Tear Down Statues, Lose Our Shared History

CLAY: As a kid growing up, I was fascinated by the Civil War. I went to all the battlefields, studied it, and so the idea of tearing down Civil War monuments or statues, to me, strikes in a particular way. And, Buck, this for me became a big issue at one of my alma maters, Vanderbilt University. They paid millions of dollars to sandblast the word “Confederate” off of a building.

They had a Confederate Memorial Hall that had to be constructed on campus at the end of the nineteenth century and just in the last couple of years they paid millions of dollars to sandblast the word. Now it’s just a Memorial Hall; it doesn’t say Confederate Memorial Hall on it anymore. And to me, I wrote about this, and I ended up…

I had a sponsorship deal with Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels pulled their sponsorship deal from me (laughing) because I compared it to erasing history. I said, “This is what the people that we claim to be fighting against do. The Taliban, for instance, they erase history, right? The idea that you’re gonna wipe a word off of a building to me is crazy.”

BUCK: And, by the way, there’s always limitations on this stuff, too, and for anybody who wants — and in the university context, they just changed my school mascot. I went to Amherst College in Massachusetts. It’s a small school, not UMass Amherst. That was down the road. But we knew those guys and gals too. But they changed the mascot because it had been the Lord Jeff, who was actually a British colonial lord.

So there would be a guy at all the football games dancing around in breeches and the who Redcoat uniform, so to speak. That’s kind of what the guy looked like. They got rid of it, though, because allegedly… They didn’t really understand epidemiology, so I don’t know how this is possible. But the story is that he gave blankets with smallpox to the natives. I don’t think this was ever proven.

I think that there’s a little bit of a jumping to conclusions here, ’cause they didn’t understand microbiology, so how would even know that? But maybe if you had people that had the blanket. The point is, they made it change. Now I think it’s the Mammoths, like the big elephant. But places like Yale… Yale got rid of — what was it? — Calhoun, right? They changed Calhoun Hall again because the connection the Confederacy. Here’s the problem that Yale University had.

CLAY: It wasn’t even, by the way, Calhoun’s connection to the Confederacy, because he was dead by the time of the Civil War. It was that he was a slave owner.

BUCK: Sorry.

CLAY: Which is the same logic, if you applied it. And Yale himself, I believe, Elihu or however you pronounce his first name —

BUCK: That’s what I was gonna say: Slave trader. Yale University is named for Elihu Yale, a slave trader, and they’re never going to change the name of the university because —

CLAY: You say never, but I don’t even know that that’s true. It’s an interesting point.

BUCK: Here’s why. It’s not because of some principle. It’s because of the value of the brand association, and they simply… People forget. Princeton, I think, was the College of New Jersey at one point. Trust me, they’re not going back to that name. They’re gonna stay at Princeton University. Yale University is essentially a hedge fund where you can take classes now.

CLAY: Yes. They make a lot of money.

BUCK: It’s a nonprofit hedge fund with tens of billions of dollars, and they’re not about to change their university to the University of Southern or Eastern New Haven. I don’t know where it is in New Haven, but the point is they know that the limitation is the value of their name brand. They’re never gonna change that. So then why go through this nonsense? “It’s never enough,” is the point. It will never be enough.

CLAY: No, that’s a hundred percent right, and so in your home city of New York, they have been honoring Thomas Jefferson with a statue inside of the New York City council chambers, I believe, Buck. Is that where this is?

BUCK: City council, yep.

CLAY: The city council had a statue of Thomas Jefferson. They have now removed it because they believe that Jefferson’s values — and by “Jefferson’s values,” they mean he lived in Virginia and owned slaves. Let me just say this, too, by the way: The thing that’s so frustrating in the Civil War and the way people talk about it, is whatever state you were born in, you pretty much fought for that side in the war.

So this idea that people were sitting around and making decisions, “Hey, am I gonna fight for the North or the South?” Well, if you grew up in the South, you fought for the South, by and large. There were a few exceptions. And if you fought… If you grew up in the North you fought for the North, by and large. There were a few exceptions, okay?

So which side you fought for was a choice of geography which you yourself did not make, because most people did not travel very much outside of their native states in their whole lives at that time. Your state was like your country, okay? So, Trump was right about this. This is something that — and I believed it when he said it, and I knew that he was right, and so many people, Buck… You remember this.

So many people came out and said, “Oh, he’s an idiot. They’re never gonna come for Washington. They’re never gonna come for Jefferson.” But I want to play you this clip. I believe this is from right around the Charlottesville incident where you had the “very fine people” lie, and I think Trump was 1-billion percent in the right here regardless of your politics. He knew that it wasn’t gonna stop with Robert E. Lee, that it wasn’t gonna stop with Stonewall Jackson or any other Confederate generals and their statues.

Listen to this.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. So this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?

You know, you really do have to ask yourself, “Where does it stop?” Was George Washington a slave-owner? Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? (audience response) Okay. Good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave-owner. Now, are we going to take down his statue? So you know what? It’s fine. You’re changing history. You’re changing culture.

BUCK: By the way, he was not only… He’s correct here, Clay, and what he is getting at, as we know, is the progressives are incrementalists all the time and they love to do this, “That’s crazy! We would never do that. It’s just this one thing.” They do it with covid. They do it with statues. They do it with communism. This is their approach to everything, and with Trump here what he’s saying, you play this out and we’re seeing the reality of this with the left and their iconoclasm spasms.

The reality is, what can you actually name U.S. places? You can’t give Native American place names anymore to anything or that’s considered an appropriation and essentially memorializing conquest and colonial expansionism. You can’t name things after the Founding Fathers if they had any connection whatsoever to the south or to slavery or owned slaves; so what are we gonna call…?

You start to wonder what is acceptable and then at what point do we say, “Okay, we all celebrate Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln held the Union together, fought the war to end slavery, but where did he stand on LGBTQ+ rights?” and I don’t know if Lincoln is sufficiently woke by those standards for us to have Lincoln, Nebraska, stay.

CLAY: He’s certainly still racist by modern-day standards because one of Lincoln’s big beliefs was we should send all the slaves back to Africa. That was one of the things that he believed. Pretty racist in twenty-first century context. Martin Luther King, Buck, if you go read Martin Luther King, he said that being gay was a mental illness and you should be treated by a psychiatrist.

As a priest in the 1950s, that was not an uncommon belief. So does MLK’s statue have to come down in Washington, D.C., because of those beliefs? Or do we recognize that everyone is a product of their era and that all of us, even you and me, Buck, even the greatest human who was listening to us right now is going to be flawed by the logic of America or the world 200 years from now? All of us are doing things that will be judged to be awful if you study history at all, we’re all guilty of something that the future will find us to be wanting of.

BUCK: And you have to wonder with all this what the real goal is.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Because I think that’s something that often gets left out of it, and what you have… Wokeness is essentially weaponized political correctness, what we call political correctness is you and I were growing up in the nineties. But you also have a rewriting of history by a really revolutionary or radical vanguard of sorts within our own society that seems to want to rebuild society not just through extreme equality but through a form of what you could consider a racial Marxism.

That there has to be a balancing and rebalancing based upon racial inequity throughout history, and there has to be this revolutionary leap. In the communist context it would be about class struggle, right? They would be the revolutionary elite would make sure that the workers, the proletariat would rise up. They would be in charge of society. Now in America you say, “Well, hold on a second.

“What is our shared history supposed to be? What is the narrative that replaces this?” If you believe in intersectionality and wokeness, it’s essentially some people apologizing for the last 500 years forever and just shutting up because they’re not allowed to talk about things and cultural appropriation — and other groups deciding that they’re allowed to determine what the path of the country will be based upon.

CLAY: Historical injustice. This is about, I believe, Buck, destroying the foundations of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the founding of this country based on the perceived sins of the founders themselves within the context of twenty-first century values. Because if you can argue Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, all those guys were big racists?

Then you can tear down the foundation of the country they created and build something entirely anew, and I believe that is the ultimate goal. And you go after who? How do you do that? You go after the weakest, right? A lot of white people out there — a lot of black people, Asian, Hispanic — they say, “Oh, that’s just Confederate soldiers; we don’t care about them.” But Trump was right. They don’t stop there.