Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Kevin D. Williamson responds to ‘Ben Shapiro and the alt-right smear’
Kevin D. Williamson responds to ‘Ben Shapiro and the alt-right smear’
Jun 4, 2025 12:02 PM

In my Friday post titled, “Ben Shapiro and the alt-right smear” I wrote:

Thus, National Review – once a bulwark of American conservatism – advocates that gay marriage is a family value – according to Jonah Goldberg – and that statues of former Confederate leadership must be torn down by patriotism – according to Kevin Williamson.

Williamson objected, saying this is what he actually wrote in his August 2017 piece “Let It Be” in National Review:

The current attack on Confederate monuments is only another front in the Left’s endless kulturkampf. The Left mitted to always being on the offense in the culture wars, and, with Donald Trump and his white-resentment politics installed in the White House and Republicans lined up queasily behind him, the choice of going after Confederate totems is clever. It brings out the kooks and the cranks, and some respectable conservatives feel obliged to defend them. Getting Republicans to relitigate the Civil War is a great victory for the Democrats, who were, after all, on the wrong side of it as a matter of historical fact. Rather than embrace their party’s proudest and finest legacy, Republicans are now trying to explain away President Trump’s insistence that there were some very fine gentlemen among the tiki-Nazis in Charlottesville. President Trump’s schoolboy forensics is here particularly embarrassing. From Abraham Lincoln to Donald Trump: Evolution runs backward for American political parties.

We should not, in any case, accept the fiction that what is transpiring at the moment is a moral crusade rather than political opportunism.

I am glad to correct the record, and I apologize for any errors or misinterpretation of Williamson’s views that my original post may have created.

Nevertheless, I stand for what I have said. If Williamson recognizes that the idea of destroying statues is part of a cultural war that helps to shape modern public debate, I could not disagree more with him. What this business with the statues really represents is an effort to erase our collective historical memory — and replace these memories with lies about the past.

In “Let it be, “Williamson writes: “What ought conservatives to do? They should listen to the oldest and most widely applicable of all the councils of conservatism and do – exactly – nothing.” Well, I can not agree that to “do nothing” is a conservative position. Quite the opposite, Conservatism is a political doctrine that implies action – or reaction – insofar as it seeks to preserve social arrangements against revolutionary temptations.

Millennials – whose knowledge of history is deficient, to say the least – are not only rallying against former Confederate soldiers or the pleasant memory of the antebellum. The war they are promoting against the Confederate statues is a war against American history and against all those who do not fit into the politically correct narrative of the past. If General Lee’s statues are torn down today, tomorrow will be Thomas Jefferson’s. If in the morning they burn Stonewall Jackson, by night it will be George Washington’s turn to meet the same fate.

In this case, the only thing silence – or inaction – means plicity.

There is a totalitarian impulse in this pulling down of statues, one we’ve seen elsewhere. To create the new reality, the new man, you must first destroy the reality we have.

The great scholar of Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski, wrote about the falsification of history under the Soviets, particularly under the regime of Joseph Stalin. But this practice of re-editing the past, Kolakowski observed, continued under other leaders. He cited the case of Lavrentiy Beria, chief of Soviet security and the secret police, who was executed a few months after Stalin’s death in 1953.

… when Beria was put to death by the new leaders, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia found a note in the next volume telling them to excise certain earlier pages with a razor blade and insert the new pages that panied the note. On turning up the place referred to, the reader found that it was the article on Beria; the substitute pages, however, were not about Beria at all but contained additional photographs of the Bering Sea.

Homepage picture: Wikimedia Commons.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
5 Things You Should Know About Washington’s Birthday
Today in the United States is the federal holiday known as Washington’s Birthday (not “Presidents Day—see item #1). In honor of George Washington’s birthday, here are 5 things you should know about the day set aside for our America’s founding father. 1. Although some state and local governments and private businesses refer to today as President’s Day, the legal public holiday is designated as “Washington’s Birthday” in section 6103(a) of title 5 of the United States Code. The observance of...
Would Kuyper go to Mars?
In his otherwise excellent work The Problem of Poverty, the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper, as a man of his time (the late-nineteenth and early twentieth mended the merits of colonialism as if there were not already people in other lands with their own calling to “till the earth” that God had made. While unfortunate for his time and context, recent events may open up a case in which colonization may be the Christian duty Kuyper believed it to be: Mars....
African Bishop: ‘Our Values Are Not For Sale’
Bishop Emmanuel Badejo of Oyo, Nigeria and newly appointed Chairman of Communications for the African bishops, has some strong words for the West. Bishop Badejo believes help for Nigeria in fighting Boko Haram has been withheld because of Nigerians refusal to accept population control tactics from the Western world. In a lengthy interview given in Rome, Badejo discusses his thoughts the Nigerian government, Boko Haram and Western policies and values. In Yorubaland, human dignity and human life are sacred. Christianity...
Coptic Orthodox Bishop on the Islamic State Mass Murder of Christians in Libya
When asked by the BBC interviewer what he would say to the terrorists if they were sitting in the studio at that moment, the bishop replied: I would say that any religion starts from a premise of a sanctity of life. And no matter what differences there are, this doesn’t justify by any means the taking of a life and especially so horrifically. I pray for them and I pray that somehow hearts are touched. I’m sure that not everyone...
More Than 300 Trafficking Victims Set Free In India
International Justice Mission [IJM] works around the world to bolster rule of law, fight corruption and help human trafficking victims. In India, human trafficking – both sex trafficking and labor trafficking – is rampant. IJM announced that government officials (who had been trained by and working with IJM) were able to free 333 people from labor trafficking at a brick factory last week. They [the trafficking victims] lived in tiny, thatched-roof huts. Each couple was responsible to make 2,000 bricks...
Battlefield Entrepreneurs: The Secret of Israeli Innovation?
Over the past 60+ years, Israel has emerged as an economic powerhouse despite all odds. With only 7.1 million people, no natural resources, and surrounded by enemies and constant threats, it has somehow managed to attract nearly $2 billion in venture capital. It produces more panies than large countries like Japan, India, Korea, and the United Kingdom, and has panies on the NASDAQ than any country other the United States. Given its range of challenges, how can this be? In...
Rev. Robert Sirico: Remembering The Faith of Oscar Romero
The Rev. Robert Sirico, in The Detroit News today, remembers the faith of slain Archbishop Oscar Romero, whom Pope Francis recently declared a martyr. Rev. Sirico recalls his trip to the church where the Salvadoran archbishop was killed. While on a lecture tour of El Salvador about a year ago, I asked my hosts if it were possible to visit the church where Oscar Romero celebrated his last Mass in 1980. The Salvadorian archbishop was assassinated by a government hit...
Unemployment Tied to One in Five Suicides
Unemployment is a spiritual problem. When a person loses their job, they’ve lost a means to provide for their family, an important aspect of their human flourishing, and the primary way they serve their neighbors. With the loss in es a loss in meaning. Not surprisingly, unemployment can have long-term negative effects munities, families, and a person’s subjective well-being and self-esteem. The most disturbing effect of unemployment is the despair that can lead people to take their own lives. One...
New Report: Orthodox Monastic Communities in the United States
The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of North and Central America has published a new report on Orthodox Monastic Communities in the United States (here). The report contains a lot of great information (“great” for nerds like me, anyway), including a whole section entitled, “‘Monastic Economy:’ Ownership of Property and Sources of e in US Orthodox Monasteries.” According to the report, In summary, the three mon sources of e in US Orthodox monasteries are: Occasional private donations including bequests and...
A Week Of Hellish Religious Persecution
Last week was a nightmarish week. Each day brought forth new violence, visited upon men and women of faith. Attacks against Christians were carried out by both Boko Haram and the Islamic State. Stephen Hicks, a non-believer, shot and killed three young Muslims in North Carolina. Al Qaeda continues to terrorize people in Yemen, and in Copenhagen, a synagogue was the target of a gunman during a bat mitzvah. In November 2012, then-Pope Benedict XVI spoke to members of INTERPOL...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved