We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Desnski,
Culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and to the premium
version of our website as well. I regret to inform you that today I'm
joined once again by Christopher Bedford, Executive editor over at the Common Sense Society.
Chris, welcome back. You're so lucky. Happy Thursday. Thursday.
We got to tweet. Someone tweeted to Chris Amy this week, So shout
out to this Twitter user. Except your request was impossible. This person asked
that Chris come on the show every single day, and I bless them.
I can't do it. It's like stare at the sun physically and mentally impossible.
But Donald Trump remember when he went and looked at the eclipse and sunglasses.
Yeah, you did wear sunglasses. I wish I could be strong.
I wish I had that strength. Now, Chris, we had a situation
yesterday. I used the we referring to the whole country because Mitch McConnell,
and this is happening as Joe Biden says things like his administration cured cancer.
Mitch McConnell had a glitch yesterday. That's probably the only way to describe it.
He went up to speak at a press press conference, stared blankly at
the reporters, appeared to just be his slight looked like it got wiped clean,
like a minor stroke. Yeah, I did. I wasn't gonna say
that because I'm not an armchair physician. We are literally sitting in armchairs,
right He did stop talking in the middle of a sentence and just stared and
was clearly lost track of where he was. It was the kind of medical
incident that you could not convince your wife you diddy to go to the hospital
after exactly, and other senators, if you haven't seen the video, other
senators had to help him walk away. He came back about five minutes later
a spring check in at seventy one. Knew exactly what to do, righte
he sprung into action, and you know, in all seriousness, we hope
that he's okay, but also in all seriousness, we need people to run
our country and from the president who by the way. McConnell told reporters later
that day he was very excited to tell Capitol Hill reporters that Joe Biden had
called him and he said, I got sandbag. That's what Mitch McConnell said
that he told Joe Biden. And this whole interaction was incredibly cringey. And
again you have the President of United States, the guys in charge to sleep
in his chair talking to the head of Spain. I think that was last
week. Yeah. And Republicans, oh Israel. Republicans have a thin minority
in the Senate right like this is. It's a razor thin minority. His
business is serious. He's not just sitting back letting, you know, the
world go by him. He's attempting to lead. He has a serious business
in front of him and is still clinging to power. And I wanted to
bring this up with you because this is an issue that you have written about
a lot and have followed really closely, whether it's Fetterman, Biden or McConnell.
It's bad. Yeah, it's really bad to have a leadership class Joe
Biden and miss McConnell who are too old and too feeble to lead it's a
sad thing to see, but it's even worse as it's the head of your
country. I mean, my point istually i've made before on this podcast,
as McConnell is now six years older than the oldest Soviet premier to ever die
in office, I mean that is, and then this is he's the same
age as Joe Bidden. We used to, yes, we used to roundomly
mock the Soviet Union with all these old people clinging to power at the polop
euro and rising up and and Reagan, one of them ka's previously oldest presidents,
pointed out that he barely got to even know half of these premiers because
they kept on dying on him. And we're at we're past that, We're
well past that. And medical science, I mean, has caught up quite
quite a good deal. And it's not like McConnell or Biden or thrown back
a leader of vodka with their breakfast every day. Maybe they should be,
it should be so they are in better health generally, but the mental health
there of a lot of our political class is they're feeble. They're extremely feeble.
And this is not an easy time. This is not nineteen ninety five
when we can have forward to America. I can just kind of go on
cruise control and coach for a minute. This is a hazardous time where the
brink of war and Americas at the brink of war in Europe. War is
raging in Europe, there's China is moving on us all over, the young,
woke activists of hijacking American corporations and the Democratic Party. He just can't
have people who don't know when it is time to step aside. And Nancy
Pelosi used to be among those we listed, and as you'd written about this
topic in the past, you'd include Nancy Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi, who I
think is she has to be like in her eighties as well, be late
seventies, early eighties, so she's not even that far apart from either McConnell
or Biden. But Nancy Pelosi did step down, which I actually find quite
interesting, and that's a segue into a question they want to ask even older.
I thought she was eighty four. Yeah, okay, so she's eighty
three, U. N Plosi's eighty three. She obviously was, you know,
not at her peak either, and would often slur her speech in strange
ways and say weird things, but she did relinquish power and actually stepped down.
And I mean in Paul McConnell, he doesn't have the Yes Queen Chorus
or the entire DC media behind him to defend him. If Nancy Pelosi had
done that playbook quote, have released something next morning about the double stand.
It's accorded to eighty three year old women, eighty one year old over versus
eighty one year old men. I think it's an honest conversation to be had.
I think CNN was they outlet them broke this morning that it's since been
released since yesterday that mcconnoll has fallen significantly more times. NBC said as well,
he had fallen recently at the airport in front of everyone. It was
quote a face plant according to somebody who was on the flight. They didn't
see it, but they described it as a face plant. Yeah, he
starts to lose balance folio, of course. Yes, And it's very difficult.
I mean, my grandfather who restaurant Peace. You told me one time
getting old end for Wissey's, except he didn't use that word. It's true,
it's difficult. It's a hard process. And everyone if they're lucky enough
just to go through it at some point or another. He said, willimps.
What he said, whimps, He said, whimps. Yes, but
we have There's there's so much that experience that age brings and understanding of an
institution is especially a place like the Senate, that age can be a great
benefit. But by the time you're face bruising old, that's a whole different
levels. It's not capable of being the person who's McConnell always always took such
stock in that his ability to control the situation, an understanding of everything going
on around him, and how he was a master of the Senate, and
when he was gone for a prolonged period of time earlier in the earlier in
this session after a fall at the Waldorf, he people in the Senate found
well, things are working just fine. We did. People, conservatives and
moderates are getting along better than they did before. They're finding out that they
can they can do things on their own. They don't need to have their
handheld by King McConnell. And that was related to me, probably by the
same story she related to you that in McConnell's absence, even some of those
establishment folks found that it was easier to it was easier for them to work
with people sort of in the right flank in McConnell's absence. They realize actually
that prior hurdles or obstructions or whatever, they could work them out. Yeah,
and I think it's time. This is a good opportunity for the Republican
leader to subside focus on his health. I mean, I know he wants
to say I'm fine, I'm fine, but he's not fine. It's clear
he's not fine. And there are there are people, there are Republicans in
the wings, none of whom I really like either politically, who are able
to take too, are able to take over and do this job. I
mean, you should rest when you're where you're ill, and my gosh,
I mean, I don't intend to ever fully retire, but I do look
forward to not having the daily grind of work. Someday I would like to
getinue writing and doing other things. I mean, eventually podcast my body will
catch up with my old man personality. Biking, Yeah, but I don't
want to drinking. Yeah, of course, I definitely wouldn't want to be
coming back to Washington, DC living here like that. I mean, go
to Kentucky, so Florida. Who cares he could, I suppose do what
Nancy Pelosi did and abdicate his leadership role and serve as a rank and file
member of the Senate. Term is up. Yeah. But all that is
to say, this is the last question I want to ask on the subject,
because we have a couple of other things to talk about today. But
with Biden, with McConnell, with Betterman, it's not purely about age,
although age is clearly a factor here because Futterman is a great example, It's
also just about health and cognitive ability. And I feel like at Donald Trump,
someone else who's also very old but cognitively contrasts with Joe Biden. Whether
you hate Trump or you love them in a very clear way, like one
of them is all right, one of them is not. And that the
question I want to ask Chris is basically, if it says anything you were
getting at this earlier. To me, what we see here is people clinging
to power. And McConnell has always been this double edged sword for Republicans because
when it comes to like being aggressive on judicial nominations and fighting tooth and nail,
for for instance, Brett Kavanaugh. We don't know what it would have
happened, what Miss mconnell would have done in that situation had Trump not been
leading the fight there. I don't know. It's a great question, but
it seems as though it's this desperate clinging to power because you worried that if
you step down, that you think you're the only person that could do these
jobs, and you think you're the establishment of your party is worried that,
you know, without you at the helm, like without Joe Biden in twenty
twenty, it's all going to crumble and AOC is going to reign supreme over
the Democratic Party. I don't know. I think to the extent it says
anything about us, because obviously there's something to be said for elder statesmen.
I think that's very very important, especially somewhere like the Senate, where people
are institutionalists and understand how things have been done. I get that, But
at the same time, to the extent says anything about us, I think
it's about power, and this is like desperate clinging to power that happens in
American politics right now. Yeah, and people with age shot in fear the
radicalism of the youth, and I think this is true in our politics.
You know. I bet if you're a European looking at the situation, you
might even want McConnell to hang in there. I mean, I'm just reading
an interview or just translating an interview for a substack with Joshua Mitchell, Georgetown
professor, in one of our senior faculty and senior fellows at the Common Sense
Society talking about, well, where is America going to be with Europe for
the next couple of years, and he said, well, right now,
the people who are clinging to power in America on the Democrats side and Republican
side are a bunch of former cold quarters who, regardless of their differences on
different politics, have an understanding of what he called, I disagree the existential
threat the Putent poses to the West. And if you get once, you
lose those people, you've got a democratic activists and folks who are probably a
lot less prone to be trigger happy in Europe and be involved in their affairs,
especially, I mean, the sins of the white Man, the sins
of Christianity, the sins of Christendom fall pretty squarely in these guy's minds on
the European people as well as US. And then you've got Republicans who have
they've certainly lost a lot of grounds since Tucker left Fox, but who are
much who are also very skeptical of this whole arrangement, and that they don't
think that the Cold War is still going on and they're not not interested in
continuing it. They So if you're if you're one of our allies, you
might be looking at these fossils who you know, maybe they stopped talking halfway
through a sentence and forget where they are and fall on their face, but
at least they have some kind of memory of the way things had been done
for that in a unipolar century. That's a fascinating observation about the Cold warriors
because that explains why they would cling so fastidiously to power in the sense that
like the world order of the Cold War is all they know, and people
who try to move on try to turn the page from that chapter, then
it becomes frightening. The Watchdold on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every
day Chris helps unpack the connection between politics and the economy and how it affects
your wallet your wages. Rising Twitter stepped into correct one of Biden's two leets
claiming wages are higher as food prices continue to soar? Could this be by
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in DC or down on Wall Street, it's affecting you financially. Be informed.
Check out the Watchdolt on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski on Apple,
Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. They're speaking of politicians, you're I
just took a picture of him like she's got having a Mike Pence moment or
so here there dressed like Mike Pence, like Mike Pence at a barbecue.
There's a fly on top of her head. I saw it. I saw
it, but I was I was deep in thought. The only person ever
successfully handled that, and I hate to be from credit is Barack Obama,
who just swatted it. Oh, but didn't hasn't. Alex Jones used that
clip of Obama and the flies because he says that what does he have an
atlant Obama and Hillary both smell like sulfur? Yeah, did they attract the
flies? Or's only right. Jones right about most things, not all things,
most at least, I mean, but I do imagine if Donald Trump
had just killed a flyer, Mike Pence had killed a fly on national television,
they'd be a monster. Yeah. But Barack Obama, look how cool
and quick he is. There's an amazing sub well, actually it's not a
subplot. There's a plot line on one of those seasons of Real Housewives with
Beverly Hills. One of the women swats a bee and the other woman is
Wickan. I don't know if this is like respecting left for animals is a
Wickan thing, but she There's like a whole fight that draws drawn out for
like an arc of five episodes because one of the housewives s wanted to be
and this would surely be our politics, and my friends were just want to
fly. There's a lot of very lost people out there who reject the religion
of their of their forefathers and try to discover something new. And there's this
really silly myth like the Wiccans were just one with nature, Like this whole
idea of like a noble savage, which is complete polocks, and the idea
that like the Druids were like a peaceful people and said, there's no evidence
really to bear that up at all. The Druids were the first civilization that
the Romans came across where they wiped it out. It's it's someone offensive also
to like warrior civilizations that would never want to take pride in this peaceful imagery.
I mean like when the Romans got then the first accounts of the Romans
coming across the Druids, they found these circles where the priests would do their
sacrifices and their prayer circles, and they were totally freaked out because literally birds
didn't chirp in these areas. And the Romans are like, whatever these people
are is so evil that we're not going to attack them. We're just going
to wipe them off the planet. And all these hippies now are like,
it's a life Shay and Jesus are so evil. I think I'm gonna be
a Druid a Wiccan and save the bees. Yeah. I understand that they're
slightly different here, but it's just it's a bunch of malarkey, as our
president might say. You wrote this week in the Common Sense Society sub sac
about Robert A statue of Robert E. Lee. Right, Yes, So
I read this piece and I figured you would come today wanting to talk about
it, and it's actually not entirely disconnected. Sometimes I feel ridiculous doing like
the mental gymnastics required at an Olympic level to string segments of a show together.
But this, yeah, I don't think this is that much of a
stretch. You were just talking about people finding solace, attempting to find solace
in new religions, and indeed the efforts of iconiclasm that have swapt the country
over the last couple of years. I've taken the form of exactly that.
That's like false new religion. People are fighting solace and hoping. Yeah,
there's a there's an active group of minority of people who are backed by their
friends in the media and friends and politics, who are trying to tear down
American history. And you know, the American people are generally don't stand for
that stuff. The American people are generally pro their history. They like their
statutes, where we're not for tearing things down. But everyone was kind of
lulled into complacency of like, listen, we just want to have an honest
debate. These folks said, we just want to we want to talk about
the past and hurtful aspects of what we want to contextualize history. And it's
like, Okay, that sounds all very reasonable. Yeah, we're gonna we're
gonna put these things into museums and cemeteries, you know where they belong.
We don't any American people like, Okay, that that sounds pretty reason why
I don't actually understand if the central road of the Capital Virginia needs to be
lined with massive statues to the Confederate Cause, Like, yes, maybe there's
a better way to do this, yes, but that's not what they hadn't
mind at all. And the perfect example was last earlier this week on Monday
Day. Through a technicality and an opponent of this move not filing on time,
the judge said that they can move ahead this museum, and Richmond and
Charlottesville can move ahead with melting down this gorgeous statue of Robert E. Lee
from the top of from Charlottesville. From Charlottesville. Okay, it's actually the
statue that in this statue was doomed by its friends. The Unite the Right
rally ended up with that deadly riot was in response to taking that statue down.
Now, it's a gorgeous statue. It wasn't completed by this artist,
but the sculptor who began, and he died while working on it. His
most famous work, if you ever in DC, is probably his statue of
Ulysses S. Grant, equestrian statue of him in front of the US Capital,
which is just a beautiful piece of work. If you're ever near the
Willard Hotel and you're waiting in line for the White House for whatever reason,
actively the Capital Actually, now I'm mixing it up, but that's it's in
front of the Capital, and it's it's really beautiful and it's worth taken in
by the reflecting pool. The Willard is famously where Ulysses S. Grant held
court. He would sit outside. He's actually rumored to haunt the Wildard.
It's the Willard. We get the term lobbying from the Willard because Grant would
sit in the lobby of the Willard and he would be lobbied. Yeah,
and I briefly confused the beautiful crust in statue right there with the one of
Grant. There is actually a beautiful piece of stature going up across from the
Willard of the World War One Memorial. Oh yes, which is truly stunning,
and actually the architects reached out. We I think we should have him
on the podcast soon. Would love that. So that this museum that it
was given to, which is like not really a museum, and it's supposed
to be. It's got a museum in its name, but it really kind
of seems more like a center for woke politics and hating white people. They
wanted to melt it down, to create it into something new, and they
the judge and then by the way, they weren't. They wouldn't even prove
to the court that the statue was still intact. And there's rumors that they're
already been sought into pieces before this order came through. We watch a big
thing, we're going to store it, and they didn't like it. That
sounds so gruesome, truly. Yeah. I packed him up. And you
know, people when when Donald Trump originally in twenty seventeen said listen, first,
they're coming for Confederates, They're going to come for our founding fathers,
everyone just mocked him and people were in fact checks false. It's just like,
I don't know how you fact check a prediction. NPR said it was
a bunch of what about is um He did the fourth of July speech in
front of Mount Rushmore and wasn't at CNN that ran a story or segment.
It was on air. I think about how it was like Trump was doing
a speech in front a bunch of racists. Oh, unbelievable. Yeah,
Ty and Teddy Roosevelt on my Rushmore. His statue was taken down in front
of the New York Public Library, a beautiful statue because I guess Teddy Roosevelt
on a horse made the native peoples of New York. By the way,
we're no longer welcomed there by their mayor. U feel afraid which is not
true. I mean, it's just it's it's absolutely ridiculous. They fought bitterly
over Jefferson in Charlottesville. Yes, they're coming essentially to take it all down.
So we've just been lied to. And the thing is my alma mater.
Sorry, I thought we thought of one more. At George Washington University.
Did George Washington name and statue has been attacked and they changed the moniker
from the colonials. Yeah, we can't have the Colonials anymore. They changed
my high school football team from the Colonials as well. You're from Massachusetts,
literally Colonials. My brother started the moving company, Colonial Moving, shortly before
this whole wave. So funny are you still getting I mean, because the
Colonial Moving, it's just like it sounds nice, colonial homes. It's this
is this is a term that like denotes class, I mean, and he
has not yet changed the name of that, and they're still getting business.
The sorry one more. The mascot on Dawson's Creek, the football team they
were based in Cape Cod fictionally, but their mascot was the Minutemen. Yeah,
the Minimen would probably have been changed. Yeah, you know. And
they always say, they always claim, well, we're going to create something
new with this, but this movement, by and large, with a few
exceptions, hasn't been much about creating anything. They've been about tearing things down.
The things that they do create are generally ugly, of a lesser artistic
quality or less uplifting. Let's just I mean, just I'm not not talking
about the figures, just the statue of itself is less beautiful then, and
we can still make beautiful stuff. There are still wonderful sculptors out there,
like this World War One memorial is going to show from saving studios, people
who can do incredible work, but they're not being chosen. And they said,
oh, we're going to tear down the statuars down Monument Row in Richmond.
All right, well, what's there now? The citizens that they're supposed
to come down are supposed to come down this month. I don't think it
has yet. The citizens are still just fighting to get the fencing taken down.
It's a bunch of pedestals covered in graffiti. It ugly some of these
cities where they had a statue of Lee or a statue of Teddy Roosevelt,
it's just a pedestal now with a couple of flower pots I saw on one
of them put on top of it. We're not creating, we're just destroying.
And you know, when I was going through this stuff and I was
reading the old headlines, a word that kept on popping out to me was
reckoning. They called it this is America's Summer of racial reckoning, and twenty
twenty and even before that they were saying that was supposed to be the summer
of reckoning, which is when this really hit a fever pitch and it started
two years before. And reckoning is very different from reconciliation. When you reconcile,
it's when brothers, sisters, family friends, countrymen come together and apologize
and forgive over past disagreements, for mistakes or wrongs that have been done.
And bringing together. A reckoning is vengeance when it's punishment for past wrongdoings.
Real and imagine, and that really should have been something that just tipped off
the American people who I think have been fooled and lied to on this and
spectacularly and very sadly idle in the faces of this, of this threat that
when you have places like NPR and CNN saying we promise a racial reckoning,
what does that mean. It means vengeance on your symbols. It means vengeance
on the people who perceived as having wronged you. It means blood debts.
I mean, none of these slavers are alive. I mean there's still a
lot of slavers in the world. Juneteenth was not celebrated in Africa or Asia,
where there's a ton of human slavery still. But that I think that
that kind of realizing that looking back through these articles was like we wrote about
this, we knew it was bad. At the Federals, there's some really
great pieces from Helen wrote about how, hey, this audiconoclassm that you see
was very similar to what I saw in China, my parents saw in China
when I was when they were growing up, when they attacked Confucius's tomb and
tore up this family graves, and it's like, why there's nothing to hear
that stands in front of of the Chinese Communist Party's rule. It's just like
a rural cemetery. And her point was, no, this is if we
can come for this person, we can come for you. No one is
safe. We can put out a statue of George Washington, then nothing is
safe. And so what is the Robbert Lea? What is its status right
now? That statue, Well, it's a mystery. But because apparently an
expert was supposed to be flown in from California to verify that the statue had
not been sought in the pieces the litigants, we're not able to get any
evidence of it. I was getting in frantic phone calls on money, like
we think it might actually already be destroyed. But what's going to happen,
and this was going to happen from the very beginning, is they're going to
melt it down, and they say that they're going to use the use it
to make new art. I'm very doubtful of that. We don't have a
civilization that really creates as much anymore. Was the promise or not the promise,
but like the pledge to put it in a museum in this case,
the actually in this case it was given to the museum who promptly and immediately
promised to melt it down right now. And they called this very disingenuously swords
into plowshares a reference to the Bible pounding the swords into plowshares and bringing about
peace. And that's but an interesting aspectively. And I'm I come to this
whole debate differently from a lot of other people because I'm from Massachusetts, but
I'm a Yankee. My family fought on both sides, but I'm thoroughly on
the side of Abraham Lincolns debate. Yes, let us both established that we
were thoroughly on the side of I'm sure some of our listeners are a little
more skeptical of the Lincoln es, Yes, a great tyrant of the North.
But Robert Lee was ended up being a peacemaker. I mean he took
up arms against his fellow man, he took up arms against his country he's
formed as allegiance to and took up arms, and a lot of people died
because of his tactical abilities to keep that war going a lot longer than it
probably otherwise would have been able to. But the end he retired to Washington
Lee University Washington University at the time, and then was trying to be a
peacemaker. And these statue. A lot of the statutory that came around when
this came around in the fiftieth anniversary or so of the war, such as
A one hundred years old, were towards reconciliation. There's that excellent footage that
still remains in an audio recording of the anniversary. I think it's the fiftieth
anniversary of Gettysburg where Confederate veterans and Union veterans met at the high point of
the Confederacy. Pickets charged and reached over the fence and shook each other's hands,
and they put up them on some humble monuments there to reconciliation. There's
a beautiful Confederate memorial in Arlington Cemetery. Cemeteries, remember those were a place
that were supposed to be safe. This is a place for the ghost,
This is a place for the past. Those those aren't safe either. Literally,
a monument to reconciliation that stands over the number of graves that were Confederate
graves that were reburied there after the Spanish America War is the Department of Defense
is moving forward to tear it down. Republicans are absolutely silent on this in
Congress and the Senate. They don't want to talk about it. It's a
very awkward subject for them. And this statue literally has one of the bars
resting on a plowshare like it says it like this cause is over, the
Confederacy is over. Now it's time to come together Swords and the plowshares.
And they want to tear that down. So there's some irony to this Charlottesville
program being called Swords of the Plowshares. One. We know that when they
say they want to contextualize, they just want to destroy. When they say
they want to put in museums, they just want to destroy. When they
say they're in cemeteries. They just want to destroy. When they say that,
swords and the plowshares, they want to destroy that too. It's a
very destructive movement, and it's we've been fooled, and there's a lot of
ugliness now and a lot of empty spaces and what we're once beautiful American civic
spaces. Correct me if I'm wrong. The Richmond Monument drives statues. Those
were Jim Crow era, right when you had people in the South trying to
sort of reestablish dominance. Okay, you're googling it right now. Yeah,
I'm not actually sure if those were put up to me this, I feel
like we're on who wants to be a millionaire. There's a bunch of different
statute. We had two the North essentially sort of building monuments to the Civil
War right away. The South did not because the South was starving to death.
Yeah, and they were. They've been ravaged. The war aside from
Gettysburg, had been fought entirely in the South. Their dollar was worthless.
I mean, America didn't even really catch up to how devastated the South was
until World War One, when the amount of men who were incapable of We're
in the uniform because their necks were swollen by a lack of salt in their
diet. And the and the American people suddenly realized, whoa half of our
country is unfit for military service because of malnutrition. And the South entirely in
the South, we had to go down there. No started building their monuments
right away. The South really started building a lot of their monuments on the
fiftieth anniversary and then again on the hundredth anniversary. The hundred anniversary does coincide
with Jim Crow, and there certainly was an aspect and some of these communities
of this is a Confederate town. Yeah, rabble rousing civil rights people need
to get lost, and there's a lot of unfriendliness. And that's why I
think a lot of people look at that and reasonable people and saying, well,
maybe this should be contextualized, Maybe this would be better in a museum.
But then there's other things like in Alexandra, where I now live,
there was a statue of Confederate Sam I think his name was, and it
was just a lone infantryman who was facing towards the South and away from DC.
And the whole point was like go home. The war is over,
and this is an anonymous person, like the average Confederate, just like the
average Union. They didn't own anything, forget about humans. They didn't know
people who knew who owned humans. And even those statutes were unsafe and they
were torn down. So while there is like there is history there that ought
to be contextualized, and there are things that we need to reconcile and come
together on and forgive each other on. And part of forgiveness is seeking seek
asking forgive us an apology to apologizing. That's real, but that American instincts
toward grace and then American instincts toward harmony was taken advantage of by kind of
like Maoist's style political activists who were actually just there not to have a reconciliation,
but to have a reckoning and not to build ties between communities about to
destroy them. And the fruits of their work are everywhere. I mean,
race relations are so much worse than they were ten years ago. They were
there worse than they were before Barack Obama became president. Things have gotten bad,
and there's a lot of hate being taught now in our schools that's born
out in polling by the way people say their perception of race relations in the
United States tanked along Obama administration. Yeah, and every little matter was raised
to a national level frequently, over and over again by the Obama administration.
And now there's a whole generation who's being taught in schools. And I mean
my stepson was in DC schools and they had they had a spirit week and
like one day it was like where a switch, where who are you to
school? Day? Surprise, We're gonna teach you about Trayvon Martin in kindergarten.
Some of them, some of the first graders and secondatis came home crying.
I heard. I think it went right over the heads of the kindergarteners.
What are you talking about? And it's like, it's not like Trayvon
Martin was some awful civil rights lynching, like a dark I'm at till moment
in American history. It's like it only really is a pivotal moment to these
teachers of a very certain age, like mid thirties, early forties today,
to them like this is our is our m at till moment? No,
it wasn't. What was this a national thing? But they're teaching hate in
the schools you have the people have taken over and I've always run actually the
Smithsonian of Black History, who are saying that things like being on time,
discipline, things like that are just are white ways to keep down persons of
color. That's a very toxic message to send out to a whole generation that
is being raised with nineteen sixties like race hate as kind of a normalcy.
And it's not in every school, but it's in way more schools than you
think. Yeah, segregation isn't essentially you see in the college commencements, literal
segregations indoors, Yeah, in dormitories. Yeah. And to speak up,
I mean it's as another interesting thing and the Joshua Mitchuan of you. And
we'll figure out which we're going to post in the sub stack later today.
If I get to it is, um, I lost my train of thoughts.
I want to keep continue. You're posting nothing's really going to stop this,
Like white American conservatives are not going to stop this. It's gonna need
to be a rebellion from within Black America. That says, what is going
on here? Well, that's that's the because they're they've been used by activists
and white politicians the number headic side to be this kind of like battering ram
against opponents, and it's going to have to come from that community like Tim
Scott's and other folks who stand up and say, what are you doing on
the view preaching race hate? What are you talking about? Yes, there
are difficulties in America. I like Tim Scott's message on this because it's more
nuanced than most. It's not just like they're they're white America. Everything's fine,
You're good and so. Yeah, I've had some problems in my life.
I've probably been pulled over more often than I would have had I not
been black, but they did that. This is a racist and irredeemable country.
Is obscene. Oh, this is the Tim Scott speech after I can't
breathe. This is a twenty sixteen Eric Garner seen, which is brutal.
By the way, cigarettes my gosh, Oh, it's unbelievable, but it
has led to in a moment of levity here the the racal site through DC
streets. The last couple of years of like grossly obese activists wearing masks on
ninety five degree days that I can't breathe, sharks and I'm like, yeah,
your lungs and hard. I work it over. Time you pick that
mask off and hit the gym, you can't breathe. You see. It's
hard for me to laugh at that because I think of how all of the
rich white liberals in the newsrooms of the glossy magazines, planning magazine covers or
TV segments that say obesity is healthy over and over again that backlashes was beginning.
Is it's so exploitively not it is exploitive and disgusting. Um, it's
funny you mentioned that, you know, there's a lot to go off of
from Evan and ran lay In a while, you have been rambling a while,
not out of character, but like really like you can't get on your
bike gold. But Trayvon Martin was when I looked back. I was in
college at the time, and I remember having just this incredible sinking feeling.
This is on the heels of I mean, what a year or two after
the Beer Summit, maybe like three years after the Beer Summit, which was
a smaller scale and obviously much less tragic, sort of similar version of what
happened in some ways with Traymon Martin and George Zimmerman. In that the story
became huge national news and it didn't need to President Wade In. Yeah,
and I just remember having such a sinking feeling when that happened, and feeling
really scared about the future of the country. And I was so young.
I mean, I didn't know anything, but I had viscerally this awful feeling
about where this was all going. And I think if you look back now,
that is it was after Traymon Martin that it then went to Ferguson and
Michael Brown. It then went to Freddy Gray, which and that was bigger
than Trayvon Martin. Um. And it was a lie that was carried on
from months and months and months, and it just truly set us back so
far. And I do feel like it all came down to it really started
with the Trademond Martin playbook from the media and from Democrats, and they've got
a powerful tour of the media I think has as the biggest role to play
in this. I mean, if you go to some like neo nazi and
racist corners of the internet, you'll find websites that just collate every example of
black and white violence. Yeah, and they're just video ACTI video that I've
seen on Twitter people just and I'm like, what the heck is this?
And I realized this is this is account to just post black and white violence.
Yeah, and that stuff is extremely incendiary and it's dangerous dialogue to engage
in. I mean, I mean, it's fine if you want to be
honest and talk about it. But the whole national media decided that cop on
black violence was going to be their thing. Yeah, like the mirror image
of the dark corners of the Internet was our national media. So it didn't
matter if someone had a handgun and was running from police and had opened fire.
It was and it didn't matter if like we saw it with Freddy Brown
in Baltimore, where a black youth was killed by a combination of black and
hispanic police officers and a majority black police force in a majority black city with
a black police chief and a black mare. It was a white man's fault,
and the media was just blaring this and it's it's so it was,
it's so toxic, and it's led a lot of people. That's how I
met a friend of mine, older, older woman, maybe sixty, who
went from just like a normal like Obama voting liberal too. We need to
abolish police. What living in this beautiful suburb of New York City, very
expensive Tonytown, and we need to abolish police. You can't be serious.
But I saw it on the TV. It's probably fine in her town.
The Federals exposed one of those stories, how I became a police abolitionist,
written in The Atlantic. This was your reporting. Yes, yeah, and
people talking like this this won't changed my mind. I started this article being
skeptical of abolished police, and I ended it thinking we must do this.
And the article was the idea that the first this activist Deerka Purnell had the
first time she'd ever seen a police shooting was a cop had shot a child
for skipping a sign up sheet at their baseball at the basketball court at their
local YMCA or something community center. And I got away with it and I
was back on the job. It turned out it wasn't true. They were
both children. They were cousins. When was a security guard, they were
like best friends, and they had a fight and he wounded him and he
was sobbing when the police got there. I can't believe I shot my cousin,
and who's fired and arrested? The kid was fortunately, okay, and
all of it was a lie. And we finally battered at The Atlantic,
which used to have like used to literally run articles about their fact checking.
When we finally battered them over the head enough with this, like, look,
this is obviously false, they changed. They didn't retract the article.
They said, well, the message still stands, which is that the White
Man's Path, I guess a famously anti racist publication. And right, the
Atlantic, given its history, and this is advancing neo racism. Essentially,
that's what the narrative has been for a really long time, and that's what
it became. It metastasized into something really awful, and that's where we get
segregation in college norms now and lawlessness in DC. We're a whole generation of
kids who are supposed to be in high school. We're instead not in school
for two years. Well, their parents were trying to get to work,
if they were working at all. There's a lot of families in DC.
There are generations without a job, and they're at the same time told it
was racist to arrest them, so like they know they're not going to get
arrested. So I mean, right now, there are young adults who think
that they won't be arrested for carjackie. The police can't chase them. It's
not just our beauty and our statuary and the true things that we have and
our history. It's our youth and our sense of community as an American people
have all been really torn apart. And I got initiate they weren't corn apart
by white racism. Well the correctort apart by these activists. It's so where
I was going to go with that. And by the way, in the
words of not your mayor anymore, my Mayor Muriel Bowser, this isn't Mayberry.
It's literally when she said at a press conference this week after keys had
been stolen from vallet stands around town, She's like, basically by saying that
is blaming the businesses for the lawlessness and the city that she's presided over during
this crime spike by saying, this isn't Mayberry. Amazing, what a ridiculous
crime. If for your listeners who don't live in Washington, DC, it
actually made me giggle on my awful like prankster punk rock like back of my
brain. When you had somebody somebody stole all the keys from a valley stand
at the nice restaurant at Del Friscos. Yeah, uh, but it's a
lawless system. The cops that the people who had their cars key stolen were
like, are you going to do anything about this? And the cops like
like, what do you mean we think we solve carthufts? Like all you're
gonna patrol the garage where all the cars are, And the cops like seemed
bewildered by this line of question. I can I work here where to write
a report? Yeah? Yeah, no, I have just the anecdotal reports
that people have been dealing with in the city are truly unbelievable. To Virginia.
Yeah, literally, I moved to Virginia. They solve crimes. I
get like new crime of who hacks on roberty Lee, like a string of
robberies, like not arrested. I mean when one of our colleagues the house
was burgled in uh and Alexandria burgled, they arrested the guy like two weeks
later because they dusted for Prince. Imagine if I called the cops of my
house in DC, it was like somebody brand in here. They're like,
oh, okay, what do you want me to do? Arrest somebody?
Actually arrested this guy. That actually happened at the old office. There was
no dusting for Prince if you'll remember, Yes, yeah, it was no
dusting for Prince. Okay, anyway, we have our best men on it
that working around the clock shifts, so all of that decide. Because I
think we've talked about monument driving Richmond before. That is one of the I
thought that was despicable and just also um so physically oppressively despicable when you were
driving down Monument driver in Rickman. Now, whether it's I thought it was,
I don't want the Confederates full disclosure. But they were such beautiful statue.
It was such a grand boulevard. It was this beautiful statue. The
design was so ugly, the design was incredible. If it was not a
bunch of traders and racists, So it would be a different conversation who fought
for the dissolution of the country. But man, some listeners are really can't
have as in this podcast, eighteen ninety was the first monument that was late.
So it's pretty thoroughly not not that though there was there was one.
There was one monument that I was very happy to see taken down. I
think it was in Tennessee of Nathan Bedford Floyd, the cavalry General Christopher Bench.
I wasn't my glics. It's not just because he like found it the
coop luck Land and was a psychotic calvary general really probably the best of the
war. It was just a really ugly statue. It had like red glowing
eyes. It was like and contentionally evil looking. Yes, go'll take that.
Let don't put that a museum. Yeah, melt that down? Yeah,
please? No. The Miament Drive one for me was like if I
put myself in the shoes of a black American looking up at that, or
some of a black person lives in Richmond, it was aggrandizing them. It
wasn't historical context, and I think that's a key distinction. But that gets
the last point I wanted to make and wanted to pose to you. You
mentioned forgiveness, and that is fundamentally I think what this gets back to,
over and over again, there is no concept we could talk about this at
nauseum. How it was illustrated I think in an eye opening way over the
course of cancel culture. But I don't think anybody has any goal of forgiveness
there is no limiting principle. There is no end to any of this,
and that's what's I think most frightening in that. I agree, Um,
you know, there has to be um forgiveness obviously, not just of the
past, but any wrongs that are genuine wrongs that happen in the present.
Um. Yes, But I don't think anybody that's involved in the iconoclasm has
any concept of what would finally allow them to forgive of, what would be
what does that look like? What is your end? Yeah? They got
again. I guess to go back to this Mitchell interview and he does a
lot of work on this in general, Joshua Mitchell. The scapegoating, the
idea that which comes from the ancient Hebrew idea of putting the sins of the
community out of goat and sending that coat out of the desert, you know,
just which is a tough sentence for that goat, but it takes the
sins out of the community. That's so many good goats lost to this,
you know. But well, they were big on animal sacrifice, and we
don't, the Christians no longer do the animal sacrifices that we have that we
have the lamb who all the sins would take out on that on Christ.
But the concept still exists, and the concept of sin in America was crucial
to our Puritan foundings. Did you see the scapegoat of the sins of the
community being exercise early in American history seat in Salem. And the reason why
the witch trials went for as long as they did in Salem but way longer
in Europe is because of the reaction of American Christians and the forgiveness aspect of
Hold on a second, maybe we shouldn't be burning all these witches. That's
a fascinating point you should write about. Our scare was much much more contained
than the European one, which went for centuries. Usually there were more witches
see in this context though, that's actually really fascinating question of how because again,
like time and again, what is their end? They don't have one,
and I the Bible found the answer of like forgiveness. And that's where
people in the community were like, hold on a second, and they're we're
not Christians. We are so unmoored in this era of moral relativism. And
there's no there's no confession, there's no confession, but there's also no fundamental
concept of forgiveness because there's no end right, there's no right and wrong.
Everything is relative and there's just total untetheredness from principle. I mean, I
look at the arguments for having over reparations, unbelievably racist whole thing. Whether
my family who emigrated here in World War two should have to pay or just
my part of the family that was here during the Civil War. Should I
get a discount from my family that fought in the Union or should I pay
more because of my family fought for the Confederacy. What about the guy who
came over here from Ukraine? Does he have to pay? Does Kamala Harris
get money from Indian and Jamaican descent or is it just Barack Obama? And
does he have to pay because he's related to a slaveholder. It's just completely
insane. But if there was like a trillion dollar check that the NSCASE could
write and be like all right, issue settled, Never talk about it again,
there's no more talking about this, like do it. But there's no
way that's the case because there is no forgiveness, there's no reparations. Will
not rest like they will not the claim it's always to like to address past
grievances and press past wrongs and past sins. But it won't, it won't
possibly affix it. It's too useful of a tool. It's too useful of
a cuddule for people who want to take the American characters understanding of sin and
wrongdoing and search for redemption, which goes all the way back to the early
Protestant preachers of America, our constant search for God, Please bless us,
God, give us grace? How can American people be redeemed? And they
take that and they've twisted it. Did you say something nice about Protestants?
They did some good work here. Unfortunately their experiment has failed, and you
will after a century of war for end with a papal state. I never
heard you do that before. But they've twisted that American one, and that
American want of mercy and forgiveness. They've twisted it into subservience, and that
American search for sin and wrongdoing and redemption. They've twisted it into reckoning.
And they're not going to stop because these are tools with which to remake society.
They've they've never the left has never been able to use class fighting so
far in America to really get the things they wanted. But they can use
race, and that's and they can appeal to those even while a lot of
the Christianities itself has gone unfortunately, the silk based cultural instincts exist in the
shadows, and and that they're using that against us, and it's we need
to be aware of it. I mean, we need to reckon with that.
We need to reckon with that. That's the real reckoning. So I'll
just finish by quoting or paraphrasing. I was reading Russell Kirk recently and he
writes that the conservative doesn't believe the world can never be made perfect but tolerable.
And I think when you are again untethered from a sort of solid,
concrete moral foundation, that isn't you know your house is built on rock and
not on sand. Which moral relativism is the sand in that metaphor, in
case it was unclear, which it probably was, But that if you don't
fundamentally, if you believe that this world can be made perfect, then you
will never be satisfied. Because human beings are programmed to be suspicious of each
other based on all kinds of different immutable characteristics. Whatever it is, it
will always exist. We can make it better, we can't make it perfect.
And if you believe that we have to make it perfect, and we
can indeed make it perfect, you will never ever be satisfied. Exactly right,
And there's one more plug for our subseat, because it hits us.
We posted a really great piece earlier this week or maybe last week, a
speech on a Speeza. Daniel Patrick Monahan, the late Democratic investor and senator,
gave warning of that with the new Left, saying, you guys are
trying to make society perfect, and you're in a hurry, and it's very
dangerous. And the zeeds of this recent round of race hate and problems and
reckonings in America are not planted in the eighteen sixties. The real stuff we're
seeing were planted in the nineteen sixties with the radicals, and that is what's
coming to fruit now. I mean, America dealt with the Civil War.
Three hundred thousand men died just on the Union side alone in that Civil War.
And but this is a new thing and they're trying to they're trying to
lean back to it like a bunch of Mason's claiming they came from the pyramid
builders, but really it came from the nineteen to six season. That's that
needs to be addressed from within the communities that they're using to batter us or
I don't think it's going to be put under control, Chris, Where can
people read that? Read that subseck post? It was fantastic. Where can
people find it? You can find it a common Sense Society dot sub stack
dot com and right now we're on talks to get around special homepage. There
you go, Chrisford, executive editor of Soon perhaps a homepage for the common
Sense Society Stack. You've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour.
A Memlijasinski, culture editor here at The Federalist will be back soon with
more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray about