Stolen Valor

As the South wonders how our culture, ways and symbols will fare in Trump 2.0, and being keenly aware of our monumental losses in his first term, the first few weeks reveal that Trump still has a Southern blind spot. I am not of course, referring to an area on the president’s retina but to the secondary definition of the term: an area in which one fails to exercise judgment or discrimination.


In 2017 there was no hindsight and events that questioned just what Trump believed about the narrative of the Southern cause came fast and furious due to the actions by the City of Charlottesville. Trumps advisors of Southern heritage then and even today are not of the more knowledgeable and praising of our ways and heroes.   


His choice of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions for AG came around to bite him and today South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham detracts rather than compliments. 


I am sure that the president hoped it would all go away. With the Administrative Deep State deep into “Russia-Russia-Russia!” “there being good people on both sides” of the removal of the Lee monument from Charlottesville issue would for sure be forgotten. 


In a recent article by Mike Goodloe for Abbeville, Goodloe entertains the MAGA grassroots, populist movement and the South by focusing on perhaps Trumps most audible fighter Steve Bannon. [1]  He wrote: 

Bannon perhaps sees himself as Grant to Trump’s Lincoln, though for a better cause.  The posse are his troops.  Bannon is completely committed to influencing and advancing a Trump agenda which Bannon sees as restoring the United States to its founding as a constitutional republic.  This appears to be aligned with the goal of the Southern tradition in its political aspect.  To put it mildly, the ADS (and its affiliated institutions) is no friend of the Southern tradition.  It is the enemy of that tradition in fact. It is deeply embedded in the effort to discredit the Southern tradition as racist and treasonous, to remove southern symbols and distort southern history (e.g., the 1619 Project and the move to rename military bases named after Southern generals).[2]

When Trump was asked to weigh in on the Unite the Right rally, he was coming down the golden escalator from his pent house atop Trump Tower in Manhattan. Had he seen it coming or, in subsequent statements to the press, fixed Charlottesville as a First Amendment issue, he’d had been off and running. So too Bannon and all of the other White House advisors. This is true today when January 6th involves the same Constitutional protected rights. I agree with Goodloe assertion that: 

if Bannon attempted to use the Confederacy as his rhetorical cudgel he would be defeated right out of the gate.  Moreover, many Americans have succumbed to the “Lincoln Myth” and are susceptible to manipulations based on that myth.  Bannon may see it as a nonstarter to swim against that tide. 

It is true that Bannon and the majority of Trump's most ardent advisors sees Trump as the agent for “restoring the United States to its founding as a constitutional republic”. That the majority of White Southern voters remain on the side of the Constitution is critical to Trump's efforts in his second term. Our enemies within have put Trump and White Southerners in the same boat as they strive to make America a “Democracy” and institute mob rule. 

​Which is why the better, legal and winning response to Charlottesville would have been freedom of speech. And framing it and later events under the First Amendment. Goodloe ends with 

proponents of MAGA that do not explicitly advocate for the Southern tradition (or even seem to be opposed to it), such as Bannon, can be seen as allies under the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” 

This may work right now as a strategy but, we are in fact closely aligned and rowing in the same boat toward the same goal. Trump in his second administration has no other choice than to take sides with our common enemies clearly in his cross hairs and their being taken to task in many recent actions and pronouncements. But as we - the good people of the South - see clearly, sensitivity to the monuments part of the greater national culture war and cancel culture continue to call attention to Trump’s Southern blind spot. 


For instance there was the choice to have The Battle Hymn of the Republic performed at his inauguration.  This demonstrated to his Southern supporters that there was yet no one in his orbit to provide feedback on even seemingly simple actions that could be divisive. On February 11th, Trump's new Secretary of Defense Hegseth made believe that the administration put a nail in cancel culture by changing the 2023 Naming Commission renaming of Fort Bragg, named for the Confederate General Braxton Bragg to Fort Liberty, not back to Bragg, Braxton but to World War II veteran Pfc. Roland Bragg who was from Maine and not even a Southerner who had distinguished himself in that war. True, General Braxton Bragg, even by Southern war historians, was considered one of the worst generals, but that is really not the point, is it? Trump and Hegseth continued the steal. When given the opportunity to restore the fort’s historic name, they still canceled the Confederate. 


Trump, like just about everyone I am close to, has only a cursory knowledge of the “Civil War” and Reconstruction. It takes a particular love of American History and curiosity to alter that. History buffs like myself have noticed that Trump 2.0 has expressed a keen interest in the Gilded Age, going as far as to compare his policies and actions as owing to those times and his vision of a “Golden Age of America”. So, the man is, after all, susceptible to musing about historical myths and symbols. Progress is being made, but there is a long way to go. Perhaps if Trump were to ponder writers like Richard Weaver , he would gain the conviction to act. Weaver in an essay titled The Southern Tradition wrote: ​

Unquestionably Reconstruction did something to deepen the self-consciousness of the Southern people, to make them feel less American rather than more so. They became the first American ever to be subject to invasion, conquest, and military dictation. In estimating the Southern mind it is most important to realize that no other section of America has been through this kind of experience. In fact it is not supposed to be American story. [3]

Before I get to Charlottesville - and basically all of the over 120 Confederate Monuments vandalized and or removed since - as property guaranteed and protected under our Fifth Amendment: a final word about our monuments and the First Amendment. The lawsuit brought to stop the removal of the Lee Equestrian monument cited the existing Virginia preservation law, as well as the original agreement between the builders of the monument and the government. They failed to challenge the removal on Fifth Amendment grounds, the monument ownership was never being conveyed to the local or state government. Federal law trumping state - even if the State of Virginia would not honor its own preservation law. When it became listed on the National Registry of Historic Places in 1997, federal law and protocols for removing enforced by the Department of Interior kicked in. 


Three years later, in 2020, when the Mayor of Richmond Levar Stoney, in league with Virginia’s governor Ralph Northam, removed the famous Lee Equestrian Monument, it, along with the others, had been designated National Historic Landmarks in the 1990s.  This designation carried even stricter federal laws and protections. Not learning from Charlottesville, attorneys for the plaintiffs in the removal of the monument case not only loss on appeal their claim that the city failed to honor the agreement made with the owners, but the superior court cited federal law The Government Speech Doctrine. As long as this unconstitutional doctrine created by a liberal Supreme Court in the 1990s stands, it will be used against any and all individuals and groups seeking justice for the monuments. 

I am not a lawyer, nor have I played one on television, but common sense (you know, that American commodity near and dear to our President’s heart) tells me that all these monuments created to honor the bravery and valor of those that fought and died for their state and their cause and, each paid for by donations from everyday people during hard times, were not the property of the city or county where each stood. This point is critical to Trump 2.0 in that in his 2020 executive order on monuments and, his recent similar 2025 EO the orders only address attacks and removal of federally owned monuments on federal lands, that is federal property. The vandalism and or removals from 2017 to the present all involve privately own monuments on local municipal lands. 

The historical accounts for each Confederate monument reveal from the cost of the sculptor, the granite, bronze and labor, that each of these remembrances in tangible and intangible ingredients outvalued the small piece of ground offered to host it by the municipality, and that the monuments' value increased, not decreased, in value over time. That was what was so egregious (and psychotic) when Charlottesville, after removing the statue of Lee, the city took it to an undisclosed foundry and had it melted to a puddle of molten bronze. 


Fortunately, none of the bronze masterpieces from the removed monuments have shared its fate. Few lovers of Southern antiquities are aware however, that after the assaults on the Confederate monuments plans began to use these sculptures to tell a very different story about them to future generations. Cities like Richmond entertained briefly, leaving the monuments, like theirs on Monument Avenue alone, but adding some form of accompanying text about what “they” determined the monuments represented. In short, there was the opportunity to recontextualize each of them. But, mayors like Richmond’s Stoney and New Orleans’s Landrieu wanted to appeal to their base and stage an ideological victory using the visual of its removal from the public space, even in the case of Stoney who made the residents pay for the removals. Rather than to remove the paint and graffiti, the works had a greater impact left in their new state.


The first exhibit of this kind was at Richmond’s Valentine, a museum founded by the very sculptor responsible for the statues used for the city’s Jefferson Davis monument, Edward Virginius Valentine. By changing the entire focus of the Valentine to one about the Lost Cause and the museum’s racist sculptor and president, money came flowing in from new sources. 
 

Toppled and painted statue of Jefferson Davis by Valentine at the Valentine, Photo: The Valentine

As the old expression goes, “out of sight, out of mind." Once the city and county governments had removed their troublesome monuments, bases and sculptures, they did as they wanted with them with few exceptions. Each was stolen, and stolen in clear view. As both Stoney and Landrieu soon discovered, storing them was another headache. Soon however, requests came in for the stolen artifacts. For the nation’s museums, social justice combined with the Confederate antiquities were the new cash cow. 
​

I, for one, have had enough. And based on polls, I am not alone. Even when Charlottesville removed the Lee monument both a CNN poll and one by NPR/Marist showed the majority of all Americans polled wanted the monuments to remain. PRRI conducted a large poll this past June and after all the press promoting the monuments as racist, the majority, 52% want them left alone. While this is down almost 10% from polls in 2015 by CNN and NPR/Marist, the 2015 polls where not as large a sampling. I can’t help but wonder the results of a poll about ort Carolina’s Fort Bragg being named for a soldier from Maine.  Does Trump really think people wouldn't notice?
 

Returning to the newest group of institutions taking on the canceling of the South, museums, probably the largest of these museum exhibits meant to recontextualize art stolen from the Confederate monuments has been planned for the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in of all places, Los Angeles. The dedicate Brick exhibit was supposed to open over a year ago and their website now states that it is coming this year.


There is always the chance that the recent fires could delay the exhibit, but it brings up an opportunity to find justice for the monuments. I have been researching applicable federal law as it pertains to federally protected monuments. Given his recent actions, can we lean on the Trump administration to forego the expense of attorneys and a lawsuit to have federal agents arrest those involved under 18 U.S. C. 2314, the specific law about moving stolen art valued at least $5,000 across state lines, once those antiquities are transported from the various cities in the South to the museum?  That could being to make things right.


As we in the South now have to add museums to our list of organizations and institutions to keep from stealing the valor that our once great monuments called to mind, I call for those who wish to preserve the Southern ways to turn our efforts to federal solutions under Trump 2.0 until which time that proves unproductive. Since 2020, I have seen too much good money chasing bad state lawsuits. Trump and appointees are demonstrating a tenacity that can “stop the steal” and not just in our elections. Going department by department we are learning about the money spent on every imaginable far-left preoccupation. One can just imagine what Southerners are paying on programs that censor Southern history and worse yet, teach future generations that all Southerners are white supremacists and racists.

 
Curing our president’s blind spot is not anything we can control, just as much as sending Steve Bannon a stack of books that tell the real story about Lincoln and the War for Southern Independence and making him read them, less alone believe them. So, it remains on my wish list. As we all grow older and hopefully wiser, a remark such as “there were good people on both sides can be replaced by “show me where you get the right to nullify the speech of others” and "show me proof of ownership." 


If I can be as blunt as our Commander and Chief, you have a wealth of Southern supporters that have been anxious to have your new Secretary of Defense return the Reconciliation Monument to Arlington and charging those cost to the army. A statement about using 62.5 million of taxpayer funds would be nice as well. Excuse us if we are not jumping up and down with another renaming of Fort Bragg. How much is that going to cost us? 

Notes:
1. https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/is-maga-in-the-southern-tradition/ 
​2. Ibid
​3. Weaver, Richard, The Southern Essay, Liberty Press, 1987 ​