Ignorant Woke Leftists Remove Robert E. Lee Statue in Richmond

CLAY: They pulled down the statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond yesterday. It had been there since 1890, so a hundred — if my math is right — over 130 years that statue had been in that location in Downtown Richmond. I don’t know where that statue’s gonna be relocated, but they used to have a Monument Avenue and they had all these different Confederate generals, and they pulled all these statues down.

Robert E. Lee was the last one. So we talked about this before, Buck. I am a Civil War history nerd. I actually went to Civil War sleep-away camp in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. So I have spent an inordinate amount of hours in my life reading all about the Civil War, and only in the last, I would say, five or six years has this massive argument to tear down all of these Civil War monuments and memorials really taken root, and it’s madness.

It’s absolute madness. It is Taliban-like in terms of its censoring and removal of history of something upset you. I’ve talked about this at my alma mater. They paid millions of dollars, Buck, to sandblast the word Confederate off of Confederate Memorial Hall which was built by, you know, the Daughters of the Confederacy, they gave the money through it to be built. Now it’s just Memorial Hall.

But wherever you live… I think this is important, and I think a lot of people need a history lesson and this not gonna surprise people that we have a real woeful lack of knowledge about history, in particular American history, in this country. Whatever state you lived in in 1860 or 1861, 99%, that was the side that you ended up fighting on.

So this idea that there were people making choices on whether they were in the North or the South and where they were gonna fight based on larger societal issues, if your state seceded, you fought to the South because that’s where you lived, and people really didn’t leave their states. They were like countries, and that’s how you ended up.

Your allegiance was a geographic reality, not some sort of good-versus-evil, modern-day Civil War Disneyfied fairy tale which is what so many people want to believe. So, this idea that by tearing down statues we’re making America in any way better? This is where Trump was right in a big way, because he said, “It doesn’t end here.”

BUCK: Oh, my gosh, Clay. I live a close walk to Columbus Circle here in New York City, and as of… I haven’t walked by it maybe in a couple of weeks now. But as of a couple of weeks ago, there is still a big metal barrier, barricade fence around Columbus Circle, and there are NYPD units. Sometimes they’re in substantial numbers.

I’ve seen as many as over a hundred officers there when it’s near Columbus Day, but there are people who have to be there on constant watch because there’s a real fear that the Antifa, lunatic left is going to come in and deface and maybe even destroy and topple this statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Circle in New York.

Remember, it started… It always happens this way, too. It started out with the Confederate monuments back in June-July of 2020. That’s when all of this got going. There was someone shot at a statue of Juan de Onate, I believe it was, in New Mexico, who was a Spanish conquistador that — let’s be honest — one in a thousand people max in this country know who Juan de Onate is.

CLAY: Too high.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: I have no idea. Yeah.

BUCK: But they’re always, you know, “It’s a genocide, conquistador,” all this. They were going after Father Junipero Serra.

CLAY: They tore down a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Illinois, the land of Lincoln. They tore down statues of Ulysses Grant. They tore down statues of George Washington. They were gonna go after Andrew Jackson, if the president hadn’t been able to try to defend the Andrew Jackson statue in Lafayette Park.

BUCK: “Protesters ripped down…” This was from the Sacramento Bee. “Protesters ripped down a statue of Junipero Serra.” There’s Juan de Onate and Junipero Serra. He was “a missionary who established Spanish missions in California.” Clay, being a missionary at that point in time was imperialism and white supremacy and therefore they have to tear down that statue, too.

So priests! I mean, they actually tore down at one point a statue of Gandhi in the U.K. I mean, they went for everything. They were tearing down statues of abolitionists in some places ’cause they just… I think that was actually they just didn’t know. They thought, “Oh, it looks like a guy from the Civil War!”

CLAY: Yeah, yeah, right.

BUCK: Here was a guy fighting to end slavery, but, anyway, they don’t care.

CLAY: Well, Lincoln and Grant kind of had something to do with the North winning the Civil War and their statues got torn down as well. I looked at the pictures. I was actually curious as they took down the statue. Who do you think was standing around the statue celebrating?

BUCK: I know they were chanting. There was a BLM chant as the statue came down.

CLAY: Yeah, mostly white people showing up at the Robert E. Lee statue to cheer the fact that it was being torn down. And this is like the white liberal who has bought into the idea that they are the savior, right, the white liberator. To me it is a fundamental failure of American history.

And, by the way, Ralph Northam, Mr. Blackface himself, also said, “Oh, it’s finally time to tear down these insurrectionists,” trying to connect it to January 6th, of course, and when we come back, Buck, you have got a list of this ridiculous —

BUCK: Oh, it’s amazing. The woke time capsule, folks, that’s going into the statue for a future generation to open.

CLAY: I haven’t heard this so you’re gonna share this we me live. I can’t wait.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: I remember when I was a kid and I went to Catholic school here in New York, and when we were really little like first grade, kindergarten, there was a jelly been a jar and we played a game where you had to guess how many jellybeans — and if you got close enough to the number, you’d get the whole thing in jellybeans.

CLAY: Oh, yeah, yeah.

BUCK: I could tell you right now, I had one teacher who used to throw Starbursts to you if you could get random bits of sports trivia, usually baseball.

CLAY: How’d you do?

BUCK: I didn’t need the candy, fortunately, because I did not do well but other kids were like, “Joe DiMaggio!”

CLAY: Have you, by the way…? Speaking of the candy toss and also time capsule, have you ever participated in time capsule yourself? When I was in first grade, we did a time capsule in my elementary. I don’t know whether they’re actually gonna pull it.

BUCK: What happened?

CLAY: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know why they did it. I don’t really remember any of the details. I remember we put something in there, and I still remember, like, the time capsule being, you know, put somewhere underneath the school. But I don’t know when they’re actually gonna pull it out. I remember thinking that I would be alive when it happened, but I’m not sure what’s actually in there.

BUCK: We have a photo of you that went up on ClayandBuck.com. Was that your high school graduation photo?

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: You had that sort of long, behind-the-ears hair of the guy playing bass from Stone Temple Pilots or like Sound Garden or something.

CLAY: I looked a little bit like Gavin Rossdale if you remember him from Bush. Remember Bush.

BUCK: Oh, oh, oh! The super handsome lead singer on Bush. Look at this!

CLAY: I’m saying my hair looked like him.

BUCK: — married to Gwen Stefani, that guy? I like the PR. That was very smooth. (laughing) Pretty solid.

CLAY: It was a good look on the hair.

BUCK: So, back to the time capsule now. Now, we’ve told you more than you ever need to know about our grammar school days. What’s going into this time capsule at the pedestal? Just so you know, in 1877 the put a time capsule in the 40-foot concrete pedestal that was at Robert E. Lee monument that has been replaced, and now they filled it with new artifacts, and it’s gonna go…

I forget where it is. I’ll tell you in a second. But what have they put in it? A BLM sticker, an expired covid vaccine vile, a photo of a “Stop Asian Hate” protest, and a Virginia Is for For Lovers badge. Now, the one to me that’s the most… The Stop Asian Hate protest, that whole thing lasted by two weeks because people would see the photo of the individual or the video of who had attacked the Asian or Asian-American individual, and it was very hard to make the case that it was a white supremacist Trump supporter. So that went away.

CLAY: It was always almost exclusively — all these things that went viral for very short period of time — black guys beating up Asian people. And, by the way, the Babylon Bee had a great headline. Do you remember seeing this headline?

BUCK: They have a lot of great headlines. They do a really fantastic job.

CLAY: Yeah. It’s a great brand, great website. But they had Asian Lives Matter. They had, you know, Hispanic Lives Matter. And Black Lives Matter. And the headline was — and I’m paraphrasing — you know, an Asian Lives Matter sign, makes it suspiciously close to All Lives Matter. Right?

Which is actually really funny because All Lives Matter we were told is racist, right? If you say, “Hey, everybody matters. All Lives Matter,” oh, it’s, “How dare you!” In fact, that’s on I think the white supremacy pyramid we were talking about earlier that Google was training its people. If you say All Lives Matter, that’s white supremacy.

BUCK: Yeah, if you look at web… We should go back to some more of that.

CLAY: The pyramid?

BUCK: You remember all of the Google critical race theory training?

CLAY: Columbus Day is also white supremacy.

BUCK: That’s not new. That’s not. They’ve been saying that. Columbus as a purveyor of genocide and indigenous enslavement has been around now for years. They hate Christopher Columbus. But as we all know, one of the problems is if we’re gonna start pulling down monuments… We didn’t even get to this before and we have this time capsule here.

The left only forestalls the argument about how can we have Washington, D.C., named for George Washington? How can we have the Jefferson Memorial? How can we have any of these things of the American founding if we’re going to not only judge by the standards of wokeness today but also to take action and erase, whitewash different aspects of our history, whatever it may be.

How can we create this stop of the iconoclasm, right? And the answer is that they just aren’t there yet. It’s kind of like we’re gonna get you all to get the shot and then the booster shot’s gonna come in six months. We all know that’s gonna happen, but they just don’t want to make the case yet.

CLAY: Well, it’s also interesting when they apply their own woke standards. You know, Martin Luther King, who has a memorial as well, said that being gay was a mental illness, like you should get treatment if you were gay. That was not a wildly outlandish opinion for somebody to have in the 1950s, right?

But by the standards of modern woke culture, Martin Luther King should be canceled for his opinion in the 1950s that being gay was a mental illness. That’s an unacceptable opinion to have today, and so if you apply — which is the problem here. If you apply twenty-first century standards for behavior to people who lived hundreds of years ago or even 50 years ago, they don’t live up to it.

And the real irony here is, as anyone who has ever studied history knows, the same people judging today — the uber-woke among us — are going to be found lacking hundreds of years from now for somethings that we are doing that they have decided are inappropriate in 200 years.

BUCK: Oh, I think you can dramatically accelerate that timetable because the super-woke part of is that there’s, like, an ideology cannibalism at the heart of this.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: They eat each other as part of the proof of how woke they are.