The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 89 - When Will The War On Statues Extend To The Left's Heroes？

00:00:00.000 So a bunch of students tore down a Confederate monument at UNC Chapel Hill this week. 0.88

00:00:07.020 And the media calls these people protesters, but they really are just vandals and criminals.

00:00:13.680 Whatever you think about the Confederacy, it is felony vandalism to destroy a statue like that.

00:00:19.500 But this is the precedent that we've set over the past few years.

00:00:22.780 It's a very dangerous precedent, in my view, where if you don't like a statue, well, then go ahead and just tear it down.

00:00:28.920 The law is going to step to the side and allow felony destruction of property to occur without doing anything about it.

00:00:36.760 Now, that said, I have no problem with this specific monument coming down, per se.

00:00:44.800 I think we can't lump all Confederate monuments together.

00:00:49.380 Not all Confederate monuments are equal.

00:00:52.800 This one was erected in, I believe, 1918 or somewhere around there.

00:00:56.920 And it was clear from the beginning that it was associated with white supremacy.

00:01:02.460 So, yeah, take it down.

00:01:04.100 Now, I still don't think that a school should stand by and let students do it themselves because that's a crime.

00:01:10.740 And you can't have that kind of chaos.

00:01:12.480 And you can't allow students to just go, well, I don't like this.

00:01:14.720 And so they take it down.

00:01:17.600 And I still don't think we can lump all Confederate monuments together.

00:01:20.600 I think we have to take it on a case-by-case basis.

00:01:23.200 And there are several problems with the precedent that we're setting here and that has been said over the last couple of years when it comes to these monuments, not the least of which is how unevenly the precedent is applied.

00:01:36.780 There are many monuments in America that may be reasonably considered offensive because they commemorate bad people or they commemorate people who represented bad things or both in some cases.

00:01:50.460 And the argument against Confederate monuments, I guess, is that they fought for a bad thing, which is slavery.

00:01:57.000 Now, of course, everyone agrees in modern America that slavery is a bad thing.

00:02:02.520 Not everyone agrees from a historical perspective that it's necessarily exactly accurate to say that the Confederates fought primarily for slavery.

00:02:12.000 I'm not going to really get into that discussion.

00:02:13.720 It's a different discussion about the real causes of the Civil War and everything.

00:02:16.700 That is a multifaceted discussion.

00:02:18.240 I think anyone who's done even a little bit of reading understands that it's certainly not – it's at least not quite as simple as that.

00:02:24.700 Now, there are those who argue that it was straightforwardly a war over slavery.

00:02:29.380 Others will point out that slavery was only turned into the reason for the war about midway through.

00:02:34.660 It was a political decision made by Lincoln when he began to see that Europe may come to the aid of the South, and he saw that, and that's when the Emancipation Proclamation came.

00:02:44.400 And the Emancipation Proclamation was a political document that had no actual effect and did nothing at all except politically because it was written specifically to free slaves in the states that Lincoln no longer had any control over while allowing states that he did control to keep their slaves.

00:03:03.660 So, again, it was just a political document, and this idea that it was a war over slavery, something happened halfway through.

00:03:11.580 Going into the war, Lincoln made it clear that he did not want to fight a war over slavery, and if he could keep the union together and keep slavery, he would do that.

00:03:19.720 He also made it clear while he was running for president that he did not believe in equality for black and white people.

00:03:28.140 He did not believe that black people were equal to white people, so he was a racist himself.

00:03:32.060 Now, all of these things are, you know, these are all relevant, but let's put all that to the side.

00:03:36.920 But what I don't think can be denied is that several of the men who've had their monuments torn down, especially Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, some others, these particular men, let's just talk about Jackson and Lee for a second, these were men of high moral character and great personal courage who did not themselves believe that they were fighting for slavery.

00:03:59.400 Both men opposed slavery personally, as did plenty of other Southerners, though I think Lee's wife did own slaves, which is true.

00:04:08.660 General Grant's wife also owned slaves. 0.84

00:04:10.740 You saw that in the North as well, which is another reason, which is another complicating factor when you think about, well, did the people in the North, the Northern soldiers especially, did they think that they were marching down into the South to fight against slavery?

00:04:24.220 And I think the answer in most cases is no, and we kind of can see that the answer is no, because some of their generals actually owned slaves.

00:04:33.900 But the point is that they, you know, guys like Jackson Lee, they felt obliged to fight on the side of their home states.

00:04:45.120 You can say that they were wrong about that, that they were mistaken, they made the wrong choice, they were blinded by loyalty to families and homes and whatever.

00:04:52.360 But if you paint them all as slobbering racists, or if you suggest that Jackson and Lee were fighting because they really wanted to keep black people enslaved, well, then it's going to be clear that you've just never read a history book, because that's just not accurate.

00:05:07.580 The interesting thing is that both Lee and Jackson were admired by the North and the South during the time of the Civil War.

00:05:18.760 The men who marched down into Virginia to kill Confederates still had a greater respect for some of the Confederate officers than we do today, which is kind of interesting.

00:05:28.000 I mean, these guys had a much greater reason to hate those men than we do, and yet they didn't hate them nearly as much.

00:05:35.580 And I do think when you're looking at a guy like Robert E. Lee, you do have to look within the context of the time.

00:05:42.380 This was a war hero, a man that was respected, as I said, across the country before the Civil War.

00:05:47.100 The federal government comes to him and wants to put him in charge of the army.

00:05:51.260 But from Lee's perspective, as a Virginia man, if he does that, even though he opposed secession and he was morally opposed to slavery, but if he were to take this job offer from the federal government, it means that he will be leading troops into his home state, into his home, taking up arms against his friends, neighbors, and even his own sons.

00:06:13.560 So, for him, it's a choice between the federal government or his family and his home and his country.

00:06:22.720 Now, what we have to understand is that back in those days, especially in the South, you consider, when you talked about your country, when a guy said, my country, what he meant most of the time was his state.

00:06:35.800 In the early days of the United States, people, especially in the South, identified much more with their state than they did with the country.

00:06:45.160 They saw the country as this collection of states, but they looked at their state as their actual home and their country and what they were most loyal to.

00:06:54.740 We don't look at it like that now, but it's kind of hard to say they were wrong for seeing it that way.

00:06:59.760 I would argue that they were actually much more in the spirit of what was intended when the country was founded, where it was never really intended that people would necessarily identify with the federal government or have any great loyalty to it.

00:07:14.860 People were more loyal to their actual homes because they were tied to their homes.

00:07:18.900 They were tied to the land.

00:07:20.380 They were, you know, we didn't, they didn't have all the technology.

00:07:22.400 They didn't have radios and internet and everything where they could kind of connect with everyone across the country.

00:07:26.320 They just had their home and their land and their farms and their families.

00:07:29.340 That's all they had.

00:07:30.240 And that's what they were loyal to.

00:07:31.600 And that's what guys like, so someone like Robert E. Lee, he had to make that choice between, in his mind, it was between his home and the federal government.

00:07:41.540 He chose his home.

00:07:44.220 And then he proceeded to fight with great brilliance and dignity, always outnumbered, always outmanned, always outgunned, and yet winning battle after battle with courage and tenacity.

00:07:54.360 And that's why he has monuments.

00:07:55.640 The fact that the Confederacy was a slave-holding country is a very serious moral problem, and yes, he is stained by it inevitably. 0.68

00:08:03.960 But Thomas Jefferson actually owned slaves personally, hundreds of them.

00:08:08.960 Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of humans.

00:08:11.480 He owned people.

00:08:13.220 And yet most of us can still admire the great things that he did and honor him for those reasons, for the great things that he did.

00:08:19.740 Even aside from the very dark evil that he was personally and directly involved in.

00:08:26.480 So what I'm saying is, my opinion on Confederate statues is that some of them are worth keeping up.

00:08:33.740 Some of them are not.

00:08:34.680 And it really just depends on the situation.

00:08:39.060 But I do think we need to try to develop a little bit of a more nuanced and mature and historically accurate perspective on that period in our history, which I think many of us simply don't have.

00:08:54.740 Be that as it may, the argument is that all of these monuments must come down because the monuments represent slavery.

00:09:04.420 Whether or not the individuals who actually fought for the South meant to or wanted to personally fight for slavery, and many of them had no such intention.

00:09:15.120 But that's the argument.

00:09:45.120 I think we can agree, or should agree, that they don't deserve monuments either.

00:09:51.760 We would all be kind of upset if animal rights activists erected a monument to Adolf Hitler on the basis that Adolf Hitler was himself a proponent of animal rights, which he was, or environmentalism or whatever.

00:10:06.140 So it seems that the precedent is that only decent people who fought for decent things can have statues.

00:10:19.540 Here's my problem, though.

00:10:22.300 It has been open season on the indecent and offensive monuments only so long as those are monuments to 19th century white guys from the American South.

00:10:34.200 That, to me, seems way too selective.

00:10:36.620 If we're going to do this thing, if we're really going to start purging the offensive monuments on the basis that I've just mentioned here, then I think we have to do it all.

00:10:47.300 It doesn't make sense to focus especially and only on these Confederate monuments.

00:10:52.060 It makes no sense.

00:10:52.700 If we do it so selectively, then the selective nature of this purging will lead people, myself included, to suspect that there is a specifically left-wing ideological motivation behind this outcry against statues.

00:11:09.580 And it actually has very little to do with slavery or racism or anything.

00:11:17.740 If it's not ideological, if our modern sensibilities simply will not tolerate statues that commemorate problematic figures of any sort,

00:11:28.320 then I think it doesn't make any sense that the outrage has not extended beyond Confederate soldiers.

00:11:34.420 You know, many people in the South feel that this is an attack on their heritage and their history.

00:11:43.560 If it's not that, if it's not an attack on their heritage and their history, if it's really just a movement against evils like racism and slavery,

00:11:52.160 then all of the statues associated with evil should come down.

00:11:56.280 If these are the only ones that come down, then I think people from the South that are upset about this because they feel like their heritage and history is being attacked,

00:12:06.100 I think they're vindicated.

00:12:07.460 They have every right to be upset, and their suspicions have been vindicated and confirmed.

00:12:11.680 If theirs are the only statues that come down, if we're looking to be consistent,

00:12:18.420 then we have to go for all the offensive statues, or we go for none of them and just let them all stay up.

00:12:23.340 I think that's kind of the way, you know, that's the way we have to look at it.

00:12:27.060 If we are, this is not whataboutism, okay?

00:12:28.920 This is just simply a matter of consistently applying a principle.

00:12:35.760 And I think a lot of the time people are, I know I get accused of whataboutism.

00:12:39.980 Although you're, you know, that's any time something is going on and you come along and you say,

00:12:43.820 well, yeah, but whatabout, there's not always a problem.

00:12:49.060 Sometimes it makes sense to say whatabout, because what you're, the message, the argument you're making is,

00:12:54.880 okay, let's extend this principle.

00:12:57.360 Let's consistently apply the principle.

00:13:00.140 And when a principle is only being applied over here, but not over here,

00:13:04.460 I think it is perfectly reasonable to come and say, what about over here?

00:13:09.540 Let's take that principle and extend it.

00:13:14.200 And if you don't want to extend that principle across the board, well, then there's something wrong with the principle.

00:13:20.720 And we need to reevaluate.

00:13:22.420 That's the point of the whatabout argument is what we're trying to do is we're trying to establish that

00:13:27.620 if you don't want to consistently apply the principle, there's something wrong with the principle.

00:13:31.840 We need to throw it out or we need to consistently apply it.

00:13:34.940 So let's go over a few other offensive monuments and statues that, if we are consistently applying the principle,

00:13:45.280 should also come down.

00:13:48.120 Number one, there is the monument to child sex predator Harvey Milk in San Francisco.

00:13:55.020 Now, there are a few monuments to Harvey Milk in San Francisco.

00:13:58.940 And I think across the country, there are even streets named after him and schools. 0.96

00:14:03.680 And there's a naval ship named after him for some damn reason. 0.95

00:14:07.480 I don't know why. 0.97

00:14:08.360 He's got his own naval ship.

00:14:11.980 And he has his own postage stamps.

00:14:15.860 Okay, this guy's all over the place.

00:14:17.280 I don't advocate for tearing down the schools just because they have his name, and I don't advocate for demolishing the naval ship.

00:14:26.000 I think those can just be renamed.

00:14:28.100 The postage stamps can be burned.

00:14:30.640 But the monuments must come down.

00:14:34.580 Harvey Milk is, despite what you may have heard in Hollywood, this is not a civil rights hero.

00:14:41.040 This is not a hero of any kind.

00:14:42.360 All he did, this is what he accomplished with his life, is he was attracted to other men, and he was elected to public office.

00:14:50.000 That was his whole achievement, is his own political advancement.

00:14:54.280 That's what he did.

00:14:55.540 Okay?

00:14:56.380 That was his one achievement.

00:14:58.780 But I don't see how that minor political achievement outweighs the fact that Harvey Milk was a pederast who preyed upon drug-addicted boys.

00:15:12.360 There's a quote from one of his friends that is instructive, because even his friends, even the people that knew him, don't deny this fact.

00:15:23.340 One of his friends said that he had a penchant for young waifs with drug abuse problems.

00:15:29.340 Let's be more specific about this.

00:15:30.880 The young waifs were minors, runaways, and drug addicts who came to Milk looking for a mentor or a father figure. 0.98

00:15:42.360 And instead, they were groomed to be Milk's sex toys, essentially. 0.93

00:15:47.560 At least two of his victims later went on to commit suicide. 0.99

00:15:52.960 Okay?

00:15:54.020 This was a deeply evil man.

00:15:56.340 He contributed nothing of value to society. 0.91

00:15:58.560 He left misery and suicide in his wake.

00:16:01.420 He preyed upon drug addicts and runaways, and he used their helplessness and their vulnerability as a means to satisfy his own sexual desires. 0.73

00:16:13.940 That's what he was. 0.95

00:16:15.140 He was murdered by a fellow Democrat.

00:16:20.740 That doesn't make him a martyr just because I'm sorry that he was killed.

00:16:24.840 That doesn't change anything about it.

00:16:26.380 Just because a guy's killed doesn't make him a martyr, doesn't make him a hero, doesn't make him a saint.

00:16:29.860 You're not automatically canonized just because you were killed.

00:16:32.340 It doesn't change the fact that he was a pederast who preyed upon 15-year-old boys who were runaways and drug addicts and were confused and lonely.

00:16:40.140 That's what he liked to do. 0.86

00:16:40.980 That's how he got his, you know, that's how he fulfilled his sexual urges.

00:16:46.040 It doesn't change that.

00:16:47.160 The fact that he was killed doesn't change that.

00:16:48.780 He was still a deeply evil man.

00:16:51.660 And he does not deserve to be remembered or commemorated or honored at all.

00:16:56.360 Not at all.

00:17:00.560 And, in fact, I don't know what the law was back then, but according to the laws in California now,

00:17:09.860 if he were alive today, he'd be going to jail for what he did with these boys.

00:17:18.480 Number two, there is a bust of Bill Clinton in Little Rock, Arkansas.

00:17:23.200 I think it also needs to come down.

00:17:25.820 Bill Clinton has been credibly accused of rape, assault, harassment multiple times.

00:17:30.300 Juanita Broderick's story about Clinton is horrifying.

00:17:34.220 I think most of us know it by now, but it bears repeating.

00:17:37.440 According to her, she was lured to his hotel room, where he proceeded to forcibly pin her 0.70

00:17:43.020 down on the bed while she pleaded with him to stop, and he raped her, allegedly. 0.94

00:17:52.900 This was forcible, violent rape. 0.72

00:17:55.660 This was not even a, you know, a thing where some of the stuff you see in Hollywood where

00:18:05.140 basically Clinton promised to advance her political career if she slept with him, and 1.00

00:18:10.480 so she did it, and then she regretted it, you know.

00:18:12.740 It wasn't that kind of thing.

00:18:13.920 This was pin her down on the bed. 0.99

00:18:16.420 She's pleading with him to stop. 0.99

00:18:17.920 She's saying no, no, and he rapes her.

00:18:20.260 The kind of thing that would put most people in prison for a long time, but instead, Bill

00:18:27.680 Clinton went to the White House, and there are many other stories of abuse, all of them

00:18:32.740 from people who are far more credible than Clinton himself, and almost all these stories

00:18:38.660 follow the same pattern.

00:18:40.160 They sound very similar.

00:18:41.680 They're very consistent, and the people that have been telling these stories about Clinton

00:18:45.020 have been telling the same story for years.

00:18:46.460 They haven't changed it, so that's what makes them credible, and yet this guy has a statue

00:18:51.000 in Arkansas.

00:18:52.440 I think it needs to come down.

00:18:54.380 Number three, there's a statue of a mass murderer, Vladimir Lenin, in Seattle.

00:18:59.820 Now, this statue, I believe, is privately owned.

00:19:02.180 It's on private property.

00:19:03.760 I would not support destroying private property, but the statue toppling mobs don't seem to mind

00:19:10.880 destroying things that don't belong to them, so I'm trying to figure out why they haven't

00:19:14.820 gone after this one yet.

00:19:16.920 I'm not saying that they should.

00:19:18.400 As I said, all these things should be done legally, should be taken down legally, but

00:19:21.920 it's just interesting that they haven't set their sights on this yet.

00:19:24.780 Lenin was a Marxist revolutionary who founded the tyrannical Soviet state, which would then

00:19:31.860 proceed to murder, imprison, starve, enslave tens of millions of people over the course of

00:19:37.400 the 20th century, hundreds of millions of people.

00:19:39.260 So for a while on the left, there was an effort, and I think there still is an effort, to separate

00:19:47.980 Lenin from Stalin and to say, well, Stalin was the butcher, and even though there are

00:19:54.420 still some people who, in fact, we talked about a couple weeks ago, there was a poll

00:20:00.140 done among millennials, and a certain not-that-small percentage of millennials actually admire Stalin.

00:20:06.440 They think he was an admirable guy, so even Stalin is-but I think among a lot of liberals,

00:20:11.780 there has been historically an attempt to separate Lenin from Stalin and say, well, Stalin was

00:20:16.160 the butcher, and Lenin was just a fighter for Marxist ideals.

00:20:21.220 They were both butchers.

00:20:23.340 Although Lenin was a fighter for Marxist ideals, and that should tell you something about Marxist

00:20:28.780 ideals, that he was a butcher and yet was also consistently a fighter for those ideals,

00:20:33.380 because they are terrible and morally depraved ideals, but that was Lenin, so that needs to

00:20:43.280 come down.

00:20:44.880 Number three, or what are we on?

00:20:46.440 Number four, I think.

00:20:47.620 There's a bust of eugenist Margaret Sanger in the National Portrait Institute.

00:20:53.240 Now, Margaret Sanger, of course, is the-and this bust is part of their civil rights exhibit,

00:21:02.460 to make it even worse, part of their civil rights exhibit, and the National Portrait Institute

00:21:12.240 is run by the Smithsonian, Smithsonian, Smithsonian, I can't speak.

00:21:19.940 Anyway, so it's part of their civil rights exhibit.

00:21:24.020 Margaret Sanger, obviously the founder of Planned Parenthood, she once proudly spoke to the KKK, 0.88

00:21:29.420 and it is true, maybe you've seen that picture online of Margaret Sanger standing up in front

00:21:35.260 of a bunch of hooded KKK members and giving a speech, that photo is fake, it's Photoshop,

00:21:41.340 not a real photo, but she did actually speak to the KKK, she spoke to a group of female 0.92

00:21:46.940 KKK members, she was a proponent of the eugenics movement, and the eugenics movement was, which

00:21:53.100 was popular in the early 20th century, the eugenics movement was, and is, all about ridding society

00:22:02.080 of the undesirable classes through forced sterilization and abortion and other methods. 1.00

00:22:09.180 Now, Sanger's apologists will say that she was not a racist, and that she wasn't looking to 0.96

00:22:20.460 specifically annihilate the black race, instead she was looking to just get rid of poor people, 1.00

00:22:27.580 and especially people with mental disabilities, regardless of the race. 1.00

00:22:30.880 And that's true. That doesn't make her any better. She's still, that's not, that's a heck of a

00:22:38.500 defense, isn't it? But I think it's interesting. I've actually seen, there's a certain quote from

00:22:43.160 Margaret Sanger that her defenders will cite in order to defend her against racism charges.

00:22:50.800 And I want to read this quote to you. This is her talking to a group of black pastors. And this is

00:23:01.420 what she said. She said, the most successful educational approach to the Negro is through 1.00

00:23:09.900 a religious appeal. We don't want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, 0.96

00:23:16.320 and the minister is the man who can straighten out the idea, if it ever occurs, to any of their more

00:23:21.420 rebellious members. Now, I'm not sure that her statement about educating, quote, rebellious Negroes 1.00

00:23:30.720 does much to debunk the racism charges. I don't think it does. But I do know that she explicitly desired

00:23:40.960 to eradicate the undesirables. And then the organization that she founded, which was later

00:23:47.340 known as Planned Parenthood, though, at the time when she founded, I think it was called the Birth

00:23:51.780 Control League or something like that. That organization would then go on to actually eradicate

00:23:57.260 over 7 million undesirables, according to her. I don't think that's a coincidence. You see, I think

00:24:05.620 she had this idea, and then the organization she founded went on to carry out that idea, 0.99

00:24:12.880 preying especially on minority neighborhoods and killing a disproportionate number of black babies. 0.98

00:24:22.640 That's not a coincidence. Now, ironically, this bust of Margaret Sanger has been defended, 0.98

00:24:32.780 the person who runs the National Portrait Institute,

00:24:35.620 defended it on the grounds that her racist views mirrored her time. So they were part of the

00:24:42.200 historical context. And also, the National Portrait Institute said that, well, the effort to remove

00:24:49.020 the bust is really part of an ideologically motivated campaign. And the backlash against

00:24:56.080 the various monuments to Harvey Milk has also been blocked on the basis that, well, you're only trying

00:25:03.380 to tear those down, and you only want to get rid of those because you're anti-gay. But these are

00:25:08.780 exactly the arguments that defenders of Confederate statues make. It's the exact same argument.

00:25:15.460 What they'll say is that the troubling aspects of the Confederacy must be seen within their historical

00:25:22.120 context. And they'll also say that the effort to wipe these statues out is more political than it is

00:25:32.160 ethical. Now, it would seem to me that in the interests of integrity and consistency, we must

00:25:40.440 decide if we're going to apply that consistently or not. Are we going to tear down all of the problematic

00:25:50.880 statues or none of them? To focus on just one sort of problematic statue and to ignore the monuments

00:25:59.080 that enshrine other kinds of historical evil or other historically evil characters, to do that is to

00:26:07.320 basically admit that the attack on Confederate statues is really nothing more than a political stunt. So we just

00:26:13.940 have to make up our mind. That's the point. Thanks for watching, everybody. Thanks for listening. Godspeed.

00:26:18.580 Thank you.

The Matt Walsh Show - August 23, 2018

Ep. 89 - When Will The War On Statues Extend To The Left's Heroes？

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