in some ways a better case you can make for taking Washington down. And once we do that, then what is the

United States anymore? It's, you know, we're a young country. We don't have the rich history to pull back to, you know, like many

European countries do. But if the history we do have is gone, then, you know, we're really in trouble.

Is it gonna be like a sports star, music stars? Like who are the ones that kids are gonna be trying to pretend to be like or to have as heroes and role models?

So, I mean, I appreciate you tracking this stuff. I know it can get discouraging. So, you know, I just want to say,

I understand that, empathize with that. And for everyone in the audience who's listening, but there are strength in numbers and I would encourage you to get involved and, you know, in your local community, try to do what you can.

Preserve the heroes of your local community. They're all imperfect. No one's perfect except Jesus. But the things that they did model, the virtues, sacrifice, honor, duty to home and country, those kinds of things.

Try to preserve those things as best you can. And any final words for us, Rebecca?

I was just gonna say, you know, people need to understand 1861 to 1865.

And that's part of the problem. I think a lot of conservatives and Christians, you know, are on the right track when it comes to other, you know, cultural war issues, existential issues.

But if you can't see, if your history is bad over the war between the states, there's no way you can understand what the founding is.

Because if you think it's about mass democracy and America was an apostate nation and that, you know,

Lincoln was the fulfillment of it and then the cherry on top was Martin Luther King, no way you can defeat any of our founders.

There's no way you can defend any of our roots and our heritage. So I would advise people to, right, because that's part of the problem.

And my last thing would be, I would encourage people to not be scared to be called names.

Because if you're being called a racist, honestly, you're probably doing something right because that word means nothing anymore.

And, and I understand it can hurt your employment and that, but, you know, you have to have the back of people fighting and then you have to be brave and speak the truth.

And I think if more people did that, you know, the people in power, would not be so emboldened, with their tail tucked between their legs.

And, you know, I just think people need a very backbone to fight like you, like the

Abbeville Institute and some other folks like that, because existential thing, it's beyond a very existence type battle we're fighting here and I believe it's good versus evil.

So I would say pray a lot, do what you can, leave it at the foot of the cross. Don't cry when the monuments come down, but see what you can do.

To understand history better and know that this is just one piece of the cultural

Marxist puzzle to hurt people and to actually give some people rights and others to take their rights away.

So yeah, just do your homework. Amen. Yeah, well, that's good.

And, you know, teach your children. The Bible has a lot to say about that, especially I think of the nation of Israel and what parents were supposed to pass down to them about their own history, about what the

Lord had done. And you can do that, whether there's a monument in the public square or whether there's public school teachers teaching absolute garbage, you can still fulfill your responsibility.

And that's all God's gonna hold you accountable for anyway. When this whole thing started, I immediately thought, and I know there's a few like me who did, you might be one of them,

Rebecca, that under the current definition of what racism is, the

Bible is going to be canceled and oppression really more broadly, or the current definition of what oppression is, the

Bible's toast. There's no way that what the Bible teaches about the relationship between men and women, even

Paul's teaching and even some of Jesus's parables that are connected to slavery and how to function in a pagan slave system, which the

Roman world was, all the things about nations and the importance of distinctions between nations and boundaries and all the things that exist in the

Bible that are taught or exemplified will make it the subject to cancellation by the current standards.

And I wouldn't wanna pick a fight with God. That's what these people are doing.

They're picking a fight with God when they start down this road. And I think it's little by little, inch by inch, the progressives progress every year, but it's been big leaps lately.

And so it can be surprising, but don't be disheartened. Take courage.

Greater is he who is in us than he who is in the world. We have a bigger and greater and more powerful force.

That's the God and the Lord Jesus Christ with us. And eternity goes on for a long time.

This temporal world is not all there is. So that's my encouragement. And Rebecca, thank you so much for weighing in on this.

If people wanna find out more about you, dissidentmama .com. Looks like you got a t -shirt there in the background, so you can get a t -shirt that says

Dissident Mama on it. And so I appreciate it and God bless.

And you have a good day, right, Rebecca? All right, thank you. Well, I hope that was helpful for everyone. I hope that was inspirational.

I hope that you got to know two people who are taking this upon themselves. They don't have the platforms that others do, but they're building them and they're doing so over time, but they're getting good information out there and they're doing what they can.

And their area of influence and their local communities with the platforms that they have available to them.

And I think if this kind of thing locally is just replicated all over the place, this washes away whatever stranglehold the national or international media have.

But it's, you know, and already I see, this is kind of like a hopeful outlook in a way. I know,

I realize someone who's very pessimistic is going to tell me that, John, it doesn't matter because, you know, iTunes and some of these places are, they're owned by big corporations and they're woke.

And I get it, I get it, I get it. But here's the thing, the market's already finding ways around some of this stuff.

There's already alternatives to YouTube. There's already starting, yeah, they're not as popular. I know, there's already starting to be alternatives to even podcasting platforms.

And there's competition that's now going on. I remember, you know, right now, I'm trying out something called

Red Circle. I don't know how long I'll do it. I'm not been very, I haven't liked it that much. But one of the things that, because they had someone that reached out to me and said, hey, you're on Anchor, would you wanna come to Red Circle for your podcast?

I said, okay, you know, we'll be able to get you more revenue and it's not true at all so far.

It's been like a third of what I was getting with Anchor, but they want to, you know, they're trying to compete.

And one of the things I said, and I kept saying it, and I was very serious about it, I said, look, I don't wanna be canceled. If you guys are gonna cancel me,

I'm not coming over there. And I basically got, you know, the person who reached out to me was like, no, no, no, we're not gonna do that.

We're not gonna do that. We value free speech. So look, there is a sense in which people want to compete, and that's a perk.

They want to be able to provide free speech platforms. I'm not saying that it's happened as fast as we want.

I'm not saying that it's happened as much as we want. I'm just saying it is happening. And when you have people that you know personally that are taking some of these issues on, you're a little more likely to trust them.

You're a little more likely to think, okay, that's not that kooky, because, you know what, I know them. They're my neighbor. They're my friend who goes to church with me.

They're my friend who goes to sports, and their kids play with my kids, and, you know, whatever the case is. But that's kind of the thing that I think is going to, that's the best way to combat this is a localist approach.

You're not gonna be able to fight the, fight on the same platform and level. But this is kind of like death by a thousand cuts.

If you have, you know, a million people that are doing what Bev is doing, doing what

Rebecca's doing, and if they're embedded in their local communities, if they're trusted, if they have good character, if people know them, that's powerful stuff, guys.

And so I just want that to inspire people. I want you to see that this kind of thing is happening, and you can use your social media in a positive way like this.

And don't worry about not having a huge audience. You know, you have, the influence that you have is important.

And if you can affect the people that just live with you or live around you to some degree, you know, you're doing something.

And don't get discouraged that it's not as big as, you know, I don't know, MSNBC or, and they're not that big actually.

But that's my point. So I hope that was helpful for you to see some other examples of people that are doing some of the same thing, and from a different angle maybe, but the same thing that I'm doing.

And I just hope that that inspired you. So God bless, go forward, live your life as best you can for the glory of God this week.