RFK Jr. says he had ‘visceral reaction against’ removal of Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
I ndependent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he had a “visceral reaction against” the removal of the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that was once the focal point of the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Kennedy said in an interview with podcast host Tim Pool on Friday that he opposes “destroying history” when asked about the Charlottesville City Council’s decision in 2021 to remove the town’s statute of Lee and melt it down to create new public art. Kennedy, who went to law school at the University of Virginia, said he had a personal reaction to seeing the statue removed.
“I have a visceral reaction against the attacks on those statues,” Kennedy said. “There were heroes in the Confederacy who didn’t have slaves, and you know, I just have a visceral reaction against destroying history. I don’t like it.”
“I think we should celebrate who we are,” Kennedy added. “We should celebrate the good qualities of everybody.”
The 2017 decision to remove the statute of Lee from a park in Charlottesville sparked outrage, including from White nationalist sympathizers who gathered at the “Unite the Right” protest that August and violently clashed with counter-protesters. Heather Heyer, a counter-protester, was killed when a man drove his car into a crowd.
Kennedy said he doesn’t “think it’s a good, a healthy thing for any culture to erase its history,” and suggested historical figures like Lee should be celebrated for their positive qualities even if they also took actions that are now “regarded as immoral … or wrong.”
“We need to be able to be sophisticated enough to live with, you know, our ancestors who didn’t agree with us on everything, and who did things that are now, you know, regarded as immoral, you know, or wrong,” Kennedy said. “Maybe they had other qualities that we want to celebrate.”
“Clearly, Robert E. Lee had extraordinary qualities of leadership,” he added.
Kennedy also defended his past celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day , a holiday celebrated on Columbus Day borne out of Native American advocacy to honor Indigenous peoples who inhabited the Americas. Pool, the podcast host, accused Kennedy of seeking to erase Christopher Columbus’ legacy by celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but Kennedy argued both holidays can be honored alongside each other.
“I think it’s important for us to be part of a community where we can recognize all kinds of people. We can recognize Italian Americans to whom that is an important holiday, and at the same time, we can recognize the indigenous people who were, you know, made the ultimate sacrifice of one of the greatest genocides in the history,” Kennedy said.
At a rally in Philadelphia in October, during which he formally announced his switch from running in the Democratic primary to running as an independent, Kennedy said it’s “a hopeful sign” that the US celebrates Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Prior to his remarks, Kennedy was introduced by Lewis GrassRope, a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.
“It’s a hopeful sign now for our country that we celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” Kennedy said last October. “It shows that our country is now ready to explore and to tell each other the untold histories of those dispossessed people who have previously languished on the margins.”
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This is historical ineptitude on an indefensible level. Robert E Lee owned slaves. He not only owned slaves, he wrote that only God would decide when the Negro had advanced enough to merit freedom.
Kennedy is a dangerous idiot.
Forgive him, he missed the woke indoctrination that so many others got.
“There were heroes in the Confederacy who didn’t have slaves."
True, very few of those who fought for the Confederacy owned slaves.
More than half the Confederate soldiers were farmers, although only a very small percentage of them owned slaves. The others came from many different types of jobs: carpenters, clerks, blacksmiths, students, etc.
Who Fought? | American Battlefield Trust (battlefields.org)
Kennedy knows US history.
Kennedy heavily implies that Lee did not own slaves. That is 100% wrong.
Kennedy is a good example of historical ignorance.
LOL.
By the way, the expressed purpose of the confederacy was to preserve slavery. If you dont know that then you dont know history either.
By the way, you can thank your friend for the team visit. Sorry if I was too keen.
May I recommend this book for you and others?
The "causes" of the Civil War always lead back to slavery.
Have you ever read the southern states declarations of secession ?
They all mention slavery, albeit to slightly varying degrees, as the reason they were leaving the Union.
As Col Jessup said " they ( southern sympathizers) cant handle the truth".
The problem and reason they wanted to keep slavery viable, was the fact that the economy of the south depended on the cotton trade and other agricultural things. The north had manufacturing which contributed a major portion of theirs. As shitty as it was, the north, it was felt at the time, was trying to choke the life out of the south........and it worked. As stated elsewhere by another member, the south went downhill from there
The truth is that the Africans were not the only ones who could have worked the cotton and tobacco fields, whites could have too, including the families of the plantation owners. But they didnt want to do that menial backbreaking work and wanted to get it for free.
Thus slavery was "necessary" in southern eyes.
Exactly.
so it was about preserving slavery, as I have said.
Yeah - many of us can remember the stories of how the Redman made good slaves for them Yankees.
How much damage did that worm do anyway?
A lot of damage! Nothing is left but brain stem and worm shit...
Whoever it was that flagged your comment should be flogged.
Since "worms" weren't mentioned in any of the comments above yours nor in the seeded article, what are you trying to describe?
Ahh Ha! Another good reason for the MAGA nutters to vote for RFK Jr. Democrats are gonna pass on Olde Brain Worm, as we call him...
If Biden got a brain worm it would starve to death before anyone found it.
Gotta remember George - ya gotta have something there - which they don't.
Yeah, he is not a fan of the taliban mindset that destroys statutes. Good for him. Since Ancient Rome, through the Middle Ages, through taliban, fanatical totalitarians always destroy statutes when they can
No one can logically explain why we should have statues of traitors in American cities. I'm sure Lee had many "good " qualities. That is not sufficient reason to keep statues of him. Washington and Jefferson also owned slaves, but they also did much much more for the establishment of our country. They are much more complicated cases and the statues of them justifiably remain. Lee is not in that class.
Great to see you say that John - so when are you and your "Patriots" gonna demolish that sacred place in SD called Mt. Rushmore that bears the faces of two of the biggest racists and four of the most advocates of genocide introduced to the new "America"????
I dont know why you are asking me that question. I have known for a long time that the man who built Mt Rushmore was a white supremacist. I have no intention of visiting Mt Rushmore.
How Mount Rushmore Became Mount Rushmore - The …
Web Jul 1, 2020 · He also espoused white supremacist and anti-Semitic ideas, according to excerpts from his letters included in “ Great White Fathers ,” a book by the writer John Taliaferro about the history of...
Big deal.
Do I need to reiterate?
[✘]
Really?
Yes really. I am not into shit that happened almost 100 years ago JUST to inject race into a conversation
If you don't care that the Indigenous had their land stolen so a racist, anti-semite could build a monument...then ok
have a nice day
well put
What about the indigenous who had that land “stolen” by other indigenous a few decades before the us “ stole” it from them?
there’s some weird cult that believes only the group that occupied the land immediately before the current possessor has a claim on the land. Bizarre.
also, the accurate word that has applied throughout human history across the world is conquered, or rarely, purchases as the case may be.
And the U. S. government jumped at the deal that he would be the perfect type person to place such great examples of U. S. leaders for the world to idolize = racists - genocide adherents.
The Crazy Horse memorial is being build with private and public donations and labor. Rushmore was government contract.
Huge difference.
Not entirely true First. Most Federal memorials used little to no money from the Fed and were privately funded. Mount Rushmore was a little different as the Fed did fund a minority percentage of it.
Are Native Americans 'Americans', or are they merely a conquered people ?
Of course they are Americans.
Our American taliban on the left need to erase history that helped form this great nation. Such history is just a reminder of how pathetically weak their Marxist mentality is.
I guess you could say Lee helped form this great nation - by losing. That wasnt his intent of course.
It’s sad watching my friends on the left trying to build their sanitized little progressive bubbles, safe spaces and echo chambers. Tearing down statues, changing the name of storied military bases like Fort Bragg to Fort Creampuff or whatever, to lessen the pain caused by their chronically delicate sensibilities. Etc, etc ….
Get over it …..
Yeah...The War of Southern Rebellion was not a blight on our history at all/S
It caused the south to slither further into poverty but they started it. It's taken over a hundred years to rise above the slimy tactics of Jim Crow and racist attitudes.
This liberal (and I resent the term American Taliban, because it's obviously used incorrectly) wants us to remember our history and that includes the good, bad, and the ugly.
History can be , and is, remembered without monuments to traitors.
The American Civil War era is one of the most written about periods in world history.
And progressive red-ass over a statue, can be overcome as well but it won’t be, because of simple, delicate sensibilities issue.
The American Taliban that want to tear down historical US monuments are nothing more than revisionists looking to sanitize and/or rewrite history.
And it is true. The war of Northern Aggression has been written about copiously. To bad many on the left are more or less clueless about such a widely documented event.¡
LOL.
True colors.
That is such a bullshit term! The southerners were the ones who fired on Fort Sumter. It WAS a FEDERAL fort!
Good fucking grief....at least I stayed awake in history class
***To be called The War of Southern Rebellion from this day forward
Let us not forget the South rebelled to preserve slavery!
So, "The Slave State Rebellion Against The United States"
The war of Northern aggression?
Your reading of “true colors” here are, like usual, way off the mark.
You are the one who called it The War Of Northern Aggression. That is for you to explain, not anyone else.
The War of Northern Aggression is a term used to describe the American Civil War from a Southern perspective, emphasizing Northern imposition on Southern states 1 2 . The term was coined by segregationists in the 1950s as part of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy movement 2
Call it what you want,[✘]
Why would I need to? You’ve already erroneously claimed true colors. You think you have it all figured out.
My comment was in response to another made up name used here for the Civil War and had the expected effect.
First I ever heard that term was from a cousin who grew up in old Williamsburg when I was probably 10-12 years old. We used to have North vs South football games at family reunions and managed to respect each other in spite of our differences.
Some folks here would do well to adopt that mentality.
Those "fanatical totalitarians" who destroyed statues throughout the Roman Empire were Christians.
Yeah - just "doing unto others as they would do unto you - but doing it first".
"Do unto others then split"
Family Embarrassment Party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last week said on a far-right podcast that he has a “visceral reaction against” the removal of Confederate statues, because that might allegedly “erase history,” the Washington Post reports (gift link). In particular, Kennedy was commenting on the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, the excuse for the deadly 2017 Unite the Whites Right rally.
What a coincidence! When we read about Kennedy’s defense of the monuments that sprang up across the South during the Jim Crow era to reinforce white supremacy and “Lost Cause” ideology, our viscera reacted, too. Fortunately, a good rinse and some coffee soon got the taste out of our mouth.
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Kennedy wished we could all still be back in the land of cotton Friday during a visit to the podcast hosted by rightwing sack of ignorance and beanies Tim Pool, because, he said, it’s not “a good, healthy thing for any culture to erase history.” That’s pretty funny, in a not-funny way, considering that the monuments themselves were part of a very deliberate effort to erase the actual history of the Confederacy and replace it with a fake version that portrayed the Confederate cause as noble.
In the false Lost Cause version of history, Confederate heroes fought not to preserve the institution of slavery, but to “defend their homes” from mean Yankee invaders who wanted to take away everything that mattered to them (slavery and white supremacy. Also magnolias).
You know, Yankee invaders like the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment from Kennedy’s home state, the Union’s first Black regiment, as dramatized in the movie Glory . You want a monument to inspire the study of history? Here’s Boston’s memorial to the 54th Massachusetts and its commander, Col. Matthew Broderick.
Kennedy’s comments made clear he’s swallowed the Lost Cause narrative hook, line, and cotton gin fan blade.
Again, it’s the monuments themselves that created a revisionist history. That Kennedy seems unaware of that very reality indicates just how deeply the false narrative has penetrated Americans’ thinking about the Civil War and its bloody, still not fully resolved aftermath.
Perhaps someone should point out that there were probably some members of the Werhmacht who didn’t hate Jews, but German cities don’t have monuments to them. Even his own weird criterion of celebrating “heroes in the Confederacy who didn’t have slaves” would exclude Lee, a brutal enslaver. (Why yes, the notion that Lee owned no enslaved people is another Lost Cause myth, relying on the tiny detail that he inherited custody of 189 enslaved people from his wife’s father.)
Further, Kennedy said he wouldn’t have supported the Pentagon’s post-Charlottesville move to rename bases and weapons systems that honored the dishonorable traitors who fought against the Union — a move Donald Trump also opposed.
Kennedy explained that “we” need to understand that “our” values may change over time, you see:
Once more, this is when we would remind Kennedy and others willing to soft-peddle the Confederacy that there were plenty of people in the 18th and 19th century who recognized slavery as a moral rot, not least enslaved people themselves. They didn’t simply say, “Oh, these are the values of my time! I would be silly to oppose them!” Nor were they visited by woke history professors with time machines, although I’d probably read that story.
In other news, sounds like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might not understand his own history, which he lived, or he might just be an inveterate liar. Either way, all of it tracks.
Like other troubling statues, this one in Massachusetts depicts a white man, holding the power astride a horse with blackmen, subservient, walking below him. The white leader is dominating in the foreground while the Black soldiers are regulated to the background.
The artist, of course is a white man with a European heritage, and Saint-Gaudens used pejoratives to describe Black people in his memoirs.