Speaker 1: Meaning a live man like this man letting butterfly flapping
and wing dig down in the forest. Man, it gonna
cause a tree fall, letting five thousand miles away. Man,
nobody seen it.
Speaker 2: Nobody else might see.
Speaker 1: You don't need to know many.
Speaker 3: Luck you followed the other story and.
Speaker 1: You got directed like that. That's wain man. Don't blackly
dang on the panel man, no matter. Man.
Speaker 2: All right, George Bagby, Welcome back to the Jay Burton Show.
How are you doing.
Speaker 1: I'm doing great. It's good to be back. Thanks for
having me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm very excited to have you back. Uh. As
we were discussing off air, this episode is sort of
a you know, a continuation or a you know, further
exploration of what we spoke about last time now several
months ago. But I assume everyone is familiar with you.
Obviously will allow time for filling at the end, but
would you like to introduce our topic for today?
Speaker 1: Indeed, yes, we talked previously about controversies in classical schools
and some of the priorities there that I found myself
in conflict with. Initially, it was a great surprise to me.
The Lady Gaga episode, the controversies about sexual ethics, which
I didn't think was necessary to go very far into.
I thought that I had I thought I had the
parents on my side. Certainly it turned out I didn't,
and there was more of a There was more of
an element there of wanting to be respectable and not
saying controversial things that would get you in trouble with
the left that I didn't appreciate at that time. I
thought that we were pushing back against the modern world
in modest and vague ways. I wasn't there to throw
bombs or anything. I wasn't trying to stoke any controversy.
I was paying lip service to basic sexual morality. In
the context of teaching Dante, one of the things I
did was I explained the image in Dante of the
barren sand where the usurers and sodomites were marching around
tilling barren earth forever in hell, and that this was
a kind of fraud. And I was explaining the images,
so the image of usurers, they're making something infertile into
something fertile. They're turning money which does not naturally reproduce
like animals and agricultural crops naturally reproduce because of their nature.
They're turning money into something fruitful, and so they're punished
in the barren sand that does not bring forth any fruit.
And likewise, the sodomites are forever running tilling the sand
with their feet because in their lives they had turned
something meant to be fruitful, which is sex, into something barren.
And so we see this kind of thing recapitulated endlessly
in Dante. You know, the gluttons are constantly eating too
much and vomiting in Hell, and they're surrounded by rotting
food and such, and sometimes those images are extremely easy
to understand, but the barren sand was more complicated, and
so I went in some length on that to explain
what Dante meant. It turned out to be. It turned
out to be very controversial just to explain it. I
even had my dean come talk to me about it,
and I thought that I had won honor for the
school by going into that. I had even given a
lecture at a conference about that instruction about teaching sexual
moras in the context of teaching literature, because it's a
major element. It's something that everyone's talking about in their
own time. It's in pol politics, and my whole presentation
on that occasion was how to do this innocuously and
also its importance. Funny enough that particular lecture I had
an interesting member in the audience, Rod Dreyer, was actually there.
It was it was the very first time I'd ever
encountered him. But anyway, I after seven years of that
first teaching job, my contract was not renewed. That was
a moment of incredible crisis for me because it was
a reconsideration of teaching as a career. Would I what
would I do if I wasn't going to teach? And
I decided to leave the area. I went and took
another job with someone that I knew and trusted to
do more or less the same thing, and got myself
rank in a new school, and I found elements there
that I was totally accustomed to. Thankfully, it wasn't my
teaching responsibility, but this was also an interesting element in
classical schools just generally, the civil rights narrative from the
nineteen sixties is a particular focus where it doesn't necessarily
need to be of Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham
Jail has become a standard, and this is taught in
rhetoric classes. It's not taught in a historical context. It's
not taught in an American history course, modern history course,
not necessarily anyway, it's a standard in the rhetoric class.
So they analyze the argument and it's it's famous and
taught in like junior high as a standard piece for
intense investigation, and they're working on it rhetorically. They're analyzing
arguments and such. But it is part of the inflated
role of Martin Luther King and his legacy, so that
he is he's taken as a secular saint. And that's
an element that's very widespread. And I encountered that yet
again at my new school. Political salvation story, and that's
a very important American narrative. It figures very large, and
I think that one of the reasons it's there is
to win credibility for Christian schools in America. Moreover, it
is one of the essential beliefs of practically all the
adults involved in the school. They've they've all that they've
all put an awful lot of stock into the narrative.
But that wasn't that wasn't my role at my first
school or my second school. I never had that on
my on my syllabus. It wasn't in the classes that
I taught, but it's interesting to note that that's that's
a standard, and that that ended up coming back later.
I was given a special role at my new school.
I was given the role of reviewing the history curriculum,
specifically the history curriculum for anti European bias, for the
needless assaults on European heritage in America in particular. Now,
that proved to be an extremely challenging assignment because you
basically just have to go back into old textbooks to
skirt that kind of narrative. But my work in that
was not so important as the fact that I was
given that task. So one of the things I did
do is I taught modern literature, and particularly American literature.
I still remember the morning that I began teaching The
Great Gatsby for the first time, and I went to
my favorite diner, a really old diner, and had the
Great Gatsby with me and had my notes in such
and I and I was reflecting. I think I wrote
a letter I frequently did when when I went to
the diner very early in the morning before I taught,
and I was reflecting on how I felt like I
had really made it as a teacher that I was
teaching The Great Gatsby in high school. I felt like
I had really really achieved a landmark in my career
by doing that, and that was that was very satisfying.
But I also taught Flannery O'Connor, who I really love.
We had a tremendous amount to cover in that class,
which was a challenge, but we were reading everything that
rises must converge. So if you don't know this story,
I was. I was talking to Pete Kenyonez about this
story just recently and recapitulated the platform. The story involves
a man named Julian, a young man who's taking his
mother to the doctor. And his mother has gone through
all of the sit ins and bus protests and such
in the South from that period, and she's very worried
to ride the bus with black people. She's very concerned
about public transportation, she's concerned about her safety. Made newly relevant,
perhaps just in recent times. Julian his response to his
mother is fury and resentment. He hates her scruples and
for all of her her so called backwards opinions about
civil rights, which manifest in the short story. She is
very kind. She's an old woman in poor health. She
talks to the black people on the bus. She's totally
respectful to them, though she voices her misgivings with her son.
She gives a black child a nickel, insists on doing
so as an emblem of patronage, which the girl's mother
resents in anger and knocks the nickel out of the
old woman's hand. But her intentions are all benevolent, and
it's clear that that's so, whatever her opinions might be,
whatever we might think of them. The narration is very
clear that Julian is the one in the wrong. He
wants to make an example of his mother. He's responding
to her very angrily, bitterly telling her that she's going
to she's going to embarrass him. Curiously, Julian tries to
interact with the black people on the bus to show
his own political opinions, and he has no idea how
to talk to them, and they look at him as
if he's weird, he's out of line. He doesn't succeed
in interacting with them, whereas Julian's mother seems quite comfortable
with them. In interacting, and she has she has more rapport,
seemingly is able to get along, at least until the
final scene where the angry mother knocks the nickel out
of her hand. Well, when that final confrontation takes place,
now they're on the sidewalk and Julian berates his mother
in public and says, now you're going to see how
things really are. Now you're feeling the embarrassment I've always
wanted you to feel. We live in a new era
now where everyone is equal, And in the midst of
his berating her, she collapses on the sidewalk and dies
of a stroke. So it's one of these very compelling
Flannery O'Connor stories where we see we see conflict of
sin in an individual and it manifests in some revel
litory moment which should be a moment of repentance. This
is one of the great themes in O'Connor, and O'Connor
marks at the very end of the story in Narration
that Julian is now entering a new world of pain
and repentance. So she's putting a punctuation point at the
very end in her inimitable brief style. But she's also
pointing about the whole You know, she's indicating the point
of the story in the narration, in these tiny little
remarks in the narration, where it's clear what's going on
according to the narrator. Well, I was teaching this in
my high school class, and my students responded in a
very unexpected way. They were all against Julian's mother. Several
students are saying, she.
Speaker 3: Deserves it, these racist opinions, They deserve public humiliation, punishment,
and this is the point of the story, that she
needed to die.
Speaker 1: And I was pointing out the remarks in the narration. No,
you're not getting what O'Connor is talking about here. This
is actually something much more complex. The point of the
story is not backwards racist opinions, deserving to have to
be publicly humiliated and excoriated and such. The evil in
the story is in Julian. And so that led to
something much bigger. I brought a a selection of quotes
from black American authors to the class and I distributed them.
And my inspiration for that handout, which predated Flannery O'Connor
and teaching literature in that mode. My inspiration was a
book by Robert pin Warren called Who Speaks for the Negro,
which he published in the sixties. And what Robert Pinwarren
did was he traveled around the country and he talked
to Martin Luther King, he talked to Malcolm X, he
talked to James Baldwin. He talked to black educators in universities.
And the point of his book he asked them all
the exact same questions, and he wrote a whole book
of his interviews with them. And the whole point of
his book was they all had different ideas about policy
in the Civil Rights era. None of them had the
same vision. So that is what I distributed to the class,
and I said, you all think you know what's right
with the Civil Rights era, but what did Black Americans
think of this? And among the quotes are black nationalists
who say they need an independent country, a homogeneous racial nation.
Among them are opponents of desegregation, like Zora Neil Hurston,
who says, the Native Americans don't whine about their social
status in America. I take the side of the Indians.
I don't want anyone forcing someone to associate with me.
They should associate with me because I'm a compelling person
and they like me. That's that's what Zaora and Neil
Hurston said, And of course you've got Malcolm X and
MLKA and all the rest. And the whole point of
the of the handout was not this person's right and
this person's wrong. The whole point of the handout was
there are a lot of different opinions here, you know,
if we're interested in what they think about the situation,
we'll note here there's a great variety who speaks for
the negro Robert Penn Warren's evocative question. Well, I ended
up having conversation with the faculty because the whole thing
was about it was about Julian's mother and the glee
that certain students had with her death in the story,
and I talking to my colleagues about this and saying
that I found it quite disturbing that they would gang
up on an old woman in the context of the
story and say she deserves to suffer and die and
inhumiliation and not getting the point of O'Connor's O'Connor's tale anyway,
But I circulated my handout that was, in retrospect a mistake,
because there was a there was a scandal soon after
that which I'm not going into but the result was
a new atmosphere of paranoia, of a very unsettled time.
We had a great many faculty meetings, faculty and staff
meetings in which the school's stance on race became the
primary concern of the board. So it turned out I
had enemies after the Flannery O'Connor situation and my efforts
to try to explain the story and talk about the
Civil Rights era with a completely hands off sort of approach.
I wasn't there to say what I thought was right
in the Civil Rights era. The whole point was what
did black Americans have to say about it? And those
were all names that anyone would have heard of, you know,
these weren't obscure people on my list of quotes. But
the controversy it led to this paranoid investigation into the
beliefs of various faculty members, and I was singled out.
So there were two things that led to me being
singled out so far as I know. The first was
the handout. The second was my special role in history
curriculum to root out and replace anti European bias in
the curriculum, needless hostility to white people in the curriculum,
the history curriculum. Soon after this whole investigation commences, I
realize how serious the matter is. Board members start meeting
me after my last class and pull me aside into
the into the work room, a private space, and I
get really incredible questions from them. The first sign of
trouble is a board member of pulling me in. I'd
met him before, but we'd never had a conversation. And
he's also a father in the school, you know, his
children attend the high school. And he says, yes, I'm
here to ask you. Are you a racial segregationist? And
I said no, what would what would give you that inclination?
What would give you that idea? And he said that
he had been told that I was. And I found
that very interesting, especially considering we had one black student
in the entire K through twelve program and she was adopted. Like,
we don't believe in segregation, but is it to facto segregation?
Any critic would say it was. But that's not the statute,
that's not the policy, that's just how it ended up.
So I didn't mention any of that. Of course, that
had grounds to bring up later, but I said, no,
I don't espouse that I don't propose that I'm a
teacher and I'm explaining things I had been given a
history class. I was teaching American history, and this was
American history too, So it began with Reconstruction, and I
was distributing readings and questions primary sources from Reconstruction. I
had edited things for a history reader and handed them
out to the students, and they brought questions that I
had written for class discussion and confronted me with them
and saying, well, what are you trying to say about
civil rights in the reconstruction Europe? And I said, I'm
trying to motivate conversation about it. What are you preferring here?
This was a subject of argument at the time. How
to affect citizenship for the freed slaves? What was the
best way of going about that? Are their notable differences
between the freed slaves and the white citizens of the
post war or South. This, it seems to me to
be perfectly reasonable, and I don't have any brief for
it other than that. But they were offended by the
tone of some of my questions. They also looked into
the poetry recital for my history class. I had chosen
Donald Davidson's Tall Men an excerpt from it now, just
so you can appreciate, this was the point on which
I got confronted privately by a board member. Soon after
this controversy began. The line that they found so offensive
in The Tall Men by Davidson was, shall I say
the praise of men bright honor? The songs of my
own race and the ways of fighters are something read
in a book only, or graven only in stone, and
not in the hearts of men. So Davidson is reviewing
Davy Crockett and Andrew Jackson in his poem. His poem's
title The Tall Men, he refers to many times referring
to the founders of the state of Tennessee, and also
reflecting on modern ways and how easy our modern life is.
We glide effortlessly over the pavement, you know, gently tapping
the gas pedal. We sit beneath air conditioning in office towers,
where our ancestors were carving out civilization in the wilderness.
We're fighting the Indian nations. We're watching their loved ones
massacred and fighting for their place in the new world.
And so he's drawing a contrast there and then saying,
are the ways of my ancestors something we only read
in a book or is it something that's in our being?
Are we essentially organically connected to our ancestors who founded
our place in America? And he offers a lot of
good material for historical reflection, which I've always resonated with.
I've always been a fan of Donald Davidson. But the
board members decided they were going to cancel the poetry
recitation right at the end of the semester, after everyone
had already memorized it. They singled it out as offensive
and it used the word race. The songs of my
own race and the ways of fighters are engraved not
on stone only, but also in the hearts of men.
They found that highly offensive, and once again I was
pulled aside. I was asked if I was a racist,
and I said, no, it rather depends on what you mean.
But I wasn't going to I wasn't going to address
that under the circumstances. I denied it, and they said, well,
you gave your students this poem to memorize. And one
of the board members, this was a couple of men
that pulled me aside on that occasion one of the
board members said, well, I looked him up on Wikipedia
and he was a racist. Why were you giving them
racist poetry? And I I offered my brief for the
tall Men now the name of my press, a tribute
that resulted in pulling the poem from recitation, and then
I got a very interesting assignment from the board. Now
I believe this was something that was specially decided. I
don't think that it was. I don't think this was
something that everyone was required to do, is what I'm saying,
though I don't know that for sure. I was given
a statement on race that was written by a third party.
The board had found a statement for Christian schools about
civic nationalism, the idea that this was something adaptable and cultural,
nothing intrinsic. The statement went well out of its way
on ostensibly Christian and Biblical grounds to conclude that race
is an Unchristian concept and that anyone that thinks race
exists has anti Christian priors. I was asked to write
an essay in response to this statement and also to
affirm its conclusion. I demurred artfully wrote an essay exhibiting
all of the instances of national differenentfernces, tribal affiliations, ancestry
mentioned in the Bible, and saying this statement being being
emphatically Christian in its effort couldn't mean contradicting the Bible
on matters of ancestry and inheritance and national characteristics, or
even the creation of the nations of the world at
the Tower of Babele. Those are all explicit in Christian
belief and in the Bible itself, So the statement cannot
mean that. The statement instead means that the topic of
race has been dangerously politicized and Christians should avoid the subject,
which I try to find some quality ways to assent to.
This is too dangerous to talk about. People that talk
about it are destroyed and everyone knows that. So for
the sake of the institution, we avoid those subjects, is
what I wrote. Well, the demur was not satisfying to
the board, so we had an interview. They called me
in for a special meeting with the board members to
talk about the statement. Now, the people that gave me
this statement were considering making it the official statement of
the school and putting it on the website. This civic
nationalist statement about race, a statement that they had never
considered that they themselves had not written. They did not
know the issue. So I went to the meeting. The
meeting or the statement was all based on the assertion
that race is a social construct, that it is man
made in fact, that any differences that we might notice
between people are differences of nurture and not of nature.
And they said that the belief of anyone that claims
to be a Christian, that believes that there are differences
between the nations of the Earth is outside of the
Christian communion in a serious way. That's what the statement said.
So I went to the meeting, and I was prepared
to talk about what I had written, but I decided
to start the meeting with questions to the board, which
turned out to be all that was necessary. First, I
was well aware that the civic nationalist position is one
of the key targets of the race critics of the time.
So Ibram Kinsey and Robin DiAngelo and Tom Nahasi Coats,
they all excoriate the civic nationalists because they all believe
that race is real, and they believe that races are
divided into two groups, oppressor races and oppressed races. Therefore,
everyone must note who is being oppressed and who the
oppressors are, and anyone who refuses to do that by
taking a civic nationalist stance are, according to them, the
worst racists of all and deserve primary focus for attack.
Now this is in the literature and in the journalism
and such. This is broadly known, but they obviously did
not know that. So initially I asked them if they
were aware that that was the mainstream on the matter.
They were all in a panicked situation. They were desperately
trying to get out of out of the gaze of
their enemies. They did not want to be accused of
being racist. They were extremely afraid that they would be.
They were considering issuing this statement as a way of
getting out of that. What they thought was a mainstream position,
an uncontroversial position, was actually quite controversial and would not
have saved them. So I told them, if you make
this the official policy of the school, if you require
us all to publicly assent to this, if you post
this on your website, you will increase hostile attention on
the institution. These are your enemies. This is how they think.
No matter what we might think, this is what they think,
and they hold all the cards. They have all the
power to destroy you. You can't duck this by making
a civic nationalist statement. So though it may be what
you sincerely believe, though you might think this will get
you out of trouble, if you were to make this statement,
you should make it privately. You should not make it
a public statement. They were completely unaware of this. None
of them had heard of the writers I mentioned. None
of them were aware of the state of the discourse,
because for them, this was a brand new problem that
had them all afraid. So that was my first question
to them, Do you know these writers? Do you know
what they would say about you? Do you know what
will happen if you make this a public statement of
the school. They didn't know the writers, they didn't know
what they said about them, and they had no idea
what the implications would be if they made it a
public statement. So I advised caution. Second, I said, do you,
gentlemen believe well, how did I say it? I wrote
it down here? Would you tell a Jew that race
is a social construct? This question had never occurred to them.
They looked at one another in shock, and they looked
back at me, and they said, no, no, we would
not do that. And I said, so you have. You've
got a statement that you can't tell someone outside of
your own immediate circle. What I could have said is
you've got a statement on race you cannot share with
anyone outside your own race. The thought had never occurred
to them. Of course, we could have taken in another direction.
Would you tell a black man that race was a
social construct, that it wasn't real? They wouldn't. But I
decided to stick with I decided to stick with the
biblical nation, a biblical race, if you will. Lastly, I
asked them, do you believe do you sincerely believe the
Bible teaches that race is a social construct made by
the action of human beings and not through any other reason.
And my source which I brought up, what about the
Tower of Babel? Did God providentially divide the peoples of
the earth? Does that represent divine intention? This had also
never occurred to them, though they did read my essay.
Presumably they were more interested in my demurl. So I asked,
does the Bible teach race as a social construct? They
had no answer. They found the thought disturbing. So I concluded,
and I said, you have a statement your enemies may
not see because they will destroy you for it. You
have a statement that you cannot share with anyone outside
of your own special circle, and you have a statement
that you cannot assert is biblically true. This is a problem.
And I left it, and the meeting dissolved, and I
walked away from that meeting with a singular conviction that
I would either be asked into leadership because they didn't
know what was going on and I'd made that clear
to them, or I couldn't stay in retrospect, I believe
that all of the interviews, all of the tests I
was given, in particular the essay I was asked to write,
were efforts to find grounds to fire me that did
not pan out. I stood by everything that I had
said in class an out. I stood by all opinions
that they actually had had approached me. At one time,
another board member had come to me to ask for
all of my handles on the Internet. He asked if
I had Facebook. I did not. He asked if I
was on Twitter. I was not. I had never had
a presence on Twitter at that time. I had a
Facebook account, but it had been deleted years previous. He
then wanted to get any blog articles I had written
in my life. And I went to the interim headmaster,
who was a friend of mine and who was very
supportive of me through the whole thing, a very humane
man who I'm still friends with. He's no longer at
the institution. Many are not this is. This all happened
years ago. So one of the reasons I decided to
talk about it. I asked him about that. I said,
so they want they want MySpace articles I wrote in college.
This is outrageous that I'd be subjected to such scrutiny
at this occasion in my career that a college student
wouldn't have some controversial opinion or other. This is obviously
an effort to fire me and cancel me. And he
was very sympathetic and said that he thought that it was.
It was paranoid and bad policy. It was. It was
extremely discouraging to everyone I talked to. And I don't
know what other faculty we're going through at that time.
I only know my own experience because I went through
all of those encounters alone. But when I walked out
of that inquisition about the race statement, I knew that
I would either I would either come out with enhanced
position or I would have to leave. There wouldn't be
any means for me to stay, and I did not
want to stay. I talked with my wife many times
in that period saying I want nothing to do with
these people. The sooner that I can leave this arrangement,
the better. But of course I didn't want to lose
my contract. I had nothing to go on on for
besides my salary. You know that that was the way
I supported my family. So it was a very uncertain period.
Soon after, maybe a couple of weeks after, I got
a call another meeting with the board. So I went,
and this this was right after exams, midterms, and we
were all coming back to the school for class. In
a couple of days, I had everything graded and I
sat down in the room with the board members and
they said, we've decided that we will part ways. We
have decided you are not in violation of your contract
or the code of conduct. No doubt they had been
looking for ways that I was. Because the next step
was they helped me gather my things. I gave them
the graded tests, and they escorted me off campus and
told me not to come back. They also gave me
a statement in writing that in the name, in the
name of the board, that I would be paid the
remainder of my contract, and indeed I was up till
the very last paycheck, which I caught a couple of
years later. In the midst of all of that, I
got a public confrontation by an officer of the school,
the person that I had talked to about the quotes
about from from the Black American writers in relation to
the Flannery O'Connor episode. She confronted me in a public
place in front of my friends and called me a
white nationalist and excoriated me. And after that I realized
I had I had serious opponents in the structure of
the school. Then then it made more sense to me
the kinds of confrontations that I'd had, the board member
asking me if I was a racial segregationist and such.
It made a little more sense that someone in the
structure had taken a side against me and was saying
things about me unknown to me at that time. So
it's a it's an interesting circumstance, and I want to
I want to try to explain the position of the
board because I like these people. In spite of everything
and I feel like they did something honorable to me
under the circumstances of honoring my contract, for instance, last paycheck,
notwithstanding whatever I got it eventually. These were professionals, these
were accountants, These were our ends, These were people with
small businesses. These were people that had put extraordinary resources
and time to set up an institution they could trust
to educate their children. That is a really extraordinary achievement.
There are very few people that have the time and
resources to do such a thing, and the charge of
racism would cancel all of them, would destroy their careers,
would destroy the institution they had built. We know the
forces that would act against them, We know how ruthless
they are, and their rally to try to avert that
disaster makes perfect sense. The fact that they didn't know
what was going on, the fact that they did not
know the state of the discourse is not in the
least unusual. Who's reading White Fragility leftists? You know, we
may know the thesis of those books, but they don't
make for edifying reading. Let's let uh, let's let prude
and dimes handle things like that. They can tell us
what's going on there, so we don't have to read
it right? Do you even read the prudentialist in our
friend Dimes from Canadia? They're doing wonderful work there. But
these these middle class folks with so many virtues, and
I'm I don't think that I'm overstating this. I have
tremendous sympathy for these people. They don't want to touch
the likes of me with a ten foot poll and
I've learned through heart experience I can't trust them because
of the huge disparity between me and them. I'm utterly
at their mercy. They could bankrupt me by tossing me
to their enemies to distract their enemies from their throats.
And that's the situation until we find some way to
set up an independent institution that's not vulnerable to such
tax and that leadership that will protect their own people.
I don't see a way, not for me, anyway to
tease Chetta at a school. I chose to teach at
this school for particular reasons. And this this all fell
apart in in the course of the controversy in obvious
and unspoken ways, and it was a it was an
extremely important experience. It was it was based on my
transition out of that I started driving Uber. I was
I had no desire to go and work for any
employer at that point, but I had a family to
care for, and so I started driving Uber full time
soon after that, and UH was able to make things
work doing that for a while. Now I've I've mostly
transitioned out of that and have other other means to
support my family. But I've been I've been privately burgh.
Let's see, I've been a private contractor just self employed
since then. And Tall Men Books is my major effort.
What have I done with all of this, all this
initiative and time between now and then? I started Tall
Men Books, which is a reference to the poem that
once got me in such serious trouble. It is my slogan,
and I want everyone to remember that the bones of
tall men lie in American earth, and those are our
ancestors who gave us our inheritance. This is not something
that we just read in dusty old books. This is
the blood that flows in our veins. So that's my story.
I'm glad to be able to conclude it here with
you today.
Speaker 2: There are several things there. One just this morning I
wrapped up Brad Kelly's excellent book Darkened Earth. I don't
have the copy in front of me. He'll be on
to discuss it soon. But the sort of inciting incident
is an academic cancelation. And you know, one of the
things that he talks about that is that sort of
slow dawning realization that they're not on your side, right,
that you have been sort of singled out and selected out,
and people are acting to sort of preserve their own skin.
And I'd imagine that's sort of a difficult transition to
go through, right, realizing that while you may have friends,
they're not in a position to protect you. And interesting
note there, and again I think that you're check kind
of pick a through line. There's something interesting as well
to the degree to which, you know, kind of good
conservatives in quotes are really the only believers in the
kind of civil rights mythology of a previous era. And
they think that by you know, holding that position and
retreating to it, that they can protect themselves. And that
is plainly not true. You know, as you've said, the
people who accuse them already have disdain for those figures.
And you know, no matter how many times you've guided
a group of you know, seventeen year olds through letters
from Birmingham jail. That will not protect you from the mob.
It's by no means a deterrent. Absolutely Well, George, we've
sort of wrapped this story and now you were, you know,
on your own, you have your your book sales. Is
there any sort of advice or something you could offer
to someone in a similar situation, right, someone who's sort
of going through a cancelation?
Speaker 1: Oh my, I think we we have plenty of examples
in our circles of people that have encountered these pressures
or been forced to switch careers, been identified as deplorable
on whichever grounds. It's. It's a really difficult thing to
deal with. And I'm I made the the difficult choe
of trying to stick with what I knew and trying
to support my family off of that. And it's taken
a while to make that a viable means of income,
and it's taken many sacrifices. We must continue to network
among people of our own beliefs and build up organizations
to support one another. The Old Glory Club has been
extremely helpful to me, help me find people to work with,
help me find talent to do things that I don't
know how to do myself, and has offered me tremendous
solidarity and also of financial support. The Old Glory Club
gave me a grant for a series of books that
I've been republishing, The Chronicles of America. Just as an example.
I've had very kind private individuals arrange fundraisers for me
when I've been in special need. This is something that
I'm very humbled and deeply grateful for. My family and
I are just overwhelmed with the kindness that people in
the organization have shown to us, and it's done us
tremendous good. Recently, I was able to get a dentist
from my daughter through private gifts from friends. But obviously
we want to be more independent and self sufficient. I've been.
I've been in business for myself now for several years.
I've got a wife and three children. I have to
travel a lot to support my family, but it's also
offered all sorts of new rewards. It's wonderful to work
in my field with my material and what I know best.
That's sometimes I think that maybe I should move into
something more traditional in terms of employment, but we also
know that that's an extremely difficult thing to do now too.
My advice for those who are under these pressures, facing
cancelation or going through it is network with those you trust,
get advice, consider relocation because when you go through a cancelation,
when you are excluded from the community on grounds that
you think dangerous thoughts, you believe unpalatable things, it may
be time to find different community to network with. After
my cancelation, I lost a lot of valuable social contacts
in my town. And many of these people they meant
me well. They never had problems with me, they never
attacked me. They offered me their support privately that they
thought what was going on was dreadful, was wicked. They
are subject to the same kinds of social forces as
the board members were. Their careers could have been attacked,
they could have been brought under suspicion. They wanted to
stay out of attention, and I can't blame them, but
it means that I became a dangerous person to associate with,
which I think plenty of people on your podcast certainly
can relate to. This is a common story among us.
So identify the friends who aren't afraid to be seen
with you. Identify the friends who are not afraid to
associate you publicly. Those are the kinds of people that
we need to rally with in with the unusual challenges
that we face today. It's those that you can trust,
those that will be known by your side in public.
Those are the most valuable connections that we can cultivate.
Go into business with those people, relocate to be near them.
If you can't get along with your family under the
under the circumstances, family ties are always the deepest and
should be the ones that we primarily look for. Family
will help you. Family will will get up in the
middle of the night when you're all sick and imperiled.
Family will come and defend your house from a mob.
It is a special kind of friend that will stand
with you and do that. And I'm extremely proud and
humbled to have many of those friends, many of which
most of which I've come to know after the cancelation.
So socially, it's been very instructive, very painful, but also
very instructive and very rewarding. Some of the things that
I've encountered since that whole ordeal.
Speaker 2: Well, as we've said, people know where to find you, George,
I'll be sure to put those links in the description.
It's good to have you back on. I know obviously
you've been very busy, but I enjoy our episodes immensely,
so thank you.
Speaker 1: It's a great pleasure. Thanks for making time for me.
Speaker 2: As far as my stuff, Jay Burdens Show, Apple, Spotify, YouTube,
anywhere you listen to podcasts, this is what I do.
I was just kind of doing some tabulating and realized
I've been doing this for two hundred and twenty five days, right,
not all that long. And as George said, all right,
striking on on your own can be It can be
a little intimidating, right, you're sort of jumping into an
abyss and you'll have been great, right. I couldn't do
it without your guys support. It's you know, what pays
my mortgage, So thank you all so much. If you're
wondering what you get for your support, get the episodes
early in ad free on Patreon, Substack, or gum Road.
Also check out our sponsor, Axios Remote Fitness Coaching. JD's
another guy right who's you know, started a business with
guys like us. Check him out, support him, tell him
I sent you and George. It was great speaking to you.
Thank you very much, to everyone to know home, keep
your head up. I can't last for ever. But what