RadixJournal - October 27, 2023


The Lost Cause

Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Robert E. Lee Thomas Jefferson George Washington Woodrow Wilson Alex Stevenson Brahmin Jackson
The Cargo Cultist Apocalypse Now

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

123.6

Word count

1,091

Sentence count

73

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The removal of a Confederate monument in Washington, D.C. from the National Museum of American Civil War and the removal of the Lee statue in Arlington National Cemetary in Arlington, Va. are two of the most controversial events of the past week.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I don't know if you've seen this.
00:00:01.820 They have officially melted down the statue of Robert E. Lee.
00:00:09.280 You know, this is obviously deeply symbolic.
00:00:13.760 And there's even a burnt offering quality to these things.
00:00:20.100 I mean, the fact that the Washington Post is showing these images,
00:00:26.260 you know, it's almost like we're watching someone being sacrificed
00:00:30.480 in like a temple of Vulcan or something.
00:00:32.820 I mean, I don't think I've got too much Brahmin on my brain.
00:00:37.680 I think that's how it's being seen.
00:00:41.400 And it's a melting down of an idol, basically.
00:00:45.180 I think that is fascinating in itself.
00:00:48.700 And it's obviously a kind of ritualistic humiliation, so to speak.
00:00:54.440 Like, that is what's going on.
00:00:57.040 And so I definitely understand why a lot of people will be offended by this.
00:01:06.340 But I kind of...
00:01:10.260 Maybe it's my tendency to try to look on the bright side
00:01:13.820 or see a silver lining.
00:01:14.900 I do feel like this destruction of the monument is kind of liberating.
00:01:23.120 And, you know, the...
00:01:28.060 I don't think I would ever again engage in some kind of protest for Southern history.
00:01:35.100 And also because, you know, they...
00:01:40.680 Those guys who want to hold on to the lost cause and et cetera,
00:01:44.080 I think they can kind of defend themselves or not.
00:01:46.700 But it's just not something that I would do.
00:01:53.380 And I think a lot of things that were said around that time were true.
00:02:00.840 In the sense that...
00:02:02.940 I mean, I remember saying this at one point.
00:02:06.220 Like, I want to see full iconoclasm.
00:02:08.760 You know, let's not just take away Robert E. Lee.
00:02:11.920 I mean, Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner.
00:02:15.220 Let's go all the way.
00:02:16.940 I want to see you do it.
00:02:18.020 I want to see you have intellectual consistency
00:02:20.660 and not pretend that all of these generations of Americans
00:02:28.640 weren't all connected on some basic level.
00:02:31.760 Yeah, George Washington, right?
00:02:33.720 Our first president.
00:02:34.880 Yeah.
00:02:35.120 So, you know, I have those thoughts as well.
00:02:39.400 And, you know, the alt-right was right.
00:02:44.440 We saw a series of iconoclasm that continued in 2020 with BLM.
00:02:51.040 It was going on in 2016 post-Trump that continued in 2020.
00:02:56.320 You know, paintings of Woodrow Wilson are being taken out of universities.
00:03:00.560 I mean, it goes on and on.
00:03:02.080 And it's a general trend and it kind of ebbs and flows.
00:03:05.640 I think it will slow down here and there, but it will always come back.
00:03:10.020 And we've even seen it recently where some Palestinian protesters have attacked,
00:03:16.180 you know, British architecture.
00:03:18.520 Obviously, that doesn't make sense on some level, but it's, you know,
00:03:22.740 it's an almost it's a trope of fighting.
00:03:26.260 The system is taking down these symbols.
00:03:28.540 But I think it's also important to, you know, critically examine the symbols themselves because
00:03:35.380 the lost cause myth was a myth.
00:03:41.860 And it also was a kind of negotiation, as it were, between Yankees and Southerners, where
00:03:49.720 you're going to we won this war.
00:03:54.380 We are ultimately going to be a union in which Washington prevails.
00:04:00.640 But we're going to let you have your cake and eat it, so to speak, of we're going to, in fact,
00:04:08.540 quasi deify your generals by naming all these army bases, but also put those army bases in the south.
00:04:15.560 So we'll let you, we'll get all these southern whites to get gung-ho about the military and go fight in wars. 0.81
00:04:23.160 And there'll be these army bases with confederate generals, but they'll ultimately, let's be honest,
00:04:28.820 be Yankee bases in the south named, you know, after Jackson or Lee, etc.
00:04:33.940 So I think there was that sort of negotiation going on in the period, the end of Reconstruction and a national reconciliation,
00:04:45.080 which I think is worth, worthwhile, actually.
00:04:49.740 But there was also a sort of lost cause, a kind of bad lost cause,
00:04:55.340 where Southerners wanted to pretend that the Civil War wasn't, in fact, about slavery
00:05:02.580 and was some kind of libertarian protest against an encroaching government.
00:05:10.640 And, you know, it's good we, Alex Stevens was a good writer and a very clear writer,
00:05:19.280 and he made it very clear that this was about slavery and it was even ultimately about race on some level.
00:05:26.900 You can read the cornerstone of the Confederacy speech, and it even goes after Jefferson.
00:05:36.140 There's a, this is based on the prospect that Thomas Jefferson might very well have been wrong
00:05:41.700 when he wrote those lines about human equality.
00:05:46.400 And for Southerners to kind of live in this blindness of,
00:05:56.520 it was about libertarianism or the Constitution,
00:06:01.740 as opposed to being a revolt against the Constitution, which it was,
00:06:05.360 but it was about the Constitution of libertarianism.
00:06:07.760 It wasn't about race or slavery.
00:06:10.020 And they took this to just elaborate ends of, like, talking about black Confederates
00:06:15.860 and all of this just increasingly nonsensical propaganda
00:06:21.940 to show that they weren't, in fact, racist and that they were the good guys, etc.
00:06:28.020 I think in some ways these statues were blinders for Southerners,
00:06:35.700 and in some ways they covered up realities,
00:06:39.540 and in some ways they became false idols.
00:06:45.540 And they were ultimately, I mean, the fact that these statues were given
00:06:53.140 to an African-American institute that just melted them down
00:06:56.520 demonstrates who really has the power in this situation.
00:07:03.000 And I'm not implying that blacks have the power.
00:07:05.640 I think there are political football in this as well.
00:07:09.400 But, you know, isn't there something good about just ripping the Band-Aid off
00:07:16.920 and facing reality, as opposed to engaging in this Southern temptation of nostalgia
00:07:26.200 and false nostalgia, kind of imagining something that never really was?
00:07:34.540 And maybe there's something that can be very positive about getting rid of those statues
00:07:42.560 that gave Southerners a kind of false sense of security.
00:07:48.140 And maybe all of that stuff was a lie, and it's a lie that the state doesn't find terribly useful anymore,
00:07:59.600 and it's a kind of old lie that's outlived its usefulness.
00:08:05.240 And maybe there's something to be said about this being good.
00:08:11.180 You know, like, let's take down the Confederate flag in South Carolina.
00:08:15.820 Let's not pretend that, first off, there isn't an inherent contradiction of waving a Confederate flag.
00:08:24.240 That was a rebellion against the Union. 0.93
00:08:28.580 And to be part of the Union while flying the flag is a bit oxymoronic and ridiculous, even.
00:08:37.960 And let's just kind of get rid of it and face reality and stop living in this dream world of the lost cause myth.
00:08:48.180 Just a thought.