The Ricochet Podcast - Statues, Protests, and Firings

Episode Date: August 18, 2017

Another busy week and to help us parse it, we enlist Ricochet Editor @jongabriel (not a member? Join Ricochet using the new ExJon leve1!) and guests Victor Davis Hanson and The Federalist’s Ben Domenech. We cover everything: the protests, the statues, and the firings. Listen! Music from this week’s podcast: The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by The Band (from The Last Waltz) The all new opening... Source

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we're modern on the internet with a with a wonderful sparkling site with all kinds of fun stuff on it peter welcome hello hello hello well here we are at the end of another exhausting week they're just exhausting the news is exhausting just exhausting. The news is exhausting. The reaction to the news is exhausting. The spinning. We start with North Korea. We go to Confederate memorials. We end, perhaps, with an attack in Barcelona.

Stuff that used to seem to be spread out over the course of a fortnight or two now seems to be compacted in 72 hours. Barcelona. What can you say except point out that Wolf Blitzer, if I get this right, called the Barcelona attack a copycat of the Charlottesville attack. Unbelievable.

Unbelievable. It's just extraordinary. And it reminds you that history begins this morning for some people, that everything that came before is irrelevant if some point can be made to advance a certain he can't possibly believe can he that the people in in spain were inspired by some fruit wad running his car and killing a woman in the united states of america

we have one name according to the new york Times now. There may be more names that they finally get around to releasing, but a spokeswoman for the Catalan police identified Musa Ukabir. Now, Musa Ukabir, something tells me, is not someone particularly interested in the American Confederacy. And I might also point out that Ukabir, to my knowledge, is not an old Spanish name. It is madness. Of course, it was another Islamist attack. And the idea that Wolf Blitzer suggests that it's a copy, it really is a kind of insanity at this point. I had to drive around, had some meetings up in San Francisco yesterday. I spent some time in the car and I listened to NPR.

Why did I? I don't know why. As if my blood pressure needed to be higher. It's fascinating. I listen to a show called 1A, which is actually reasonable. It's always smart and it's necessary to listen to what's being said there. Go on. Yeah, I think you're right.

I think it is. I think it is actually necessary in any event they too made the point that this was that the charlottesville was somehow one of a piece with the people with the fellow who mowed down 100 people in marseille and with these people in running pedestrians down in barcelona obviously it is obviously it is not anyone can it's it's beyond the george orwell the old george orwell line an idea so ridiculous only an intellectual could believe in it even they don't believe in it they cannot believe in it so what we have here is a country which is at least a press will come to the chief executive in a moment but the press is is simply out of its mind really on insane and the old strict sense of the word insane unhealthy ill something is wrong with the press but but

they're perfectly able from to switch from assigning collective responsibility in one instance to turning over here and denying any sort of collective responsibility and i'm not saying that there is an either k i'm just saying that in the first instance of the attack in Charlottesville, the guy driving his car into the crowd is specifically related to a particular ideology that is shared by a huge number of people, even if they are not members of this tiny cell of losers. But then you look over here in Spain, and there's nothing to be learned from this at all. By the way, I'm not sure that it's a huge number of people. That's one of the striking things to me about the press is simply ignored, that the number of people who are marching in Charlottesville, I have seen numbers, but they don't vary all that widely.

They're small. The numbers run from a low of 200 to a high of 400. But they will see 330 million. It's not vast numbers. No, no, no, not at all. But what they will do is that I'm sorry, you're seeing what they'll suggest. Sorry, go ahead. who will say that the small, tiny sliver of morons and losers is actually indicative of the strain of thought in the right in general, that this is just a more enthusiastic efflorescence of the view. As long as I'm venting about things that have enraged me. The other evening I was watching PBS, and there was a new documentary on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy,

what their hook, what gave them the right to replay this thing. By the way, I don't know whether this is on the whole PBS system because I was watching. It was being used during a fundraising drive by one of the local PBS stations here. So I don't know whether it was across the whole system. But the hook was that they were comparing John Kennedy and Walter Cronkite and cutting back and forth between events in Dallas and Walter Cronkite was learning in the newsroom and CBS, John Kennedy, Walter Cronkite, roughly the same age, both in their forties at that stage, both have been in the second world war, so on and so forth. Okay. But they trotted out the same old stuff, junk that William Manchester

put in his otherwise very fine book, Death of a President. And by what I mean by junk is William Manchester was the one who wrote that book quite fairly quickly, as I recall, a year or two after it came out. In any event, he indicted not just Lee Harvey Oswald, but all of Dallas. John Kennedy was a martyr to right-wing America. Climate of hate. Climate of hate. There is no evidence whatsoever, none, zero, nada, zip, zilch, that Lee Harvey Oswald in any way partook of any political atmosphere in Dallas. He had nothing to do with any right-wing organization in Dallas. What we know he had something to do was with the Soviet Union and Cuban communists. He went to the Soviet Union and lived there for months. He went to Mexico City and visited the Cuban embassy. To the extent that Lee Harvey Oswald, a troubled lunatic,

had any ideology at all, it was of the left, not of the right. And furthermore, what was it, a week or 10 days before he shot John Kennedy, we know, we learned that he took a pot shot at General, what was his name, General Walker, who was a leader in the John Birch Society. So Lee Harvey Oswald tried to kill a right winger before. In any event, all this has been known for half a century. And there on PBS, the same old junk gets trotted out. It is lazy. It is irresponsible. Okay, if I may extend my rant by about another 90 seconds. And I may, but I just have to interject here.

Go, go, go. You sound a lot like a climate of hate denier. You're a climate of hate denier. Go on. Now, again, when I was listening to PBS, I beg your pardon, this was NPR. Now I'm back in the car getting enraged, blood pressure rising. Donald Trump made a number of assertions during the news conference on Tuesday that are factually interesting. If you're a real journalist, he said there was violence on both sides.

Was there? He said there were good people on both sides was there he said there were good people on both sides oh that's interesting are there good people in the uh in the keep up in the preserve the statue of robert e lee in um in are there good people on the preserve the statues side of the confederate statues side of the argument and you know i've been looking around on the internet and some of them some people people who want to preserve Confederate statues explicitly disavow any white supremacism, condemn slavery. There are, I mean, this is quite interesting. He raised a number of points that interested sentient journalists would have investigated and not a bit of it. NPR with all its resources, a substantial portion of which come from us, the taxpayers

against our will. They benefit by using the tax system to fund themselves and they couldn't get off their backsides to investigate and conduct any real journalism. The entire hour was just spent interviewing people who were condemning Donald Trump off the tops of their heads. No reporting, no real journalism. It was just spent interviewing people who were condemning Donald Trump off the tops of their heads. No reporting, no real journalism. It was just appalling. All right, I'm out of breath.

Well, what we've had – oh, go ahead. I was just going to ask you, when he said that there are fine people on both sides, was he talking about the people who assembled the Unite the Right and the Antifa? That was the impression that I got. Well, with Donald Trump, of course, who knows? But my point is – We're in for a right. unite the right and the antifa that was the impression that i got well with donald trump of course who knows but but it my point is right who knows and that's exactly right journalists could help us find out if they were doing their jobs right but it's not the journalist's job to figure out from the tangled mass of cold spaghetti that is coming out rhetorically from the

administration sometimes what exactly he really means well he's not you can do follow-up questions with the press office what did he mean they may actually ask the president it could you could you could get interesting or it could be that the press office had no good answer and then you report that it is it is the it is the time to rhetorically denounce both sides and i have no problem with saying that the other side is violent too put them in the context of both groups share collectivist ideas of racial identity, which are antithetical to the American character and experience and our ass and what we want to be. And that requires a finer rhetorical skill and an intellectual grasp of what's going on than the man seems to have. And that's why we get into the situation, because he makes it so easy for the people who come preloaded with hate to get him again and by the way i don't i'm attacking npr and pbs i don't want to let donald trump off the hook here on tuesday there are distinctions to be

drawn between the alt-right and the antifa whoever they are the united states has never gone to war with with anybody on the uh the antifa movement we went to war to defeat nazis we went to war we had a civil war to settle the question of slavery of white supremacist but we had a cold war we had a cold war against the antifa kind because they are the we absolutely do when they're marching with hammers and sickles. Are they marching with hammers and sickles? Did they march with hammers and sickles in Charlottesville? I didn't see them there at the time. Maybe I didn't. But there were swastikas.

I mean, there were obvious references to the KKK and obvious references to the not. For sure, that deserved a sharper condemnation from the president of the united states than anything he might say about the antifa movement for sure we've gone we've been through wars to defeat those ideas and those forces and if the republican party is anything it is the party of abraham lincoln and the dignity of every human being no matter what the race and trump muffed it missed it completely i i don't want to let that man off the hook. He just blew it. And that we're spending a week talking about this when, as you pointed out, there are real things to worry about. North Korea among them is Donald Trump's fault.

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Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution. Stanford Professor of Classics Emeritus at California Hoover Institution. Stanford, professor of classics emeritus at California State University. Fresno, a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He does the classicist podcast right here in Ricochet. Who wouldn't want to listen to BDH? If only there was a way to bring him on to this show, I'm just thinking. Oh, well, as long as we're going to continue that hoary trope for the rest of the show,

there is, and here he is. Welcome, victor we had an interesting situation this week with north korea and at the end of the week we had steve bannon telling a political reporter that essentially for all the fire and fury talk there's nothing we can do is he right and is this something really that they ought to be saying no i don't think he's right uh we have been doing things. I think it's the first time that a North Korean Kim of the three generations has actually stopped or backed off. He didn't back down. He backed off, at least for a while, in his threats to attack Guam. And that was because of the good cop, bad cop of Trump and Mattis threatening military action, and then Tillerson and McMaster saying there was a diplomatic out.

So when Bannon said that, I think it was unfortunate because it undermined what the administration is doing. And of all the things he said in that interview to Robert Kutner, that's the one that's going to get him in trouble, I think, because it affects national security. He shouldn't have said that. I don't know why he called up that reporter, which he had done earlier.

It wasn't a very bright thing to do, but he's a bright guy. Maybe he knows something that you and I don't, but it didn't seem to be very valuable unless he wants to be fired. I don't know why. Victor, that's a firing offense, isn't it? Peter here.

Yeah, I think it is. I don't think why. Victor, that's a firing offense, isn't it? Peter here. Yeah, I think it is. I don't think you want the special advisor to the president. I mean, I think it is in the term of classical definitions. I don't mean that I think he should be fired or Trump should fire him. I'm just thinking that this was an administration along past lines. It may or may not be. I'm hedging because I'm trying to imagine what would have happened if Ben Rhodes said that the Iran deal was a bad idea, or would Obama have fired him?

Probably not. I don't know. But I don't want to make a sweeping statement like that. But it did undercut their credibility. Well, and what's interesting, too, this is John Gabriel Victor. What's interesting is we have seen a lot of movement on North Korea. We actually had Kim back down from his lunatic threats to threats on Guam because we have pressured China. And a lot of that is tough talk. That that is diplomacy. It's not just all sweetness and light. Diplomacy is saying, look,

if you don't change your behavior there are going to be serious repercussions not only to north korea but to china and trade and all sorts of other things so it seems like it actually has worked yeah i think that's been actually the most significant thing that trump team has done after some 30 years they were the first administration to actually see results. They got really tough sanctions through the UN. They're probably going to get more. They had some effect on China. Trump did what other presidents like Clinton and even Obama,

but Harry Truman, he sort of, not so much as Richard Nixon, though, playing the mad bomber along with the good cop, Henry Kissinger. But presidents have done that in the past, and it's been effective. Peter knows better than I do that Reagan called, I think, Gaddafi the madman of the Middle East, or flaky. And, you know, that open mic, we start bombing the Soviet Union. I think the Soviets put an entire army on call when they heard that so whether it was inadvertent or an accident so presidents do stuff like that trump has been pretty good at it and it seems to work so it's just mysterious why somebody who says he's a jacksonian on foreign policy would undercut the

president and i just don't believe he thought it was off the record victor clever guy yeah yeah go ahead victor peter here once again this is the question we have to ask the president's remarks in the wake of charlottesville are still what he gave this press conference on tuesday here we are friday it's still dominating the news and now mitt romney has a statement up on facebook in which he's calling on the president to apologize it's a long statement, five good-sized paragraphs here. Let me quote one sentence. Whether he intended to or not,

what President Trump communicated caused racists to rejoice, minorities to weep, and the vast heart of America to mourn. Close quote. Should Donald Trump apologize? Well, I think he should, believe it or not, issue a fourth statement. And the second one was pretty good. In other words, he has to understand that the whole controversy, everything he said in his press conference was in theory correct.

There were probably a few people who just wanted to protest the monuments. But the alt-right racist Confederate Nazi, those crazy people, had hijacked that movement. And so even though they had a legal right to express their views, and even though the Antifa counter-protesters were in some ways as extreme, there wouldn't have been any news unless those white racists had prompted. So what Trump needed to do was saying this entire thing, whatever the details are, was promulgated and started by this group of people whose views I abhor. And he did that in the second one.

But then in the press conference, he went off, as he always does, on these cul-de-sacs about the statues. So I think he should just clarify it and say, I want to put this to an end, and I think that the culpability lies with these dangerous, or they're not so dangerous, they're crazy and they're vile, the Nazis and the neo-Confederates. So I think he could do that. Right. He should do that. Right, he should do that.

So, we've got, again, I'm just clicking around here looking at the news of the morning, and Gingrich says we've reached an inflection point, and Trump is more isolated than he realizes. Victor, you have your position, correct me if I'm wrong, but your position all along has been reluctant support for Trump. You've never hesitated to point out how reluctant your support is, but between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, your view was it was about a 49-51 decision, so forth. Do you feel he gives a speech to a joint session of Congress, which is wonderful, then he tweets the next morning and distracts attention he gives a speech in saudi arabia uh which which is a pretty strong statement against terrorism he's got all the arab is a remarkable event and then he tweets and off he goes on another controversy speech in poland

powerful speech in poland their controversy this anyway you get the point. Are you beginning to feel that the George Will, Bill Kristol argument, Max Boot argument, that the guy is just unsound in and of himself, whatever the issues may be, he is unfit for the office? Well, I don't really think that he's, I mean, everybody thinks you can't tell Trump anything, but I don't think that he is forming U.S. foreign policy. I think it's Pompeo, Mattis, McMaster, Tillerson. And I don't think that he's doing much with economic policy. So I ask myself the same question you ask me every day.

I say to myself, right now, would you like a sober and judicious hillary clinton or barack obama dealing with immigration policy and the list of stones warning us uh... how great the iran deal is that we have to have six party talks and more uh... foreign aid for north korea that uh... there needs to be more regulation we've got a keep banning fracking on uh... federal lands we've got a close banning fracking on federal lands. We've got to close down coal. Sanctuary cities are a good thing.

And I'm not convinced that's true. I think the country is much better off than it was six months ago. But I understand that Trump is erratic, and he's suicidal in the sense that, I don't mean that literally, but he says things that hurt his thing. He's got a pretty good anti-terrorism policy, but when he tweets something that's factually incorrect about John Pershing, that was a rumor.

Part of it may be true that he buried Muslim extremist terrorists in the Philippines in pig skins or he put pig blood on bullets. That was sort of a common rumor, but we don't know whether it's true or not. Pershing himself had a carrot and stick approach, so he says things that are factually, at best, dubious. So all that bothers me, of course it does. But I will say one thing. We're in new territory. We've never had a president who popular icons said they wanted to blow up or they wanted to ritually decapitate him

or plays said they wanted to stab him or they've gone after his wife as an illegal alien or his daughter as a shyster or entrepreneur making profits out of the White House. We've never had a media like CNN before in which, if you just look at it a second, they had to fire three of their top journalists for making up news. We've had one guy, Fareed Zakaria, who's a serial plagiarist. We've had another person who was fired from his show.

We've had another host who held up a his show. We've had another host who held up a decapitated facsimile of Trump's head. We've got this Jim Avila who's completely on him. I'm not sure, though. I think he's got to stop tweeting. Kelly's got to be more assertive.

We're in new territory. I don't think we've ever had a media like this in my lifetime. And it's not just something that I'm saying to quote everybody does it because the Shorenstein center showed that in the case of CNN, I think 93% of their coverage was negative. We've never been there before. Never have. And so we're in a virtual civil war of the media against Trump. And it really redefines, I think people's views of those who work for him.

They said, well, how can they work for Trump? And I sleep better at night that there are these wonderful people like Sessions and Pruitt and the foreign policy team that are working for him. And they're doing a great job. They're under enormous pressure, though. And so I think that's where i am we we should we could grant i think that that represents in a special kind of heroism jim mattis john kelly you know hr mcmaster i don't i've met him but you know these people and they're not particularly political people they're just trying to hold the country together they're just they They're just trying to hold the country together.

They're just serving. They're not just trying to hold the country together. They're trying to do two things. They're trying to use Trump's conservative instincts, which were apparent when, the appeasement of North Korea, the red line stepover lines, deadlines that were empty, the Libyan disaster, the disastrous reset, the Spratly Islands aggression, China. I mean, we were in really dangerous. We had a very charismatic and mellifluous president that almost got us into a war,

and they're trying to stop that and restore deterrence when they have a very unsteady person they work for. So I have a great deal of admiration for them. But before we write off Trump, there's something there. And that there is, I don't think that Mitt Romney, who was probably right today asking Trump to clarify, apologize, would have ever got us out of a disastrous Paris Accord had he been elected. I'm sure that he would have appointed Jim Mattis as Defense Secretary.

I don't think he would have made the appointment that you see in education or EPA. I know he wouldn't have done all those deregulations, and I know he wouldn't have gone to West Virginia and revived the coal industry. And I know that he wouldn't have won those blue states, the so-called blue wall. There's no way in the world he would have. That's all true, and I grant that, and they're good things. They've got to be very careful because Trump is not a catalyst for this movement. He's a reflection that the Republican Party, and yes, the intellectual elite that are so vehemently anti-Trump,

and that includes Bill Kristol or George Will or whoever we want to cite, they had forgotten that their idea of absolutely free trade without worry whether it was fair or not, and their coastal viewpoint of globalization, and their sort of open borders helps commerce and cheap labor, and their sort of, I want to get along with the politically correct left, and I'll make concessions. That had alienated a lot of people,

and it came off as elitist and condescending. And they're like the Bourbons. They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. And so until they can come up with an alternate view or a view of somebody, if they think that Trump's going to go out of office and then Mike Pence is going to call up the Weekly Standard and the National Review and say,

look, he's gone, let's go back to Jeb Bush Republicanism and we can win again. They're going to lose. Well, speaking of bourbon, apparently I'm not supposed to drink Belit bourbon anymore because the CEO of the company is not friendly toward LBGTQ,

two-spirit, etc. rights during some family dispute. This came up and now people are being encouraged not to drink this bourbon. And that's a sort of unending, grinding culture war that makes a lot of people reluctantly vote for Trump or the right, because they just see a pointless, endless assault on the private sphere, the insertion of politics into everything but that said we know that no matter who the republican president had been if it had been met romney or if it had been marco rubio that he would be held up by some as a embodiment of white supremacy and the corporatist elitist oligarchical interest etc but with trump it makes it very very easy doesn't, for them to find in him all the things that they would naturally find in others.

And it makes it seem more, their case, which is ridiculous, seem more reasonable, which is why many of us lament. Well, we know. I tend to concur with that. I wish he would not tweet. I wish Kelly would. But, you know, I share your views on that. But there's something that I don't know. And I wish he would not tweet. I wish Kelly would, but, you know, I share your views on that, but there's something that I don't know. And I don't think, you know, and I don't think anybody knows. And that is to the extent that Trump is sort of like the burner

on your stove and he turns it on high and he puts something in it and weird things happen. And the weird things that happen are the left are that scab of the left is torn off and now we see people come out of the woodwork like Al Sharpton, the homophobe, racist, anti-Semite demanding that we get rid of the Jefferson Memorial or people now calling for the defacement of Mount Rushmore. And Trump was right about that. Are we going to rename Washington and Lee University? Maybe so. We could get rid of, we should boycott Joan Baez albums because she restarted her career with the band

the night they drove old Dixie down. I mean, these are logical assumptions that follow from the anti-Trump position on Charlottesville. Oh, here's a weird, bizarre thing. John Gabriel gets to ask a question before. Hi, Victor. As you're a historian, one thing that I've noticed with this Antifa versus alt-right, I guess you could call them very nebulously, whatever that term means today.

It's almost like you have the, you know, in Italy, the black shirts versus the reds. And I think the vast majority of Americans polling has shown this are a lot more hesitant than the media to pull down every statue we have going in the south or elsewhere to Robert E. Lee and so forth. What are your thoughts about the statues? What purpose do they serve? We've seen a lot of intellectuals based in northern states, no doubt, saying, oh, we need to tear them all down immediately when that's not the federal government's role. What purpose do they serve these days? Well, I'm someone who wrote a biography of Sherman and toured the South.

And actually, it was Sherman's March to the Sea. So I've dealt with the people who believe it was a war of Northern aggression. I've got a lot of hate mail from it. But I think there's an answer to it, and that is that when you look at the past and you want to rewrite it, it's very dangerous to do that, and you have to calibrate things very carefully. Everybody can agree you don't build a monument or reference of Sepp Dietrich, the Nazi general, or Joaquin Piper, the psychopath.

But Erwin Rommel was a professional soldier that was involved in the plot to kill Hitler. What do you do about him? And what I mean by that is, by all means, I don't think that when I go to Memphis, Tennessee, that there should be a public statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, a multimillionaire slave trader before the war, and committed war crimes at Fort Pillow.

Okay, I get that. But James Longstreet was very different. He was a reluctant Confederate. After the war, he armed African Americans to fight for Reconstruction. He apologized. He joined the Republican Party. So what I'm getting at is you calibrate the past. Maybe you don't want a public statue of Roger B. Taney, the author of Dred Scott,

or Nathan B. Forrest, but that's not the same thing as saying you want to take down Lee's statue. But progressives better be careful where this war starts, because progressivism, the large movement that energizes the Democratic Party now, was based on a pseudoscientific idea. That's where it grew up, of racial superiority, genetics, euthanasia, forced sterilization. So you pick a progressive hero today, and I can match quote-for-quote with Robert E. Lee. Susan B. Anthony, she said she would never shake the hand of a black man. Margaret Sanger, no need to go there,

but we understand that she wanted to push abortion to get rid of the non-white population. Woodrow Wilson said he wouldn't integrate the troops and there would be no black people in the civil service under his presidency. And I could go on, but my point is that they were a much more insidious, dangerous racism than the parochial tribalism of maybe Lee or Stonewall Jackson because they had the power of the intellectual elite behind them, in the North especially, and they had this pseudo-scientific veneer that was appealing to who?

Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco. They all quoted chapter and verse progressives whom they really adored, and yet we haven't seen that, so what's Planned Parenthood going to do when this thing gets going? Because they have a lot of probability. Free neology. The science was settled. Victor, thank you very much for coming with us today. We appreciate it.

Thank you. Hey, Victor. Thanks so much. One last note here. We'll get a chance to talk about this at length later. But I just got a copy of the galleys of your new book the second world wars you've written a lot of great books this may be your masterpiece everybody make a note i don't even know if it's available on pre for pre-order yet on amazon but the second world wars plural victor's newest book brilliant victor well thank you hey

victor take the rest of the week off i need it i don't want to wade into this whole statue thing it's getting something you know it's it's a lose-lose situation but trump is i don't know well when you when you talk about when you talk about the war of north yeah when you talk about the war of northern aggression being up here in the north that's sort of funny to me. And I think, well, if it was Minnesotans nowadays, it'd be the war of northern passive aggression behavior. There'd be a statue of some... I gave a talk at Louisiana State University about why Sherman was smart to burn a swath to Georgia. And believe me, I almost did not know why.

You went to Louisiana to give that lecture? Oh, Victor. Yeah. I needed money. I was in my late 30s, and I had three children that needed braces, so they paid me 500 bucks. Well, we'll turn that into academic for hire, rewrite speech for personal gain, and that's how that anecdote will pop up. Thank you, Victor. We'll talk to you later. Okay. Thanks. Yeah, so Victor's We'll talk to you later. Thank you, Victor.

Okay. Thanks. Yeah, so Victor's got a book on the Second World War. That sounds incredible. And I can't wait to read it. Wouldn't you want to just sit down in any of his classes and listen to what he has to say? Because sitting in a class is a wonderful experience that we all had in our 20s. Well, not all of us, of course.

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Hey, Ben, you had a great piece this week, which was saying that most people seem to support leaving the monuments there for various reasons, to preserve history because they agree with them or because they don't. In an age of literal iconoclasm now, which we have, we seem to have a body of public officials who want to get ahead and outside of what people actually believe and do what they think is the right thing.

This isn't how we do things in a republic, is it? It really isn't. I mean, the thing that really has bothered me about this whole process is, you know, it's important for us to remain a nation that is governed by the people, by ourselves. And so in all these localities, the people who live where these things are, they need to go through the process of making a determination, whether that's something that happens through a city council, whether it happens through legislation, whether it happens through a plebiscite or what have you. And I think instead,

we have this nationalized crushing narrative on this front that eliminates any ability to have the kind of representative self-government that we have in so many other respects in this area. What happened in Baltimore in the dead of night, you know, by an act of fiat by the mayor and by the authorities there is the exact opposite of what we should want here. We should be able to work through this process. And James, the other aspect of this we should want here. We should be able to work through this process. And James, the other aspect of this to me is I would actually be in favor of people advocating for more monuments, not fewer, in the sense that we should be having history in front of us as a group, and whether that includes statues that are erected to figures

who we believe deserve more respect from the Civil War era, whether it's Union soldiers, whether it's escaped slaves, what have you. I would much rather see that going on in this current conversation than engaging in the kind of iconoclasm that we've seen in the past couple of days. And I agree with you completely. My only caveat would be in this day and age, the statues that would be raised to those people would be unintelligible masses of aluminum. You know, like Frank Gehry's Eisenhower Monument. If they could actually find somebody who could actually carve a Frederick Douglass, that would be fantastic. Yes, yes. John?

Yes, exactly. Well, this is John Gabriel. Ben, be fantastic. Yes, yes. John? Yes, exactly. Well, this is John Gabriel. Ben, thanks so much for being on. And yeah, something I'm seeing from the hinterland way out here in the western states. Arizona was not a state until 50 years after the Civil War. You have a lot of writers ensconced in those old Yankee states, and just demanding that all the statues around the country be removed. I agree completely. How about putting up more, I think we need more Frederick Douglass statues. They should be

in every state, essentially. That's my personal take on it. But yeah, basically, where does this end? James mentioned iconoclasm, and that's exactly what it's like. Or the madness of the French Revolution desecrating churches and the like um where do progressives think this would end because so many of their heroes these many of these statues all this kind of neo-confederate revival

that happened in the 20s were democratic governors saying hey we need to incorporate the confederate flag in our current flag and uh trying trying to kind of lionize the rebellion against the North, that doesn't seem to get mentioned a whole lot. You know, it certainly doesn't. And I mean, we just contextually, I think people don't necessarily understand the context from which, you know, birth of a nation and things like that came, you know, in the historic record as something that, you know, was a real surge, particularly under Woodrow Wilson. And it's one of these things that I think people, again, should understand. When it comes to a lot of these statues as well, you saw, you know, kind of an uptick around the turn of the century in statue making. And that was something that I think was

primarily done, you know, as, you know, frankly, as a representative of the fact that that generation was dying off and that there were a lot of people who, you know, had fought under these various figures, you know, had, you know, had participated in significant battles and that people wanted to honor them and to put them as examples for the community. I think the thing that we need to keep in mind, though, is that this accepts a more complicated view of history than what I think today's progressives really want to allow. They instead are dealing with renaming all these different things on campuses and taking down all of these different professors who are engaged in wrong think. And this is not an era that's really going to tolerate the idea that someone can be honored as being heroic but wrong. Someone who, you know, the founders could be great and honorable men while also, you know, engaging in practices that will ultimately be deemed wrong by history.

Ben, your piece was mostly about process. We want to be ruled by ourselves. Statues and communities need to be discussed by communities. Get that point completely. You're touching on something else now. What do we make of, well, the late historian of the Civil War, Shelby Foote, brilliant three-volume history of the war. And then, of course, he was one of the central figures in Ken Burns' documentary, The Civil War. He was a southerner himself, of course.

And Shelby Foote used to talk about the settlement. And the settlement was, in fact, he's on their excerpts of his writing, and you can find this on YouTube. And anybody who wants to hear Shelby Foote's opinion probably ought to go to Shelby Foote. I may misstate it slightly. in the South did so just as you suggested with a certain heroism. That military figures such as Lee were military professionals and there was something honorable in that and that

figures again such as Lee fought out of a sense of community, love of native land and again there was something honorable in that. And this is a paraphrase of Foote, but the North got its victory and the South was permitted to live with a certain sense of honor. Do we think that makes sense in the 21st century? Is that a coherent point of view or was it whitewashed from the beginning? What do you think?

Well, I think that you've done a good job of stating foots point and i would encourage everyone to to look to his writing and to look uh look up the excerpt that you're talking about um i worry that we may have reached a point where this is no longer possible um in the country i mean i think one of the things that was a major factor into that that played into this at the time was that, uh, the South showed people how to lose in the sense that the, that Lee did not, you know, engage in a guerrilla resistance movement that could have, you know, taken the conflict, uh, and played out in a way he, you know, a way, he was not Nathan Bedford Forrest. He did not go down the line of saying, of resistance to this. Instead, he conceded defeat. And I think that that was something that ultimately at the end of the day, people could view that as a possibility of our

ability as a country to live together, to move forward together beyond this brutal conflict that we had over one of the worst things that humans have ever done to each other. And that's something that I think is very important and valuable and allows us to view each other as neighbors, even if we disagree about fundamental truths about human decency and the way that we ought to treat each other. I worry that we have now entered an era, though, where because of this incredible push toward virtue signaling in every single area of human life, that such a complex perspective may not be tolerated anymore within our society. Certainly, that is what the bang mobs that want to take all these things down desire. The sad part about that is that we don't just lose something when it comes

to our knowledge of history. We lose something that I think has been a critical aspect of American neighborhood and the ability to view each other, whether we are of very different political views or tribes or backgrounds, as fellow citizens and Americans, as fully the same as the person on the opposite side. And that's something that I think goes away when you have these types of forces paying for iconoclasm. How should... I'm sorry.

I was just going to say the complexity and... Go, go, go. Complexity and perspective and the rest of these things are just co-words to maintain white supremacy, as some will say. I mean, we really are looking at this sort of French revolutionary era idea of scouring history and starting from zero, which is always the progressive leftist desire. Going back to Marx to extirpate private property, to reset all of the social relationships. I mean, they really want to turn the etch-a-sketch of America upside down and give it a good shake. And while that's not the Democratic Party in total,

that's the forces that's dragging them in the direction that they willingly are not are going to be pulled, right? You know, you touched on something interesting there, which is that if you look back historically, one could argue for a significant portion of America's history in the 20th century that we actually had three parties in the country. There was a

Republican Party, there was a Democratic Party, and then there was a Southern Democratic Party. One that inherited a lot of the heritage of this and certainly was, as you said earlier, more defensive when it came to Southern history and toward these various figures. What we've had since then, of course, is a great cultural sort that has pushed all of these conservatives, people who had traditional values in a lot of different senses, out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party. So you have a much more clarified partisan divide. And then I think this has the sad effect of putting this into a position

where it is viewed, at least by the media and by many political figures, as being a monopartisan affair, and that it's, you know, okay, these are statues that Republicans alone will defend, or something like that. And that's, I think, that's another part that's sort of playing into the negative effect here, and it's why we're headed in such a wrong direction as it relates to the founders. If we view the American founders as being only of one party or tradition, then what we're doing isn't just going to lead to taking down statues, renaming things. It's going to lead to taking down the things that they built that has been fundamental to America, namely the Constitution and our founding documents. And that's where this ends up. And it's something that I think is,

is, uh, that people should respect if people should understand that they're not going to be lines drawn between, uh, between Confederates and Thomas Jefferson, uh, the, the same things that you're seeing in the, in the press today from a number of different figures, you know, Al Sharpton most recently saying that Jefferson Memorial should not be funded anymore. That kind of talk is only going to accelerate as this moves forward. And I think that people who believe in America's traditions and believe that those aspects of the founding generation that have been such a benefit to us are going to have to stand up and defend them in ways that they may never have had to before historically, just considering the conversation that we have today about race in America.

And Ben, this is John again. You spend a lot of time in the Beltway. We're all scattered about the country and looking at what's going on in the Beltway and this Trump obsession, whether for him or against him, especially the media. People just seem to be losing their mind over everything that's going on uh from within the beltway uh what is your pov and just the beltway in general on trump now um if you watch the news um if i'll spend three hours watching the news and then i talk to my neighbors not a soul is talking about trump and uh i'm just wondering where the dc point of view is right now regarding him uh the dc point of view on him is that he's an utter disaster uh and that they're also obsessed with him obsessed with every aspect of this white house obsessed with everything that they see going on within it

um constant palace intrigue and things like that. And frankly, I think that the Beltway blames Trump for all the problems that they're having, which is a perspective that I don't hear when I get out into the country. I actually do that as much as possible. And the perspective I typically hear when I get out is one that places a lot more blame

on, on the Congress than on the president. Um, they feel like these political figures who are very familiar with, uh, they're very familiar with have been promising them things for a long time. And I think that they're correct in assessing that Donald Trump would really sign any legislation that the Congress sent him that did anything approaching what he's said are his aims. And that, I think, is something that is a much more balanced perspective on this White House. I will say that there is kind of an inconsistency within the Beltway that people remark on a lot, which is that if you actually look at what agencies are doing, what the people who are in charge of these various entities are doing, it actually is a lot more close to normalcy than you might expect,

that you have a process that people go through where they make decisions and things like that. And so it's a situation where the president is kind of the anomaly. He's the thing that's different and that behaves differently than any politician to occupy that office ever has before. And that just gets people in Washington on edge and blood pressures are up and people are stressed out. And I think that that's not going to change anytime soon. I think you're going to continue to see that to be the case, even as the frustrations across the country seem to be more, you know, why are all these other politicians not able to get anything done when they are the professionals who've been around forever?

Well, you can get professional opinion at The Federalist, and you can subscribe to The Transom. And Ben, thanks so much for showing up today, and we hope to have you on soon. Always a pleasure. Great talking with you. You know, one of the interesting things about the statues, I saw this, one of the statues that was pulled down

was not a solid, massive metal or stone. It was a very thin and twisted little thing. And the reason for that is because apparently a lot of these statues were made cheaply by a northern company, I believe, that went around and sold them to southern towns and said put up a plinth and we'll give you your basic generic confederate

guy standing at standing at rest looking mournfully into the distance with a contemptuosly look and the lost cause etc and so these things actually are pretty cheap they're not that substantial and you can imagine the guys going around town to town. There's salesmen, no doubt, who went town to town to sell people these statues. And it probably came after the carpet bag era. But still, you know what the carpet baggers were, guys, don't you, what they're named for? I'm assuming it's carpet bags that they actually carried with them, right? Right. They gathered up their stuff in a carpet and made haste to the south to exploit

and to make deals and the rest of it. So the cheapness of their luggage was a sign of their... Hey, wait a minute. The reason I know about carpet bags is that my grandmother had an old one. Watch this about the cheapness. Well, actually, it probably was pretty cheap, come to think of it.

Anyway. I personally would hate to travel with a bag made out of a carpet. That was almost Kudlow-esque in its cluelessness. I just want to say. Go, go, go. And John was on to something there, John channeling this. Yeah, I personally would loathe to try to just tackle modern air travel with a bag made out of a carpet. It's preposterous.

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Well, what's coming down the wires today now is that Bannon supposedly is going to be out by the end of the afternoon, which would make this podcast a bit moot were we to talk about it. However, I'm going to make a request of Yeti here. Blue Yeti, our invaluable producer. I'm going to say two things. Use one of them. One. So the news is that Bannon is out, and this isn't surprising to anybody.

There have been a lot of accusations that Bannon was one of the White House's worst leakers, and since he called up a left-leaning political reporter and talked to him about his fights with the people in the administration, he's gathered too many enemies critics will say that this is a problem for trump because bannon was instrumental in pushing forward trade sanctions on china about intellectual property and that what we have here is the swamp drowning another and a sign that the administration is in crisis okay that's one two is the other well they were saying today that steve bannon was going to be uh fired and uh it looks likeannon was going to be fired, and it looks like it's going to be some more fake news from the people who specialize in this sort

of thing. If we know anything about Donald Trump, it's that he loves his base, and Bannon is a direct line to that. What's more, he respects loyalty, and he links aside. He knows that Bannon has been with him from the beginning. So you'll hear a lot about this from time to time. Bannon will always be on the way out, but a lot of people are saying he's going to be at Trump's right hand on the day of the second inauguration. Yet he used whichever one. And I think your opinion

was very reassuring slash problematic. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. So, and added to what John just said there as well. Well, also by the time this hits, maybe people will be listening to this on a Monday or Tuesday. After all, this is evergreen in so many ways. The eclipse is nigh.

Maybe the eclipse when you're hearing this has passed. I'm not particularly planning to do anything for it. John, are you having celebrations in your house? No celebration. We aren't mentioning at all because I'm going to use it as a parenting tool. Basically, what I'll do is tell my children that if they don't clean their rooms right this minute, I'm going to blot out the sun. It's a good motivator to give them a good

fear of their parents. Yeah, the guy who could predict those things back in the old days really did have some power. I mean, when he predicted an eclipse and it happened, that night was party central. He was turning them down left and right because he was a mage of some great and bad. What I find

funny is the old stories that it's a dragon eating the sun. Let's think about this. That's what some said. So they would go outside and bang the pots and the pans in order to drive the dragon away, right? Well, if the dragon is eating the sun, then when the eclipse goes the other way,

it's not that the dragon stopped eating the sun. The dragon ate the sun. It means that the sun has passed through the intestinal system of the dragon. A messy business. Exactly so. And I don't think anybody who believed that would go outside until it had rained a lot. At least they didn't have Purell back then. That would have come in handy.

That's right. If you were to redo a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which I believe hinges on the naming of an eclipse, that's why I always carry Purell with me. Because if I'm whisked back in time, I can amaze everyone at the court with this magic fluid that keeps you from getting E. coli or norovirus or a cold. Trust me on this. Trust me. And then I wash their hands. And then a week later, they say, I have no abscesses. Truly, this man is a magician of some sort.

So we're heading out now. John, anything you want to add about this exhausting week before we conclude this brightly podcast? Well, I just say relax, de-stress from the week. I'm sure that next week will be very calm and measured. That's the prediction that I'm making. So there will be nothing more to worry about next week. So just have an adult beverage, relax, some bullion bourbon perhaps, and my choice is Basil Hayden's, and enjoy yourself.

And the rest of the country, we are not so obsessed by what's going on in the Beltway. We have lives to lead. But that can't be so. I'm on Twitter all the time, and that's all that commands the attention of the world no you're quite right next week who knows because monday or tuesday my editor came to me and said we're thinking about doing a story about fallout shelters and i sort of groaned no we're not going to have a world it's not going to happen but it was a story about going and finding the the the remains of fallout shelters around downtown minneapolis

because there are still some places that have old ancient battered yellow and black rusty signs right the the the crackers have long gone rancid and were disposed of the water was poured out there's nothing much down there probably but a box of toilet paper but they were still there for many years reminding people that i mean the 60s had that horrible imminent fear where you had to go and take shelter because fallout is something we stopped thinking when i was growing up we didn't worry about fallout we just worried about everything getting blown up but they worried about fallout and stuff falling from the sky and having to wait inside and you know shoot your neighbors when they bang on the door and all that stuff so on monday or tuesday

there was talk about we should do a story about fallout shelters because everybody's thinking about, oh, my God, duck and cover, nuclear war again. And then by Thursday, nothing. So we live in such an exhausting cycle where Monday and Tuesday, it's nuclear war fears are back day. And Thursday, it's pulling down statues day in the course of a fargan week. So you're right, John um i think next week is probably going to be nothing at all because everything's going to just be so how can you

top this week how can you top it oh we will top it that's for sure and we will and we'll be back here to tell you about how it was topped and how some people regard the topping um and i should also tell you that uh bomb fell the the great courses, and Away Travel are some of the many fine businesses that keep us going. Support them for supporting us, please. And don't forget the Ricochet store. Do you need a USB drive, a thumb drive? Because you know it's impossible to download DNC files onto a thumb drive at the speed

at which they were, which suggests maybe that it was a leak. However, if you want to give it a try and see what your data exchange rate is, get one of those Ricochet-branded thumb drives or a shirt or a mug, who cares? But do go over to iTunes and leave a review because that helps surface the podcast

and introduces it to more people. And remember, you there, listening for years for 365 of these things and never once saying to yourself, gosh, oughtn't I throw them a dollar or two? Now you can throw us a dollar or two, $2.50. It's the new podcast tier listener. You can read, you can comment. It's cheap and it's the right thing to do. Thank you, John. Thank you, Peter, who is now sitting in the corner, silent for reasons. Oh, I know what it is.

Oh, that's fascinating. Peter has assumed the posture not of a Confederate soldier but just sort of a man of vision. And he's painted himself chalk white so that he seems like he's made of marble. And the fabric details of the sweater tied around the neck is an exquisite example of almost Bernini-like sculpturability. So that's why Peter hasn't said anything. He's turned himself into a statue over the course of this last weekend. Who can really blame him? What do statues do but just sit there and have the droppings from on high placed on their head?

See you in the comments, everybody, at Ricochet 3.0. Thank you, John. Thank you, Peter. You can wink Peter. Okay, well he's just still a statue. It's been fun. See you later. See ya. A bird joke came in the name Thank you. In the winter of sixty miles We were hungry Just a valley of lies I'll tell you

A rich man had fell In the time I remember Of the way The night That your morning Sat down When all the bells are ringing

Tonight, take your home and sit down And all the people will sing La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la Back with my wife in Tennessee But one day she called her man Said, bird, you're quick, come and see There goes the Robert E. Lee Now I don't mind

Chopping wood And I don't care If the money's all good You take what you need And you leave the rest But you should never Have taken the very best The night that your more pigs lay down

And all the bells are ringing The night that no more pigs lay down And all the people are singing Na, na, na, na, na, na, na Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na Ricochet! Join the conversation.