The Lost Cause Isn't Lost At WND

Both before and after Charlottesville, WorldNetDaily has been sad that Confederate statues are being taken down just because they represent institutionalized racism and an opponent that lost a war against the United States.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 11/14/2022

Under cover of darkness and with construction crews wearing masks, they drove Old Dixie down in New Orleans.

A statue of Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis was removed from its podium early Thursday morning, one of four Confederate memorials Democratic Mayor Mitch Landrieu has vowed to banish from the city in the name of “diversity, inclusion and tolerance” in the crime-ridden Louisiana city.

Though the removal of the statue was greeted with a cheer, The Lost Cause was not without its supporters, many of whom waved Confederate battle flags and called for the mayor to be imprisoned.

The anonymous writer then called on dubious historian David Barton, who claimed that "the Democrats cheering the statues being taken down would be shocked if they knew the history of their own party":

“The city plans to pull down four statues, those of Jefferson Davis, PGT Beauregard, the Crescent City White League and Robert E. Lee,” he noted. “I hope they tell the folks in New Orleans that all of these monuments honor Democrats, and that the Confederacy was led solely by Southern leaders of the Democrat Party. In a Democrat city like New Orleans, I can’t understand why Democrat leaders want old venerated Democrat heroes taken down!”

Not only did Barton fail to get the name of the Democratic Party correct -- which tells us he's been listening to too much right-wing radio and doesn't care enough about history to get basic names right -- he apparently failed to realize that the Democratic Party of 150 years ago is not the Democratic Party of today, which again tells us he cares nothing about actual history.

He was followed by Scott Greer, onetime secret white nationalist and author of the WND-published book with the vaguely race-baiting title "No Campus for White Men," who went for ridiculous generalization and absurd extrapolation:

“It’s an attempt to wipe out any pride Southerners should have in their heritage,” said Greer. “It’s the same kind of process we see on college campuses, where anything white people did in the past tends to be demonized. The left is driven by a desire to interpret all of history through the eyes of 21st century progressive dogma. In their eyes, everything about the American past is bad and shameful and must be driven into the dirt.”

[...]

“Soon we’ll have to take down Susan B. Anthony statues because even though she fought for women’s suffrage, she was openly pro-life; and, in today’s women’s movement, no one can be a true woman unless she supports Planned Parenthood and abortion. And of course Harriet Tubman statues will be taken down, for even though she was a leading conductor on the Underground Railroad bringing slaves to freedom, she was also a huge advocate for the right to keep and bear arms. For modern civil rights advocates, guns are anathema, and no true civil rights advocate can be for guns!

“We no longer look at heroes as people or as complex individuals; rather we now judge them solely by one issue, whatever that issue happens to be at the time. We are creating a culture where we believe we have a right not to be offended or even have our misconceptions challenged; and we’re willing to use coercion to keep ‘me’ from being offended, even if that offends ‘you.’ What offends us now is so routinely redefined that probably no statue now will survive more than a generation before it becomes offensive to someone who will demand its removal.”

Actually, the opposite is true: Society has moved toward judging heroes as real people and not one-dimensional caricatures. While Lee and Beauregard were undoubtedly complex individuals, their statues did not honor that complexity; they honored their roles in a war in which they were on the side of perpetuating slavery -- a one-dimensional caricature.

Greer doesn't explain why Southerners should have "pride" in a "heritage" that is based on losing a war and perpetuating racial discrimination, something it can be argued that the Confederate statues were celebrating and something the Battle of Liberty Place monument -- marking an 1874 insurrection in which the Crescent City White League attacked a racially mixed New Orleans police force and actually carrying an inscription stating that following the insurrection, the 1876 election "recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state" -- most definitely did.

Then again, Greer has been exposed as trafficking in white nationalism and anti-Semitism, so perhaps he's not the best source.

WND was not done misunderstanding why monuments to the Confederacy are being removed. Brent Smith first used a May 2017 column to throw out the distraction of Robert Byrd:

When I heard that these and many other monuments were being taken down for the same reason, the first thing that came to mind was the late Democrat icon Robert “Sheets” Byrd (hat tip Rush). He was, of course, a long time U.S. senator from West Virginia, but also a member of the Ku Klux Klan. And not just any member – he was a recruiter, a Kleagle.

Yet Byrd has dozens upon dozens of hospitals, parks, office buildings, community centers, federal buildings, etc. that bear his name. No one says a word about that. Of course not. He was a good liberal.

When asked, Democrats merely state that the racist Byrd should be judged on the entirety of his career – his full body of work – not just his years in the Klan.

Smith conveniently omitted that Byrd repeatedly apologized for his KKK affiliation, to the point that even the NAACP praised him for supporting a civil rights agenda. Smith offers no evidence that Lee, Beauregard, et al, ever apologized for their Confederate affiliation.

After unfairly maligning Byrd, Smith then complained that Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard was being unfairly maligned:

In fact Beauregard was not a racist. A native of New Orleans, he fought for the Confederacy because they were the home team, for want of a better term. It was well-known that he hated Confederate President Jefferson Davis – so much so that he refused to lead Davis’ funeral procession.

He was an equal-rights advocate and led the failed unification effort in New Orleans, bringing together both white and black leaders. He fought for voting rights for blacks, integrated schools, public places and public transportation, many decades before national talk of civil rights.

In a speech in 1873, Beauregard said: “I am persuaded that the natural relation between the white and colored people is that of friendship. I am persuaded that their interests are identical; that their destinies in this state, where the two races are equally divided, are linked together; and that there is no prosperity for Louisiana which must not be the result of their cooperation.”

But as the article to which Smith linked to support his claims about Beauregard admits, the statue of Beauregard that was taken down in New Orleans did not honor his post-Civil War work; it honored his stint as a Confederate general.

Meanwhile, editor Joseph Farah did what he does in one column -- portray the removal of Confederate statues as some sort of liberal conspiracy:

First, you will notice that Democrats are nearly always at the forefront of this kind of activity.

Why would that be?

Could it be because they are embarrassed and ashamed of their party’s own history?

You see, Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederacy, was a Democrat. In fact, for 50 years after the War Between the States, the white South was dominated almost entirely by the Democratic Party. White Democrats ran the South during the war, through the Jim Crow days of segregation and right up until the early 1960s.

Not a single Democrat in that era ever suggested destroying statues of Confederate heroes, taking down Confederate flags or toppling monuments memorializing the Confederacy.

What’s more, the Ku Klux Klan would have discouraged such demolition. And the Ku Klux Klan was the military arm of the Democratic Party.

As ConWebWatch pointed out when Farah previously made the claim, the KKK was not the "military arm of the Democratic Party"; while many angry Southern whites during the 1860s and 1870s were Democrats and a smaller number of them joined the KKK, that doesn't make the KKK a Democratic creation.

This time around, though, Farah surprisingly conceded that today's Democratic Party is not the one of 150 years ago. Of course, that's a conspiracy too, he writes: "It was President Lyndon Baines Johnson who got the idea of the Democrat [sic] Party becoming the 'champion' of black Americans by enticing them into dependency through welfare-style programs."

Farah didn't explain why no conservatives hike him are endorsing removal of Confederate monuments and, to the contrary, seem to be opposing it. As others have pointed out, the South has always been conservative; many Southerners started abandoning the Democratic Party starting in the 1960s after it supported integration and other equal-rights laws and shifted their allegiance over a generation from Democrats to Republicans.

After Charlottesville

WND reacted in several different ways to the 2017 unrest in Charlottesville, in which a protester was killed by a white supremacists -- hot takes, conspiracy theories, stolen glory (in the form of editor Joseph Farah trying to take credit for inventing the term "alt-left") and, of course, the "Charlottesville lie" lie, which falsely denied that Donald Trump was defending white supremacists. WND embraced another reaction as well: defending the Confederacy and its memorials.

WND let discredited adulterer Dinesh D'Souza rant in an anonymously written August 2017 article:

“Let’s start with the fact this whole thing was kicked off because of an attempt to take down a monument to Robert E. Lee,” D’Souza told WND. “Here’s the irony: Robert E. Lee was the most decorated soldier in the U.S. Army. He was a man of unimpeachable integrity. Lincoln offered him command of the Union Army, but Lee refused only because his loyalty was to Virginia. Lee opposed both secession and slavery.

“And yet to the historically illiterate left, a man who opposed both slavery and secession has come to symbolize both slavery and secession.”

Yeah, when you turn down the opportunity to fight for America to lead the Army fighting for slavery and secession, that tends to happen. It's not "historically illiterate" to point that inconvenient fact out.

Columnist Jerry Newcombe similarly defended Lee:

Gen. Lee is an ironic lightning rod for such violence. He was such a statesman that had he been born a few miles north, that is, north of the boundary of Virginia, he likely would have gone on to become a winning general for the Union, and possibly on from there to the presidency.

[...]

Gen. Lee didn’t fight to preserve slavery. He freed slaves, at great personal cost, he had inherited by marriage. He hated the “peculiar institution.” He also was in favor of the preservation of the union and opposed to secession. But when asked by President Lincoln to lead the troops to squash the burgeoning rebellion, he asked, “How can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?”

States’ rights was the ostensible reason men like Lee and Jackson fought for the Confederacy, but clearly the catalyst cause was slavery. This reality is clearly a mark against Lee, Jackson and others who fought for the South. But we should also remember them for who they actually were, rather than as two-dimensional cutouts in a simplistic morality play of obvious good versus obvious evil.

If we start to tear down all statues of Lee, Jackson and Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, why stop there? What about the nine presidents of the United States who owned slaves? Washington was the only one of those who freed his slaves.

Actually, the fact that Lee was fighting on behalf of the Confederacy meant that he was, by definition, fighting to preserve slavery. Also, removing prominently placed statues of people who fought against the United States seems like a reasonable stopping point.

Speaking of monuments, an Aug. 15 article served up a "big list of the nation’s endangered Confederate monuments and symbols" and approvingly quoted a right-wing radio host likening taking down Confederate statues to "the Taliban, pulling down Christian historical sites." The more accurate analogy, of course, would be to newly liberated Eastern Europeans tearing down statues of Lenin.

And because WND must make everything about scary, swarthy Muslims, an Aug. 15 article by Art Moore complains that the Council on American-Islamic Relations is "providing a template resolution to be introduced by public bodies such as state legislatures, city councils and school districts" asking for Confederate monuments to be removed.

In an Aug. 18 article, Alicia Powe complained not only that Nancy Pelosi is asking that Confederate-related statues be removed from the Capitol rotunda, but also that she waited so long to do so:

Over the last 100 years, Democrats have controlled Congress almost twice as long as Republicans and there have been 35 years during which they controlled both houses and the presidency. But only in 2017 did the Confederate statues in the Capitol become an issue for them.

Some suggest it’s a way to help eradicate the strong Democrat [sic] connection with the Confederacy – something about which Americans are oblivious. Not only did Republicans lead the charge against slavery, they also were targeted for death and intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan, which represented the military wing of the Democratic Party.

But today, Democrat [sic] lawmakers are accusing President Trump of being proponent of white supremacy, even though he has repeatedly condemned the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Powe didn't mention the inconvenient fact that the post-Civil War Democratic Party is not the Democratic Party of today, and that it is conservatives like her and her fellow WND employees who are now rushing to the defense of the Confederacy.

Marisa Martin -- the nom de wingnut of artist April Kiessling -- spent an August 2018 WND column trying to defend to defend the idea of Confederate statues as art, likening activists tearing down the "Silent Sam" statue at the University of North Carolina to Roman conquerors destroying things that reminded them of the conquered:

Sam was a monument to Civil War veterans from UNC, most of whom served in the Confederacy, a body many would like to forget now. That may be understandable, although it is unalterable history. It’s also an awfully long time to carry a 158-year grudge. Other than pettiness, the real problem is insisting on erasing knowledge of the Confederacy – or anything else – from our collective unconscious.

Is this ever a good thing? Maybe it is when my team does it and not yours, or if we are the conquerors or they were the oppressors. Some type of damnatio memoriae (erasing memory of the cursed) is latent in most of us. It’s ancient, tribal, almost instinctual, and present to some extent in every tribe and nation.

Here’s proof, straight from history books and current memory:

Romans razed anything and anyone who posed a threat to military or political conquest. They first created the term damnatio memoriae, issuing official orders to erase images, names, tombs and records of the no-longer-appreciated. Mongols gutted Bagdad of its treasures until it was nothing but sand. Then there were Vandals, Vikings, Goths, Ottomans and many more.

Martin did at least concede why folks are upset enough to tear down Confederate statues:

But Silent Sam is a symbol of the Confederacy and a tortuous, evil time. It recalls division, slavery, racism and death. Complicating everything is a stream of valor and high-mindedness over it all. Men from both armies were often brave, patriotic, zealous, cultured, religious and even chivalrous. There are at least 1700 or more symbols to the Confederacy in America, and 110 have been removed already. Will obliterating all memory of the past make the core issues better or heal us of the past?

Both UNC and the Daughters of the Confederacy (sponsors) claimed to have no intention to promote racism or ill-feeling at the time. Sculptor John A. Wilson was a Canadian. By contrast, local industrialist Julian Carr, who was a Confederate veteran, gave a nasty, racially charged address at its dedication. Silent Sam’s forging may have been based in a certain amount of resentment over the War and destruction to the South, even racism. Who really knows?

"Who really knows"? A lot of people do, actually. We can infer a lot from the fact that the statue was erected in 1913, at the height of Jim Crow, as this Forbes article detailed:

"Silent Sam and other Confederate monuments erected during Jim Crow represent white Southerners’ efforts -- and specifically efforts by white Southern women in groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy -- to revise Civil War history," UNC history graduate student and Silent Sam sit-in member Jennifer Standish tells me. Nearly 50 years after the end of the Civil War, dozens of Confederate statues were erected around the U.S., but particularly in the South.

"A number of historians have shown that powerful white Southerners were creating a revisionist narrative of the Confederacy as a protector of states' rights, Southern homes, and white Southern women in this period," Standish points out. These new narratives ignored slavery as the cause of the war, and contributed instead to the "Jim Crow regime, which was responsible for the disenfranchisement and murder of black Southerners," she explains.

UNC Classics Professor Jim O'Hara has also been active in understanding the history of Silent Sam and in petitioning the University administration to remove the statue. He tells me that, while Julian Carr's racist speech is well known at this point, "less well known is what the United Daughters of the Confederacy were doing in 1913." Specifically, in the same year that Silent Sam was dedicated, the UDC "unanimously endorsed and promoted for use in schools a history of the KKK that praised the heroic work they did to preserve white supremacy. So putting up these statues was unambiguously part of the white supremacist movement of the Jim Crow era." Standish concurs, further noting that "these woman had racial and class privilege that allowed them - through the Silent Sam statue - to shape how all people enter and experience UNC's campus."

Forbes also pointed out that blacks were forbidden from attending UNC until 1955.

(Martin's column included a promotion for her then-new ebook, titled “Bitter Rainbows: Pederasts, Politics, and Hate Speech,” which purports to detail "the odious history and current aggression of gay militants, as well as how to defend yourself from them." Portraying all gays as actual or potential "pedaraists" is in line with someone who freaked out over an Archie Comics storyline in which Archie died taking a bullet intended for his gay best friend. No wonder "Martin" tries to hide behind a fake name.)

The sadness continues

WND columnist Ilana Mercer, in addition to having a soft spot for apartheid, apparently has a soft spot for the Confederacy as well. She wrote in a June 2020 column lamenting the removal of Confederate statues:

Steve Hilton is a Briton who anchors a current-affairs show on Fox News.

Mr. Hilton made the following feeble, snowflake's case for the removal of the nation's historically offensive statues:

It's offensive to our Africa American neighbors to maintain statues in public places that cause not only offense, but real distress. And it is disrespectful to our Native American neighbors to glorify a man who they see as having committed genocide against their ancestors. None of this is to erase history. Put it all in a museum. Let's remember it and learn from it.

"What's wrong with Camp Ulysses Grant," Hilton further intoned sanctimoniously. He was, presumably, plumping for the renaming of army installations like Fort Bragg, called after a Confederate major general, Braxton Bragg.

Sons of the South – men and women, young and old – see their forebear as having died "in defense of the soil," and not for slavery. Most Southerners were not slaveholders. All Southerners were sovereigntists, fighting a War for Southern Independence.

Mercer went on to cheer a man named Thomas J. DiLorenzo as "the country's chief Lincoln slayer" and dismissing historian Doris Kearns Goodwin as "a pseudo-intellectual." Turns out DiLorenzo is a fan of the Confederacy as well; he tried to disassociate himself from the right-wing, white nationalist League of the South despite admitting to speaking before the group and endorsing its social and political views.

WND's Bob Unruh was very sad about a Confederate statue being "canceled" in a Dec. 22 article:

Gen. Robert E. Lee, a descendant of signers of the Declaration of Independence, a graduate of the United States Military Academy and a hero of the war with Mexico who married a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, has been canceled at the U.S. Capitol.

The statue had stood adjacent to George Washington for 111 years but now will be moved to the Virginia Museum of History and Culture.

It was Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, who once appeared in blackface and advocated for infanticide, who created a team to remove the statue, one of two the state is allowed to have in the Capitol building.

Replacing Lee will be a statute of Barbara Rose Johns.

Note that Unruh made no mention so far of the thing Lee is best known for: leader of the Confederate army, which fought against the United States in the Civil War. Nor did Unruh explain who Barbara Johns is (a civil rights leader who, as a high school student, helped create an anti-segregation lawsuit that was consolidated into the Brown v. Board of Education that ruled segregated public schools to be unconstitutional).

Also, the headline is wrong: The statue was not "torn down," it was removed and relocated.

It wasn't until the seventh paragraph of his article that Unruh got around to mentioning the defining fact of not only Lee's life but the removal of Lee's statue:

The removal of the statue is part of a movement accelerated by the protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd calling for a reassessment of major figures in American history.

In Lee's case, it was his decision, after years of serving with honor for American forces, to lead the Confederate forces..

At the end of the Civil War, Lee was granted parole to return to his home, as President Lincoln had wished.

That's an incredibly simplistic -- and inaccurate -- reading of what happened to Lee. While Lee submitted an amnesty oath to President Andrew Johnson in June 1865, he was not granted parole at that time; Lee's rights of citizenship were not restored until 1975, more than a century after his death in 1870. Further, Lee could not return to his home in Virginia because it had been turned into a burial ground for Union soldiers, known today as Arlington National Cemetery.

Which led to a complaint from anonymous WND writer in a Sept. 14 article:

A commission set up to evaluate the political correctness of the names of military bases and other sites around the nation says a memorial in Arlington National Cemetery has to go.

It's because it recognizes the Confederacy.

The Confederate Memorial at Arlington, according to the Washington Examiner, features a bronze woman and the coats of arms of the 13 states, as well as depictions of slavery.

It is "problematic from top to bottom," the commission concluded of the statue put up in 1914.

Because this anonymous WND writer is ignorant of history (or perhaps it's just laziness since the Washington Examiner article this story is lifted from is also ignorant of it), he or she omits the relevant history of Arlington National Cemetery -- namely, that it originally the estate of Lee's wife and was occupied by the U.S. government during the Civil War -- you know, the one that Lee fought on the losing side of -- and used to bury Union war dead. A descendant of the memorial's sculptor has denounced it, saying its suggestion of enslaved people as complicit in the Confederacy is offensive.

The anonymous WND writer went on to complain about the effort to remove vestiges of enemies of the United States from military installations:

The instruction is just part of a report from the commission which wants new names for military bases including Fort Bragg in North Carolina; Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia; Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Lee, and Fort Pickett in Virginia; Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Polk in Louisiana, and Fort Rucker in Alabama.

The report explained, "The recommendations are part of a larger report by the commission that seeks to propose new names for Army bases and assets that commemorate the Confederacy. The Naming Commission is set to submit a three-part report to Congress by Oct. 1 that includes recommendations for all memorials, awards, scholarships, and 'inactive, decommissioned, or obsolete assets."

It is expected to cost taxpayers about $62.4 million to do the changes the commission is requiring.

Military officials have explained that the various names preserve history, but do not signal support for the Confederacy.

The anonymous WND writer did not any cite specific "military official" making that argument, nor was it explained why the U.S. should continue to honor losers and traitors -- or why ceasing to do so makes one "woke," as the article's headline claims.